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Abolition

Prison expansion is driven by capitalism – prisoners have become labor exploited for surplus-value, used to drive down production costs and increase profit margins – increasing rates of incarceration are tied to increasing integration of prisons into the global economy – even local arguments in favor of new prisons are tied to jobs and capitalist ideology – prefer our systematic Marxist analysis of prisons to their more ambiguous historical arguments

Smith & Hattery 6 (Earl, Ph.D., Emeritus, is a professor of sociology and the Rubin Distinguished Professor of American Ethnic Studies at Wake Forest University, Angela, Professor and Director of Women & Gender Studies at George Mason University, 2007, African American Families, https://books.google.com/books?id=ej0XBAAAQBAJ&pg=PA241&lpg=PA241&dq=Interestingly,+whereas+prison+used+to+be+a+hidden+institution&source=bl&ots=r8nV06R5C-&sig=y677AyW5hbpYvvs8tCrCA4zUZOQ&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CB8Q6AEwAGoVChMI0Miv2ubtxgIVJxfbCh1upQei#v=onepage&q=Interestingly%2C%20whereas%20prison%20used%20to%20be%20a%20hidden%20institution&f=false, JHR)

Interestingly, whereas prison used to be a hidden institution, tucked away in the backwaters of American society, today they are found everywhere. This deliberate implementation over the last 2 decades of sentencing policy can be seen as using prisons as catchments for the undesirables in our society (8) . Furthermore, prisons provide a "captive" population, one that is highly vulnerable, and one that has increasingly been exploited for its labor. Wisconsin sociologist Professor Erik Olin Wright put it thus: In the case of labor power, a person can cease to have economic value in capitalism if it cannot be deployed productively. This is the essential condition of people in the 'underclass.' They are oppressed because they are denied access to various kinds of productive resources, above all the necessary means to acquire the skills needed to make their labor power salable. As a result they are not consistently exploited. Understood this way, the underclass consists of human beings who are largely expendable from the point of view of the logic of capitalism. Like Native Americans who became a landless underclass in the nineteenth century, repression rather than incorporation is the central mode of social control directed toward them. Capitalism does not need the labor power of unemployed inner city youth. The material interests of the wealthy and privileged segments of American society would be better served if these people simply disappeared. However, unlike in the nineteenth century, the moral and political forces are such that direct genocide is no longer a viable strategy. The alternative, then, is to build prisons and cordon off the zones of cities in which the underclass lives. (9) (Wright 1997:153). According to Wright, prisons can be seen as a form of modern day genocide, a strategy for removing unwanted, unnecessary, un-useful members of a capitalist society. It is a system whereby the privileged can segregate or cordon-off these unwanted members of society without the moral burden of genocide. It is easy to see how prisons accomplish this goal: they remove individuals from society and they permanently (in many states) disenfranchise them from the political realm. Prisoners and ex-convicts become virtual non-citizens, unable to challenge the economic, social or political power structures. And, the very fact of cordoning off some individuals means that the goods and riches of society are accessible only to those citizens who are not cordoned-off. As Baca Zinn and Thorton Dill note, every system of oppression has as its reflection a system of privilege (Zinn, Hondagneu-Sotelo, and Messner 2005). That which cordons some off, "cordons" others in. We note here that many first time readers of Wright interpret his comments as suggesting that he is advocating the cordoning-off of poor, primarily African American citizens, those with few skills that can be utilized by capitalism, from the opportunity structure. Nothing could be further from the truth. As a neo-Marxists, Wright is arguing that this desire to rid the society of individuals who have no skills to contribute to the insatiable and every expanding capitalist machine resulted in genocides such as that of the Native Americans in our own country and the Holocaust in Europe. Today, with genocide being deemed morally objectionable, capitalism seeks new ways in order to accomplish this same goal. And, he argues that in the United States, prisons have provided a mechanism to meet this goal. We argue that while Wright was astute in his observations that prisons provided a mechanism for removing the "unexploitable" labor from society, we argue that this formerly “unexploitable” class of Americans has now been redefined as highly exploitable by national and multinational corporations. Taking the lead from prison labor that has been around for a century or more, from agricultural labor at prison farms like Parchman and Angola, to the license plate factories that were popular in the middle part of the 20th century, dozens of Fortune 500 companies have moved at least part of their operations into prisons. As the data will demonstrate, this transition to prison labor allows corporations to significantly cut their labor costs and thus presumably increase their profits, much like plantations, ship builders, and other industries did during the 200 plus years of slavery in the United States (10). Furthermore, we argue that this relationship between the capitalist economy and the prison system that characterizes the prison industrial complex (PIC) creates a feedback loop. The more prisons that are built for profit, rather than rehabilitation, the more people who must be incarcerated. Prisons only make money when the cells are occupied. Similarly, the more prisons provide labor for corporations, the more prisons will be built. Thus, we suggest that the PIC and its attendant industries contribute to the increased rates of incarceration in the US and the continued exploitation of labor, primarily African American labor. The Economics of the PIC: The Case of the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) The economic benefits a prison brings to a community, except for the possible increases associated with census discrepancies, are debatable. Though a few jobs are created, prisons are actually very expensive to run. And, though the government pays part of the cost of incarceration, the inmates themselves seldom contribute to the cost of their own incarceration (11) . They don't pay rent. They don't pay for food and they obviously don't contribute toward upkeep and maintenance. This structure is a physical space that while providing housing for the convicted, receives little in return directly from the inhabitants