There is simply nothing revolutionary about advocating for things the way they are, even if that doesn't reflect the majority opinions of those making and judging the debates. I agree that personal attacks and virtue signaling is detrimental to a reasoned discussion, but these are highschool kids that live in a country with the highest incarcerated population in the world (the majority being black), extreme wealth inequality, a political system that offers geriatric candidates who have no interest in introducing radical social policies that might give them a future to be hopeful for. What, you think they're just going to sit back and listen to a bunch of old people tell them that everything is cool and the system works? The system clearly doesn't work! They don't even have a baseline for a reasonable discussion, to them the whole world is fighting against their futures and the "truth" doesn't matter if it will crush them.
> It is actually truly revolutionary to disagree with [Critical theory], e.g., take the stance that capitalism is an effective way of organizing labour.
There is not a lot of abolishment of capitalism going on in the west these days in practice. Dominant in certain demographics, sure, but claiming it's "actually revolutionary" to disagree seems to be a sidestep of actually engaging with the claims of why changing things would be important to anyone involved or affected in the first place. "It's revolutionary to say things should stay the same"? So instead of debating the premise, you then try to pull a have-your-cake-and-eat-it-to of saying "you're just following the crowd" as a justification for... following the crowd among those really calling the shots instead of the crowd of high school debaters.
> I also think a white elephant in the room, is that a) a lot of critical theory is incredibly badly reasoned / detached from reality and b) a significant amount of the use of it is done in bad faith (e.g., for virtue signalling, and to shoot others down, invalidate others rather than engage with their arguments and views)
This, similarly, shifts from "here's why I don't support the formats/tactics" to slipping in "just take it for granted that the contents of the arguments are actually wrong, regardless of format."
It’s a fair question to debate. What’s nonsense is turning every economic question into this one.
Instead of talking about if the tactic is valid or if the judges are doing a good job with it the comment here took a major tangent towards "actually the whole line of thought used is obviously flawed and wrong" with a dose of "nobody here is thinking about it they're just following the crowd." Which is suddenly not about tactics or scoring at all.
Again, nobody disagrees. But if you ask me if I want red or white wine, and I, instead, launch into a diatribe in Marxist-Leninism, that’s not a valid argument and it’s very annoying. Outside these debate circuits, it could come across as debilitating.
The US has a fair amount more publically owned sectors than Europe, which eg has privatized postal services.
Though the extent of it really matters, I always hear "Norway is a capitalist country" when their economy is primarily in the hands of the state, more than for example Venezuela.
But people tend to point to Venezuela, and not Norway, as an example of a failed state owned economy.
It's not really about "sectors" of the economy that are publicly owned but actual economic output. The money in the US is produced and it is in the hands of private individuals most of it. In Norway near 70% of it is produced and in the hands of the state. Obviously Norway is a particular example because they're a country that relies on natural resources extraction. But you can look at other similar countries in terms of their exports (Australia, Chile) and see how the Norwegian model differs.
The USPS, for example, is a service. It's not really a business, it doesn't have to be profitable it ideally has to be sustainable but I wouldn't say it's a necessity. Not only that, it subsidised private businesses like Amazon.
USPS is profitable, though. (even if Congress messes with their retirement accounting to make it look worse)
If they subsidize anyone it's China, because we forced them to do that by signing the UPU treaty. After that it's people who buy forever stamps.
Can you please provide some sources backing up your claim? What metric did you use?
The metrics that I would use, like the Index of Economic Freedom by The Heritage Foundation, seem to contradict your claim.
The fact that the state owns some companies in key industrial sectors and has stakes in others does not mean that the country's economy is primarily in the hands of the state.
[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_governm...
https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/2018/03/09/how-capitali...
And I mean, yeah, nordic countries for sure participate in the free-market... but Capitalism is defined by private ownership; so when you have such important portions of your economy be collectively, socially or communally owned (state, coops, labour unions) it's misleading to use such labels so lightly. These are mixed-economies, and I would even go as far as to say they're more socialist than capitalist.
