Cap K

1NC
The China threat is a manifestation of a structural issue with capital the fear that
non-traditional capitalism will surpass traditional western market systems produces a
violent backlash
Zizek 1999
Slavoj Zizek, researcher in sociology at the university of Ljubljana, The Ticklish Subject: The absent centre of political
ontology, 1999, pg. 359

After the demise of Socialism, the ultimate fear of Western capitalism is that another nation or ethnic group will beat the West on its
own capitalist terms, combining the productivity of capitalism with a form of social mores foreign to us in the West: in the l970s, the
object of fear and fascination was Japan; while now, after a short interlude of fascination with SouthEast Asia, attention is
focusing more and more on China as the next superpower, combining capitalism with the
Communist political structure. Such fears ultimately give rise to purely phantasmic formations,
like the image of China surpassing the West in productivity while retaining its authoritarian
sociopolitical structure one is tempted to designate this phantasmic combination the Asiatic
mode of capitalist production. Against these fears, one should emphasize that China will, sooner or
later, pay the price for the unbridled development of capitalism in new forms of social unrest and
instability: the winning formula of combining capitalism with the Asiatic closed ethical
community life-world is doomed to explode. Now, more than ever, one should reassert Marxs old formula that the
limit of capitalism is Capital itself: the danger to Western capitalism comes not from outside, from the
Chinese or some other monster beating us at our own game while depriving us of Western
liberal individualism, but from the inherent limit of its own process of colonizing ever new (not
only geographic but also cultural, psychic, etc.) domains, of eroding the last resistant spheres of non-reflected
substantial being, which has to end in some kind of implosion, when Capital will no longer have
any substantial content outside itself to feed on.39 One should take Marxs metaphor of Capital
as a vampire-like entity literally: it needs some kind of pre-reflexive natural productivity (talents
in different domains of art, inventors in science, etc.) in order to feed on its own blood, and thus to reproduce
itself when the circle closes itself, when reflexivity becomes thoroughly universal, the whole system is threatened. Another sign
which points in this direction is how, in the sphere of what Adorno and Horkheimer called Kulturindustrie, the desubstantialization
and/or reflexivity of the production process has reached a level that threatens the whole system with global implosion. Even in high
art, the recent fashion for exhibitions in which everything is permitted and can pass as an art object, up to mutilated animal bodies,
betrays this desperate need of cultural Capital to colonize and include in its circuit even the most extreme and pathological strata of
human subjectivity. Paradoxically and not without irony the first musical trend which was in a way fabricated, exploited for a
short time and very soon forgotten, since it lacked the musical substance to survive and attain the status of classics like the early
rock of the Beatles and Rolling Stones, was none other than punk, which simultaneously marked the strongest intrusion of violent
working-class protest into mainstream pop culture in a kind of mocking version of the Hegelian infinite judgement, in which
opposites directly coincide, the raw energy of social protest coincided with the new level of commercial prefabrication which, as it
were, creates the object it sells out of itself, with no need for some natural talent to emerge and be subsequently exploited, like
Baron Munchhausen saving himself from the swamp by pulling himself up by his own hairs. Do we not encounter the same logic in
politics, where the point is less and less to follow a coherent global programme but, rather, to try to guess, by means of opinion polls,
what the people want, and offer them that? Even in theory, doesnt the same hold for cultural studies in the Anglo-Saxon domain,
or for the very theory of the risk society?40 Theorists are less and less involved in substantial theoretical work, restraining
themselves to writing short interventions which mostly display their anxiety to follow the latest theoretical trends (in feminism, for
example, perspicacious theorists soon realized that radical social constructionism gender as pefformatively enacted, and so on is
out; that people are getting tired of it; so they start to rediscover psychoanalysis, the Unconscious; in postcolonial studies, the latest
trend is to oppose multiculturalism as a false solution .. .). The point is thus not simply that cultural studies or risk society theory is
insufficient on account of its content: an
inherent commodification is discernible in the very form of the
social mode of functioning of what are supposed to be the latest forms of the American or European
academic Left. This reflexivity, which is also a crucial part of the second modernity, is what the theorists of the
reflexive risk society tend to leave out of consideration.41

Its try or dieCapitalisms narcissistic drive makes democratization of the market

impossiblehumanity is at a crossroadsthe timeframe is now
Richard A. Smith 7, Research Associate at the Institute for Policy Research & Development, UK; PhD in
History from UCLA, June 2007, The Eco-suicidal Economics of Adam Smith, Capitalism Nature
Socialism, Vol. 18, No. 2, p. 22-43

So there you have it: insatiable growth and consumption is

destroying the planet and dooming humanity-but without
ceaselessly growing production and insatiably rising consumption, we would be even worse off. Such is the lunatic
suicidal logic of capitalist economics. Adam Smith's fatal error was his assumption that the "most effectual" means of promoting
the public interest of society is to just ignore it and concentrate instead on the pursuit of economic self-interest. In the 18th century, this
narcissistic economic philosophy had little impact on the natural world. Today it has a huge impact and is, moreover, totally at odds with the
world's scientific bodies who are crying out for a PLAN to stop global warming and save nature. Capitalist Limits to Corporate Environmentalist!!
Corporations aren't necessarily evil, but corporate managers are legally responsible to their owners, the shareholders, and not to society. This
means that the critical decisions about production and resource consumption-decisions that affect our health and survival-are mainly the
private prerogative of large corporations and are often only marginally under the control of governments. The blunt reality of this situation was
well summed up by Joel Bakan in his recent book (and film), The Corporation: Corporations are created by law and imbued with purpose by law.
Law dictates what their directors and managers can do, what they cannot do, and what they must do. And, at least in the United States and
other industrialized countries, the corporation, as created by law, most closely resembles Milton Friedman's ideal model of the institution: it
compels executives to prioritize the interests of their companies and shareholders above all others and forbids them from being socially
responsible - at least genuinely so.38 So when corporate and societal interests conflict, even the "greenest" of corporate CEOs often have
no choice but to make decisions contrary to the interests of society. British Petroleum's CEO, Lord John Browne, is
good example. In the late 1990s, Browne had an environmental epiphany, broke ranks with oil industry denial, and became the first oil
company executive to warn that fossil fuels are accelerating global warming. BP adopted the motto "Beyond Petroleum" in its advertisements,
painted its service stations green and yellow, and bought a boutique solar power outfit. But under Browne, BP has spent far more on
advertising its green credentials than it invests in actual green power production. Fully 99 percent of its investments still go into fossil fuel
exploration and development, while solar power is less than 1 percent and seems to be declining. 9 In 1999, BP spent $45 million to buy the
solar power outfit Solarex. By comparison, BP paid $26.8 billion to buy Amoco in order to enlarge its oil portfolio. BP's 2004 revenues topped
$285 billion, while its solar power sales were just over $400 million. In February 2006, Browne told his board that the company had more than
replenished its marketed output in 2005 with new proven reserves of oil and gas, and that "with more than 20 new projects due on stream in
the next three years, and assuming the same level of oil price, the annual rate of increase should continue at some 4 percent through 2010."40
So, far from shifting to renewable sources of energy, BP is not only expanding its output of fossil fuels but increasing its overall reliance on fossil
fuel sources of profit. BP now possesses proven reserves of 19 billion barrels produced in 23 countries, and the company currently explores for
oil in 26 countries. Given the proven and stupendous profits of oil production versus the unproven profitability of alternative energy, how can
Brown go "green" in any serious way and remain responsible to his owner-investors?41 Were he to do so, he would soon be out of a job.42
Ecosocialism or Collapse If we're going to stop the capitalist economic locomotive from driving us off the cliff, we are going to have to
fundamentally rethink our entire economic life, reassert the visible hand of conscious scientific, rational economic planning, and
implement democratic control over our economies and resources. We're going to have to construct an entirely different kind of economy, one
that can live within its ecological means. Such an economy would have to be based around at least the following principles: An Ecosocialist
Economy of Stasis First, in a world of fast-diminishing resources, a sustainable global economy can only be based on near-zero economic growth
on average. That means that to survive, humanity will have to impose drastic fixed limits on development, resource consumption, the
freedom to consume, and the freedom to pollute. Given existing global inequities and the fact that the crisis we face is overwhelmingly caused
by overconsumption in the industrialized North, equity can only be achieved by imposing massive cutbacks in the advanced countries combined
with a program of rational planned growth to develop the Third World, with the aim of stabilizing at zero growth on average. This will require
drastically cutting back many lines of production, closing down others entirely, and creating socially and environmentally useful jobs for
workers made redundant by this transition. This will also require physical rationing of many critical resources on a per capita basis for every
person on the planet. Human survival will thus require a profound rethinking of our most fundamental ideas-bourgeois ideas-of economic
freedom. For too long, many Americans, in particular, have come to identify their notion of "freedom," if not their very being and essence, with
insatiable consumption-unlimited freedom of "choice" in what to buy. But 50 styles of blue jeans, 16 models of SUVs and endless choices in
"consumer electronics" will all have dramatically less value when Bloomingdales is under water, Florida disappears beneath the waves, malarial
mosquitos blanket Long Island beaches, and the U.S. is overrun with desperate environmental refugees from the South. Once we as a society
finally admit the "inconvenient truth" that we have no choice but to drastically cut production and severely reduce consumer choice, it will also
become apparent that we have to put in place a planned economy that will meet our needs and those of future generations as well as the other
species with whom we share the planet. A Restructured Economy of Production for Social Need and for Use Second, we need to massively
restructure the global economy. Enormous sectors in the global capitalist economy-plastics, packaging, much of the manufactured consumer
electronics, petrochemical-based and other synthetic products, many pharmaceuticals, all genetically modified foods, and the vast and ever-
growing production of arms-are either completely unnecessary or waste increasingly scarce resources and produce needless pollution.44 Our
parents did without nearly all of this before WWII, and they were not living in caves. Many lines of production and most retail industries are
built around unnecessary replacement and designed-in obsolescence. How much of the American economy from cars and appliances to clothes
is purposefully designed to be "consumed, burned up, worn out, replaced, and discarded at an ever-increasing rate"46 so the cycle of waste
production can begin all over again? How much of the planet's natural resources are consumed every year in completely unnecessary annual
model changes, fashion updates, and "new and improved" products whose only purpose is simply to sell and sell again? If a global population of
6 to 9 billion people is going to survive this century, what choice do we have but to reorganize the global economy to conserve what shrinking
natural resources we have left, reorient production for need rather than profit, design products to last as long as possible, enforce as close to
total recycling as possible, and aim for as close to zero pollution as is possible? A Socialist Economic Democracy Third: an ecosocialist
democracy. Endless growth or stasis? Resource exhaustion or conservation? Automobilization of the planet or enhanced public transport?
Deforestation or protection of the wild forests? Agro poisons or organic farming? Hunt the fish to extinction or protect the fisheries? Raze the
Amazon forest to grow MacBurgers or promote a more vegetarian diet? Manufacture products designed to be "used up, burned up, consumed
as rapidly as possible" or design them to last, be repaired, recycled and also shared? Enforce private interests at the expense of the commons
or subordinate private greed to the common good? In today's globalized world, decisions about such questions will determine the fate of
humanity. Who can make these critical economic and moral decisions in society's interest and in the interest of preserving a habitable planet?
In Adam Smith's view, which is still the
operable maxim of modern capitalists and neoliberal economists, we should all just
"Look out for Number 1," and the common good will take care of itself. If Smith were right, the common good would have
taken care of itself long ago, and we wouldn't be facing catastrophe. After centuries of Smithian economics, the common good
needs our immediate and concentrated attention. Corporations can't make such decisions in the best interests of society or the future, because
their legal responsibility is to their private owners. The only way such decisions can be scientifically rational and socially responsible is when
everyone who is affected participates in decision-making. And time is running out. We don't have 20 or 30 years to wait for Ford and GM to
figure out how they can make a buck on electric cars. We don't have 60 or 70 years to wait while investors in coal-powered power plants milk
the last profits out of those sunk investments before they consider an alternative. Humanity is at a crossroads. Either we find a way
to move toward a global economic democracy in which decisions about production and consumption are directly and democratically decided by
all those affected, or the
alternative will be the continuing descent into a capitalist war of all-against-all over
ever-diminishing resources that can only end in the collapse of what's left of civilization and the global
ecology. To be sure, in an economic democracy, society would sometimes make mistakes in planning. We can't have perfect foresight, and
democracies make mistakes. But at least these would be honest mistakes. The conclusion seems inescapable: Either we democratize
the economy, construct the institutions of a practical working socialist democracy, or we face ecological and social
collapse.