themselves. The Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) builds and staffs prisons. Currently they have 67,000 beds (approximately 62,000 inmates) in 63 facilities – - from California to Oklahoma to Montana to the District of Columbia-- and have plans to build more. The CCA also provides food service and recreational services to their prisoners, at a cost. This private corporation, founded in 1983, trades on the New York Stock Exchange (CXW) and employs approximately 15,000 personnel. And, it is quite expensive to house a single prisoner in a jail or prison. Rough estimates indicate that it costs most states more to house a prisoner per year than to educate a citizen in college for that same year. At an average cost per year to house a single prisoner at $23,183.69, when multiplied by approximately 2 million prisoners nationally, one arrives at the figure of $46.3 billion dollars per year for incarceration in the United States. Hence, there has to be another method to pay for, both in the public or private facility, the built environment of the prison? Even the most basic economic analysis would note that the prison loses money when there are empty cells. Thus, just like college campuses must enroll enough students to fill the dorms, prisons rely on being at "full capacity." Thus, as some others have also suggested (See (Mauer 2002), part of the explanation for the rise in incarceration rates is the fact that building and expanding prisons means that we must continue to fill them. We must impose harsher and longer sentences and we must continue to funnel inmates into prisons. And, we argue here that this funnel is not being filled with white collar offenders such as Bernie Ebbs (WorldCom), Ken Lay (Enron), or Martha Stewart, but rather by vulnerable, unempowered populations, primarily young, poor, African American men. Second, and perhaps more interesting is the rise of prison industries. Whereas many prison farms, like Parchman and Angola, are self-sustaining (the inmates grow all their own food and produce all of the textiles, etc. that are needed within the prison), a new phenomenon is the entrance of prisons into the global economy. Prisons that were once producing goods only for their own consumption are now producing goods for multinational, multi-billion dollar corporations such as McDonalds, Microsoft, and Victoria's Secret. In some cases the prisons are paid a pittance and then charged, by the prison, for the costs of their incarceration. In other cases, the prisoners are not paid a wage, instead a portion of their "wages" is paid directly to the prison. Finally we note that as a result of paying prisoners a sub-minimum wage (often less than $1 per hour), the corporations are able to pocket extraordinary profits made by saving labor costs. We turn now to an examination of the wide range of prison industry that range from the manufacture of license plates for the state department of motor vehicles to the sewing of lingerie for Victoria's Secret. The use of prisoners to make products has changed from the days that they made license plates (12) for the state where the prison is located, to being deeply embedded in the production and service economy of the nation. Private commerce that utilized prisoners as labor has been underway for centuries in Anglo societies, dating back to the 1600s and before (Hallett 2004). This fits with the findings of Oshinsky showing that on the backs of prison labor Post-Bellum capitalism flourished (Oshinsky 1997). During the 20th century, penal capital moved from the raw convict leasing system characterized by Oshinsky to a service economy that mirrors the larger United States economy (Oshinsky 1997). From an economic perspective, this penal capital allows a middleman like Signature Packaging in Washington State that moves products such as Starbucks to win contracts and outbid other packagers because they use prison labor. They do not have to pay market wages, they do not pay health insurance or vacation benefits nor do they have to worry about severance pay or lay-offs. One aspect of the Prison Industrial Complex that has perhaps received less attention is the role that the use of prison labor plays in the post-industrial political economy of the United States at the beginning of the 21st Century. Various legislation that began in the 1970s and was “beefed up” in the mid 1990s opened up the ways in which prison labor could be used in both public and private industry. There are at least 4 different industries in which prison labor may be used. We will briefly summarize these 4 different ways, provide examples of each, and conclude this section with a discussion of the outcomes of this form of economic production for inmates, prisons, and local communities. 1. Factory Work In many instances, for example in the case of the manufacture of license plates, factories are set up inside the prison and inmates work, for low wages, usually 40 or 50 cents an hour. The product is then shipped out to the “client.” Though this particular type of prison labor has been around for a long time, it has expanded significantly in the last 5 years. Today, many states and counties have “corrections businesses” that allow them to produce goods on the inside and sell them to other state and local government agencies as well as to non-profit organizations. For example, in Iowa, students attending public schools may very well sit at desks made by felons. Furthermore, colleges like Grinnell have purchased all of their dorm furniture from the Iowa "Inmate Labor Program." The bed that you sleep in, the dresser that you fill with your stuff, the desk that you study on all come from the Grinnell Group, a suite of furniture made by prison laborers being held by the State of Iowa and working for pennies on the hour. It's not slave labor, but it's really close [emphasis ours]. Prisoners are given the choice of working for Iowa Prison Industries for almost no pay or virtually never leaving their cells. Working for the prison doesn't really teach much in the way of real-world vocational skills, nor does it allow inmates to take care of their families on the outside. The only real purpose of Iowa Prison Industries is to make money for the state of Iowa through virtually forced labor (13). Examples like this illustrate one of the ways in which state prisons have gotten into the "for profit" business of factory work. In many states, such as Mississippi (14), a single prison produces all of the uniforms for inmates, corrections officers, and law enforcement officers, as well as holsters, and equipment for the entire staff of the state's department of corrections. By utilizing prison labor to produce all of their supplies the state is able to keep costs low for the entire department of corrections. 