Requiring a living wage represents at best a piecemeal reform of the capitalist system,

which allows capitalisms rampant abuses to continue while hiding the true cause of the
problem: the system of power relations that benefit the few at the expense of the many.
Wolff1:
When Marx referred to workers in capitalism as wage-slaves he meant more than a striking phrase. For him, the analogy between
slavery and capitalism offered a powerful contribution to anti-capitalist movements. The clue to that contribution lies in the
Communist Manifestos summary of what differentiated communists from other leftists: the latter seek to raise wages, the former to
abolish the wage system. Whileslavery emerged at different times and places in world history, it always generated
opponents. Among the enslaved and others, two kinds of opposition arose. The first focused on
improving the slaves living conditions: these opponents demanded that slaves be better fed, clothed, housed,
treated, and so on. The second made a very different demand[ed] [that]: slavery as an institution had to be
abolished. The two oppositions sometimes collaborated, but they sometimes fought each other bitterly. Then the first accused
the second of an irresponsible utopianism that sacrificed action for the immediate improvement of slaves lives and aimed instead for
so long as slavery survived as an institution,
what at best was a distant goal. The second retorted that
improvements for slaves would be difficult to achieve, insufficient, and insecure; moreover,
by limiting the oppositions goal to improving slaves conditions, slavery as an institution was
condoned and the movement for abolition weakened. Although slavery lasted for long periods in many places,
eventually the second sort of opposition prevailed. Across much of the modern civilized world, slavery was abolished as an
intrinsically immoral and inhumane institution regardless of whether the slaves enjoyed good conditions or not. The fourteenth
amendment to the US Constitution outlawed the institution of slavery for all except prison inmates. Predictably, the de-facto slavery of
prison inmates has everywhere generated, once again, the same two sorts of oppositions. When Marx likened wage-workers to slaves,
Marx argued
he brought the lessons of oppositions to slavery to the emerging movements against capitalism. Put bluntly,
against forms of anti-capitalism that limited themselves to improving workers living
conditions. Fast-forwarding to today, Marx would criticize movements such as those for a living wage or
pension reform or welfare increases or saving social security and so on. A Marxist opposition to capitalism is rather one
focused on its abolition as a system. Marxists, he might say, are to capitalism what abolitionists were to
slavery.

Second, condoning a living wage instead of rejecting it only serves to deify the system by
naturalizing the wage concept, which is the central tenet of capitalist oppression. Wolff
2:
Neoclassical economic theory, among other hegemonic sets of ideas, has worked well to support and justify capitalism and undermine
the appeal of Marxist economic theory. One modality of its working has been the sedimentation into the popular consciousness of the
It strikes vast numbers of people as somehow obvious, natural, and necessary that
notion of the wage.
production be organized around a deal struck between a wage payer and wage
receiver. And this is all the more remarkable in as much as the vast bulk of human history displays economic systems without
wages (neither serfs, nor slaves, nor individuals who work alone, nor most collective work systems have used wages).
Capitalisms history is in part the history of the deepening conceptual hegemony of the
wage. Thus, for example, the individual peasant or craftsperson working alone has had to be renamed a self-employed person to
revision a non-wage production system as if it were waged. Naturalizing the wage concept works to