Voting negative refuses the affirmative in favor of Historical Materialist Pedagogy.

International inequality is sutured by the unequal circulation of capital. Without
revolutionary theory, there can be no revolutionary moment. Only starting from the
structural antagonisms produced by wage labor can lead to transformative politics.
Ebert 9 [Teresa, Associate Professor of English, State University of New York at Albany, THE TASK OF CULTURAL CRITIQUE, pp. 92-95]

materialist critique aims a t

Unlike these rewritings, which reaffirm in a somewhat new language the system of wage labor with only minor internal reforms,

ending class rule. It goes beyond description and explains the working of wage labor and the abstract
structures that cannot be experienced directly but underwrite it. Materialist critique unpacks the
philosophical and theoretical arguments that provide concepts for legitimizing wage labor and marks the textual
representations that make it seem a normal part of life. In short, instead of focusing on micropractices (prison, gender, education, war, literature,

and so on) in local and regional terms, materialist critique relates these practices to the macrostructures of
capitalism and provides the knowledges necessary to put an end to exploitation. At the center of these knowledges is class
critique. Pedagogy of critique is a class critique of social relations and the knowledges they produce . Its subject is
wage labor, not the body without organs . An exemplary lesson in pedagogy of critique is provided by Marx, who concludes chapter 6 of Capital, " The Buying and Selling of Labour-Power, " by
addressing the sphere within which wages are exchanged for labor power and the way this exchange is represented in the legal, philosophical, and representational apparatuses of capitalism
as equal . He provides knowledge of the structures of wage labor and the theoretical discourses that sustain it. I have quoted this passage before and will refer to it again and again. Here is the
full version: We now know how the value paid by the purchaser to the possessor of this peculiar commodity, labour-power, is determined. The use-value which the former gets in exchange,
manifests itself only in the actual usufruct, in the consumption of the labour-power. The money-owner buys everything necessary for this purpose, such as raw material, in the market, and
pays for it at its full value . The consumption of labourpower is at one and the same time the production of commodities and of surplus-value. The consumption of labour-power is completed,
as is the case of every other commodity, outside the limits of the market or the sphere of circulation. Accompanied by Mr. Moneybags and by the possessor of labour-power, we therefore take
leave for a time of this noisy sphere, where everything takes place on the surface and in view of all men, and follow them both into the hidden abode of production, on whose threshold there
stares us in the face "No admittance except on business . " Here we shall see, not only how capital produces, but how capital is produced. We shall at last force the secret of profit making. This
sphere that we are deserting, within whose boundaries the sale and purchase of labour-power goes on, is in fact a very Eden of the innate rights of man. There alone rule Freedom, Equality,
Property and Bentham. Freedom, because both buyer and seller of a commodity, say of labour-power, are constrained only by their own free will. They contract as free agents, and the
agreement they come to, is but the form in which they give legal expression to their common will. Equality, because each enters into relation with the other, as with a simple owner of
commodities, and they exchange equivalent for equivalent. Property, because each disposes only of what is his own. And Bentham, because each looks only to himself. The only force that
brings them together and puts them in relation with each other, is the selfishness, the gain and the private interests of each. Each looks to himself only, and no one troubles himself about the
rest, and just because they do so, do they all, in accordance with the pre-established harmony of things, or under the auspices of an all-shrewd providence, work together to their mutual
advantage, for the common weal and in the interest of all. On leaving this sphere of simple circulation or of exchange of commodities, which furnishes the "Free-trader vulgaris" with his views
and ideas, and with the standard by which he judges a society based on capital and wages, we think we can perceive a change in the physiognomy of our dramatis personae. He, who before
was the money-owner, now strides in front as capitalist; the possessor of labour-power follows as his labourer. The one with an air of importance, smirking, intent on business; the other, timid

Materialist critique is fundamental to a

and holding back, like one who is bringing his own hide to market and has nothing to expect but-a hiding.

transformative feminist politics. Through critique the subject develops historical knowledges of the social
totality: she acquires, in other words, an understanding of how the existing social institutions (motherhood, child
care, love, paternity, taxation, family, . . . and so on ) are part of the social relations of production, how they are located in

exploitative relations of difference, and how they can be changed. Materialist critique, in other words, is that
knowledge practice that historically situates the conditions of possibility of what empirically exists under
capitalist relations of class difference-particularly the division of labor-and, more important, points to what is suppressed by the empirically existing: what could
be, instead of what actually is. Critique indicates, in other words, that what exists is not necessarily real or true but only the

actuality under wage labor. The role of critique in pedagogy is exactly this: the production of historical
know ledges and class consciousness of the social relations, knowledges that mark the transformability
of existing social arrangements and the possibility of a different social organization--one that is free from necessity. Quite
simply then, the pedagogy of critique 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 unconceal operations of economic and political power underlying the myriad concrete details and
seemingly disparate events and representations of our lives . It shows how apparently disconnected zones of culture are in fact

linked by the highly differentiated and dispersed operation of the systematic, abstract logic of the exploitation of
the division of labor that informs all the practices of culture and society. It reveals how seemingly unique concrete experiences are in fact the common effect of social relations of production in

Critique, in
wage labor capitalism. In sum, materialist critique both disrupts that which represents itself as natural and thus as inevitable and explains how it is materially produced.