2. Manual Labor The practice of partnering with the state and local DOT (Department of Transportation) has also been popular for many years. As you drive along interstate highway systems you may see inmates digging ditches, picking up trash, mowing, and doing other sorts of highway labor. As with "factory labor" this form of inmate labor is expanding. Inmates now use heavy construction equipment, such as jack-hammers, in various projects, including the construction of tunnels in Pennsylvania. [These same inmates managed to take the jack-hammers "home" and use them to tunnel out of their home, the Western Pennsylvania Penitentiary in Pittsburgh!] This form of inmate labor has been popular for decades, because the work is often back-breaking, it is difficult to find laborers, and if unionized would be very expensive. It is also reminiscent of, and most likely based on, the chain gangs popular in the 19th and 20th centuries, especially in the south. Many municipalities, counties, and states post significant savings to the tax payers by relying on inmate labor for these sorts of projects. This use of prison labor is not, however, without controversy. In communities that have recently suffered significant declines in manufacturing jobs, local residents are becoming more vocal in their critique of these practices. In a rural Iowa community, for example, critics of this practice note that inmates have “taken” the jobs of countless citizens. In a community which has seen a decline in agricultural manufacturing (meat packing) this loss of jobs is serious and local citizens, many of whom are now unemployed or under-employed, resent the fact that jobs they could take are now being filled by prison inmates. In the case of the State liquor warehouse, 12 workers just lost good-paying jobs to prisoners who are paid 37 cents an hour. Currently, 500 state government jobs and 190 private sector positions are being filled by prisoners (15). Though prisons may bring some jobs into a community, especially jobs as corrections officers, this gain is off-set by the fact that the inmates may themselves be competing with local citizens for jobs in the free market. 3. Direct Marketing to Local Communities For much of the last century, some prisons were engaged in industries that provided goods for local markets. For example, prison farms like Parchman in the Mississippi Delta and Angola in Louisiana have for decades targeted a portion of their prison grown agricultural produce (mostly vegetables and more recently goods like catfish) to local merchants for sale and consumption in local communities. More recently, after loosening the laws that prohibited the direct competition between prisons and free enterprise, this prison enterprise has expanded to include goods that are produced in factory settings. At the Eastern Oregon Correctional Institution, a medium security state prison located in Pendleton, Oregon, that houses about 1,500 inmates, prisoners were engaged in textile factory work making the denim uniforms for all the inmates in the entire Oregon State Prison system (16) . The popularity of their denim grew and they now market their clothing line, sewn in the Prison Blues Garment Factory, appropriately named “Prison Blues”® for purchase over the internet! (17) At first glance this form of inmate labor seems nothing but positive. As extolled on the Prison Blues website, inmates learn a marketable trade that they can take with them when they re-enter the "free world." Also, they keep busy during the day, and they earn some money which is used to pay for their expenses in prison as well as for financial obligations such as child support that they have with the state. However, we argue, that industries like this, be they agricultural or manufacturing or service, by definition, as with public works, take job opportunities away from local citizens. For example, the economy is quite depressed in the agricultural regions of the Mississippi Delta and the fact that the State of Mississippi, through the MSDOC, has a strong hold in the farm-raised catfish market means that local farmers have less of an opportunity to make a living with this agricultural commodity ("Profitability Remains Elusive for Mississippi Catfish Farmers," 2004) (18). Furthermore, by paying wages that are significantly below market value, products produced by inmates can be sold at lower prices (and for a higher profit margin) often running “free world” business that pay a living wage out of the market. Thus, the exploitation of inmate labor can contribute to unemployment and lower wages in local communities. 4. Service Sector Work Perhaps the most recent change in inmate labor, and the one that seems to be the most controversial and disturbing, is the use of inmate labor for a variety of service sector work that is sub-contracted through "middle-men" for some of the nations leading manufacturers. There are estimates that in any given day the average American uses 30 products that were produced, packaged, or sold out of a prison! Through this type of service sector work, prison industries have truly infiltrated the global market. …other corporations benefit from the easy-hire, easy-fire and low-wage policies of prison employees. In Michael Moore's movie “Roger and Me,” he broke the story of TWA using prisoners to book flights. Other companies such as McDonald's, Boeing, Microsoft, Sprint, Victoria's Secret (how was your bra made?), Compaq, Toys R Us, and Revlon use prison labor for packaging, telemarketing, manufacturing, and distributing their products. Chances are, on any given day, you are the beneficiary of the work done by between ten and fifteen prison laborers. (19) Every year, inmates at Twin Rivers Corrections Unit in Monroe, Washington are busy during the Holiday Season because inmates there package Starbucks Coffee and Nintendo "GameCubes" for sale by retailers all over the nation. Twin Rivers, part of a four-unit prison that houses mentally ill inmates, high- security felons, and participants in the state's Sex Offender Treatment Program, is also home to one of three facilities operated by Signature Packaging Solutions, one of 15 private companies that operate within the state prison system and use inmate labor to supplement their outside workforce (Barnett 2002). Prisoners are engaged in everything from making electronic cash registers for McDonalds to sewing lingerie for Victoria's Secret, to taking airline reservations for TWA to packing Starbucks coffee. As noted previously, one can easily come to the conclusion that this is a positive movement in the evolution of prisons because it provides work, it teaches job skills that are transportable, and it allows inmates to earn some money while they are on the inside. However, critics, including many inmates at the Twin Rivers Corrections Unit, are skeptical of the underlying reasons for this evolution in prison industries. They do not necessarily believe it is indicative of a rehabilitative movement in prisons, but rather is driven entirely by companies seeking another way to maximize their profits. Others suspect that DOC's motives are