International relations are based on patriarchal norms – states are constructed and legitimized through masculinity making violence inevitable

Turns

Realism Good

Realism is inevitable – states will constantly strive to be the strongest and preclude other states from altering the balance of power.

Mearsheimer 1 [John J. Prof. of Poli Sci at U Chicago. The Tragedy of Great Power Politics. Pg 1-3] JL

Alas, the claim that security competition and war between the great powers have been purged from the international system is wrong. Indeed, there is much evidence that the promise of everlasting peace among the great powers was stillborn. Consider, for example, that even though the Soviet threat has disappeared, the United States still maintains about one hundred thousand troops in Europe and roughly the same number in Northeast Asia. It does so because it recognizes that dangerous rivalries would probably emerge among the major powers in these regions if U.S. troops were withdrawn. Moreover, almost every European state, including the United Kingdom and France, still harbors deep-seated, albeit muted, fears that a Germany unchecked by American power might behave aggressively; fear of Japan in Northeast Asia is probably even more profound, and it is certainly more frequently expressed. Finally, the possibility of a clash between China and the United States over Taiwan is hardly remote. This is not to say that such a war is likely, but the possibility reminds us that the threat of great-power war has not disappeared. The sad fact is that international politics has always been a ruthless and dangerous business, and it is likely to remain that way. Although the intensity of their competition waxes and wanes, great powers fear each other and always compete with each other for power. The overriding goal of each state is to maximize its share of world power, which means gaining power at the expense of other states. But great powers do not merely strive to be the strongest of all the great powers, although that is a welcome outcome. Their ultimate aim is to be the hegemon—that is, the only great power in the system. There are no status quo powers in the international system, save for the occasional hegemon that wants to maintain its dominating position over potential rivals. Great powers are rarely content with the current distribution of power; on the contrary, they face a constant incentive to change it in their favor. They almost always have revisionist intentions, and they will use force to alter the balance of power if they think it can be done at a reasonable price.3 At times, the costs and risks of trying to shift the balance of power are too great, forcing great powers to wait for more favorable circumstances. But the desire for more power does not go away, unless a state achieves the ultimate goal of hegemony. Since no state is likely to achieve global hegemony, however, the world is condemned to perpetual great-power competition. This unrelenting pursuit of power means that great powers are inclined to look for opportunities to alter the distribution of world power in their favor. They will seize these opportunities if they have the necessary capability. Simply pill, great powers are primed for offense. But not only does .real power seek to gain power at the expense of other states, it also thwart rivals bent on gaining power at its expense. Thus, a great power will defend the balance of power when looming change favors another state, and it will try to undermine the balance when the direction of change is in its own favor. Why do great powers behave this way? My answer is that the structure of the international system forces states which seek only to he secure nonetheless to act aggressively toward each other, Three features of the international system combine to cause states to fear one another: 1) the absence of a central authority that sits above states and can protect them from each other, 2) the fact that states always have some offensive military capability, and 3) the fact that states can never be certain about other slates’ intentions. Given this fear—which can never be wholly eliminated—states recognize that the more powerful they are relative to their rivals, the better their chances of survival. Indeed, the best guarantee of survival is to be a hegemon, because no other state can seriously threaten such a mighty power.

Language Focus Bad

Focus on speech as the cause of discriminatory behavior distracts from the real causes

David Campbell 98, Professor of International Politics at the University of Newcastle in England., 1998 http://calliope.jhu.edu/journals/theory_&_event/v002/2.1r_campbell.html

