Using structures of domination is politically necessary if it is the only way to

end oppression
Lawrence Grossburg, University of Illinois, We Gotta Get Outta This Place, 1992, p. 362-
364
In their desire to renounce vanguardism, hierarchy and authoritarianism, too many intellectuals have also
renounced the value of intellectual and political authority. This renunciation of authority is
predicated on a theoretical crisis of representation in which the authority of any knowledge is suspect, since all knowledge is
historically determined and implicated in hierarchical relations of power. The political reflection of this suspicion is that
structures and hierarchy are equated with domination. Intellectuals cannot claim to speak the truth of the world, and they
cannot speak for or in the name of other people. There are only two strategies available to the critic. First, the ability to
describe the reality of peoples experience or position in the world can be given over entirely to the people who are the
subjects of the analysis. They are allowed to speak for themselves within the intellectuals discourse. The critic merely
inscribes the others own sense of their place within and relationship to specific experiences and practices. Second, the critic
analyzes his or her own position self-reflexivly, and its consequences for his or her study (i.e., my history and position have
determined the inevitable failure of my authority) but without privileging that position. In either case, there is little room for
the critics own authority. While such a moment of intellectual suspicion is necessary, it goes too far when it
assumes that all knowledge claims are unjustified and unjustifiable, leaving the critic
to celebrate difference and a radical and pluralist relativism. The fact of contextual determi-
nation does not by itself mean that all knowledge claims are false, nor does it mean that all such claims are equally invalid or
useless responses to a particular context. It need not entail relativism. The fact that specific discourses are
articulated into relations of power does not mean that these relations are necessary
or guaranteed, nor that all knowledges are equally badand to be opposedfor even if they are
implicated with particular structures of power, there as no reason to assume that all structures of
power are equally bad. Such an assumption would entail the futility of political struggle and the end of history. This
is the conundrum of the intellectual Left, for you cant have knowledge without standards and authority. Similarly, although all
structures of commonality, norrnality and the sacred may be suspect, social existence itself is impossible without at least the
imagination of such possibilities. This intellectuals crisis of representation becomes
particularly dangerous when it is projected on everyday life and political struggle,
when it is mistakenly identified with a very different crisis of authority. In the post-Vietnam, post-Watergate, post-Three Mile
Island, post-Challenger, post-Jimmy Bakker world, many if not all of the traditional sources of moral, political and even
intellectual authority (including those empowered by the postwar consensus) have collapsed or at least lost a good deal of
their aura. There is a deep seated public anxiety that Americas power (moral, political, economic, etc.) is on the wane and that
none of the traditional authorities is capable of protecting Americans from the many forcesnatural and socialthat threaten
them. Here we must assent to part of the new conservative argument: Structures of ironic cynicism have become increasingly
powerful and do represent a real cultural and political problem. Both crises involve a struggle to redefine cultural authority.
For the former it is a struggle to reestablish the political possibility of theory. For the latter it involves the need to construct
politically effective authorities, and to relocate the right of intellectuals to claim such authority without reproducing
authoritarian relations. The intellectuals crisis is a reflexive and rather self-indulgent struggle against a pessimism which they
have largely created for themselves. The conflation of the two glosses over the increasing presence (even as popular figures) of
new conservative intellectuals, and the threatening implications of the power of a popular new conservatism. The new
conservative alliance has quite intentionally addressed the crisis of authority, often blaming it on the Lefts intellectual crisis of
representation (e.g., the attacks on political correctness), as the occasion for their own efforts to set new authorities in place
new positions, new criteria and new statements. Left intellectuals have constructed their own
irrelevance, not through their elitist language, but through their refusal to find appropriate
forms and sites of authority. Authority is not necessarily authoritarian; it need not claim the
privilege of an autonomous, sovereign and unified speaking subject. In the face of real
historical relations of domination and subordination, political intervention seems to demand,
as part of the political responsibility of those empowered to speak, that they speak toand
sometimes forothers. And sometimes that speech must address questions about
the relative importance of different struggles and the relative value, even the enabling
possibilities of, different structures.