more pecuniary than pure-hearted, noting that by shaving nearly 50 percent off the top of an inmate's paycheck, the department slashes its own expenses while subsidizing the companies in the program, which aren't required to pay for inmates' health insurance or retirement. "They figure that if somebody's sitting around, doing their time and doing nothing, they don't make any money off them," Strauss says. …Richard Stephens, a Bellevue property rights attorney, is suing DOC on the grounds that the program is unconstitutional, allows businesses that use prison labor to undercut their competitors' prices, and unfairly subsidizes some private businesses at the expense of others... Private businesses are “paying prison workers less than they're paying on the outside, but they aren't reducing the markup to the consumer" they're pocketing the profits. Another key difference, Wright notes, is that prisoners can just be sent back to their cells whenever business goes through a lull; "on the outside, they have to lay off workers. It's much more difficult," Wright says (Barnett 2002). The use of inmate labor allows middle level companies like Signature Packaging to under-bid their competitors by cutting their labor costs. And prisons benefit as well because by engaging their inmates in this sort of economic production and then charging inmates for their own incarceration, they are able to keep the costs of running the prison down. Wright, an inmate at Twin Rivers, sums it up: They need to know that they are buying these products from a company that is basically getting rich off prisoners." Wright, sent to Twin Rivers for first degree murder in 1987, believes parents would be disturbed to know that their child's GameCube was packaged by a murderer, rapist, or pedophile. These companies spend a lot of money on their public image," Wright says, "but then they're quick to make money any way they can (Barnett 2002). The PIC and the Exploitation of African American Labor Specifically, we have argued that the Prison Industrial Complex and its attendant "prison industries" mimics the slave mode of production. That in the end, wealthy whites (primarily men) are profiting by not paying a living wage to African American inmates (also primarily men). Thus corporations are engaging in an exploitive labor practice, termed by Marx as the extraction of surplus value. By not paying what the labor is worth when inmates are working on farms, building furniture, assembling products for giant multi-national corporations like Microsoft and McDonalds, corporations make additional profits. And, when large corporations from Microsoft to McDonalds engage in this practice they also receive an unfair advantage over their competitors. Finally, we must note here that the whole scene is reminiscent of the "plantation economy" of 17th, 18th, 19th century America. The slaves were Black chattel. They had no rights and they were a captive labor force. All of the above is the same for today's prisoner. The consent decree between prisons and private companies and government has been shattered. No longer would the private prison companies’ honor the agreement that prison goods be for use within prisons and sold only to government agencies. Now, the prison industries will sell to whomever, the highest bidder. With profits from this industry now soaring upwards to $2 billion a year, it is a monster fully out of control. We have shown in this paper that the Prison Industrial Complex (PIC) exploits the labor of African American men (and women). Perhaps more devastating, however, is the evidence that the PIC is a modern form of slavery that has devastating consequences on the African American community as well. Families are separated, social capital ties broken, and whole communities left with few human and social capital resources. In fact, not only are individuals disenfranchised, but because of the relocation of inmates and census rules, communities of need see their citizens (and consequent resources) removed and transferred to other, more economically advantaged, primarily white communities. The Prison Industrial Complex disrupts not just the communities from which inmates come, but also the communities to which they are "relocated" for the purposes of incarceration. For example, in States like New York State with a large rural land mass, and many parts of Mississippi, itself a largely rural state, are excellent spots for the prison building boom. Despite seeming to be geographically disparate, what these places share is that they are places where other modes of sustenance industries have vanished (e.g., farming, textiles, meat packing etc). Economically depressed, local residents in these states, and others, see one thing and one thing only: jobs. What they don't see are the many pitfalls of having a prison nearby. One of these is the displacing of the resident economic base, many of which are in agriculture but also service. The American Criminal Justice System (multi-layered, composed of public and private bureaucracies, and racially segregated at the top levels of management) has unleashed an unprecedented movement towards harsh, long-term incarceration on American citizens (but also overseas in such ghouls as the Abu Ghraib military prison (20)) to punish them for breaking laws, not to rehabilitate the transgressors. But primarily to exploit their labor and extract their surplus value. This is especially apparent when we recall the fact that 40-50% of inmates are serving long sentences, sometimes life sentences for what Haney and Zimbardo note is little more than untreated addition. Due to harsh new sentencing guidelines, such as 'three-strikes, you're out,' a disproportionate number of young Black and Hispanic men are likely to be imprisoned for life under scenarios in which they are guilty of little more than a history of untreated addiction and several prior drug-related offenses... States will absorb the staggering cost of not only constructing additional prisons to accommodate increasing numbers of prisoners who will never be released but also warehousing them into old age. (Haney & Zimbardo, 1998:718) We add to this by returning to the framework provided by Erik O. Wright. Not only are inmates housed into old age, but they have suddenly been identified and re-constituted as the latest, greatest captive group who's labor can be exploited. And, while inmates may see small benefits associated with the opportunities for labor that are created, as the inmates at Twin Rivers Correctional Facility so eloquently articulate, the PIC is a complex system that is not about rehabilitating inmates but is about making money for a host of national and multinational corporations. Private prison corporations, such as CCA, make money by housing prisons and "leasing" their labor to the multi-national corporations that make money and see soaring profits by paying below market wages to inmates who labor for them.

