Tournament: UT | Round: 1 | Opponent: O | Judge: J
Debate is first an educational activity. We engage in debate because of its educational merit, because it challenges us to critically engage in discourse through meaningful argumentation.
The judge is to be a revolutionary educator and use the ballot to represent their paradigm and endorse the ideas they believe to be educationally acceptable in debate since decisions influence the educational norms that are accepted. Friere:
Freire continues:
Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the oppressed. ~New York~: Herder and Herder, 1970.
But the hu~myn~ist, revolutionary educator cannot wait for this pos-sibility to materialize. From the outset, her efforts must coincide with those of the students to engage in critical thinking and the quest for mutual hu~myn~ization. His~her~ efforts must be imbued with a profound trust in people and their creative power. To achieve this, they must be partners of the students in their relations with them.
Freire 2 furthers
Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the oppressed. ~New York~: Herder and Herder, 1970.
In problem-posing education, people develop their power to perceive critically the way they exist in the world with which and in which they find themselves; they come to see the world not as a static reality, but as a reality in process, in transformation. Although the dialectical relations of wo~ and ~myn~ with the world exist independently of how these relations are perceived (or whether or not they are perceived at all), it is also true that the form of action they adopt is to a large extent a function of how they perceive themselves in the world. Hence, the teacher-student and the students-teachers 'reflect simultaneously on themselves and the world without dichotomizing this reflection from action, and thus establish an authentic form of thought and action.
We must analyze this truth and break down these power structures in order to break free from their regime of "truth" thus the role of the ballot is to endorse the debater who best to break down power structures that create a regime of "truth."
Michel Foucault. Power And Knowledge. 1980.
It seems to me that what must now be taken into account in the intellectual is not the 'bearer of universal values'. Rather, it's the person occupying a specific position- but whose specificity is linked, in a society like ours, to the general functioning of an apparatus of truth. In other words, the intellectual has a three-fold specificity: that of his class position (whether as petty-bourgeois in the service of capitalism or "organic" intellectual of the proletariat); that of is conditions of life and work, linked to his condition as an intellectual (his field of research, his place in a laboratory, the political and economic demands to which he submits or against which he rebels, in the university, the hospital, etc.); lastly, the specificity of the politics of truth in our societies. And its with this last factor that his position can take on a general significance and that his local, specific struggle can have effects and implications which are not simply professional or sectoral. The intellectual can operate and struggle at the general level of that regime of truth which is so essential to the structure and functioning of our society. There is a battle 'for truth', or at least 'around truth'- it being understood once again that by truth I do not mean 'the ensemble of truths which are to be discovered and accepted', but rather 'the ensemble of rules according to which the true and false are separated and specific effects of power attached to the true', it being understood also that it's not a matter of a battle 'on behalf' of the truth, but of a battle about the status of truth and the economic and political role it plays. It is necessary to think of the political problems of intellectuals not in terms of ''science' and 'ideology', but in terms of 'truth' and 'power'. And thus the question of the professionalisation of intellectuals and the divisions between intellectual and manual labour can be envisaged in a new way. All this must seem very confused and uncertain. Uncertain indeed, and what I am saying here is above all to be taken as a hypothesis. In order for it to be a little less confused, however, I would like to put forward a few 'propositions'- not firm assertions, but simply suggestions to be further tested and evaluated. 'Truth' is linked in a circular relation with systems of power, which produce and sustain it, and to effects of power which it induces and which extend it. A 'regime' of truth. This regime is not merely ideological or superstructural; it was condition of the formulation and development of capitalism. And it's this same regime which, subject to certain modifications, operates in the socialist countries ( I leave open here the question of China, about which I know little). The essential political problem for the intellectual is not to criticize the ideological contents supposedly linked to science, or to ensure that his own scientific practice is accompanied by a correct ideology, but that of ascertaining the possibility of constituting a new politics of truth. The problem is not changing people's consciousnesses- or what's in their heads- but the political economic, institutional regime of the production of truth. It's not a matter of emancipating truth from every system of power (which would be a chimera, for truth is already power) but of detaching the power of truth from the forms of hegemony, social, economic, and cultural, within which it operates at the present time. The political question, to sum up, is not error, illusion, alienated consciousness or ideology; it is the truth itself. Hence the importance of Nietzsche.
Legislating Rights Allows The State To Politicize Life – This Emerging Biopolitics Is The Foundation Of Giving And Taking Rights At Any Moment
Agamben 1998 ~Giorgio, Prof. of Philosophy and Aesthetics at the University of Verona~ Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. P. 127-128.~
Arendt does no more than offer a few, essential hints concerning the link between the rights of ~hu~man and the nation-state, and her suggestion has therefore not been followed up. In the period after the Second World War, both the instrumental emphasis on the rights of ~hu~man and the rapid growth of declarations and agreements on the part of international organizations have ultimately made any authentic understanding of the historical significance of the phenomenon almost impossible. Yet it is time to stop regarding declarations of rights as proclamations of eternal, metajuridical values binding the legislator (in fact, without much success) to respect eternal ethical principles, and to begin to consider them according to their real historical function in the modern nation-state. Declarations of rights represent the originary figure of the inscription of natural life in the juridico-political order of the nation-state. The same bare life that in the ancien régime was politically neutral and belonged to God as creaturely life and in the classical world was (an least apparently) clearly distinguished as zoe from political life (bios) now fully enters into the structure of the state and even becomes the earthly foundation of the state's legitimacy and sovereignty. A simple examination of the text of the Declaration 1789 shows than it is precisely bare natural life—which is to say, the pure fact of birth—that appears here as the source and bearer of rights. "~hu~Men," the first article declares, "are born and remain free and equal in rights" (from this perspective, the strictest formulation of all is no he found in La Fayette's project elaborated in July 1789: "Every ~hu~man is born with inalienable and indefeasible rights"). At the same time, however, the very natural life that, inaugurating the biopolitics of modernity, is placed at the foundation of the order vanishes into the figure of the citizen, in whom rights are "preserved" (according to the second article: "The goal of every political association is the preservation of the natural and indefeasible rights of ~hu~man"). And the Declaration can attribute sovereignty to the nation (according to the third article: "The principle of all sovereignty resides essentially in the nation") precisely because it has already inscribed this element of birth in the very heart of the political community'. The nation—the term derives etymologically from nascere (to be born)—thus closes the open circle of ~hu~man's birth.