The collapse into juridical discourse, backed by the power of the state or specific agents of the state, is obvious in the scenes above, and Butler's anxiety about the minimalization of political opposition - particularly in the first case, where the dubious nature of the 'offence' diverts attention from racism more generally - appears fully justified. The question is, however, whether the nonjuridical and nonstate forms of agency and resistance Butler places her faith in are up to the task set for them. Let's leave that concern to hang for a bit. Let us first ask how it is that the dominant modes of dealing with hate speech appear universally juridical? In answering that question, Butler demonstrates well the way in which critically interpretative thought can combine a series of theoretical assumptions to demonstrate the limitations of prevalent discourses and alternative possibilities. In so doing, Excitable Speech is a powerful statement in response to those who would maintain that arguments imbued with the idea of a "modernity without foundations" (161) evacuate ethico-political concerns from our horizon. Those who argue that hate speech demands juridical responses assert that not only does the speech communicate, but that it constitutes an injurious act. This presumes that not only does speech act, but that "it acts upon the addressee in an injurious way" (16). This argumentation is, in Butler's eyes, based upon a "sovereign conceit" whereby speech wields a sovereign power, acts as an imperative, and embodies a causative understanding of representation. In this manner, hate speech constitutes its subjects as injured victims unable to respond themselves and in need of the law's intervention to restrict if not censor the offending words, and punish the speaker: This idealization of the speech act as a sovereign action (whether positive or negative) appears linked with the idealization of sovereign state power or, rather, with the imagined and forceful voice of that power. It is as if the proper power of the state has been expropriated, delegated to its citizens, and the state then rememerges as a neutral instrument to which we seek recourse to protects as from other citizens, who have become revived emblems of a (lost) sovereign power (82). Two elements of this are paradoxical. First, the sovereign conceit embedded in conventional renderings of hate speech comes at a time when understanding power in sovereign terms is becoming (if at all ever possible) even more difficult. Thus the juridical response to hate speech helps deal with an onto-political problem: "The constraints of legal language emerge to put an end to this particular historical anxiety [the problematisation of sovereignty], for the law requires that we resituate power in the language of injury, that we accord injury the status of an act and trace that act to the specific conduct of a subject" (78). The second, which stems from this, is that (to use Butler's own admittedly hyperbolic formulation) "the state produces hate speech." By this she means not that the state is the sovereign subject from which the various slurs emanate, but that within the frame of the juridical account of hate speech "the category cannot exist without the state's ratification, and this power of the state's judicial language to establish and maintain the domain of what will be publicly speakable suggests that the state plays much more than a limiting function in such decisions; in fact, the state actively produces the domain of publicly acceptable speech, demarcating the line between the domains of the speakable and the unspeakable, and retaining the power to make and sustain the line of consequential demarcation" (77). The sovereign conceit of the juridical argument thus linguistically resurrects the sovereign subject at the very moment it seems most vulnerable, and reaffirms the sovereign state and its power in relation to that subject at the very moment its phantasmatic condition is most apparent. The danger is that the resultant extension of state power will be turned against the social movements that sought legal redress in the first place (24)

War > StructuraViolence

Events of war preclude solutions to structural violence – No alt without our action

Rabie in 94 Mohamed, professor of International political economy, Georgetown University, Praeger, “Conflict Resolution and Ethnicity”, 1994, http://www.questiaschool.com/read/14788166?title=Conflict%20Resolution%20and%20Ethnicity

In countries where democracy does not exist and where the control of authoritarian states over peoples' lives and fortunes is real, the nonviolent resolution and prosecution of political conflict is an impossibility because violence is the major tool of the oppressor rather than the oppressed. Democratization as the first order of concern, which the proponents of a limited definition of peace further advocate, cannot be effected without freedom and liberty, two conditions for access to cherished values. Therefore, a realistic definition of peace ought to take both arguments into consideration. This is particularly important since the proponents of positive peace tend to view it more as a process and less as a stationary state of political affairs, while the others see it generally in opposite terms. In fact, human experience seems to indicate that the absence of war and violence cannot be maintained without social justice, and social justice cannot be achieved under conditions of war and violence. Consequently, an operational definition of realistic peace would probably describe it as the absence of violence under conditions and relationships that provide for the nonviolent resolution of political conflict and the freedom to pursue legitimate individual and group goals without threat or coercion. Peace, to be real and human, must be understood and employed as a continuous process to lessen social tension, resolve political conflict, and create conditions to pursue freedom and justice through a gradual evolution of human perceptions and socio-political institutions. Thus, a strategy for universal peace must deal not only with war but also with the very forces and conditions that cause the eruption of war and induce the spread of violence in the first place. It must also strive to change a people's perceptions of the other in order to humanize the adversary, acknowledge his grievances, and legitimize his basic concerns. Above all, it must lay the foundation for transforming existing group relationships and state and civil society institutions, with a view to creating new more dynamic ones committed to promoting compatible visions and values with developing shared interests.

