Cap as Genocide

Their form of valuation devalues all life and renders the worst atrocities possible
Dillon 99 (Michael, badass and professor of politics and international relations at the University of
Lancaster, April 1999, Political Theory, Vol. 27, No. 2, Another Justice, p.164-5.)ch
Quite the reverse. The subject was never a firm foundation for justice, much less a hospitable vehicle for the reception of the call of another Justice. It was never in possession of that self-
possession which was supposed to secure the certainty of itself, of a self-possession that would enable it ultimately to adjudicate everything. The very indexicality
required of sovereign subjectivity gave rise rather to a commensurability much more amenable to the
expendability required of the political and material economies of mass societies than it did to the
singular, invaluable, and uncanny uniqueness of the self. The value of the subject became the standard unit of currency for the political
arithmetic of States and the political economies of capitalism. They trade in it still to devastating global effect. The technologisation of the political has
become manifest and global. Economies of evaluation necessarily require calculability. Thus no
valuation without mensuration and no mensuration without indexation. Once rendered calculable,
however, units of account are necessarily submissible not only to valuation but also, of course, to
devaluation. Devaluation, logically, can extend to the point of counting as nothing. Hence, no
mensuration without demensuration either. There is nothing abstract about this: the declension of
economies of value leads to the zero point of holocaust. However liberating and emancipating
systems of value-rights-may claim to be, for example, they run the risk of counting out the invaluable.
Counted out, the invaluable may then lose its purchase on life. Herewith, then, the necessity of
championing the invaluable itself. For we must never forget that, we are dealing always with whatever exceeds measure. But how does that necessity present
itself? Another Justice answers: as the surplus of the duty to answer to the claim of Justice over rights. That duty, as with the advent of another Justice, is integral to the lack constitutive of the
human way of being.

Capitalism imposes structural genocide on the Third World
Doughty 13 (Howard A., professor of political economy at Seneca College in Toronto, Capitalism: A
Structural Genocide, Published in College Quarterly Vol. 16, No. 2, April 2013. URL:
http://www.collegequarterly.ca/2013-vol16-num02-spring/doughty3.html)ch
Lest readers be scared off by the title, its probably best to start with some preliminary definitions. Garry Leechs book is built on foundations constructed by Johan
Galtung over forty years ago. Galtung (1971, p. 81) observed that two of the most glaring facts about this world *were+ the tremendous inequality, within and
between nations *and+ the resistance of this inequality to change. His main concern was how to explain, and how to counteract inequality as one of the major
forms of structural violence (Galtung, 1969). In addition to pursuing the empirical truth, as self-respecting intellectuals concerned with worldly affairs are
compelled to do, he seems to have subscribed to the belief that education carries with it moral and political responsibilities. It
involves the obligation of teachers and other public intellectuals to distinguish at least provisionally
between good and evil and to promote the good. Galtungs particular interest was imperialismthe relations of dominance and
submission between large collectivities, most often involving central imposing powers and peripheral colonies or client states captured within their spheres of
external influence. Examples run from ancient Persia, Greece and Rome through the heady days of European world dominance and the rising and falling empires of
Spain and Portugal, France and the United Kingdom and even the little Netherlands and Belgium, and on contemporary America. Of special concern were the
mechanisms deployed to ensure the continuing discrepancy between rich and poor, the rulers and the ruled or, if you prefer, the oppressors and the oppressed. In
addition to the tactical use of brute force, ideological factors play an important part in efforts by oppressors to persuade the oppressed that their unequal status is
actually equitable, that justice demands that authority, power and wealth be unequally distributed. This argument is frequently made on cultural, religious and
racial grounds. The powerful try to persuade the powerless of their innate superiority and of the equity that flows from inequalitysometimes described as their
leadership of a vast set of international relationships. Sometimes the dominant power adopts a patriarchal attitude in keeping with a self-serving belief that it is
its mission to bring civilization and to the far-famed lesser breeds without the law and improvement to the lives of its subordinates. Sometimes, local elites are
recruited as a comprador class. Indigenous entrepreneurs, politicians, military and law enforcement officials are then well compensated for keeping local
populations under control. Sometimes, a colonial mentality is promulgated encouraging the native peoples to mimic the manners and morals of the occupying
culture in the hope of being rewarded for suppressing their own way of life. In all cases, however, the aim is the same: to exploit indigenous resources and to take
advantage of or to supplant (in the case of settler communities such as British North America and Australia) native labour through some combination of physical
violence, inter-elite collusion and cultural suppression in what Lenin cheerfully labeled the highest stage of capitalism. All three entail a form of violence. As Paul
Farmer (2004, p. 307) explained in the Sidney W. Mintz Lecture for 2001: Structural violence is violence exerted systematically;
that is, indirectly by everyone who belongs to a certain social order. Hence, the discomfort these ideas
provoke in a moral economy still geared to pinning praise or blame on individual actors. Where
structural violence occurs, it is ultimately pointless to identify and punish particular perpetrators.