Discourse

Discourse focus trades of with action – devolves into endless theorization

Rene Francisco Poitevin ‘1, PhD Cand Sociol @ UC-Davis (“The end of anti-capitalism as we knew it: Reflections on postmodern Marxism”, The Socialist Review)
The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It) begs another question: Who are they going after? Is it capitalism or is it Marx? Their book spends so much time on what is supposedly wrong with Marxism that at times it reads more like The End of Marxism As We Knew It. This approach is typical of a pattern that, to quote Wendy Brown, "responds less to the antidemocratic forces of our time than to a ghostly philosophical standoff between historically abstracted formulations of Marxism and liberalism. In other words, this effort seeks to resolve a problem in a (certain) history of ideas rather than a problem in history."19 Simply put, postmodern Marxist politics has more to do with the micropolitics of the ivory tower than with the plight of the workers who clean their campuses. However, once it becomes clear that a necessary condition for the primacy of postmodern theory and politics is that Marxism has to go (otherwise you do not have to become a postmodern to address their concerns), J.K. Gibson-Graham's anti-Marxist hostility, while actively embracing the Marxist label in order to render it useless, makes a lot of sense. And once again, all this is done with impeccable logic: Given that Marxism is still the only doctrine that calls for the systematic overthrow of capitalism, getting rid of Marx(ism) is also to get rid of the need for revolution with a big "R."20 One of the problems with trying to make the case for postmodern Marxism is that in order to get rid of Marxism and declare its tradition obsolete, you have to distort its legacy by constructing a straw man. This straw man-reading of Marx is predicated upon the double maneuver of collapsing Marxist history into Stalinism, on the one hand, and reducing Marxist theory to "essentialism," "totality," and "teleology," on the other. As J.K. Gibson-Graham themselves acknowledge, without any regrets, "Indeed, as many of our critics sometimes charge, we have constructed a 'straw man.'"21 What is left out of their quasi-humorous dismissal of Marxism is the complicity of such a straw man in the long history of red-baiting and anti-Marxist repression in this country and around the world. Also left out is the rich Marxist scholarship that was addressing their concerns long before there was a postmodern Marxist school. The fact is that postmodern Marxist's "contributions" are not as original nor as profound as they might have us believe. For example, what about the bulk of the Western Marxist tradition since the Frankfurt School? Has it not been predicated on a rejection of the economic reductionism embedded in the passage from the Preface to the Introduction to A Critique of Political Economy in which the (in)famous base/superstructure metaphor of society gets set in stone as the "official" definition of historical materialism? Or what about Horkheimer and Adorno's relentless critique of instrumental rationality? Marxism, in spite of what the postmodern Marxists want us to believe, has long been making the case for the centrality of culture and its irreducibility to economic laws, as anybody who has read Walter Benjamin or Antonio Gramsci can certify. Furthermore, postcolonial Marxism and critical theory have also been theorizing at more concrete levels of analyses the irreducibility of subjectivity to class.22 And despite the postmodern Marxist excitement when talking about class as a relational process, in fact it is impossible to tell that they are not the first ones to talk about class as a relational process, lots of Marxists before the Amherst School have been theorizing and clarifying the relational mechanisms embedded in class politics.23 Postmodern Marxism also ignores Lefebvre's urban Marxist contribution: his emphasis on the importance of experience and the everyday in accounting for social processes.24 And Marxist feminist contributions on the intersection of agency and gender with race, class, and sexuality are conveniently erased from J.K. Gibson-Graham's reduction of Marxism to a straw man.25 The fact is that when one looks at Marxism not as a distorted "straw man" but on its own terms, taking into account its richness and complexity, Marxist theory starts to appear all of a sudden less "totalizing," "essentializing," and "reductionist" and instead as more rich in possibilities and more enabling. A third feature of J.K. Gibson-Graham's work, in particular, and of the whole radical democracy tradition, in general, is its post-structuralist extremism.26 For postmodern Marxists it is not enough to point out that, as both Foucault and Habermas argue, we inhabit an intellectual regime characterized by a paradigm shift from the "philosophy of consciousness" to the "philosophy of language."27 Nor is it good enough for postmodern/post-Marxists to recognize the pitfalls embedded in Hegelian epistemology and argue instead, as Spivak does, for strategic-- uses-of-essentialism as a corrective to the excesses of teleological thinking and fixed notions of class.28 No way. As far as postmodern Marxism is concerned, the only way to compensate for constructions of capitalism that are too totalizing is through the unconditional surrender of the Marxist project. As J.K. Gibson-Graham themselves make clear, "to even conceive of 'capitalism' as 'capitalisms' is still taking 'capitalism' for granted."29 And to try to redistribute the heavy theoretical and political burden placed upon the proletariat by reconfiguring political agency through "race-class-gender," as opposed to just class, is still a futile endeavor: essentialism is still essentialism whether one essentializes around one or three categories. This strand of post-structuralism, one that once again, can be directly traced back to Laclau and Mouffe's Hegemony and Socialist Strategy,30 is predicated on the faulty epistemological premise that what really matters is "discourse." As Laclau and Mouffe clarify, "our analysis rejects the distinction between discursive and nondiscursive practices. It offirms that every object is constituted as an object of discourse."31 The problem with this approach is that once we enter this world of epistemological foundationalism predicated on the claim that there is "nothing but discourse," we enter a world of relativism in which all we can do is "create discursive fixings," as J.K. Gibson-Graham themselves prescribe, that will guarantee that "any particular analysis will never find the ultimate cause of events."32 It is this ideological postmodern insistence on reducing all of social reality to discourse that ultimately overloads its theoretical apparatus and causes it to buckle beneath them. The Amherst School's "provisional ontology" is incapable of escaping the performative trap of trying to get rid of essentialism by essentializing all of reality as "discursive." The postmodern Marxist approach to ontology boils down to substituting in political practice every occurrence of "continuity" with "discontinuity" as a way to get rid of essentialism and macro-narratives. Even Foucault, the great master of discontinuity, distances himself from such mirror-reversal solutions when theorizing the limits of discourse and accounting for the "divergence, the distances, the oppositions, the differences" that constitute the episteme of a period.33