other words, enables us to explain how social differences, specifically gender, race, sexuality, and class, have been
systematically produced and continue to operate within regimes of exploitation-namely, the
international division of labor in global capitalism-so we can change them. It is the means for producing politically effective and
transformative knowledges . The claim of affective pedagogy is that it sets the subject free by making available to her or him the unruly force of pleasure and the unrestrained flows of desire,
thereby turning her or him into an oppositional subject who cuts through established representations and codings to find access to a deterritorialized subjectivity. But the radicality of this self,
at its most volatile moment, is the radicality of the class politics of the ruling class, a class for whom the question of poverty no longer exists. The only question left for it, as I have already
indicated, is the question of liberty as the freedom of desire. Yet this is a liberty acquired at the expense of the poverty of others. The pedagogy of critique engages these issues by situating

The core of the

itself not in the space of the self, not in the space of desire, not in the space of liberation, but in the revolutionary site of collectivity, need, and emancipation.

pedagogy of critique is that education is not simply for enlightening the individual to see through the
arbitrariness of signification and the violence of established representations . It recognizes that it is a
historical practice and, as such, it is always part of the larger forces of production and relations of
production. It understands that all pedagogies are, in one way or the other, aimed at producing an
efficient labor force. Unlike the pedagogy of desire, the pedagogy of critique does not simply teach that knowledge is another name for power, nor does it marginalize
knowledge as a detour of desire. It acknowledges the fissures in social practices-including its own-but it demonstrates

that they are historical and not textual or epistemological. It, therefore, does not retreat into mysticism by declaring the task of teaching to
be the teaching of the impossible and, in doing so, legitimate the way things are. Instead, the pedagogy of critique is a worldly teaching of the worldly.
Link
 LinkActivism

Their activism participates in the circulation of semiotics, global capital is not

threatened by their pleas for change but instead vampyrically siphon it as a way of
shifting to more insidious forms of subjecitvizationonly a strategy of withdrawal and
collapse can change the form and content and capital
Bifo '11 (Franco Berardi, Professor of Social History and Communication at the Academia di belle Arti in Milan and Founder of A/Traverse,
After the Future, ed. Genesko%26Thoburn, AKPress, p. 141-47)

Activism has generally conceived the process of subjectivation in terms of resistance. In his book dedicated to
Deleuze speaks about subjectivity, and identifies processes of subjectivation and
Foucault, Gilles
resistance: Is not life this capacity to resist force? (Deleuze 1988: 77). I think that it is time to ask: what if society can
no more resist the destroying effects of unbounded capitalism? What if society can no more resist the devastating power of financial
accumulation? The identification of the subject with resistance is dangerous in a certain sense. Deleuze himself has written that when we escape
we are not only escaping, but also looking for a new weapon. We have to disentangle autonomy from resistance. And if we
want to do it we have to disentangle desire from energy. The prevailing focus of modern capitalism has been energy, the ability to produce, to
compete, to dominate. A sort of Energolatria has dominated the cultural scene of the West since Faust to the Futurists. The ever growing
availability of energy has been its dogma. Now we know that energy is not boundless. In the social psyche of the West, energy is fading away. I
think that we should reframe the concept and the practice of autonomy from this point of view. The social
body has become unable to reaffirm its rights against the wild assertiveness of capital, because the pursuit
of rights can never be dissociated from the exercise of force. When workers were strong in the 1960s and
70s they did not restrict themselves to asking for their rights, to peaceful demonstrations of their will. They acted in solidarity,
refusing to work, redistributing wealth, sharing things, services and spaces. Capitalists, on their side, do not merely ask or demonstrate, they do
not simply declare their wish, they enact if. They make things happen, they invest, disinvest, displace, they destroy
and they build. Only force makes autonomy possible in the relation between capital and society. But what is
force? What is force nowadays? The identification of desire with energy has produced the identification of force with violence that turned out so
badly for the Italian movement in the 1970s and 80s. We have to distinguish energy and desire. Energy is falling, desire has to be saved
nevertheless. Similarly, we have to distinguish force from violence. Fighting power with violence is suicidal or useless, nowadays. How can we
think of activists going against professional organizations of killers in the mold of Blackwater, Haliburton, secret services, mafias? Only suicide
has proved to be efficient in the struggle against power. And actually suicide has become decisive in the history of our time. The dark side of the
multitude meets here the loneliness of death. Activist culture should avoid the danger of becoming a culture of resentment. Acknowledging
the irreversibility of the catastrophic trends that capitalism has inscribed in the history of society does not
mean to renounce it. On the contrary, we have today a new cultural task: to live the inevitable with a
relaxed soul. To call forth a big wave of withdrawal, of massive dissociation, of desertion from the scene
of the economy, of non-participation in the fake show of politics. The crucial focus of social
transformation is creative singularity. The existence of singularities is not to be conceived as a personal way to salvation, they may
become a contagious force. Yes we can, the headline of the campaign of Barack Obama, the three words that mobilized the hope and political
energies of the American people in 2008, have a disturbing echo just one year after the victory of the democratic candidate. These words sound
like an exorcism much more than like a promise. Yes we can may be read as a lapse in the Freudian sense, a sign coming from the collective
subconscious, a diversion from the hidden intuition that we can no more. The mantra of Barack Obama has gathered the energies of the best part
of the American people, and collected the best of the American cultural legacy. But what about the results? So far Obama has been unable to deal
with the global environmental threats, the effects of the geopolitical disaster produced by Cheney-Bush, the effects of the powerful lobbies
When we think of the ecological
imposing the interest of the corporations (for instance, of the private health insurers).
catastrophe, of geopolitical threats, of economic collapse provoked by the financial politics of
neoliberalism, its hard to dispel the feeling that irreversible trends are already at work inside the
world machine. Political will seems paralyzed in the face of the economic power of the criminal
class. The age of modern social civilization seems on the brink of dissolution, and it is hard to imagine
how society will be able to react. Modern civilization was based on the convergence and integration of the capitalist exploitation of labor force
and the political regulation of social conflict. The regulator State, the heir of Enlightenment and Socialism has been the guarantor of human rights
and the negotiator of social balance. When, at the end of a ferocious class struggle between work and capital but also inside the capitalist class
itself the financial class has seized power by destroying the legal regulation and transforming the social composition, the entire edifice of
modern civilization has begun to crumble. Social Darwinist ideology has legitimized the violent imposition of the
law of the strongest, and the very foundations of democracy have been reduced to rubble. This accelerated
destruction of tolerance, culture and human feelings has given an unprecedented impulse to the process of accumulation and has increased the
velocity and the extent of economic growth throughout the last two decades of the 20th century. But all this has also created the premises of a war
against human society that is underway in the new century. The war against society is waged at two different levels: at the
economic level it is known under the name of privatization, and it is based on the idea that every fragment
and every cell of the biological, affective linguistic spheres have to be turned into profit machines. The
effect of this privatization is the impoverishment of daily life, the loss of sensibility in the fields of sex, communication, and human relationships,
and also the increasing inequality between hyper-rich minority and a majority of dispossessed. At the social level this war is waged in terms of
criminalization and in-securization of the territory and of economic life. In large areas of the planet, that are growing and growing in extent,
production and exchange have become the ground of violent confrontation between military groups and criminal organization. Slavery,
blackmail, extortion, murder are integral parts of the lexicon of Economy. Scattered insurrections will take place in the coming years, but we
should not expect much from them. Theyll be unable to touch the real centers of power because of the militarization of metropolitan space, and
they will not be able to gain much in terms of material wealth or political power. As the long wave of counter-globalization moral protests could
not destroy neoliberal power, so the insurrections will not find a solution, not unless a new consciousness and a new sensibility surfaces and
spreads, changing everyday life, and creating Non-Temporary Autonomous Zones rooted in the culture and consciousness of the global network.
Full employment is over. The world does not need so much labor and so much exploitation. A radical reduction of labor-time is necessary. Basic
income has to be affirmed as a right to life independent of employment and disjoined from the lending of labor-time. Competence, knowledge,
and skills have to be separated from the economic context of exchange value, and rethought in terms of free social activity. We should not
look at the current recession only from an economic point of view. We must see it essentially as an
anthropological turning point that is going to change the distribution of world resources and world power.
Europe is doomed to lose its economic privilege, as 500 years of colonialism are ending. The debt that Western people have
accumulated is not only economic but also moral: the debt of oppression, violence and genocide has to be
paid now, and its not going to be easy. A large part of the European population is not prepared to accept the redistribution of
wealth that the recession will impose. Europe, stormed by waves of migration, is going to face a growing racist threat. Ethnic war will be difficult
to avoid.
In the US, the victory of Barack Obama marks the beginning of the end of the Western
domination that was the premise of the modern capitalist system. A wave of non-identitarian
indigenous Renaissance is rising, especially in Latin America. The privatization of basic needs (housing, transportation, food)
and social services is based on the cultural identification of wealth and wellbeing with the amount of private property owned. In the anthropology
of modern capitalism, wellbeing has been equated with acquisition, never with enjoyment. In the course of the social turmoil we are going to live
through in the coming years, the identification of wellbeing with property has to be questioned. Its a political task, but above all it is a cultural
task, and a psychotherapeutic one too. When it comes to semiotic products private property becomes irrelevant, and in fact it is more and more
difficult to enforce it. The campaigns against piracy are paradoxical because the real pirates are the corporations that are desperately trying to
privatize the product of the collective intelligence, and artificially trying to impose a tax on the community of producers. The products of
collective intelligence are immanently common because knowledge can neither be fragmented nor privately owned. A new brand of communism
was already springing from the technological transformations of digital networks, when the collapse of the financial markets and neoliberal
ideology exposed the frailty of the foundations of hyper-capitalism. Now we can predict a new wave of transformation from the current collapse
of growth and debt, and of private consumption as wellbeing. Because of these three forces commonality of knowledge, ideological crisis of
private ownership, mandatory communalisation of need a new horizon is visible and a new landscape is going to surface. Communism is
coming back. The old face of communism, based on the Will and voluntarism of an avantgarde, and on the paranoid expectations of a
will not be resurrected. A totally new brand of communism is
new totality was defeated at the end of the 20th century and
going to surface as a form of necessity, the inevitable outcome of the stormy collapse of the capitalist
system. The communism of capital is a barbarian necessity. We must put freedom in this necessity, we need to make of
this necessity a conscious organised choice. Communism is back, but we should name it in a different way because historical
The historical communism of
memory identified this particular form of social organization with the political tyranny of a religion.
the 20th century was based on the idea of the primacy of totality over singularity. But the
dialectical framework that defined the communist movement of the 20th century has been
completely abandoned and nobody will resurrect it. The Hegelian ascendance played a major role in the formation of
that kind of religious belief that was labeled historicism. The Aufhebung (abolition of the real in favor of the realization of the Idea) is the
paranoid background of the whole conceptualization of communism. Inside that dialectical framework, communism was viewed as an all
encompassing totality expected to abolish and follow the capitalist all encompassing totality. The subject (the will and action of the working
class) was viewed as the instrument for the abolition of the old and the instauration of the new. The industrial working class, being external to the
production of concepts, could only identify with the mythology of abolition and totalization, but the general intellect cannot do that. The general
intellect does not need an expressive subject, such as was the Leninist Party in the 20th century. The political expression of the general intellect is
at one with its action of knowing, creating, and producing signs. We have abandoned the ground of dialectics in favour of
the plural grounds of the dynamic of singularization and the multilayered co-evolution of singularities.
Capitalism is over, but it is not going to disappear. The creation of Non-Temporary Autonomous Zones is not going to give
birth to any totalization. We are not going to witness a cathartic event of revolution, well not see the sudden breakdown of state power. In the
following years well witness a sort of revolution without a subject. In order to subjectivate this
revolution we have to proliferate singularities. This, in my humble opinion, is our cultural and political task. After
abandoning the field of the dialectics of abolition and totalization, we are now trying to build a theory of
the dynamics of recombination and singularization, a concept that is clearly drawn from the works of
Flix Guattari, particularly from his last book, Chaosmosis. By the word singularity I mean the
expression of a never seen before concatenation. The actor of this expression can be an
individual, a collective but also an event. We call it singularity if this actor recombines the multiple flows traversing its field
By the world
of existence following a principle that is not repetitive and referring to any preexisting form of subjected subjectivity.
singularity, I mean an agency that does not follow any rule of conformity and repetition, and is not framed
in any historical necessity. Singularity is a process that is not necessary, because it is not implied in the consequentiality of history
It is the emerging of a self-creative process. Rather than a swift change in
neither logically nor materially.
the social landscape, we should expect the slow surfacing of new trends: communities
abandoning the field the crumbling ruling economies, more and more individuals giving up their
search for a job and creating their own networks of services. The dismantling of industry is unstoppable for the
simple reason that social life does not need industrial labor anymore. The myth of growth is going to be abandoned and people will look for new
modes of wealth distribution. Singular communities will transform the very perception of wellbeing and wealth in the sense of frugality and
freedom. The cultural revolution that we need in this transition leads from the perception of wealth as the private ownership of a growing amount
of goods that we cannot enjoy because we are too busy purchasing the money needed for acquisition, to the perception of wealth as the enjoyment
of an essential amount of things that we can share with other people. The de-privatization of services and goods will be made possible by this
much needed cultural revolution. This will not happen in a planned and uniformed way, this will rather be the effect of the withdrawal of singular
individuals and communities, and the result of the creation of an economy of shared use of common goods and services and the liberation of time
for culture, pleasure and affection. While this process expands at the margins of society, the criminal class will hang on to its power and enforce
more and more repressive legislation, the majority of people will be increasingly aggressive and desperate. Ethnic civil war will spread all over
Europe, wrecking the very fabric of civil life. The proliferation of singularities (the withdrawal and building of NonTemporary Autonomous
Zones) will be a pacific process, but the conformist majority will react violently, and this is already happening. The conformist majority is
frightened by the fleeing away of intelligent energy and simultaneously is attacking the expression of intelligent activity. The situation can be
described as a fight between the mass ignorance produced by mediatotalitarianism and the shared intelligence of the general intellect. We cannot
predict what the outcome of this process will be. Our task is to extend and protect the field of autonomy, and to avoid as much as possible any
violent contact with the field of aggressive mass ignorance. This strategy of non-confrontational withdrawal will not always succeed. Sometimes
confrontation will be made inevitable by racism and fascism. It is impossible to predict what has to be done in the case of unwanted conflict.
Non-violent reaction is obviously the best choice, but it will not always be possible. The identification of wellbeing with private property is so
deeply rooted that a barbarization of the human environment cannot be completely ruled out. But the task of the general intellect is exactly this:
fleeing from paranoia, creating zones of human resistance, experimenting autonomous forms of production based on high-tech-low-energy
production whilst avoiding confrontation with the criminal class and the conformist population. Politics and therapy will be one and the same
activity in the coming time. People will feel hopeless and depressed and panicking, because they are unable to deal with the post-growth
economy, and because they will miss the dissolving modern identity. Our cultural task will be attending to those people and taking care of their
insanity, showing them the way of a happy adaptation at hand. Our task will be the creation of social zones of human
resistance that act like zones of therapeutic contagion. The process of autonomization has not to be seen as Aufhebung, but as
therapy. In this sense it is not totalizing and intended to destroy and abolish the past. Like psychoanalytic therapy it is rather to
be considered as an unending process.
 LinkAnti-Imperialism Affs