Everyone is to blame. Within what are euphemistically called asymmetrical power relations (some
have power and some dont), structural violence may take physical or psychological forms. It may be
expressed in bloody massacres or in the cultural genocide of robbing a people of their languages,
religious traditions and other elements of their distinctive heritage. What distinguishes structural
violence from incidental atrocities and singular acts of repressionwhether perpetrated by ordinary
individuals or by the authoritiesis its ubiquity. Structural violence is embedded in the entire culture
as well as in the specific practices of dominant institutions and, of course, the beliefs and behaviour of
all the individuals involved. Although not everyone participates, everyone is aware of, and even in
their silence, complicit in it. There are no innocent by-standers. The adjective structural can be elaborated further.
Structures require a discernible empirical pattern, a logical order, an existence apart from the subjective perceptions or motivations of the people involved in it. In
the language of anthropologist Marvin Harris (1980, pp. 29-45), it requires an etic (broadly, externally and objectively observable) as well as an emic (narrowly,
internally and subjectively experiential) dimension. It must not be merely idiosyncratic, but part of a commonality in which everyone participates in some fashion
and to some degree. Misogyny, for example, may refer to the attitudes and actions of individual persons (mainly males) toward other persons (always females). We
can generally tell from expressed beliefs and behaviour whether a person is a misogynist (though it might be harder to prove the negative that he is not). Detailing
such information and applying the label appropriately is, however, a matter of particularized concern only. It might be useful for a biographer (if the man is
sufficiently famous), a potential dating-service hook-up (if a woman is sufficiently desperate) or a criminal profiler if the fellow shows up as a suspect in cases of
serial sexual assault. As fascinating or as repelling as these instances might be, the word structural does not apply. To be a structure in sociology, anthropology
or related disciplines necessitates persistent, collective attitudes and actions. Detecting a structure of misogyny, therefore, entails observable behaviour over time,
connected to other social patterns of thought and action, and generally operating to perform some important social function. So, there may be both individual and
structural misogyny in certain societies, but structural misogyny must be an integral part of the larger social system and most likely linked to religion, marriage and
kinship practices, laws of inheritance and the like. In his book, Leech addresses just such a systemic between capitalism and genocide. It is well to attend to both
terms. Capitalism is a familiar word. I suspect, however, that even in Western democracies where
capitalist economic arrangements are most familiar, advanced and dominant, most citizens would be
hard-pressed to put together a coherent definition, description, explanation and justification of
capitalism. Suffice here to say that it is an economic system in which the principal form of ownership
dictates that the means of production and distribution of goods and services are held mostly in
private handswhether individual and corporate. Genocide is also a familiar word. It is generally
understood to be the intentional destruction, usually by violent means, of a group of people by some
organized adversary, most often a government or at least well-organized paramilitary forces. Of
course, there are variants including the previously mentioned phenomenon of cultural genocide,
which entail the extinguishment of a culture and its people, typically by means of forced assimilation.
Still, the basic idea is clear enough: genocide is the attempt to significantly devastate or eradicate an
entire people. Here, then, is the tricky bit. Garry Leech has taken it upon himself to establish both an empirical and a logical connection between capitalism
and genocide. In his view, genocides are not distortions, excesses or aberrations of otherwise benign
relationships. They are not merely possible under capitalism; rather, they occur regularly and of
necessity. Capitalism, in his opinion, is responsible for contemporary genocide, and contemporary genocide
is the logical outcome of capitalism. This, I understand, is hard to take. Most of us are either
enthusiastic or reluctant supporters of capitalismbut supporters nonetheless. In fact, most of us are
actual, though inadvertent and largely unconscious, mini-capitalists. For instance, anyone who makes even modest
investments in mutual funds or has an employment-based pension is partly dependent on and complicit in capitalism. Many of us have a share in all sorts of
enterprises which most of us, I suspect, would be unable to name. Albeit small-scale owners and investors, we may have put our money in investment products or
own dividend-paying whole-life insurance policies. Even those of us with personal accounts in savings banks receive our puny rates of interest on the backs of
people who have borrowed money from that bank to purchase a home or an automobile or to put their kids through college. We are, therefore, in extricably
implicated. Of course, there are also those who are a bit more Wall Street-wise and Securities & Exchange Commission-savvy. They may play the markets as
others buy occasional lottery tickets, bet on professional sports teams or play the ponies. They may fancy themselves to be bold entrepreneurs. They may trade in
futures and hedge-funds. They may sincerely think that capitalism is the most efficient and dynamic mode of production ever created by our species. Karl Marx
would agree. They might also believe that capitalism is the most equitable system, for it purports to reward hard work and to punish sloth. They might believe as
well that, under capitalism, rational laws of supply and demand govern the price of commodities (including human labour), consumables and personal services, and
that people make rational choices about how to earn and how to spend their money. So, they conclude, capitalism not only works, but it is also fairsometimes
harsh, but ultimately fair. Karl Marx would demur. With these elementary notions in mind, let me try to set out Garry Leechs argument in terms anyone can
understandeven me. Leech starts out conventionally enough. He takes his interpretation of genocide directly from the United Nations Convention on the
Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948). The United Nations was in the business of defining and supporting human rights from the outset.