Socialism does have a bad reputation though. So I don't blame for these countries to label themselves as "capitalist"; i mean, it's better for business.
There is a big difference between governments owning things vs. exclusions to citizens owning things.
In most cases, workers can own the means to production as many corporations are public. They just have to risk their capital to buy a share of the company - like every other owner.
There are worker coops, customer coops, and state owned companies in the US.
Also you're still trying to argue against Keynes and your statement would make China and Vietnam capitalist, which would be a surprise to them. Not to mention Lenin's NEP mixed economy.
nb the people who "control" the means of production in the US are the voters, who can get the government to pass laws regulating it. It doesn't matter if you "own" it ie are equityholders. Although we have that too, in the form of our worker-owned index fund company Vanguard.
Well they are. Just because they wave red flags and call themselves "socialist" doesn't make it true, for the same reason North Korea is precisely none of "democratic", "people's", or a "republic" despite its assertions otherwise.
A thing being true throughout an economy and it being permitted by the formal rules are not the same thing.
Socialism is not merely where some workers do control some of the means of production, but where the entirety of the means of production are cobtrolled by the workers by virtue of their being workers.
If some people who happen to work also happen to have a private property relationship to some capital sufficient to be on par with their labor in terms of importance in their personal relation to the economy, then they are just petit bourgeois in a capitalist economy.
I am not sure the word can be rescued from the 20th century at this point.
Also, people just get on here and disagree with Keynes?
> The capitalist economic system has not done justice to the national and social vital interests of the German people. After the terrible political, economic and social collapse as a result of criminal power politics, only a fundamental reorganization can take place.
> Content and goal of this social and economic reorganization can no longer be the capitalist striving for profit and power, but only the well-being of our people. Through a public economic order, the German people should receive an economic and social constitution that corresponds to the rights and dignity of human beings, serves the spiritual and material development of our people and ensures internal and external peace.
This was dubbed "Christian Socialism", and, under the influence of Adenauer, the program soon inched somewhat to the center towards a concept now known as "social market economy", a term, which had also been in use by (some) social-democrats. Conceptionally, it's deemed different from ordoliberalism as it is more process-oriented and pragmatic. (We may also see how someone who is leaning marginally towards anarcho-capitalism like, say, Elon Musk, must be perceived as entirely misaligned.)
Also, the idea that revolution is inherently good has been a dead cliché since the IT industry got hold of it.
This seems to have been forgotten since Tucker Calson et al started redefining woke | CRT to mean whatever they currently hated to avoid addressing policy.
[0] https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2022/08/countering-disinfor...
As readers of my book *All One in Christ* will find, the content of CRT is even more disturbing than this brief summary indicates – and it is also riddled with blatant logical fallacies, crude social scientific errors, and assumptions and policy recommendations that are utterly contrary to the natural moral law and the Catholic faith.
* people choosing to build a casino on a specific portion of their land that they choose to build upon, and
* people having no say over third parties excavating a giant hole beneath a large area of their land at a particular location they believe has deep religous meaning | spititual connection.
However, only one of these is actually going on.
So many people. Look no further than the activists who are continuing to protest against Cop City in Atlanta despite the fact that the cops have already murdered one person [1] and arrested many more on trumped up charges [2].
[1] https://theintercept.com/2023/04/20/atlanta-cop-city-protest... [2] https://theintercept.com/2023/06/21/cop-city-georgia-attorne...
I've spent years in academia, admittedly in STEM but I saw little actual explicit critical theory. I was all alone discovering and reading post-Marxist texts, with no group to discuss it with.
Even famously conservative universities like U. Chicago have plenty of this stuff going on.
And that tracks with my personal campus experiences, as well as the historical account of critical theory itself.