The affirmatives characterization of the international system by inequalities in

imperial power overlooks historical materialist conditions underlying militarism and
war
Lapointe 7 (Thierry, 2/28/07, "Beyond an Historicism Without Subject: Agency and the Elusive Genealogies of State Sovereignty",
http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p180176_index.html)

hierarchical relations of power in the international system may not solely rest on
It becomes clearer, in this context, that

objective inequalities in military might as has been contended. As critical approaches generally argue,
these hierarchical relations are themselves shaped through and conditioned by various institutionalised
structures of powermaterial and discursivethat reproduce social relations of domination and
subordination between human subjects across time and space. The question of their historical conditions of emergence and transformation
appears to be the fundamental one for any critical approach in IR that seeks to avoid what John M. Hobson calls the fallacy of tempo-centrism and chronofetishism (Hobson 2002). Critical

How to problematise the historical

scholarship remains deeply divided on the way in which they problematize the relation between power and sovereignty.

conditions of emergence of discourses and practices of state sovereignty remains a question that still
needs to be debated. In this regard, it exists a fundamental line of fracture dividing Poststructuralism and
Historical Materialism in their respective ways to theorise the articulation of power relations/dynamics
of power with social discourses and social institutions across time and space. This paper seeks to critically explore the way in
which Post-Structuralist scholars in IR have approached the question of the historicity of state sovereignty. While acknowledging their contributions in critiquing the a-historical and essentialist

the central weakness of Poststructuralism is that by understanding

foundations of mainstream IR scholarship, it will be argued that

formation and transformation in state sovereignty as expression of shifting discursive paradigms, it

tends to evacuate the specific, uneven and differentiated social relations that create the historical
conditions for such discourses to emerge. It will be argued that Poststructuralism magnifies the internal coherence of an epistemic paradigm
discursive rules of an historical eraand downplays the variety of ways in which specific discourses can be mobilized to

produce, reproduce and transform different sets of social relations of power by human agents across
space in a given historical period. Thus, I argue that Poststructuralism eschews an analysis of the historical
process of formation and transformation of forms of knowledge/social power in relations with
differentiated forms of institutionalized social practices.
 LinkChina
Their analysis of US-China relations absent serious interrogation of dialectical
materialism dooms the aff to failure
MARKOWITZ 13-Professor of History @ Rutgers, PhD @ University of Michigan [Norman, China and the U.S. in the World Today: A
Marxist Historian's Perspective by Norman Markowitz, Political Affairs, 6/18/2013, http://politicalaffairs.net/china-and-the-u-s-in-the-world-
today-a-marxist-historian-s-perspective-by-norman-markowitz/, DKP]