ItsUniversal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) set out a substantial inventory of putative rights which has only expanded in scope and grown in number from the
initial commitment to assorted negative freedomsprotection against unwarranted interference from the state and protection of civil liberties such as freedom
of speech, association, conscience and so onto a catalogue of positive freedoms such as guarantees of clean water, adequate nutrition, education and the like.
This human rights template is articulated wholly within the traditions of liberal democracy. The prohibition on genocide, however, is surely at the top of any list.
Apart from the willful extermination of our entire species, it is hard to imagine a more fundamental human right. Leech then moves on to a standard definition of
capitalism, including the arguments for the legitimacy of private property and paeans to the free market from recent capitalist apologists including Frederick von
Hayek, Milton Friedman and Ludwig von Mises. From them we learn that capitalism is not simply mass production, but mass production to satisfy the needs of the
masses (Mises, 1991, p. 15). From this perspective, despite its association with popular culture slogans such as greed is good, capitalism seems almost
philanthropic. In addition, a case is presented that the theory of capitalism retains its original commitment to the sovereignty of the market and pays homage to the
guidance of the ever-present invisible hand of market forces that remains dominant and ultimately both efficient and fair. In the capitalist market, of course, it is
the power of those who own and control capital that takes precedence over the consumer needs and desires, but even here there is wiggle room, for the needs and
desires are said to be demanded by consumers who vote with their dollars and pay extortionist prices because it is their needs and desires that are being met. The
market premise, therefore, both assures the continuation of thefundamental inequity of ownership and control and justifies it in terms of allegedly free choice. In
the end, of course, it is easy to see how many so-called consumer needs and desires are manufactured through massive advertising campaigns for specific products
and by the underlying propaganda for material consumption in general. Private purchases are celebrated, even though they eventually substitute for personality,
character, social relations and a sense of meaning in a society in which people are alienated from nature, from their communities, their work, their intimate
relations and finally from themselves. We are what we buy. (Fromm, 1955; Fromm, 1961, pp. 1-85). From this critical perspective, Leech goes on to say that it is
the structural dominance of capital over labour rather than mere differences in personal income and
inheritance that defines the capitalist system. From its basic and escalating disparity, Leech argues that
structural violence and sometimes structural genocide are the unavoidable outcomes of
capitalism in its catastrophic, which is to say, its impending form. To many citizens in liberal
democracies, the logical necessity of genocide as a corollary of economic market mechanisms may
seem like an untenable stretch. Leech nonetheless offers a number of persuasive case studies to prove his point. He reveals the North
American Free Trade Agreement to be an instrument whereby American-based agribusiness has
destroyed local Mexican agriculture and led to death and dispossession among thousands of the rural
poor. He points to India where the governments own figures show that over 200,000 Indian farmers
have been driven to suicide by the effects of policies imposed by the World Trade Organization, the
World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. In Africa, too, investment from the North
according to rules manufactured in the interest of advanced capitalist countries have deformed
development, ruined indigenous farmers and prioritized edible crops for export while allowing citizens
of those countries to fall below subsistence living and to starve. In all, Leech attributes as many as ten
million deaths annually to the hegemony of capitalism.. Even so, Leech refrains from an unqualified condemnation of free markets
themselves. In his view, they would not be the essential problemif, that is, they were actually free. Instead, it is the concentration of capital
in monstrous global corporations that provide the power to extend domination from the nation-state
to imperial relations with peripheral domains. This domination is expressed in the policies of
sovereign governments and the rules imposed by the international regulatory agencies that do their
bidding. They combine to share responsibility for the misery of the bottom billion of the human
populationthat portion of humanity which exists (or tries to exist) on incomes of only a few
hundred dollars a yearand for the devastation of the global ecology, most noticeably in the
phenomenon of climate change, but also in the desertification of agricultural lands, the destruction of
rainforests, the alteration of geological forms and the plain old industrial and chemical pollution that
is contaminating earth, air and water.