Capitalism comes first—the alternative reveals individuals must confront the social system collectively or risk being confined to isolated difference prisons that perpetuate the status quo.

Islamophobia

Starting at Islamophobia guarantees the continuation of global neoliberalism – the aff diagnoses the problem wrong – their author

Kundnani 14 (Professor of Terror Studies and Media @ NYU & John Jay College, in an interview with Brandon Jordan, 12/26/14, “Interview: Author Arun Kundnani on How Media Promote Radicalization Myths & Fuels Islamophobia,” http://firedoglake.com/2014/12/26/interview-author-arun-kundnani-on-how-media-promote-radicalization-myths-fuel-islamophobia/, JHR)

What we need to do is find a way to give people a different kind of political framework to interpret the issues and grievances they have. At the moment, if you are angry about U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East, there are not many people addressing it in a radical, passionate way. You go to these violent fundamentalists since they are really speaking to that. We need to create alternatives so there are other kinds of politics out there that can attract young people who feel angry about these issues and give them a different way to think about that is not bound up in this militarized, harden identity politics. Rather, it goes deeper into understanding what is behind a lot of this stuff, in which capitalism and imperialism works. But not doing that using the framework of identity politics

Capitalism uniquely entrenches Islamophobia – hundreds of years of empirics prove

Kumar and Jay 14 (Deepa, Associate Professor of Media Studies and Middle Eastern Studies at Rutgers University, Paul, senior editor at the real news, 10/15/14, “Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire - Deepa Kumar on Reality Asserts Itself,” http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=12527, JHR)

JAY: So when does Islamophobia rear its head again in a serious way? KUMAR: So the story that I tell in the book is that there isn't one long stream of hatred between East and West in the clash of civilizations. Even during the time of the Crusades, you found different attitudes among Christians and Jews who lived in Al-Andalus. And then you see a complete dying down of these attitudes around 13th, 14th century. The rise of nationalism creates different attitudes, different enemies, and so on. And, in fact, there's great admiration for the Ottomans, because the Ottomans, compared to Europe--and remember, Europe is just coming out of the Dark Ages, and they see this really advanced civilization, incredible political administrative system, and they want to be like them. They consider the Ottomans to be Europeans of a sort. But what happens is that once the Ottomans are defeated, in Vienna, for instance, and once they start to go into decline economically and politically compared to Europe, where you see the rise of capitalism and technology and so on, that's when there is the reemergence of these ideas, because there's a sense in which Europeans are superior, and therefore the white man's burden is to go off and vanquish these barbaric people. JAY: And start colonizing the areas that were part of the Ottoman Empire. KUMAR: Exactly. And so Edward Said, whose book Orientalism really charts the process by which a systematic body of knowledge is created to justifying empire, to justify European colonialism--. JAY: Yeah, you've got to dehumanize those who you will either colonize or enslave. KUMAR: Absolutely.