And the milieux that circulates this is really primarily liberal, centrist in practice, overwhelmingly supporting and electing quite mainstream fully "capitalist" political parties... but with the aesthetic or appeal to a past radical, anti-capitalist, socialist "scene"... without an actual meaningful program or alternative for the working class. A working class which has as a result almost completely divorced itself from this "left."
Which is all the end product of the demolition of the organized socialist left & trade union movement in the west through the 70s and 80s and early 90s and the retreat of associated intellectuals into academia and cultural politics.
If, as I keep hearing from right-wing commentators, "the left" is somehow dominant, it's only because "the left" has wholesale dropped its historical anti-capitalist mission, and has retreated almost exclusively into culture wars; and generally taken positions which enrage the right on that basis, but doesn't actually challenge any real power. A very general "anti-oppression" politic which is primarily concerned with individual concerns, not collective ones. This "left" that I keep hearing about from the Shapiro etc types foaming at the mouth, it's a caricature not only made by its opponents... but by itself.
Just Liberalism, and a very 21st century American product.
Liberal across the Atlantic means something closer to its classic definition.
One of the first challenges I have when discussing politics with Americans (and increasingly other Canadians) is precisely trying to define how I, as maybe a more "traditional" socialist radical, do not fit on the spectrum they've defined there. I share a disgust with the conservative right, am secular, and broadly call myself a feminist or anti-racist but when it moves to bread and butter issues, gun control, or some identity politics stuff... there's basically no correspondence...
(Here in Canada, it's muddled in different ways, where "Liberal" is a political party, defined mainly by "whatever will win an election" than any constant ideological focus. Right now it's vaguely "left" (in so far as it takes "left" positions on cultural issues, combined with some kind of neo-Keynesian budgetary spending model, but combined with low corporate taxes) but in my mind it's really just a kind of croneyism... but that's a rant. We have a separate, sometimes-successful, social democratic party which sorta muddies any kind of comparisons to the US, but comparisons to the UK also don't work because our NDP isn't really like their Labour party, either... though it might want to be)
Incidentally, if you talk about liberalism people are more likely to understand that you mean the philosophy rather that some basket of policies and jargon that are popular with the liberal tribe at the current moment.
> broadly call myself a feminist or anti-racist
Even these labels are fraught, at least in the US. They are pretty much doublespeak insofar as the folks who identify as 'anti-racist' in the US tend to endorse policies that are explicitly racially discriminatory (they would say 'race conscious', but they mean exactly the same thing), and the folks who identify as 'feminist' in the US have no discernible interest in gender equality.
This was not some grand conspiracy, the Socialists just realized that workers in the West were generally happy and well off (iirc Marcuse said "Capitalism delivers the goods") and not at all friendly to Socialists' plans of revolution.
As a result there was a push to shift the propagandizing ("educating") to the next best oppressed groups they could find, with these being the familiar categories of LGBTQ, racial minorities (only certain ones), women etc.).
Just like the socialist revolutionaries of old, the majority of the "New Left" are not parts of those groups. They are merely using them as a "revolutionary mass" whose misery and grievances are single-use tools for the revolutionaries to gain power. Lenin was fuming at Bolshevik party members who actually tried to negotiate better working conditions or pay pre-1917 because happy workers don't have "revolutionary potential" (a euphemism for not being desperate enough to want to put him in power).
> If, as I keep hearing from right-wing commentators, "the left" is somehow dominant, it's only because "the left" has wholesale dropped its historical anti-capitalist mission, and has retreated almost exclusively into culture wars; and generally taken positions which enrage the right on that basis, but doesn't actually challenge any real power.
I explored some of the reasons for that above, but everybody with some sense could see that capitalist societies were happier, almost never genocided their own population, were vastly more prosperous and even produced enough surplus to have better social welfare than Socialist countries. On the other hand Socialism always ended badly, sometimes catastrophically. People are not blind, and associating your political movement with 60 million corpses is not a smart move.
The reason they don't challenge "real power" is because the objective is to gain the power vested in those institutions, not to challenge them.