The focus on structural violence instead of direct violence makes preventing war impossible.

Thompson in 3 William, Professor of Political Science and Director of the Center for the Study of International Relations at Indiana University, “A Streetcar Named Sarajevo: Catalysts, Multiple Causation Chains, and Rivalry Structures,” International Studies Quarterly, 47(3)

Richard Ned Lebow (2000–2001) has recently invoked what might be called a streetcar interpretation of systemic war and change. According to him, all our structural theories in world politics both overdetermine and underdetermine the explanation of the most important events such as World War I, World War II, or the end of the Cold War. Not only do structural theories tend to fixate on one cause or stream of causation, they are inherently incomplete because the influence of structural causes cannot be known without also identifying the necessary role of catalysts. As long as we ignore the precipitants that actually encourage actors to act, we cannot make accurate generalizations about the relationships between more remote causation and the outcomes that we are trying to explain. Nor can we test the accuracy of such generalizations without accompanying data on the presence or absence of catalysts. In the absence of an appropriate catalyst (or a ‘‘streetcar’’ that failed to arrive), wars might never have happened. Concrete information on their presence (‘‘streetcars’’ that did arrive) might alter our understanding of the explanatory significance of other variables. But since catalysts and contingencies are so difficult to handle theoretically and empirically, perhaps we should focus instead on probing the theoretical role of contingencies via the development of ‘‘what if ’’ scenarios.

Consequences > Epistemology

Epistemological critique may decrease our ability to know the future with certainty, but this only supports defaulting to any risk of impacts large in magnitude-these are more important than small structural factors

TYLER COWEN in 2006 The Epistemic Problem Does Not Refute George Mason University Consequentialism Utilitas, Dec2006, Vol. 18 Issue 4, p383-399

The epistemic critique increases the plausibility of what I call 'big event consequentialism'. In this view, we should pursue good consequences, but with special attention to consequences that are very important and very good, or correspondingly, very bad. This includes stopping the use of nuclear weapons, saving children from smallpox, making progress against global poverty, and maintaining or spreading liberal democracy. Big events, as I define them, typically are of significant practical importance, involve obvious moral issues, and their value is not controversial to benevolent onlookers. In contrast, consider 'small events'. Preventing a broken leg for a single dog, however meritorious an act, is a small event as I define the concept. Making American families wealthier by another $20 also would count as a small event. We should not count small events for nothing, but epistemic issues may well lower their importance in refiective equilibrium. Of course we do not need a strict dividing line between big and small events, but rather we can think in terms of a continuum. In some cases a large number of small benefits will sum up to a big benefit, or equal the big benefit in importance. It then can be argued that we should treat the large benefits and the small benefits on a par. If we lift a different person out of poverty one billion times, this is no less valuable than lifting one billion people out of poverty all at once. Here two points are relevant. First, sometimes we are facing a single choice in isolation from other choices, rather than examining a rule or general principle of behavior. In this case it does not matter whether or not the small benefits would, if combined in larger numbers, sum up to a greater benefit. The small benefits will not be combined in greater numbers, and we should still upgrade the relative importance of larger benefits in our decision calculus. Second, not all small benefits sum into equivalence with larger benefits. Sometimes one value has a lexical relationship to (all or some) other values. For instance arguably a large number of canine broken legs, even a very large number, do not sum in value to make a civilization. It does not matter how many dogs and how many broken legs enter the comparison. In other words, civilization may be a lexical value with respect to canine broken legs. And when lexical elements are present, the mere cumulation of numbers of broken legs does not trump the more significant value. Numerous value relationships have been cited as lexical. A large number of slight headaches, no matter how numerous, may not sum up in value to equal a smaller number of intensely painful deaths or personal tortures." A very large number of 'muzak and potato' lives do not sum to overtake the value of a sophisticated civilization.^^ Rawls put forward liberty and the difference principle as his lexical values for all political comparisons.^^ For our purposes, we do not require a very strict notion of lexicality for these designations to matter. A big value need not be lexical against a (multiplied) smaller value at all possible margins. Instead the big value need only be lexical across the comparisons that arise under relevant policy comparisons. Furthermore a big value need not be lexical in absolute terms against all other smaller values. We therefore receive further guidance as to which big events are upgraded in the most robust fashion. The big values that receive the most robust upgrading would be those values with some lexical importance, relative to possible comparisons against other smaller values.^" To sum up these pointsz, critics of consequentialism would like to establish something like the following: 'We find it hard to predict consequences. Therefore consequences do not matter very much, relative to other factors, such as deontology or virtue ethics. We should abandon consequentialist morality.' But so far epistemic considerations have yet to produce a strong argument for this view. The arguments support a different conclusion, namely downgrading the importance of minor consequences, and upgrading the importance of major consequences. The most robust major consequences are those which carry values with some lexical properties, and cannot be replicated by a mere accumulation of many small benefits.