The serious study of History is always about understanding the past as it relates to the present and on that basis trying to grasp what are the likely
developments in the near future Marxist analyses of history is about understanding the larger political economic

system, the social classes in conflict within that system, and the dialectical relationships, that is dynamic interactions between
changing conditions, social movements Ideologies which are serve as bridges between social movements and changing conditions. In

that sense, Marxism enables us to understand in a holistic way the relationship of the general to the specific,

to understand the relationship of dominant ideologies to economic political systems, and the
relationship of cultures to changing political economy Finally, Marxism connects theory with practice,
science, a science of society, with social class partisanship, providing a holistic analysis that can become a force in itself
to advance positive change, that is, the interests of the working class and the path to socialism. Let me try to brief apply that analysis in broad
outline to Chinese- U.S. relations today and in the near future First we have to look at global political economy and of course the capitalist world system The
capitalist world system has developed for centuries, but for
the questions we are asking concerning U.S. China relations, its
most important developments have taken place with the rise of industrial capitalism in the 19th and 20th centuries,
which has produced modern imperialism, the imperialism of export capital and with it the world or global market, leading to
globalized militarization, global wars, global depressions. This modern imperialism has produced its
dialectical antithesis, attempts at socialist revolutions and anti-imperialist national revolutions , of which the
Chinese peoples Revolution, of the 20th century, combining anti-imperialist national liberation with a commitment advanced by the Chinese Communist Party to
construct a socialist society, is by far the most important, both in its time and today. Let us look very briefly a the United States and how it got to where it is today
The United States had the first major anti-colonial revolution in modern history, a revolution also to establish an independent bourgeois republic. It became in the
19th century the first large capitalist republic in modern history, expanding across North America. After 1890 it surpassed Britain to become the leading industrial
capitalist nation After WWI, it replaced Britain as the leading finance capitalist nation. Today in the early 21st century its ruling class and the political economy that
they control are in a very contradictory position. The U.S. state was after WWII the founder and leader of NAT0 bloc, against the Soviet Union and its allies and the
world communist movement until the fall of the Soviet Union. This served as a 20th century industrial capitalist version in the twentieth century of old 19th century
Holy Alliance which, with Britain in the background, fought against the expansion of the French Bourgeois revolution, against the revolutionary Jacobin state and
the later Bonapartist empire. But unlike Britain, which had used the forces made up the Holy Alliance against the French Revolution and Napoleon, but kept a
distance from its more reactionary expressions in advancing its initially hegemonic economic power to develop its global empire in the name of civilization,
progress, and free trade, the U.S. state was always both the creator and leader of the NAT0 bloc and the
advocate of its most aggressive and reactionary policies. Also, unlike the British, which emerged richer and more powerful from the
from its victory in the wars of the French revolution, the U.S. economy emerged from the U.S. NATO bloc victory in the wars of the cold

war in a much weaker position in terms of industry and finance than it was at the beginning of those conflicts after WWII, even
while its leaders foolishly, George HW Bush and others, proclaimed a new world order and genuflected, as they continued to do, to the concept of globalization.
Although they would never admit it, in all likelihood even to themselves, the capitalist leaders of the U.S. fear that China will in the
21st century follow their path in the 19th and 20th.

Incorporation of China into liberal economic regimes is a form of neocolonialism that

relies on maximizing productivity and cultural domination
Vandevelde 98
Kenneth J. Vandevelde, Professor of Law @ Thomas Jefferson School of Law, "The Political Economy of a
Bilateral Investment Treaty." The American Journal of International Law 92.4 (1998): 621-41. ProQuest.
As the foregoing suggests, economic liberals espouse an outward-looking philosophy that regards integration into the global economy as the
key to economic development!17 They favor the removal of barriers to transfrontier investment flows that inhibit global integration and
diminish the production of wealth. Further, liberals contend that the negative effects ascribed to foreign investment are often in fact
attributable to flawed host state regulatory efforts and thus the proper response is less, rather than more, regulation.48 Particularly within
developing states, economic nationalists,
with their emphasis on nation building and economic development,
have found common cause with Marxist economists, who advocate a more equal distribution of wealth
within the international community.49 These theorists share an inward-looking philosophy and are generally suspicious of
unregulated foreign investment. They support intervention in the economy when necessary to ensure
that foreign investment conforms to their political goals of promoting the national independence and
economic development of Third World states. Their concern about a liberal foreign investment regime is twofold. First,
foreign investment may not produce the promised increase in efciency. Dependency theory, for example, asserts
that foreign investment fosters underdevelopment rather than economic growth in developing states.52 The essence of the argument is that
the subsidiary in the developing state will be operated for the benet of the parent company and thus will transfer resources from the
developing to the developed state rather than in the other direction.53 It is alleged, for example, that foreign investment may
reduce both foreign currency reserves54 and employment.55 Even where they accept the liberal economic analysis as
essentially correct in theory, critics of liberalism point to extensive market failures in developing states that they
believe will prevent an unregulated market from delivering the promised growth.56 The second concern is that,
even where the promised productivity materializes, in- creased productivity and economic development
are not the same thing.57 Economic development theory, particularly since the 19705, has emphasized that economic develop-
ment requires both increased productivity and a more equitable distribution of wealth?8 From this
perspective, the real goal is development, not simply increased productivity, and liberalism promises only
the latter. The second concern thus focuses on the distribu- tional consequences of foreign investment.
These consequences are both internal and external. Foreign investment redistributes wealth and power
internally in that not all members of the society will benet equally or at all and some may be
disadvantaged by it?9 The benets may be most likely to accrue to better educated urban populations60 or to
politically dominant ethnic groups, which serves only to reinforce or extend existing gaps between the
wealthy and the poor.62 Alternatively, the creation of new centers of wealth, power and opportunity may weaken the position of
traditional elites.63 Foreign investment redistributes wealth and power externally by transferring control over local assets to persons who are
outside the national political system.64 This may be particularly objectionable where the enterprise subject to
foreign control is important to the host states military defense, cultural identity or other vital
interests.65 Indeed, the Marxist critique of foreign investment characterizes it as a recolonialization of the
host State.66 The apprehension about foreign control ranges from fears of intervention in the political process
to concerns about cultural imperialism. The critique of liberalism is not limited to developing states.
Economic nationalists in developed states may fear inward foreign investment, particularly that from
other developed states, for many of the same reasons that economic nationalists in developing states
fear it. Economic nationalists also may fear outward investment because of con- cerns that it will transfer productive capacity, hence
employment, abroad.69 11. THE LIBERAL IDEOLOGY OF THE BITS BITs present themselves as quintessentially liberal
documents. The typical BIT cites two goals in its preamble: the creation of favorable conditions for investment by nationals and companies
of one party in the territory of the other, and increased prosperity in both states.70 In short, the avowed purpose of a BIT may be
distilled into ve words: increased prosperity through foreign investment. The preamble thus afrms the
basic liberal doctrine that free movement of capital will yield greater productivity. Further, the history of
the BITS indicates that a principal inducement for states to enter into a BIT has been precisely that it
afrms liberalism. Although the rst BIT program was inaugurated in 1959 by Germany,71 BIT negotiations proceeded throughout the
19603 at a largely desultory pace. In the ten years from 1959 through 1968, only seventy-four BITS were concluded, that is, fewer than eight
per year worldwide.72 Of these seventy-four, half were concluded by Germany. The pace of negotiations did not noticeably change until the
mid1970s, when ideologi- cal debates concerning the standard of compensation for expropriation that was required by customary
international law emerged as the central issue in discussions of international investment law. Developed states proposed the negotiation of
BITS providing for prompt, adequate and effective compensation for expropriation as an antidote to eco- nomic nationalist assertions that
expropriated investors were entitled to no more than national treatment and Marxist claims that no compensation at all was owed. Thus, the
BITS acquired a distinct ideological purpose. Indeed, the United States was unwilling to negotiate any BIT that did not embrace the prompt,
adequate and effective standard, despite the fact that the treaty might have offered real protection in other respects for foreign investors,
because any such protection would have been insufcient to justify the ideological consequences of agreeing to a weaker compensation
standard. In direct response to United Nations General Assembly debates on the measure of compensation, the United States launched its BIT
program in 1977.76 Several other developed states also inaugurated their programs in the 19705.77 France concluded its rst BIT in 1972,78
the United Kingdom in 1975,79 Austria in 1976,80 andjapan in 1977. During the ten years from 1977 to 1986, some 153 BITS were negotiated,
meaning that the pace of negotiations in the decade starting in the mid-19705 was about double that of the rst decade of the program. The
pace of negotiations quickened a second time in the early 19903, with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the transformation of the Central
and East European economies from socialism to free markets.82 Conclusion of a BIT represented a relatively easy way for these
states to demonstrate their renunciation of Marxist economics and their com- mitment to a liberal economic
regime. For example, some 196 BITS were signed in 1996 alone,83 an astonishing contrast to the fewer than 8 per year signed in the
19605.84 BITS have therefore been concluded in many cases because they symbolize a commit- ment to economic liberalism. The sincerity of
that commitment, however, can be mea- sured by examining the provisions of the BIT.