Capitalism controls the root cause of their impacts - Islamophobia was created to justify the failures of neoliberalism

Wheel 14 (Emory Wheel, Emory student newspaper, 11/4/14, “Islamophobia Stoked by Neoliberal Idealogy, http://emorywheel.com/islamophobia-stoked-by-neoliberal-ideology/, JHR)

Nevertheless, one must not forget that the ideological framework of the neoliberal state predefines the process of the construction of such a marginalized identity. Terrorism, for example, is a neologism, a notion created by the neoliberal governments to excuse an already-failed war to gain control of territories and fight “the enemies of Western democracy,” yet Muslims cannot escape this accusation of enmity or of being a terrorist or a Jihadist, leaving them in a long-run resistance against the negative, false consciousness of the government that criminalizes their existence. This reasoning by the forces of neoliberalism is lethally dangerous for grouping a diverse religion under the perception that Islam itself breeds terrorism.

Islamophobia isn’t about identity it’s a social construct that only the alt can challenge

Tutt, 13 (Daniel, Ph.D. in philosophy and Documentary Film Producer, fellow at the Institute of Social Policy, citing Keepa Kumar and Stephen Sheehi, Huffington Post, "How Should We Combat Islamophobia?," http://www.huffingtonpost.com/daniel-tutt/how-should-we-combat-islamophobia_b_3149768.html, JHR)

In this model, Islamophobia is not understood as a fear cultural of otherness, but as a political campaign that is tied to American power and discursive processes that subject Muslims to the power of the state and other interests. In this model, Islamophobia is understood as a symptom of American power and imperial interests, particularly the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq since 9/11, and the bloated security state that followed from 9/11. Stephen Sheehi sees the origin of Islamophobia in the rise of neoconservative think tanks following the cold war, specifically propagated by public intellectuals such as Bernard Lewis and the media commentators, such as Fareed Zakaria, who espouse his views. Islamophobia is not about Islam as an identity, rather it is a construct that cuts across party lines and is propagated by the global elite to maintain the agenda of global capitalism. In Sheehi's framework, Islamophobia began on the ashes of Orientalism, and found its sprouting and coming into being inside the Beltway think tanks. Similarly, we find in Deepa Kumar's text,"Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire," a situating of Islamophobia as a symptom of American imperial wars and engagement in Iraq and Afghanistan. The implication for both Sheehi and Kumar are that large international coalitions should be formed to advocate for international justice through solidarity with other marginalized groups, and issues such as poverty eradication, Occupy Wall Street, and so on. Kumar points out that since 9/11, more than 700,000 Muslims have been interviewed by the FBI, which means that nearly 50 percent of all Muslim households have been touched by the FBI's "investigations" into Muslims.

Islamophobia grew out of notions of western technological rationality

Grosfoguel 10 (Ramon, Associate Professor in the Department of Ethnic Studies at University of California Berkeley, Fall 2010 “Epistemic Islamophobia and Colonial Social Sciences,”

http://scholarworks.umb.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1380&context=humanarchitecture, JHR)

If we follow the logic of Weber to its final consequences, that is, that Muslims are irrational and fatalistic people, then no serious knowledge can come from them. What are the geopolitics of knowledge involved in Weber 's epistemic racism about Muslim people? The geopolitics of knowledge is the German and French orientalists' epistemic Islamophobia that is repeated in Weber's verdict about Islam. For Weber, it is only the Christian tradition that gives rise to economic rationalism and, thus, to Western modern capitalism. Islam cannot compare to the "superiority" of Western values in that it lacks individuality, rationality and science. Rational science and, its derivative, rational technology are, according to Weber, unknown to oriental civilizations. These statements are quite problematic. Scholars such as Saliba (2007) and Graham (2006) have demonstrated the influence of scientific developments in the Islamic World on the West, modern science and modern philosophy. Rationality was a central tenet of the Islamic civilization. While Europe was in obscurantist feudal superstition during what is known as the Middle Ages, the school of Baghdad was the world center of intellectual and scientific production and creativity. Weber's and Weberians' Orientalist views of Islam reproduce an epistemic Islamophobia where Muslims are incapable of producing science and of having rationality, despite the historical evidence.

Race

Claims that race and gender discrimination cannot be explained by production are depoliticizing and normalize capital – even if these inequalities are based in culture they are part of a historical superstructure that is organized around the means of production. Only the alternative provides the political tools to dismantle this structure.

Tumino ‘01 (Stephen Tumino, Really Hardcore Marxist, “What is Orthodox Marxism and Why it Matters Now More Than Ever Before”, Red Critique vol. 1, wcp)