Anti-Cap Fem = Bad

Anti-capitalist feminist discourse is bad - it’s romanticized, it denigrates other feminist as “bad girls”, and fails to take into account racial divides

Eschle and Maiguashca 13 (Catherine Eschle is a British political scientist, feminist, academic, and Senior Lecturer in the Department of Government, University of Strathclyde and Bice Maiguashca is a Professor of Political Science at University of Exter, “Reclaiming Feminist Futures: Co-opted and Progressive Politics in a Neo-liberal Age”, Political Studies, Volume 62, Issue 3, http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-9248.12046/full, accessed 7/13/16//KR)

We begin our critique by subjecting to scrutiny the substantive claims evident in our authors' narratives of retrieval and reinvention regarding who might be the rightful bearer of progressive politics, what a progressive political agenda should look like and how that agenda must be pursued. In terms of the favoured agent of change, all three writers share what could be described as a nostalgic attachment to the socialist feminism of the past, with Fraser and Eisenstein arguing for its revival and McRobbie lamenting its demise. Now, while we have no issue with nostalgia per se playing a role in the articulation of a progressive politics (see Bonnett, 2010), or with the notion that socialist feminism may be a good place to start that endeavour, we underline two interconnected problems with how this plays out in all the texts under discussion. First, socialist feminism is romanticised, presented as an ideal type rather than as a concrete, internally complex, historically specific political project. McRobbie has been criticised, rightly, for mobilising socialist feminism as a kind of ‘shortcut label’, never describing exactly what it was or why it might have declined in popularity (Van Zoonen, 2010, pp. 170–1). Perhaps she might be excused this, given that she does not rely on socialist feminism for her progressive politics of the present. But Fraser and Eisenstein do, and here too socialist feminism remains elusive, glimpsed only through rose-tinted spectacles. Fraser's account, for example, contains some historical inaccuracies, eliding as it does socialist feminism in the 1970s with black and anti-imperialist feminism and attributing to all three an intersectional analysis that was actually pioneered by black feminists (Fraser, 2009, p. 103; e.g. Combahee River Collective, 1977). In Eisenstein's book, the issue is rather one of absence: socialist feminism is explicitly summoned in an earlier article (Eisenstein, 2005, p. 488) and implicitly invoked in the book in calls to ‘put socialism back on the agenda’, but barely features in the accompanying analysis of the triumph of mainstream liberal feminism over what Eisenstein calls ‘social feminism’ and ‘labor feminism’ (Eisenstein, 2009, pp. 40–54). Connectedly, Fraser and Eisenstein neglect internal debates and conflict among socialist feminists. This can be seen in their discussion of the revaluing of care work, positioned by both authors as central to a socialist-feminist revival and especially important to Eisenstein's progressive vision, but which has long been subject to high-profile contestation among socialist feminists and beyond in ways that surely merit some consideration.2 The second problem, closely connected to the first, is that contemporary strands of feminism are assessed in light of this romanticised ideal and found wanting. So, for example, McRobbie's sweeping dismissal of ‘third wave’ feminism as an apologia for capitalism ignores the expansive literature on the internal contestations and contradictions of this feminist trend (e.g. Dean, 2009; Henry, 2004; Snyder, 2008). In parallel, Eisenstein's depiction of the rise of post-structuralist feminism in the 1990s ignores, among other things, the fact that many of the thinkers involved – like McRobbie herself – come out of a socialist feminist tradition. To use an argument made by Cynthia Weber (1994) in a different context, all three authors in their own ways are disciplining feminism from an assumed position of authority and in accordance with their own purposes, elevating socialist feminists as the ‘good girls’ of the past and thereby denigrating, variously, liberal feminists, cultural theorists, post-structuralists or the third wave as the ‘bad girls’ of the present. In so doing, our authors run the risk of reifying differences among feminists, failing to ‘appreciate the connections’ and hard-won alliances that flow through ‘the feminist body as a whole’ (Weber, 1994, p. 347). The limitation of their vision of the agent of progressive politics, however, goes beyond the shared tendency to discipline contemporary feminism in light of an idealised socialist feminism. In