The AFF is another step in the agenda of neoliberal multilateralism

BOND 16-Professor in Political Economy @ University of KwaZulu-Natal, where he has directed the Centre for Civil Society [Patrick, Socialist
Worker, Imperialisms Junior Partners, June 1, 2016, https://socialistworker.org/2016/06/01/imperialisms-junior-partners, DKP]

Neoliberal Multilateralism Simply put, "racism,

crude capitalism and patriarchy" associated with 20th century U.S.
imperialism have been largely replaced by Obama's neoliberal multilateralism--a style of governance that the BRICS have
bought into, not opposed. This isn't something to celebrate. Multilateral neoliberalism leaves the BRICS countries

far less able to pursue any positive South-South interventions. Indeed, Rousseff's ouster demonstrates this clearly and the
incoming Temer regime is likely to pursue a desperate course to re-establish its global position. The Westward drift announced by Temer's Foreign Minister Jos
Serra, plus Brasilia's renewed neoliberal agenda on the home front, suggest this will be the case. But while it's obvious that Serra is going to become much more
active as a sub-imperial ally of the United States than was Rousseff, Rousseff also did little of substance on the foreign policy front aside from occasional anti-Yankee
rhetoric (such as when she learned from Edward Snowden that Obama had bugged her phone and e-mail). As the thoughtful (and generally pro-BRICS)
commentator Oliver Stuenkel recently lamented: Rousseff failed to articulate anything resembling a foreign policy doctrine, and Brazil's foreign policy since 2011
was shaped, above all, by the president's mind-boggling indifference to all things international and foreign policy makers' incapacity to convince Rousseff that
foreign policy could be used to promote the government's domestic goals--as both [former Brazilian presidents] Lula and Fernando Henrique Cardoso so skillfully
showed. Serra, on the other hand, has promised that: Priority will be given to the relationship with new partners in Asia,
particularly China, this great economic phenomenon of the 21st century, and India. We will be equally committed to modernizing the bilateral exchange
with Africa, the big neighbor on the other side of the Atlantic... We will also take advantage of the opportunities offered by

inter-regional fora with other developing countries, such as the BRICS, to accelerate commercial
exchanges, investments and sharing of experiences.
 LinkCognitive Labor

Global capital has entered into semiotics, the affirmatives liberal dreams of a changed
future only participate in that system of the accumulation and circulation of symbols
that maintain the form of production
Bifo '7 (Franco Berardi, Professor of Social History of Communication at the Academia di belle Arti in Milan, and Founder of A/traverse,
Technology and Knowledge in a Universe of Indetermination, SubStance #112, Vol. 36 no. 1, trans. Giuseppina Mecchia, pp. 68-72)

When we talk about the mental nature of the productive process we mean that the functions assigned
by governments to the productive processes are subsumed and internalized by them. There is no longer
any distinction between processes of social labor and the general governance of society. Of course, there
remains the fiction of a political decision, of a political representation, but the actual ability to govern the social
processes on the part of the political will can only play an extremely marginal role. It isnt politics (with all its complicated
mechanisms of representation, decision, and sanction) that decides on the fundamental questions arising in the spheres of technology and finance or in the creation of an interface connecting

imaginary. Government is integrated into the circulation of information, if we

technology, finance, society, languages, and the

consider information in its fullest sense, as an algorithm of processes that can be activated by techno-
social automatisms. Programming, understood as the elaboration of a software able to analyze, simplify, systematize, and mechanize entire sequences of human work, is at the
core of government action, if we call government a function of decision and regulation. Within the process of techno-social elaboration, of software development, we see the

configuration of alternatives which have completely disappeared from the scene of political
representation and of ideology. According to the user interfaces realized by the programmer, technology can function either as an element of control or as an agent
of liberation from work. The political problem is entirely absorbed within the activity of the mental worker, and of the programmer in particular. The problem of the alternative, of a different
social use of certain activities, can no longer be detached from the very forms of this activity. The person who works in a machine shop, or on the assembly line, has to separate herself from
her workplace if she wants to rediscover the conditions for a political transformation, if she wants to upset the political and technological modes of oppression. This is why, during the proto-
industrial era, it was necessary to build a political organization external to the factory and to the working knowledge of the worker. But this is no longer the case when work becomes an

In the age of mental labor, the problem of organization and of

activity of coordination, invention, understanding, and programming.

political action can no longer be separated from the one concerning the paradigms of the productive
operation. Software programming reveals the close relation between dependent labor and creative activity; in this case, we observe how the mental work of the programmer acquires
a political function of transformation within his very way of operating, and not only a productive function of valorization. The two functions can be distinguished in the sphere of project-

oriented consciousness, but they live on the same operational plane. The consequence of the increasingly mental nature of social labor
is that politics is replaced by an internalized function of social production and becomes a specific and
decisive choice between the alternative uses of a certain knowledge, an invention of interfaces situated
between crystallized information and social use, between cognitive architecture and an ecology of communication. Obviously, this doesnt prevent
politics from continuing to celebrate its ever more excessive rituals. But these rituals have lost their efficacy; their only consequences

are internal to politics itself. But if this is what is happening to politics, what about economics, both as a discipline and as a field defining human activity? Is economics
still a science when the determining factors in the economic field are becoming unstable and immaterial, when they seem to elude the quantifying rules which are at the core of economics as

The model
a conceptualizing system? Keynes, the post-Keynesians and the neo-classicists alike cast the economy in a model in which a few constants drive the entire machinery.

we now need would have to see the economy as ecology, environment, configuration, and as
composed of several integrative spheres: a microeconomy of individuals and firms, especially
transnational ones; a macroeconomy of national governments; and a world economy. Every earlier economic theory
postulated that one such economy totally controls; all others are dependent and functions. [] But economic reality now is one of three such economies. []. None totally controls the
other three; none is totally controlled by the others. Yet none is fully independent from the others, either. Such complexity can barely be described. It cannot be analyzed since it allows of
no prediction. To give us a functioning economic theory, we thus need a new synthesis that simplifies but so far there is no sign of it. And if no such synthesis emerges, we might be at the
end of economic theory.25 Economics became a science when, with the expansion of capitalism, rules were established as general principles for productive activity and exchange. But if we

The ability to
want these rules to function we must be able to quantify the basic productive act. The time-atom described by Marx is the keystone of modern economics.

quantify the time necessary for the production of a commodity makes possible the regulation of the
entire set of economic relations. But when the main element in the global productive cycle is the
unforeseeable work of the mind, the unforeseeable work of language,when self-reproducing
information becomes the universal commodity, it is no longer possible to reduce the totality of
exchanges and relations to an economic rule. In any system as complex as the economy of a developed country, the statistically insignificant events, the
events at the margin, are likely to be the decisive events, short range at least. By definition they can neither be anticipated nor prevented. Indeed, they cannot always be identified even after
they have had their impact.26 Economic science doesnt seem able to understand the current transition because it is founded on a quantitative and mechanistic paradigm that could

, but is unable to explain and regulate the process

comprehend and regulate industrial production, the physical manipulation of mechanical matter

of immaterial production based on an activity that cant easily be reduced to quantitative

measurements and the repetition of constants: mental activity. Information and communication technologies are disrupting the social and
economical mechanisms of the developed countries. The current indicators of traditional macroeconomics are becoming

obsolete and of little significance; moreover, the place and function of economics itself as we still see it
are put into question. The phenomenon of growth without job creation devalues a whole series of
concepts. This is how even the concept of productivity fails to resist the challenge raised by the new
realities. With the new technologies, the majority of production costs are determined by research and equipment expenses that actually precede the productive process. Little by little,
in digitalized and automated enterprises, production is no longer subjected to the variations concerning the quantity of operational factors. Marginal cost, marginal profits: these bases of
neoclassical economic calculations have lost a good part of their meaning. The traditional elements of salary and price calculation are crumbling down.27 Robins analysis shows that economic
categories cant explain the majority of the processes that are truly meaningful in our time, and the reason clearly consists in the fact that mental work is not quantifiable like the work

performed by an industrial worker. Therefore, the determination of value the keystone of classical economy both as a
science and as daily economic practice becomes aleatory and indefinable. In Symbolic Exchange and Death, Baudrillard wrote:
The reality principle corresponded to a certain stage of the law of value. Today the whole system is swamped by indeterminacy, and

every reality is absorbed by the hyperreality of the code and simulation. The principle of simulation governs us now, rather than the
outdated reality principle. Finalities have disappeared, the models generate us now. [] Capital no longer belongs to the order of political

economy: it operates with political economy as its simulated model. With the digitalizing of production, the abstraction of capital
makes a qualitative leap. Not only is production an abstract production of value, but the economic indicators are autonomous from the system

of production, and are constituted as a synchronic, structural, self- referential, and autonomous system,
independent from the real world. The increasingly financial nature of our economy means exactly this. The stock markets are the places
where obsessions, psychological expectations, fears, play, and apocalyptic ideologies regulate the game.
Realist economies were governed by their goals, the nave goal of producing use value for the satisfaction of specific needs, or the subtler goal of valorization as the increase of invested

capital. Now, instead,it is impossible to explain our economies on the basis of their goals, whether we identify
them with the intentions of certain individuals or certain groups or with the goals of an entire society.
The economy is governed by a code, not by its goals: Finality is there in advance, inscribed in the code. We can see that nothing has changed
the order of goals has simply ceded its place to a molecular play, as the order of signifieds has yielded to
the play of infinitesimal signifiers, reduced to their aleatory commutation.29 The economy therefore
appears as a hyper-reality, a simulated, double, and artificial world that cannot be translated in terms of real production. The mental nature of todays economy is not
only expressed by the technological transformation of the productive process, but by the global code in charge of interpreting the process constituting our entire world. Consequently, the

science of economics can no longer explain the fundamental dynamics governing humanitys productive
activities; nor can it explain their crisis. Economics has to be replaced by a global science whose characteristics and field of inquiry are still unknown: a science
that would be able to study the processes of formation of Cyberspace, understood as the global network of signs-commodities. In an interview published in 1993 by the Californian magazine
Wired, Peter Drucker develops once again the theme of the inadequacy of economic categories associated with the digitalization of productive processes: International economic theory is