Cap -> genocide
Santos 03 (Boaventura de Sousa, Professor of Sociology at the School of Economics, University of
Coimbra (Portugal) and Distinguished Scholar at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Law School.
"Collective Suicide?" March 28, 2003, URL: http://www.ces.fe.uc.pt/opiniao/bss/072en.php)ch
According to Franz Hinkelammert, the West has repeatedly been under the illusion that it should try to save
humanity by destroying part of it. This is a salvific and sacrificial destruction, committed in the name of the need to
radically materialize all the possibilities opened up by a given social and political reality over which it is supposed to have total power. This is how
it was in colonialism, with the genocide of indigenous peoples, and the African slaves. This is how it
was in the period of imperialist struggles, which caused millions of deaths in two world wars and
many other colonial wars. This is how it was in Stalinism, with the Gulag and in Nazism, with the
holocaust. And now today, this is how it is in neoliberalism, with the collective sacrifice of the
periphery and even the semiperiphery of the world system. With the war against Iraq, it is fitting to ask
whether what is in progress is a new genocidal and sacrificial illusion, and what its scope might be. It is above all appropriate to ask if
the new illusion will not herald the radicalization and the ultimate perversion of the western illusion:
destroying all of humanity in the illusion of saving it. Sacrificial genocide arises from a totalitarian illusion
that is manifested in the belief that there are no alternatives to the present-day reality and that the
problems and difficulties confronting it arise from failing to take its logic of development to its
ultimate consequences. If there is unemployment, hunger and death in the Third World, this is not the
result of market failures; instead, it is the outcome of the market laws not having been fully applied. If
there is terrorism, this is not due to the violence of the conditions that generate it; it is due, rather, to
the fact that total violence has not been employed to physically eradicate all terrorists and potential
terrorists. This political logic is based on the supposition of total power and knowledge, and on the
radical rejection of alternatives; it is ultra-conservative in that it aims to infinitely reproduce the
status quo. Inherent to it is the notion of the end of history. During the last hundred years, the West has experienced
three versions of this logic, and, therefore, seen three versions of the end of history: Stalinism, with its logic of insuperable efficiency
of the plan; Nazism, with its logic of racial superiority; and neoliberalism, with its logic of insuperable efficiency of the market. The first two
periods involved the destruction of democracy. The last one trivializes democracy, disarming it in the face of social actors sufficiently powerful to be able
to privatize the State and international institutions in their favour. I have described this situation as a combination of political democracy and social
fascism. One current manifestation of this combination resides in the fact that intensely strong public opinion, worldwide, against the war is found to he
incapable of halting the war machine set in motion by supposedly democratic rulers. At all these moments, a death drive, a
catastrophic heroism, predominates, the idea of a looming collective suicide, only preventable by the
massive destruction of the other. Paradoxically, the broader the definition of the other and the
efficacy of its destruction, the more likely collective suicide becomes. In its sacrificial genocide
version, neoliberalism is a mixture of market radicalization, neoconservatism and Christian fundamentalism. Its death drive takes a
number of forms, from the idea of "discardable populations", referring to citizens of the Third World
not capable of being exploited as workers and consumers, to the concept of "collateral damage", to
refer to the deaths, as a result of war, of thousands of innocent civilians. The last, catastrophic heroism, is quite clear
on two facts: according to reliable calculations by the Non-Governmental Organization MEDACT, in London, between 48 and 260 thousand civilians will
die during the war and in the three months after (this is without there being civil war or a nuclear attack); the war will cost 100 billion dollars, enough to
pay the health costs of the world's poorest countries for four years. Is it possible to fight this death drive? We must bear in mind that, historically,
sacrificial destruction has always been linked to the economic pillage of natural resources and the labor force, to the imperial design of radically changing
the terms of economic, social, political and cultural exchanges in the face of falling efficiency rates postulated by the maximalist logic of the totalitarian
illusion in operation. It is as though hegemonic powers, both when they are on the rise and when they are in
decline, repeatedly go through times of primitive accumulation, legitimizing the most shameful
violence in the name of futures where, by definition, there is no room for what must be destroyed. In
today's version, the period of primitive accumulation consists of combining neoliberal economic
globalization with the globalization of war. The machine of democracy and liberty turns into a
machine of horror and destruction.