terms of Fraser and Eisenstein, an additional problem arises with their insistence that feminism and ‘the left’ be reintegrated. Indeed, in our view, both these authors seriously underestimate the tensions between these two political forces, historically and today. Although Eisenstein (2009, pp. 203–6) acknowledges the much-documented ‘unhappy marriage’ between them throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and Fraser (2009, p. 10) notes the critique by second-wave socialist feminists of the androcentrism of their left comrades, both analysts assume that such obstacles can be overcome. Fraser simply asserts the necessity of reunion while Eisenstein's prescriptions for ‘healing’ (2009, pp. 206–9) between the left and feminism, based on the former taking feminist forms of solidarity and aspirations more seriously, and the latter going ‘beyond anger’, seem to us to be set out more in hope than in realistic expectation. Even more worrisome is the implication that the progressive character of socialist feminism is secured by its adherence to the socialist/Marxist/left side of the equation. Surprisingly, for Fraser and Eisenstein, socialist feminism appears to acquire its critical bite and realise its emancipatory promise only in so far as it is socialist or left, not feminist. Thus, feminism qua feminism is positioned not only as non-left, but also as non-progressive.3 Turning to McRobbie's political imaginary, the agent, as we have seen, is assumed to be the individual subject (i.e. female student) who is depicted as capable of deep personal transformation. But McRobbie's articulation of the nature, direction and end product of this process, although evocative, remains rather inchoate and non-committal. First, she gives us no justification of why she lays all her hopes for a ‘new minoritarian politics’ on the role of higher education, in general, and on young, middle-class, cosmopolitan students from the colonial periphery, in particular. She certainly fails to explain in what sense these relatively privileged students are ‘minoritarian’ and why she thinks that their highly mobile, reconstituted subjectivities will be ‘novel’ in any way or, for that matter, progressive. Moreover, McRobbie's turn to the individual as the bearer of progressive politics seems to leave no room for the key ingredient that any collective effort at re-articulation would require, that is, intersubjectivity. Instead, her vision of the politics of becoming seems to take for granted the individualisation of women and, in so doing, accept the very terms of the Faustian pact between feminism and neo-liberalism that she decries. On this view, resistance in contemporary conditions can only be undertaken by individual subjects, alone, with no possibility of collective political struggle perceived now or in the future. If the agents of progressive feminist politics proposed by these authors are problematic, so too are their agendas. With respect to McRobbie's agenda, we have already indicated that her suggestions on this topic are very schematic. Her call for a ‘relentless critique of capitalism’ (McRobbie, 2009, p. 49) offers a starting point, one shared with Fraser and Eisenstein. But it is far less apparent how her affirmative vision of ‘radical democracy’ and ‘multiculturalism’, along with their attendant values of ‘pluralism’ and ‘otherness’, fits with this critique. In other words, even if one could foster such a radical ethos in the classroom, how would one go about translating this moment into a wider social and political project that might challenge ‘our total subsumption by capital’ (McRobbie, 2009, p. 164)? By comparison, Fraser's and Eisenstein's plea for the return of socialist feminism reactivates a more explicit, extensive and substantive political agenda revolving around the re-centring of a critique of capitalism, the reintegration of class, race and gender in this analysis and the revaluation of socio-economic and cultural axes of oppression so that the former is once again given its due. This call for a recalibration of feminist political priorities sounds reasonable enough. And yet there is a danger here that in their efforts to rectify an assumed skewing of feminist analysis whereby gender is privileged over class and race, and recognition over redistribution, Fraser and Eisenstein actually tip the scales in the other direction, allowing for the reassertion of class and socio-economic oppression over other forms of power and suffering. Such a hazard arises in the first place because the existence of the imbalance to which they are responding is, at the very least, contested. After all, what about the claims of Latin American feminists that they have long sought to integrate an account of class and gender oppressions (e.g. Chinchilla, 