The traditional factors of production land, labor, and capital are becoming restraints rather
obsolete.

than driving forces. Knowledge is becoming the one critical factor of production. It has two incarnations: knowledge applied to existing processes, services, and products is
productivity; knowledge applied to the new is innovation. [] Knowledge has become the central, key resource that knows no geography. It underlies the most significant and unprecedented
social phenomenon of this century. No class in history has ever risen as fast as the blue-collar worker and no class has fallen as fast. All within less than a century. Furthermore, Drucker
remarks that the concept of intellectual property, which is the juridical concept that was at the basis of classical economy and of the capitalist system, no longer has any meaning in an age

when the circulating commodity is information and the market is the info-sphere: We have to rethink the whole concept of intellectual
property, which was focused on the printed word. Perhaps within a few decades, the distinction between electronic transmissions and the printed word will have disappeared. The only
solution may be a universal licensing system. Where you basically become a subscriber, and where it is taken for granted that everything that is published is reproduced. In other words, if you

dont want everybody to know, dont talk about it. The system of property regarding the products of intellectual labor no
longer works in the age of the reproducibility of information. As a conclusion to these observations on the obsolescence of economics as a
generalized interpretive code, I would like to quote Andr Gorz, who writes in his Mtamorphoses du travail: Discipline by means of money is a hetero-

regulation that interrupts the communicational infrastructure ensuring the symbolic reproduction of the
experiential world. This means that all the activities that transmit or reproduce cultural acquisitions, knowledge, taste, manners, language, mores [], and that allow us to find
our bearings in the world as givens, certitudes, values, and self-explanatory norms; all these activities cannot be regulated by money or by the state without causing serious pathologies in our
world of experience. Money (i.e. economics) and the State (i.e. politics) are no longer able to govern or to discipline the world of production, now that its center is no longer a de-brained force,

That center is now occupied by mind flows, by the ethereal substance of

a uniform and quantifiable time of manual work.

intelligence, which eludes every measurement and cannot be subjected to any rule without inducing
enormous pathologies and causing a truly maddening paralysis [destruction] of cognition and affectivity.
 LinkDeath/Extinction

This capitalist regime based on consumption is predicated off of the desire to prolong
life indefinitely -- thats the root cause of violence and warfare
Robinson 12 (Andrew, Political Theorist, Activist Based in the UK and research fellow affiliated to the Centre for the Study of Social and
Global Justice (CSSGJ), University of Nottingham, Jean Baudrillard: The Rise of Capitalism & the Exclusion of Death, March 30,
http://ceasefiremagazine.co.uk(in-theory-baudrillard-2)