1
Richard Wolff (Emeritus Professor of Economics, University of Massachusetts, Amherst). Anti-Slavery
and Anti-Capitalism. 15 December 2006. http://www.rdwolff.com/content/anti-slavery-and-anti-
capitalism
naturalize capitalist relations of production, the employer/employee relation, not as one among alternative
production systems but as somehow intrinsic to production itself. Workers, trade unions, and intellectuals
often cannot imagine production without wages and hence wage payers juxtaposed to wage earners.
This helps to make capitalism itself appear as necessary and eternal much as the
parallel theories celebrating feudalism and slavery performed the same function for
those systems of production. The naturalization of the wage system helps support the notion that the fundamental
goal of workers organization must be to raise wages.
Education is the aim of debate but we cannot be content with bourgeois liberal
practice. The role of the ballot is to reject capitalist modes of production.
Capitalism causes inevitable crises, inequality, and dehumanization. McLaren:2
While well-meaning progressive educators might be willing to criticize the manner in which humans are turned into dead objects that
within capitalist society, all
Marxists refer to as fetishized commodities, they are often loathe to consider the fact that
value originates in the sphere of production and that one of the primary roles of schools is to serve as
agents or functionaries of capital. Furthermore, they fail to understand that education is more reproductive
of an exploitative social order than a constitutive challenge to it precisely because it rests on the foundations of
capitalist exchange value. Reading Marx and Freire may not alchemize us into revolutionaries capable of transcending capitalism but
ignoring what they had to say about transforming education in the context of class struggle would be a huge loss to our efforts. Much
of my work has tried to demonstrate that many liberal progressive educational reforms are embedded in
a larger retrograde, opportunistic and banalizing politics that situates itself a culture of liberal
compassion and a polyglot cosmopolitanism that does more to impede educational transformation than advance it.
Revolutionary critical pedagogy is a mode of social knowing that inquires into what is not said, into
the silences and the suppressed or the missing, in order to un-conceal operations of economic and
political power underlying the concrete details and representations of our lives. It reveals how the abstract logic of the exploitation
of the division of labor informs all the practices of culture and society. Materialist critique disrupts that which represents
itself as natural and thus as inevitable and explains how it is materially produced. Critique, in other words, enables us to
explain how social differencesgender, race, sexuality, and classhave been systematically produced and continue to operate
within regimes of exploitationnamely within the international division of labor in global capitalism,
so that we can fight to change them. Thus, a pedagogy of critique is about the production of transformative knowledges.
It is not about liberty as the freedom of desire, because this liberty, this freedom of desire, is acquired at the expense of the poverty of
others. A pedagogy of critique does not situate itself in the space of the self, or in the space of desire, or in the space of liberation, but
in the site of collectivity, need and emancipation To sum up, teachers need to support sustainable alternatives
to neoliberal capitalism with its emphasis on economic growth; protect natures resources for future generations; protect
ecosystems and help support biodiversity; support a community based economics, and a grassroots democracy that includes
participatory and direct forms, embody anti-racist, anti-ableist, anti-sexist, and anti-homophobic pedagogies that respect diversity and
work from a post-patriarchal perspective.

Also, capitalism is the reason other forms of exclusion and oppression exist. Taylor:

capitalism is a system that is based on the exploitation of the many by the few. Because it is a system based on gross
Marxists argue that

inequality, it requires various tools to divide the majority--racism and all

oppressions under capitalism serve this purpose. Moreover, oppression is used to justify and

2
Peter McClaren. Professor of Education, UCLA. Critical Pedagogy Against Capitalist Schooling.
http://www.globaleducationmagazine.com/critical-pedagogy-againstcapitalist-schooling-socialist-
alternative-interview-peter-mclaren/. Accessed 4/26/14.
"explain" unequal relationships in society that enrich the minority that live off the
majority's labor. Thus, racism developed initially to explain and justify the enslavement of Africans--because they were less than human and undeserving of
liberty and freedom. Everyone accepts the idea that the oppression of slaves was rooted in the class relations of exploitation under that system. Fewer recognize that under

wage slavery is the pivot around which all other inequalities and oppressions
capitalism,

turn. Capitalism used racism to justify plunder, conquest and slavery, but as Karl Marx pointed out, it also used racism to divide
and rule--to pit one section of the working class against another and thereby blunt
class consciousness. To claim, as Marxists do, that racism is a product of capitalism is not to deny or diminish its importance or impact in American society.
It is simply to explain its origins and the reasons for its perpetuation. Many on the left today talk about class as if it is one of many oppressions, often describing it as
"classism." What people are really referring to as "classism" is elitism or snobbery, and not the fundamental organization of society under capitalism. Moreover, it is popular today

oppressions can reinforce and compound each other, they are born
to talk about various oppressions, including class, as intersecting. While it is true that

out of the material relations shaped by capitalism and the economic exploitation that is at the heart of capitalist society. In
other words, it is the material and economic structure of society that gave rise to a range of ideas and ideologies to justify, explain and help perpetuate that order. In the United
States, racism is the most important of those ideologies.

The alternative is complete rejection of the capitalist system; mere reform is insufficient
because it ensures the system will regenerate itself stronger from the pieces left. Kovel3:
The value-term that subsumes everything into the spell of capital sets going a kind of wheel of accumulation, from production to
consumption and back, spinning ever more rapidly as the inertial mass of capital grows, and generating its force field as a spinning
Because
magnet generates an electrical field. This phenomenon has important implications for the reformability of the system.
capital is so spectral, and succeeds so well in ideologically mystifying its real nature, attention
is constantly deflected from the actual source of eco-destabilization to the instruments by
which that source acts. The real problem, however, is the whole mass of globally accumulated capital, along with the speed of its
circulation and the class structures sustaining this. That is what generates the force field, in proportion to its own scale; and it is this
force field, acting across the numberless points of insertion that constitute the ecosphere, that creates ever larger agglomerations of
capital, sets the ecological crisis going, and keeps it from being resolved. For one fact may be taken as certain that to resolve the
ecological crisis as a whole, as againsttidying up one corner or another, is radically incompatible with the
existence of gigantic pools of capital, the force field these induce, the criminal underworld with which they
connect, and, by extension, the elites who comprise the transnational bourgeoisie. And by not resolving the crisis as
a whole, we open ourselves to the spectre of another mythical creature, the many-headed hydra, that
regenerated itself the more its individual tentacles were chopped away. To realize this is to
recognize that there is no compromising with capital, no schema of reformism that will
clean up its act by making it act more greenly or efficiently We shall explore the practical
implications of this thesis in Part III, and here need simply to restate the conclusion in blunt terms: green capital, or non-polluting
capital, is preferable to the immediately ecodestructive breed on its immediate terms. But this is the lesser point, and diminishes with
its very success. For green capital (or socially/ecologically responsible investing) exists, by its very capital-nature, essentially to
create more value, and this leaches away from the concretely green location to join the great pool, and follows its force field into
zones of greater concentration, expanded profitability and greater ecodestruction.
Also, the alternative solves better than the aff: as long as capitalism persists, exploitation
is inevitable and piecemeal reforms such as the living wage will be inevitably rolled
back. The alt is a pre-requisite to actually solving for the harms the aff identifies. Wolff
34:

3(Joel, Professor of Social Studies at Bard, The Enemy of Nature, p 142-3)

4
Richard Wolff (Emeritus Professor of Economics, University of Massachusetts, Amherst). Anti-Slavery
and Anti-Capitalism. 15 December 2006. http://www.rdwolff.com/content/anti-slavery-and-anti-
capitalism
Thus, no surprise attaches to the fact, these days, that one widespread kind of social criticism concentrates on softening capitalisms
negative impacts on workers and the larger society. It seeks to raise workers wages and benefits and to make governments limit
capitalists rapaciousness and the social costs of their competition. In the US, this is what liberals do: from the minimalist
oppositions within the Democratic Party to the demands of social democrats and many radicals for major wage increases, major
What always frustrates liberals and radicals is the difficulty of
government interventions, and so on.
achieving these improved workers conditions and the insecurity and temporariness of
whatever improvements they do achieve. Today they bemoan yet another roll-back of improvements, namely
those won under FDRs New Deal, Kennedys New Frontier, and so on. Marxism is that other kind of opposition that
demands the abolition of capitalism as a system. Since Marxists find capitalist exploitation to be as
immoral and inhumane as slavery, they might logically seek a further amendment to the US Constitution that abolishes it as well. A
Marxist program would seek to replace capitalist production by a non-wage system, one where the workers will not only produce
surpluses but also be their own boards of directors. The associated workers would, as Marx suggested, appropriate their own
surpluses and distribute them. The wage-payer versus wage-recipient division of people inside production would vanish. Every
workers job description would entail not only his/her technical responsibilities to produce a specific output but also her/his
responsibilities as part of the collective that appropriates and distributes the surplus. Monday to Thursday, each worker in each
enterprise makes commodities, and every Friday, each worker functions as a member of that enterprises board of directors. The stakes
here are less obtaining higher wages than abolishing the wage system.The
point of such a Marxist program is to
overcome the conflicts, wastes, and inequalities (economic, political, and cultural) that flow from the
existence of capitalist exploitation whether or not wages are raised. The point is likewise to stress the incompatibility of
any genuine democracy with the wage system and its usual social effects (and again whether wages are higher or lower). Of course, in
the struggle between such a Marxist perspective and its various critics, the latter will depict the programmatic advocacy of an end to
the wage system as impracticable, utopian, or deluded. Those persuaded by neoclassical economics will simply dismiss or ignore not
only the Marxist criticism of the wage system but Marxism altogether. For them, the wage system is not only eternal and necessary,
but also fair and efficient. For them, since there is no surplus, they need not read or learn Marxist theory and criticism, let alone
debate it. So Marxist theory [is] and its proponents can and are largely excluded from public discourse in the media, the schools, and
politics. For liberals suspicious of neoclassical economics or neoliberalism as it is now more often called - the Marxian program
sketched above would be seen as utopian fantasy at best. Yet, not the least irony of Bushs America today is how his regimes
relentless removal or reduction of the past reforms (high wages, pensions, medical insurance, social security, state social programs,
etc.) makes a liberal politics today seem painfully deluded to so many. The liberals seem hopelessly weak, unable to stop let alone
reverse the Bush juggernaut. Worse still, what [liberals] they advocate are precisely the reforms now
being dismantled and thus revealed as having been fundamentally insecure all along. The
audience for capitalisms critics and opponents is thus being primed to listen rather attentively to Marxist claims that an abolition
of the wage system offers not only a better society but also a far better basis for securing
those improvements in wages and working conditions that mass action can achieve. What is needed now
are Marxists able and willing to articulate those claims to that audience, to persuade ever more of capitalisms critics and opponents
that abolition of exploitation and the wage system must be a component of their program for social change.