1991)? Or what about those feminist critics who do not accept the recognition and redistribution dualism and by implication the categorisation of social movements (including feminism) on this basis (Alcoff, 2000; Butler, 1998; Young, 1997)? It is beyond the scope of this article to adjudicate these competing claims. The point we are trying to make is simply that Eisenstein and Fraser are offering a solution to a problem that many other feminists seem unconvinced actually exists – and in this way, may be creating a new problem of their own. A second issue with Fraser's and Eisenstein's call for a re-centring of the critique of capitalism is that neither scholar makes clear how socio-economic and cultural axes of oppression, or gender, race and class, can be understood as mutually constitutive within a framework that simultaneously privileges capitalism. Our anxiety on this point is that feminist contributions to the progressive agenda, rather than socialist or Marxist ones, get lost. This worry is particularly heightened when Eisenstein asserts that ‘gender, race and nationality are ultimately grounded in production relations’ (Aguilar, cited in Eisenstein, 2009, p. 213), implying that these other axes of oppression, and the struggles they generate are, in fact, an effect of the foundational structure of capitalism. She reinforces this impression when she intimates that the divisions between white women and women of colour in the US are primarily an issue of class, rather than race (Eisenstein, 2009, p. 214). Fraser is not much more reassuring. Characterising capitalism as a ‘social totality’ (Fraser, 2009, p. 103) and entreating feminists to make market-mediated processes the ‘major focus’ of their analyses (Fraser, 2009, p. 115), she does little to alleviate fears that she is rebalancing the scales in favour of production relations and the class politics that this generates. These drawbacks with the substantive characterisations of the agent and agenda are accompanied by an almost complete neglect of political practices. Fraser, for one, tells us nothing about how her preferred political agent should act. We do get glimpses of what progressive political practice should look like from Eisenstein, who includes popular education, consciousness raising, mass mobilisation, coalition building, union organising and neighbourhood cooperatives in her trawl through possible ways forward (Eisenstein, 2009, pp. 202–27), and from McRobbie (2009, p. 166) who suggests critical pedagogy as crucial to the transformation of her students' subjectivities. But in the end, rather than defend these suggestions in light of what might constitute progressive political practices in a neo-liberal age, all three authors seem to assume that these practices will automatically flow either from the revival of social feminism both as an agent and agenda or, in the case of McRobbie, from the transformation of students' subjectivities. Moreover, all three implicitly limit the array of possible progressive practices by strenuously denying the potential of either cultural and/or institutionalised practices. In this way, we are left to assume the nature of progressive feminist practices from what they are not. We have shown in this section that all three of our authors have an uncritical affection for socialist feminism, whether this is mourned as the progressive agent of the past or willed back into being to carry the hopes of the present. This attachment carries with it exclusions and blind spots, for socialist feminism remains highly under-specified and indeed romanticised in these texts, as does the relationship between feminism and the left. This not only makes Fraser's and Eisenstein's case for the retrieval of socialist feminism as the agent of progressive politics less compelling, it also allows them to skew their desired progressive agenda in ways that favour Marxism over feminism and to neglect the role of concrete political practices in bringing about this agenda. Even McRobbie, who refuses to return to the past for a saviour, is unable fully to flesh out her vision in ways that offer a convincing alternative to the socialist feminism for which she yearns. Indeed, her focus on the individual subject and educational encounters in the classroom could be said to signal an unsatisfactory retreat from collective action in the wake of socialist feminism's alleged demise. On both accounts, then, socialist feminism functions as a benchmark to discipline contemporary strands of activism as insufficiently progressive by comparison. As we will go on to argue in the next section, this disciplining dynamic is sustained and made more plausible by the ways in which three interconnected concepts are deployed by these authors to undergird their proleptic imaginings.