Anti-capitalism is very pregnant where I live (France) with one mainstream political party embracing it and the Green supporting it covertly. It's a position which is popular amongst parts of most Green parties in Europe.
I'm wondering if the author simply thinks the current K's are simply just worse.
I'm bringing up some old memories now, but lets go with some random topics that I recall
a) We should increase USAID funding to Africa to fight HIV/AIDS
b) We should increase alternative energy incentives in the US.
With the USAID topic, we had to learn in high school:
- What is USAID, how does it work
- How does foreign aid to Africa work
- How does the Govt actually allocate funds
- What is HIV/AIDS, how does it spread, and what work is done to prevent/cure it
With the alternative energy topic, we learned:
- How does national alternative energy policy work
- How do states deal with their own energy security vs others
- Does nuclear count as alternative energy
What high schooler is being tought these topics in class. I definitely see debates on HN that are FAR worse than a High School debate since so much research and planning is done by debaters on these topics, and probably know far more than most people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophist
To many an audience, that's all that matters. I have a persuasive essay due tomorrow night. Part of that is transferable rhetorical strategies removed from the actual specifics. On the flip side of your argument, just presenting a list of facts is not persuasive.
Which I want to point out as the root of the problem. Debate is not really about learning, not in the arts and sciences sense.
I remember once an MIT lecture made the point that medicine is not really science. I'll extend that and say, debate is not really about the truth. There's nothing to learn, all it is is learning the rationalizations to serve one side.
You could just as easily have a research club where awards are given for the best research on any given topic. That's essentially what the science fair is.
But it's important to you to have a winner declared between a and b? A fun game, sure, but don't delude yourself into thinking it had more value than entertainment. You could have learned about or been taught energy policy through any number of means. But you are failing to consider why the framing of HIV vs energy funding as a winner take all debate is, as I said above, incredibly dumb.
Why do people cheat at anything? Because they want to win.
These kinds of questions are not interesting, because EVERYONE ASKS IT. Every single HN question on this topic of "why would you do this" would have reams of evidence/theory to refute it and explain why you're a crazy person for questioning this strategy.
Even back in my day, we definitely had debates where the argument effectively was "This debate is racist, and if we don't win you are all racists" And so you would have to figure out strategies to fight back.
You can see it all the time in the rhetroic online with activists and whatever, people who don't know how to argue, arguing with others that are making either bad faith arguments or trying to figure out how to deal with Kritique style arguments. It waste's their time and everyone elses time.
By being able to argue for/against Kritiques, you gain the ability to quickly call out the fucking bullshit and go straight to the meat.
I'm not so sure about that. Because, if what Bodnick says is true, the judges never go for the meat but always vote for the sizzle. As she herself wrote, 'For example, many leftist judges will not accept a response to a Marxism kritik that argues that capitalism is good.' Sounds more like the K advocate (with the aid of the judge) is more interested in diffusing aromas than putting ribeye on the table.
We were supposed to debate a South African about apartheid. He couldn’t make it so we debated our teacher (who made his opinions known he was not a fan). He destroyed our arguments one by one. We knew for the rest of the class we would have to up our game.
This! I actually laughed out loud at the following line from tfa:
> A Public Forum debater who reached Semifinals at the Tournament of Champions told me: “I had to know critical theory to win... you have to be prepared in case you have to run it or go against it.”
Literally what? That's the entire fucking point. This is like people complaining about squirrels in debate or cheese in an RTS: if it worked, you suck, so maybe try not to suck instead of whining about it? I mean, I, personally, find arguments and worldviews rooted in appeals to authority to be quite gross, but I don't pretend that I can bury my head in the sand and cry unfair if someone deploys an argument like that against me and I can't deal with it due to lack of familiarity. Not really seeing how this scenario is any different.
Even in the extreme case of an outright biased judge, that's still in the game: inverting the K to demonstrate that, actually, the side that raised it are arguing for structural racism or whatever is both a ton of fun and really good experience.