This Is Already Seen In The United States Where The Government Revokes The Rights Of Workers To Strike When The Government Deems It Unfit
NLRB reads
Section 7 of the National Labor Relations Act states in part, "Employees shall have the right. . . to engage in other concerted activities for the purpose of collective bargaining or other mutual aid or protection." Strikes are included among the concerted activities protected for employees by this section. Section 13 also concerns the right to strike. It reads as follows: Nothing in this Act, except as specifically provided for herein, shall be construed so as either to interfere with or impede or diminish in any way the right to strike, or to affect the limitations or qualifications on that right. It is clear from a reading of these two provisions that: the law not only guarantees the right of employees to strike, but also places limitations and qualifications on the exercise of that right. See for example, restrictions on strikes in health care institutions (set forth below).
When politics and life become one through the creation of rights systems, then all life becomes controllable by the state and becomes open to extermination in order to protect "the body of the people"
Agamben 1998 ~Giorgio, Prof. of Philosophy and Aesthetics at the University of Verona~ Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. P. 147-148. ~
4.2. A few years earlier, Verschuer had published a booklet in which National Socialist ideology finds what may well he its most rigorous biopolitical formulation: " 'The new State knows no other task than the fulfillment of the conditions necessary for the preservation of the people.' These words of the Führer mean that every political act of the National Socialist state serves the life of the people. . . . We know today that the life of the people is only secured if the racial traits and hereditary health of the body of the people ~Volkskorper~ are preserved" (Rassenhygiene p. 5). The link between politics and life instituted by these words is not (as is maintained by a common and completely inadequate interpretation of racism) a merely instrumental relationship, as if race
were a simple natural given that had merely to be safeguarded. The novelty of modern biopolitics lies in the fact that the biological given is as such immediately political and the political is as such immediately the biological given. "Politics," Verschuer writes, "that is, giving form to the life of the people ~Politik,das heifbt die Gestaltung des Lebens des Volks~" (Rnenhygiene p. 8). The life that, with the declarations of rights, became the ground of sovereignty now becomes the subject-object of state politics (which therefore appears more and more in the form of "police"). But only a state essentially founded on the very life of the nation could identify its own principal vocation as the formation and care of the "body of the people." Hence the seeming contradiction according to which a natural given tends to present itself as a political task. "Biological heredity" Verschuer continues, "is certainly a destiny, and accordingly, we prove ourselves masters of this destiny insofar as we take biological heredity to be the task that has been assigned to us and which we must fulfill." The paradox of Nazi biopolitics and the necessity by which it was bound to submit life itself to an incessant political mobilization could not be expressed better than by this transformation of natural heredity into a political task. The totalitarianism of our century has its ground in this dynamic identity of life and politics, without which it remains incomprehensible If Nazism still appears to us as an enigma, and if its affinity with Stalinism (on which Hannah Arendt so much insisted) is still unexplained, this is because we have failed to situate the totalitarian phenomenon in its entirety in the horizon of biopolitics. When life and politics— originally divided, and linked together by means of the no-man's-land of the state of exception that is inhabited by bare life—begin to become one, all life becomes sacred and all politics becomes the exception.
ALT- Strike
Power circulates through relationships demanding repetition; challenging the order breaks the system
Rouse, 94 Joseph Rouse, professor of Philosophy and Science in Society at Wesleyan University, The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, 1994, p. 106
This sense of power as dispersed emphasizes the importance of what Foucault called the "swarming" of the disciplinary mechanisms; those mechanisms were thereby transformed from a local exercise of force within the confines of a particular institution into far-reacing relationships of power. Indeed, as Wartenburg has pointed out, these practices exert power only to the extent that they reach far enough to affect the availability or absence of alternative access to the goods that the exercise of power would enable or prevent. These networks through which power is exercised are not static. Foucault speaks of power as "something that circulates" (PK, 98) and as being "produced from one moment to the next" (HS, 93). Wartenburg points out that such a dynamic account is inherent in the recognition that power is always mediated by social alignments. In exercising power through a coordinated social alignment, "the present actions of a dominant agent count on the future actions of the aligned agents being similar to their past actions. But this faith in a future whose path can be charted entails that the dominant agent not act in a way that challenges the allegiance of his aligned agents, for only through their actions can that future be made actual." Power can thus never be simply present, as one action forcibly constraining or modifying another. Its constitution as a power relation depends upon its reenactment or reproduction over time as a sustained power relationship.
To Disrupt These Power Flows The Negative Engages In a strike against these systems of power by refusing to engage with systems that attempt to enact policies which enshrine the state's ability to grant rights forcing the state to surrender to maintain its flow of power