Current anti-capitalist feminist discourse uses multiple definitions of words like “radical”, “left”, and “progressive” interchangeably to further an agenda without giving the words context meaning it limits out other forms of feminism that aren’t “progressive enough” – challenging this literature is the only way to adequately discuss feminism

Eschle and Maiguashca 13 (Catherine Eschle is a British political scientist, feminist, academic, and Senior Lecturer in the Department of Government, University of Strathclyde and Bice Maiguashca is a Professor of Political Science at University of Exter, “Reclaiming Feminist Futures: Co-opted and Progressive Politics in a Neo-liberal Age”, Political Studies, Volume 62, Issue 3, http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-9248.12046/full, accessed 7/13/16//KR)

Fraser, Eisenstein and McRobbie all mobilise, to varying degrees and in different ways, the concepts of ‘left’, ‘radical’ and ‘progressive’ to characterise the kind of feminism to which they aspire. None of these terms is defined clearly and, partly as a result, our authors often use them interchangeably. This conflation, in our view, serves both to restrict their political imagination and to enable them to assert, rather than defend, their conclusions. Let us take each concept in turn. In all the texts under consideration, the category ‘left’ is equated with a specific political force, namely socialism and/or Marxism. We have several problems with this move. To begin with, little detail is supplied about this agent in either historical or sociological terms. Eisenstein (2009, pp. 203–4) does discuss the Marxist tradition briefly, referring to ‘successive Marxist revolutions’ and struggles, particularly in the Global South, but McRobbie and Fraser give us nothing at all. Just like the trope of ‘socialist feminism’, then, ‘left’ becomes another short-cut label referring to a decontextualised, generalised social actor. Moreover, this understanding of the left excludes the contribution of other strands of activism commonly associated with the term, such as social democracy or anarchism. Left-wing politics has thus been effectively, if unintentionally, policed by our three feminist authors in much the same way as they have policed feminism. Finally, by assuming that left = Marxism, our authors equate the term with a specific political agenda, the salient feature of which is its anti-capitalist orientation. This is a common tendency in the wider literature.4 Nonetheless, we suggest that it unnecessarily limits our understanding of the left to what it is against, leaving untouched the question of what it is for. While the meaning of left in the texts under discussion is narrow and fixed, the concept of radical is used more promiscuously (see Pugh, 2009, for a variety of usages). There are at least three different ways in which the term is deployed. The first refers to ‘the desire to grasp and pull up the roots of an existing political arrangement’ (Bonnett, 2010, p. 7); such a view is shared by all three authors, but is particularly striking in the writings of Fraser and Eisenstein, with their monological conception of capitalism as the sole source of all other power relations and their attendant injustices. ‘Pulling up’ capitalism, it is thus implied, would bring with it an end to not only class inequalities but also those hinging on gender and race. A second way in which radical is mobilised is to refer to a privileged political agent, one that exhibits ‘distinctly bold forms of political commitment’ (Bonnett, 2010, p. 7) and/or which represents ‘the people’, or the ‘voice from below’. For Fraser and Eisenstein this agent is represented by the left, by the socialist feminists who align with them and by working-class and black women who ‘identif[y] more with the grassroots’ than with elites (Fraser, 2009, p. 105). In McRobbie's case (2009, p. 164), it is the elusive ‘minoritarian subject’ who is exclusively charged with the responsibility of ‘invent[ing] some feminist newness’. A third, less prominent, conception of radicality at work in these texts pertains to the alleged ‘purity and authenticity’ of a particular set of political practices (Dean, 2008, p. 284). Although all three authors clearly assume that some practices are more radical than others (e.g. critical pedagogy for McRobbie), none of them specifies why this is the case. Thus the term radical has multiple connotations, often deployed