Bias disclaimer: ran/defended against Ks in PF to great success long ago
Debate is competitive. Yes, each side wants to "get one over" or "blindside" their opponent, but that's not different with the K than with any other creative argument or novel bit of research, and at higher competitive levels everyone is going to be quite comfortable debating the K (at least since the 1990s).
This seems like an advantage to the affirmative side. in that light, Ks are a strategy to negate the affirmative advantage.
People are taking it more seriously. In the past, one had the capacity to debate opposition. That appears less true today. Debate experience doesn’t seem to correlate, in my experience, with ability in negotiation or public speaking anymore.
My impression is that the author thinks that K's are bad in principle. And that the level of popularity is a problem. Certainly that's how I think about it. What you call "quite a lot of fun to run with," I call, "intellectually dishonest groupthink." Ideas should be debated on the merits of the ideas, and information on the merits of the facts. Winning on the popularity of the ideology you espouse is an easy way to ignore holes in your ideology.
Lawyers have a saying. "If the law is on your side, pound on the law. If the facts are on the side, pound on the facts. If neither is on your side, pound on the table." K's are pounding on the table. And pounding on the table is sufficient reason to declare that you have lost the debate.
how on earth is it "revolutionary" to express "the current economic system that dominates 95% of all countries on earth with little to no challenge is actually just fine"
that is the opposite of "revolutionary"
It's revolutionary for an Anglo-Saxon educational setting, I'd imagine, because I'd infer Marxism is enforced as a moral standard by a significant number of teachers in some schools.
It's a leftist moral pocket inside the US.
Muslims would be a conservative moral pocket.
Saying gays should die is taboo in most of the country but not inside most islamic religious gatherings.
Etc.
> Saying gays should die is taboo in most of the country but not inside most islamic religious gatherings.
Again, any direct evidence? I'm pretty sure that is false. Note the Christian scripture and some leaders say similar things, but the vast majority of Christians do not.
Also - the world isn’t capitalist for ideological reasons. You have to work hard against nature to destroy the notion of personal property.
It's true that it goes against the debate in the moment, but if you zoom out and look at the role of debate within greater society, I think it makes sense to challenge the topics brought up for debate and the whole system that we live in.
(Also, even that isn't an instant-win button! Any decent debater can spin an actually-you're-the-imperialist argument in almost any circumstances, and sadly paying attention to judge biases is also routine. And FWIW at something like a state championship tournament there are a lot more normie judges who won't vote for a K, no matter how well argued, than there are Maoists.)
Sure. But not in the debate itself.
That's classic bad faith participation and means the argument you are representing is being ill-served to the point of dishonesty.
There are 5 of what are called "stock issues" that are the basis for judging a round, and the affirmative side must win all of them to take the round. The negative side need only win one.
One of those stock issues is "topicality." The affirmative wins topicality as an issue by affirming the resolution. The negative is not so bound. This leads to an absolutely classical negative strategy called the "counter-plan." Essentially, what this is is a strategy where, rather than the negative simply saying "nuh uh" to the affirmative's points, they put forth their own plan and argue that it is better than the affirmative's plan.
There is some thought that the negative counterplan must explicitly be non-topical, i.e. not advocate for the resolution. So, for instance, the the resolution might be something like "Resolved: That the United States government should reduce worldwide pollution through its trade and/or aid policies," which was actually the 1992-1993 high school policy debate resolution. The negative could argue that the US should reduce worldwide pollution by means other than trade and/or aid policy, or that the US should do something completely unrelated to pollution reduction, because that action would create bigger benefits than the affirmative plan.
For this strategy to work, it's best if the counterplan and the affirmative plan are mutually exclusive, so it's a common strategy to simply hijack the affirmative plan's funding plank to make it all work.