We must use the institutions that exercise power to change them
Lawrence Grossburg, University of Illinois, We Gotta Get Outta This Place, 1992, p. 391-
393
The Left needs institutions which can operate within the systems of governance,
understanding that such institutions are the mediating structures by which power is
actively realized. It is often by directing opposition against specific institutions that
power can be challenged. The Left has assumed from some time now that, since it has so little access to the
apparatuses of agency, its only alternative is to seek a public voice in the media through tactical protests. The Left does in
fact need more visibility, but it also needs greater access to the entire range of apparatuses of
decision making and power. Otherwise, the Left has nothing but its own self-righteousness. It is not
individuals who have produced starvation and the other social disgraces of our world, although it
is individuals who must take responsibility for eliminating them. But to do so, they
must act within organizations, and within the system of organizations which in fact
have the capacity (as well as the moral responsibility) to fight them. Without such organizations, the only
models of political commitment are self-interest and charity. Charity suggests that we act on behalf of others who cannot act
on their own behalf. But we are all precariously caught in the circuits of global capitalism, and everyones position is
increasingly precarious and uncertain. It will not take much to change the position of any individual in the United States, as the
experience of many of the homeless, the elderly and the fallen middle class demonstrates. Nor are there any guarantees
about the future of any single nation. We can imagine ourselves involved in a politics where acting for another is always acting
for oneself as well, a politics in which everyone struggles with the resources they have to make their lives (and the world)
better, since the two are so intimately tied together! For example, we need to think of affirmation action as in everyones best
interests, because of the possibilities it opens. We need to think with what Axelos has described as a planetary thought which
would be a coherent thoughtbut not a rationalizing and rationalist inflection; it would be a fragmentary thought of the
open totalityfor what we can grasp are fragments unveiled on the horizon of the totality. Such a politics will not begin by
distinguishing between the local and the global (and certainly not by valorizing one over the other) for the ways in which the
former are incorporated into the latter preclude the luxury of such choices. Resistance is always a local
struggle, even when (as in parts of the ecology movement) it is imagined to connect into its global
structures of articulation: Think globally, act locally. Opposition is predicated precisely on locating the points of
articulation between them, the points at which the global becomes local, and the local opens up onto the global. Since the
meaning of these terms has to be understood in the context of any particular struggle, one is always acting both globally and
locally: Think globally, act appropriately! Fight locally because that is the scene of action, but aim for the global because that is
the scene of agency. Local struggles directly target national and international axioms, at the precise point of their insertion
into the field of immanence. This requires the imagination and construction of forms of unity, commonality and social agency
which do not deny differences. Without such commonality, politics is too easily reduced to a question of individual rights (i.e.,
in the terms of classical utility theory); difference ends up trumping politics, bringing it to an end. The struggle against the
disciplined mobilization of everyday life can only be built on affective commonalities, a shared responsible yearning: a
yearning out towards something more and something better than this and this place now. The Left, after all, is defined by its
common commitment to principles of justice, equality and democracy (although these might conflict) in economic, political
and cultural life. It is based on the hope, perhaps even the illusion, that such things are possible. The construction of
an affective commonality attempts to mobilize people in a common struggle, despite
the fact that they have no common identity or character, recognizing that they are the
only force capable of providing a new historical and oppositional agency. It strives to
organize minorities into a new majority.