simultaneously, to capture variously the imperative to challenge a foundational power relation, to grant priority to a particular agent or to favour a particular practice. One difficulty here is that our authors do not make clear which understanding is in play at any one time, or think through the implications of these contrasting definitions. The term is instead continually mentioned in passing as if its meaning was self-evident. Another is that all three renditions of the term are associated by our authors with the left. Thus radical is used to characterise the left agenda understood as anti-capitalism, and the left political agent, embodied by Marxist struggles. All these associations are simply asserted, rather than substantiated. While it may be a very common move in left-wing traditions to deploy the notion of radicalism in this way, it seems an obviously self-justificatory move to us, one that clouds the historically complex relationship of the left to diverse traditions of radicalism (Bonnett, 2010, pp. 6–7). Finally, the notion of ‘progressive’, while invoked rather less frequently than the other two terms, nonetheless features in all three accounts. Eisenstein (2009, p. 1) tells us on the opening page of her book that she is ‘a progressive, a person on the left’, while McRobbie (e.g. 2009, p. 25) uses the term to express approbation for social movements that are implicitly deemed to be on the left. Although Fraser mentions the adjective only twice in ‘Cunning of History’ (preferring to use the term ‘emancipatory’), she has deployed it repeatedly in her earlier work to refer to struggles seeking to overturn economic inequalities and social hierarchies (e.g. Fraser, 1995). Regardless of its frequency of use, in all cases the term progressive is deployed to indicate a politics of which our feminist authors approve, that is, it is used to indicate the worthiness of a particular struggle. Thus, unlike ‘left’, which does have a fixed substantive meaning, and ‘radical’, which has multiple connotations, the term progressive plays the role of an empty signifier, that is, it has no independent, agreed-upon content, instead gaining its meaning in relation to the context in which it is used and specifically in relation to left and radical. While the notion of progressive is often used in this substantively empty but normatively loaded way in the wider literature (Brass, 2006; Loberfeld, 2004), for us such a habit poses a problem to the extent that it exonerates scholars from justifying the normative evaluations that accompany the deployment of this term. Indeed, in much of the left literature it is enough to characterise a movement as left or radical for it also to be deemed progressive.5 Yet the notions of left and radical simply cannot be relied on to do the necessary justificatory work here: they do not, in themselves, tell us why a particular form of politics is worth defending. Overall, it can be seen that the concepts of left, radical and progressive play an important role in the feminist works we have reviewed, simultaneously delineating and affirming the kind of feminist politics to which Fraser, Eisenstein and McRobbie aspire. Eliding these concepts throughout their texts allows our authors to present readers with a fait accompli: left politics is radical and, in turn, must be progressive. It is this conflation that enables our authors to construct and sustain their stories of co-optation; any feminism deemed not to be left, in the narrow sense of the term, is precluded from being radical or progressive and thereby positioned as part of the problem rather than the solution. Moreover, it allows all three authors simply to assert the normative value of their proposed feminist futures rather than defending them in either empirical or normative terms. Even more importantly for us, this conceptual circularity limits their vision of who counts as progressive and what can be included in a progressive agenda. Connectedly, it encourages the neglect of what constitutes progressive practice to the extent that left and radical are read off the agent and agenda so that for all intents and purposes practices enacted by a left-wing actor in the name of a radical agenda are assumed to be progressive. In the name of the more ‘open future’ that Fraser calls for (2009, p. 113), we think it is necessary to revisit these concepts and, by redefining them, take one step towards widening the range of possible futures for feminism.