Absolutely none of this is any sort of bad faith tactic. An affirmative team must always be prepared to argue a comparative advantage case. As I said, this is completely bog-standard, classical policy debate strategy, and in no way constitutes bad faith. But, yet, because the negative has no duty to be topical (and, indeed, could possibly be more convincing if they are explicitly non-topical), they might spend half their time talking about something not mentioned at all in the resolution.
As a college admissions officer or employer, if this is what the endeavor had degenerated to, I would place no stock in it as a skill builder or source of any reputable credential.
So you have no idea what you're talking about.
Better yet: "this is atypical in-group power play: the misuse of authority in the absence of substance is de facto perpetuation of the institutional dysfunction laid clear by outsiders."
Which "k" is that?
Your arguments is basically a mediocre elitism K,
The style of "critique is inherently bad" argument made by this article is also perfectly possible to make within debate. But it's not common, less because of biased judges (who certainly exist, in all directions) than because it doesn't stand up to scrutiny very well in context. Policy debate isn't a great truth-finding endeavor, but it is ruthlessly competitive and as a result pretty effective at weeding out arguments that, like the article's, rely on a low-context audience who have heard a lot about out of control woke college students but haven't just watched a bunch of rounds of vigorous dispute over everything from hypothetical policy details to the boundaries of the year's topic to, yes, critical theory, with practiced advocates on every side.
One thing about personal attacks. Some people take sides on an issue based on their political alliance. That means many times their arguments are contradictory. Pointing this or hypocrisy out is a personal attack but it also shows their arguments are disingenuous.
We can certainly discuss if they should and how we can encourage/discourage certain tactics, and it feels the article focuses on that. Not so much the comments here.
Debate is just not a thing that subjects itself to being gamed in this way.
Ah, the status quo, truly the highest form of revolution.
Not sure if you meant to combine "elephant in the room" with "white elephant" but the coinage is weirdly appealing. Critical theory is a white elephant that bankrupts those who take it up. It is also the elephant in the room that can't be named because to do so would nullify you as a rightist running dog, aka, a class enemy.
True. It may overlap with revolutionary views, but is not, inherently, itself revolutionary. It is a view of what is, not a view of what should be done about it.
> Socially, it is dominant
No, its not.
> (particularly among that demographic).
There is essentially no demographic, other than one defined specifically by adherence to critical theory, for which this is true.
> It is actually truly revolutionary to disagree with it, e.g., take the stance that capitalism is an effective way of organizing labour.
This has been the dominant view, across society (at least, as weighted by social power, maybe not in pure number of adherents terms), in the developed West for longer than capitalism has had a name (which it got from people disagreeing with that dominant viewpoint in the mid-19th Century.)
It is not truly revolutionary to hold what is both the dominant elite viewpoint and the viewpoint supporting the dominance of the elites.
I think the parent comment means for the audience to substitute whatever minority group the reader finds the most loud and obnoxious. In other words, it's nonsense when read literally because it's not meant to be read literally; it's a dogwhistle.
Is this supposed to be satire? According to neoclassical economics, "capitalism" (to be precise, neoclassical economics actually denies the existence of capitalism) is a mathematically unimprovable system that is already as perfect as it gets and any alternative will make things worse. Economists are literally blind to the things that cause recessions and they will deny any potential solution because those are already assumed to be implemented implicitly.
The author is arguing that the rise of K-s is killing true debate (where anything can be advocated for and one wins based on the quality of arguments) with something else (clever appeal to authority and personal attacks).
The aim of debate is to foster people who form their own opinions, but the current structure instead fosters people who blithely subscribe to the current social norms. Critical theory is not revolutionary. Socially, it is dominant (particularly among that demographic). It is actually truly revolutionary to disagree with it, e.g., take the stance that capitalism is an effective way of organizing labour.
I also think a white elephant in the room, is that a) a lot of critical theory is incredibly badly reasoned / detached from reality and b) a significant amount of the use of it is done in bad faith (e.g., for virtue signalling, and to shoot others down, invalidate others rather than engage with their arguments and views)