Any effective political theory will have to do at least two things: it will have to offer an integrated understanding of social practices and, based on such an interrelated knowledge, offer a guideline for praxis. My main argument here is that among all contesting social theories now, only Orthodox Marxism has been able to produce an integrated knowledge of the existing social totality and provide lines of praxis that will lead to building a society free from necessity. But first I must clarify what I mean by Orthodox Marxism. Like all other modes and forms of political theory, the very theoretical identity of Orthodox Marxism is itself contested—not just from non-and anti-Marxists who question the very "real" (by which they mean the "practical" as under free-market criteria) existence of any kind of Marxism now but, perhaps more tellingly, from within the Marxist tradition itself. I will, therefore, first say what I regard to be the distinguishing marks of Orthodox Marxism and then outline a short polemical map of contestation over Orthodox Marxism within the Marxist theories now. I will end by arguing for its effectivity in bringing about a new society based not on human rights but on freedom from necessity. I will argue that to know contemporary society—and to be able to act on such knowledge—one has to first of all know what makes the existing social totality. I will argue that the dominant social totality is based on inequality—not just inequality of power but inequality of economic access (which then determines access to health care, education, housing, diet, transportation, . . . ). This systematic inequality cannot be explained by gender, race, sexuality, disability, ethnicity, or nationality. These are all secondary contradictions and are all determined by the fundamental contradiction of capitalism which is inscribed in the relation of capital and labor. All modes of Marxism now explain social inequalities primarily on the basis of these secondary contradictions and in doing so—and this is my main argument—legitimate capitalism. Why? Because such arguments authorize capitalism without gender, race, discrimination and thus accept economic inequality as an integral part of human societies. They accept a sunny capitalism—a capitalism beyond capitalism. Such a society, based on cultural equality but economic inequality, has always been the not-so-hidden agenda of the bourgeois left—whether it has been called "new left," "postmarxism," or "radical democracy." This is, by the way, the main reason for its popularity in the culture industry—from the academy (Jameson, Harvey, Haraway, Butler,. . . ) to daily politics (Michael Harrington, Ralph Nader, Jesse Jackson,. . . ) to. . . . For all, capitalism is here to stay and the best that can be done is to make its cruelties more tolerable, more humane. This humanization (not eradication) of capitalism is the sole goal of ALL contemporary lefts (marxism, feminism, anti-racism, queeries, . . . ). Such an understanding of social inequality is based on the fundamental understanding that the source of wealth is human knowledge and not human labor. That is, wealth is produced by the human mind and is thus free from the actual objective conditions that shape the historical relations of labor and capital. Only Orthodox Marxism recognizes the historicity of labor and its primacy as the source of all human wealth. In this paper I argue that any emancipatory theory has to be founded on recognition of the priority of Marx's labor theory of value and not repeat the technological determinism of corporate theory ("knowledge work") that masquerades as social theory. Finally, it is only Orthodox Marxism that recognizes the inevitability and also the necessity of communism—the necessity, that is, of a society in which "from each according to their ability to each according to their needs" (Marx) is the rule.

The only way to effectively challenge racist institutions is a unified struggle against class – all other methods fail – your evidence

Kundnani 14 (Professor of Terror Studies and Media @ NYU & John Jay College, in an interview with Brandon Jordan, 1/16/15, “Interview: Author Arun Kundnani on Understanding Terrorism, the Surveillance State & How to Discuss Reform,” http://firedoglake.com/2015/01/16/interview-author-arun-kundnani-on-understanding-terrorism-the-surveillance-state-how-to-discuss-reform/, JHR)

KUNDNANI:  That’s a part of it. Firstly, the mainstream terrorism studies tend to avoid defining terrorism very precisely, which means you don’t look at state terrorism. Secondly, it often tries to identify something like a terrorism mindset. It’s not so much focused on the act of terrorism than the culture or psychology that produces it. Particularly, if you focus on the culture that produces, you’ll then get into all of these arguments about some kind of culture of religious extremism that communities have problems with. I think the bigger kind of distinction in a way though is between non-state actors and state and structural violence. Mainstream terrorism studies focuses entirely on non-state actors and won’t use the word “terrorism” for anything else. When you use the word violence, it is not easy to define. If you want to have a consistent and objective definition of violence, you have to include the structure violence of an economic system like capitalism, which puts millions of people in poverty, struggling with hunger or lack shelter. That is also a kind of violence. JORDAN: Connecting accumulation by dispossession with the racial component of it. You want more resources and you’re going to do anything to get it. KUNDNANI: Yeah, I would say capitalism is always going to be bound up with structural violence. What you’re doing with a capitalist system is putting profits over people; therefore, someone’s well-being and health can be dispensed with in the name of profit. JORDAN: This discussion today reminds me of a quote by Martin Luther King Junior. In his “Beyond Vietnam” speech on April 4, 1967, he said something worth repeating in this day and age: I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a “thing-oriented” society to a “person-oriented” society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered. There seems to be a strong connection with the overall capitalist system and the Islamophobia seen in the West. Deepa Kumar, a Rutgers University Professor, elaborated on the importance of a structure for mass surveillance on The Real News [last October]. I suppose my question is then, is this fully ingrained into our system? KUNDNANI: Martin Luther King, by the time he gives his speech in 1967, comes to understand the issue of racism he’s been dealing with is connected to a wider system. It is the same system that caused the Vietnam War and causes poverty across the U.S. We have to constantly go back and forth to thinking about the specific issues we’re immediately concerned with, whether it’s Islamophobia or surveillance, but also look at the bigger picture and how these’s issues connect together. So how does Islamophobia connect with the oppression of women? How does the policing issue in Ferguson connect with the U.S. bombing in Iraq and Syria again? The only way we can deal with these issues is by linking them together, seeing the connections and having an understanding that we need a movement that brings different constituencies each affected by the system in specific ways. Some notion of capitalism or neoliberalism is the only way to unite all of these issues together and seeing them connected.