Government action is necessary. Alternatives like anarchy, localism, spirituality,
and eco-centrism will get squashed and worsen current destruction
Taylor 2k Professor of Social Ethics
Bron, Professor of Religion & Social Ethics, Director of Environmental Studies, University of
Wisconsin-Oshkosh, BENENEATH THE SURFACE: CRITICAL ESSAYS IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF DEEP
ECOLOGY, P. 282-284
A more trenchant problem is how bioregionalists (and the anarchists who influenced
their most influential theorists) often assume that people are naturally predisposed
(unless corrupted by life in unnatural, hierarchical, centralized, industrial societies) to
cooperative behavior. This debatable assumption appears to depend more on radical
environmental faith, a kind of Paul Shepard-style mythologizing, than on ecology or
anthropology. Unfortunately for bioregional theory, evolutionary biology shows that
not only cooperation promotes species survival; so also, at times, does aggressive
competitiveness. Based on its unduly rosy view of the potential for human altruism, it
is doubtful that bioregionalism can offer sufficient structural constraints on the
exercise of power by selfish and well-entrenched elites. It should be obvious, for
example, that nation-state governments will not voluntarily cede authority. Any
political reorganization along bioregional lines would likely require widespread
violence and dislocation. Few bioregionalists seem to recognize this likelihood, or
how devastating to nature such a transitional struggle would probably be. Moreover,
making an important but often overlooked point about political power, political
theorist Daniel Deudney warns: The sizes of the bioregionality based states would
vary greatly because bioregions vary greatly. This would mean that some states would
be much more powerful than other [and] it is not inevitable that balances of power
would emerge to constrain the possible imperial pretensions of the larger and
stronger states. Andrew Bard Schmookler, in his critique of utopian bioregional
progeny). For ignoring a specific problem of power. He asked: How can good people
prevent being dominated by a ruthless few, and what will prevent hierarchies from
emerging if decentralized political self-rule is ever achieved? One does not have to
believe all people are bad to recognize that not all people will be good, he argued; and
unless bad people all become good, there is no solution to violence other than some
kind of government to restrain the evil few. Schmookler elsewhere noted that those
who exploit nature gather more power to themselves. How, then, can we restrain such
power? There must be a government able to control the free exercise of power,
Schmookler concluded. Once when debating Green anarchists and bioregionalists in a
radical environmental journal, Schmookler agreed that political decentralization is a
good idea. But if we move in this direction, he warned, there should be at the same
time a world order sufficient [to thwart] would-be conquerors. Moreover, Since the
biosphere is a globally interdependent web, that world order should be able to
constrain any of the actors from fouling the earth. This requires laws and means of
enforcement. Schmookler concluded, Government is a paradox, but there is no
escaping it. This is because power is a paradox: our emergence out of the natural
order makes power and inevitable problem for human affairs, and only power can
control power. Bioregionalism generally fails to grapple adequately with the problem
of power. Consequently, it has little answer to specifically global environmental
problems, such as atmospheric depletion and the disruption of ocean ecosystems by
pollution and overfishing. Political scientist Paul Wapner argues that this is because
bioregionalism assumes that all global threats stem from local instances of
environmental abuse and that by confronting them at the local level they will
disappear. Nor does bioregionalism have much of a response to the globalization of
corporate capitalism and consumerist market society, apart from advocating local
resistance or long-odds campaigns to revoke the corporate charters of the worst
environmental offenders. These efforts do little to hinder the inertia of this process.
And little is ever said about how to restrain the voracious appetite of a global-
corporate-consumer culture for the resources in every corner of the planet. Even for
the devout, promoting deep ecological spirituality and ecocentric values seems
pitifully inadequate in the face of such forces. Perhaps it is because they have little if
any theory of social change, and thus cannot really envision a path toward a
sustainable society, that many bioregional deep ecologists revert to apocalyptic
scenarios. Many of them see the collapse of ecosystems and industrial civilization as
the only possible means toward the envisioned changes. Others decide that political
activism is hopeless, and prioritize instead spiritual strategies for evoking deep
ecological spirituality, hoping, self-consciously, for a miracle. Certainly the resistance
of civil society to globalization and its destructive inertia is honorable and important,
even a part a part of a wider sustainability strategy. But there will be no victories over
globalization and corporate capitalism, and no significant progress toward
sustainability, without new forms of international, enforceable, global
environmental governance. Indeed, without new restraints on power both within
nations and internationally, the most beautiful bioregional experiments and models
will be overwhelmed and futile.