Symbolic exchange or rather, its suppression plays a central role in the emergence of capitalism. Baudrillard
sees a change happening over time. Regimes based on symbolic exchange (differences are exchangeable and related) are
replaced by regimes based on equivalence (everything is, or means, the same). Ceremony gives way to spectacle,
immanence to transcendence. Baudrillards view of capitalism is derived from Marxs analysis of value. Baudrillard accepts Marxs view that
capitalism is based on a general equivalent. Money is the general equivalent because it can be exchanged for any commodity. In turn, it
expresses the value of abstract labour-time. Abstract labour-time is itself an effect of the regimenting of processes of life, so that different kinds
of labour can be compared. Capitalism
is derived from the autonomisation or separation of economics from the
rest of life. It turns economics into the reality-principle. It is a kind of sorcery, connected in some way
to the disavowed symbolic level. It subtly shifts the social world from an exchange of death with the
Other to an eternal return of the Same. Capitalism functions by reducing everything to a regime based
on value and the production of value. To be accepted by capital, something must contribute value. This
creates an immense regime of social exchange. However, this social exchange has little in common with symbolic exchange. It ultimately
depends on the mark of value itself being unexchangeable. Capital must be endlessly accumulated. States must not collapse. Capitalism thus
introduces the irreversible into social life, by means of accumulation. According to Baudrillard, capitalism
rests on an obsession
with the abolition of death. Capitalism tries to abolish death through accumulation. It tries to ward off
ambivalence (associated with death) through value (associated with life). But this is bound to fail. General equivalence the
basis of capitalism is itself the ever-presence of death. The more the system runs from death, the
more it places everyone in solitude, facing their own death. Life itself is fundamentally ambivalent. The
attempt to abolish death through fixed value is itself deathly. Accumulation also spreads to other fields. The idea of
progress, and linear time, comes from the accumulation of time, and of stockpiles of the past. The idea of truth comes from the accumulation
of scientific knowledge. Biology rests on the separation of living and non-living. According to Baudrillard, such
accumulations are now in crisis. For instance, the accumulation of the past is undermined, because historical objects now have to be concealed
to be preserved otherwise they will be destroyed by excessive consumption. Value is produced from the residue or remainder of an
incomplete symbolic exchange. The repressed, market value, and sign-value all come from this remainder. To destroy the remainder would be
to destroy value. Capitalist exchange is always based on negotiation, even when it is violent. The symbolic order does not know this kind of
equivalential exchange or calculation. And
capitalist extraction is always one-way. It amounts to a non-reversible
aggression in which one act (of dominating or killing) cannot be returned by the other. It is also this
regime which produces scarcity Baudrillard here endorses Sahlins argument. Capitalism produces the Freudian death drive,
which is actually an effect of the capitalist culture of death. For Baudrillard, the limit to both Marx and Freud is that they fail to theorise the
separation of the domains they study the economy and the unconscious. It is the separation which grounds their functioning, which therefore
only occurs under the regime of the code. Baudrillard also criticises theories of desire, including those of Deleuze, Foucault, Freud and Lacan.
He believes desire comes into existence based on repression. It is an effect of the denial of the symbolic.
Liberated energies always leave a new remainder; they do not escape the basis of the unconscious in the remainder. Baudrillard argues that
indigenous groups do not claim to live naturally or by their desires they simply claim to live in societies. This social life is an effect of the
symbolic. Baudrillard therefore criticises the view that human liberation can come about through the liberation of desire. He thinks that such a
liberation will keep certain elements of the repression of desire active. Baudrillard argues that the processes which operate collectively in
indigenous groups are repressed into the unconscious in metropolitan societies. This leads to the autonomy of the psyche as a separate sphere.
It is only after this repression has occurred that a politics of desire becomes conceivable. He professes broad agreement with the Deleuzian
project of unbinding energies from fixed categories and encouraging flows and intensities. However, he is concerned that capitalism can
recuperate such releases of energy, disconnecting them so they can eventually reconnect to it. Unbinding and drifting are not fatal to
capitalism, because capitalism itself unbinds things, and re-binds things which are unbound. What
is fatal to it is, rather,
reversibility. Capitalism continues to be haunted by the forces it has repressed. Separation does not destroy the
remainder. Quite the opposite. The
remainder continues to exist, and gains power from its repression. This turns
the double or shadow into something unquiet, vampiric, and threatening. It becomes an image of the
forgotten dead. Anything which reminds us of the repressed aspects excluded from the subject is
experienced as uncanny and threatening. It becomes the obscene, which is present in excess over the scene of
what is imagined. This is different from theories of lack, such as the Lacanian Real. Baudrillards remainder is an excess rather than a lack. It is
the carrier of the force of symbolic exchange. Modern culture dreams of radical difference. The reason for this is that it exterminated radical
difference by simulating it. The energy of production, the unconscious, and signification all in fact come from the repressed remainder.
Our
culture is dead from having broken the pact with monstrosity, with radical difference. The West
continues to perpetrate genocide on indigenous groups. But for Baudrillard, it did the same thing to itself
first destroying its own indigenous logics of symbolic exchange. Indigenous groups have also increasingly lost the
symbolic dimension, as modern forms of life have been imported or imposed. This according to Baudrillard produces chronic confusion and
Gift-exchange is radically subversive of the system. This is not because it is rebellious. Baudrillard thinks the
instability.
system can survive defections or exodus. It is because it counterposes a different principle of sociality to that of
the dominant system. According to Baudrillard, the mediations of capitalism exist so that nobody has the
opportunity to offer a symbolic challenge or an irreversible gift. They exist to keep the symbolic at bay.
The affective charge of death remains present among the oppressed, but not with the properly symbolic rhythm of
immediate retaliation. The Church and State also exist based on the elimination of symbolic exchange. Baudrillard is highly critical of
Christianity for what he takes to be a cult of suffering, solitude and death. He sees the Church as central to the destruction of earlier forms of
community based on symbolic exchange. Baudrillard seems to think that earlier forms of the state and capitalism retained some degree of
symbolic exchange, but in an alienated, partially repressed form. For instance, the imaginary of the social contract was based on the idea of a
sacrifice this time of liberty for the common good. In psychoanalysis, symbolic exchange is displaced onto the relationship to the master-
signifier. I havent seen Baudrillard say it directly, but the impression he gives is that this is a distorted, authoritarian imitation of the original
symbolic exchange. Nonetheless, it retains some of its intensity and energy. Art, theatre and language have worked to maintain a minimum of
ceremonial power. It is the reason older orders did not suffer the particular malaise of the present. It is easy to read certain passages in
Baudrillard as if he is bemoaning the loss of these kinds of strong significations. This is initially how I read Baudrillards work. But on closer
inspection, this seems to be a misreading. Baudrillard is nostalgic for repression only to the extent that the repressed continued to carry
symbolic force as a referential. He is nostalgic for the return of symbolic exchange, as an aspect of diffuse, autonomous, dis-alienated social
groups. Death Death plays a central role in Baudrillards theory, and is closely related to symbolic exchange. According to Baudrillard,
what we have lost above all in the transition to alienated society is the ability to engage in exchanges
with death. Death should not be seen here in purely literal terms. Baudrillard specifies early on that he does not
mean an event affecting a body, but rather, a form which destroys the determinacy of the subject and of value
which returns things to a state of indeterminacy. Baudrillard certainly discusses actual deaths, risk-taking, suicide and so on.
But he also sees death figuratively, in relation to the decomposition of existing relations, the death of the self-image or ego, the
interchangeability of processes of life across different categories. For instance, eroticism or sexuality is related to death, because it leads to
fusion and communication between bodies. Sexual reproduction carries shades of death because one generation replaces another.
Baudrillards concept of death is thus quite similar to Bakhtins concept of the grotesque. Death
refers to metamorphosis,
reversibility, unexpected mutations, social change, subjective transformation, as well as physical death.
According to Baudrillard, indigenous groups see death as social, not natural or biological. They see it as an
effect of an adversarial will, which they must absorb. And they mark it with feasting and rituals. This is a
way of preventing death from becoming an event which does not signify. Such a non-signifying event is absolute
disorder from the standpoint of symbolic exchange. For Baudrillard, the wests idea of a biological, material death is
actually an idealist illusion, ignoring the sociality of death. Poststructuralists generally maintain that the problems
of the present are rooted in the splitting of life into binary oppositions. For Baudrillard, the division
between life and death is the original, founding opposition on which the others are founded. After this
first split, a whole series of others have been created, confining particular groups the mad,
prisoners, children, the old, sexual minorities, women and so on to particular segregated situations.
The definition of the normal human has been narrowed over time. Today, nearly everyone belongs to one or another marked or deviant
The original exclusion was of the dead it is defined as abnormal to be dead. You livies hate us
category.
deadies. This first split and exclusion forms the basis, or archetype, for all the other splits and
exclusions along lines of gender, disability, species, class, and so on. This discrimination against the
dead brings into being the modern experience of death. Baudrillard suggests that death as we know it does
not exist outside of this separation between living and dead. The modern view of death is constructed
on the model of the machine and the function. A machine either functions or it does not. The human
body is treated as a machine which similarly, either functions or does not. For Baudrillard, this misunderstands the nature of life and
death. The modern view of death is also necessitated by the rise of subjectivity. The subject needs a beginning and
an end, so as to be reducible to the story it tells. This requires an idea of death as an end. It is counterposed to the
immortality of social institutions. In relation to individuals, ideas of religious immortality is simply an ideological cover for the real
exclusion of the dead. But institutions try to remain truly immortal. Modern systems, especially bureaucracies, no longer
know how to die or how to do anything but keep reproducing themselves. The internalisation of the
idea of the subject or the soul alienates us from our bodies, voices and so on. It creates a split, as Stirner would say,
between the category of man and the un-man, the real self irreducible to such categories. It also
individualises people, by destroying their actual connections to others. The symbolic haunts the code as the threat
of its own death. The society of the code works constantly to ward off the danger of irruptions of the symbolic. The mortal body is
actually an effect of the split introduced by the foreclosure of death. The split never actually stops
exchanges across the categories. In the case of death, we still exchange with the dead through our own
deaths and our anxiety about death. We no longer have living, mortal relationships with objects either.
They are reduced to the instrumental. It is as if we have a transparent veil between us. Symbolic
exchange is based on a game, with game-like rules. When this disappears, laws and the state are invented to
take their place. It is the process of excluding, marking, or barring which allows concentrated or
transcendental power to come into existence. Through splits, people turn the other into their
imaginary. For instance, westerners invest the Third World with racist fantasies and revolutionary
aspirations; the Third World invests the west with aspirational fantasies of development. In separation, the
other exists only as an imaginary object. Yet the resultant purity is illusory. For Baudrillard, any such marking or barring of the
other brings the other to the core of society. We all become dead, or mad, or prisoners, and so on,
through their exclusion. The goal of survival is fundamental to the birth of power. Social control
emerges when the union of the living and the dead is shattered, and the dead become prohibited. The
social repression of death grounds the repressive socialisation of life. People are compelled to survive
so as to become useful. For Baudrillard, capitalisms original relationship to death has historically been
concealed by the system of production, and its ends. It only becomes fully visible now this system is collapsing, and production is
reduced to operation. In modern societies, death is made invisible, denied, and placed outside society. For
example, elderly people are excluded from society. People no longer expect their own death. As a result, it becomes
unintelligible. It keeps returning as nature which will not abide by objective laws. It can no longer be absorbed through ritual.
Western society is arranged so death is never done by someone else, but always attributable to nature.
This creates a bureaucratic, judicial regime of death, of which the concentration camp is the ultimate
symbol. The system now commands that we must not die at least not in any old way. We may only
die if law and medicine allow it. Hence for instance the spread of health and safety regulations. On the other hand, murder
and violence are legalised, provided they can be re-converted into economic value. Baudrillard sees this as a
regressive redistribution of death. It is wrested from the circuit of social exchanges and vested in
centralised agencies. For Baudrillard, there is not a social improvement here. People are effectively being
killed, or left to die, by a process which never treats them as having value. On the other hand, even when
capitalism becomes permissive, inclusive and tolerant, it still creates an underlying anxiety about being
reduced to the status of an object or a marionette. This appears as a constant fear of being manipulated. The slave
remains within the masters dialectic for as long as his life or death serves the reproduction of
domination.
 LinkDeconstruction

Their post-Marxist foray into language is bourgeois ideation, their framework of

equivalency collapses into pluralism that entrenches capitalist subjectivity
Stoddart 2007 Mark C. J., University of British Columbia, Ideology, Hegemony,
Discourse: A Critical Review of Theories of Knowledge and Power, Social Thought & Research,
Vol. 28.
Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (1985) offer a post-Marxist model of discourse that builds upon the Marxist
problematic of relations of oppression and domination within capitalism. Drawing on a Gramscian framework, they are
concerned with the ways in which social power and resistance function through discourse. In
their model, hegemony is achieved through the discursive connection of subject positions within
the social realm. They adopt a more open, fluid conception of hegemony than Gramsci, arguing that there are only hegemonic
moments within a complex and shifting discursive social reality. They write: Hegemony is, quite simply, a political type of relation, a
form, if one so wishes, of politics; but not a determinable location within a topography of the social. In a given social formation,
there can be a variety of hegemonic nodal points . . . they may constitute points of condensation of a number of social relations . . .
insofar as the social is an infinitude not reducible to any underlying unitary principle, the mere idea of a centre of the social has no
meaning at all (Laclau and Mouffe 1985:139). Laclau and Mouffe focus on deconstructing the essentialist elements
of critical theories of ideology. For example, they reject the notion of class as a foundational category
of political identity. They argue that a sense of political identity does not emerge from ones class position. Rather,
individuals work to construct a collective political identity through discourses that create relations of equivalence between subject
positions (p. 128). There is no preordained reason why the working class should adopt a left politics. Discourses
of
equivalence may construct a working class identity, which links working class subject positions
in opposition to a discursively constructed capitalist class. However, the construction of such a subject position
requires concerted effort. Alternatively, working class identity might be constructed in alliance with the nation state in opposition to
an external other through a discourse of national security (as was witnessed in the aftermath of 9/11 in the United States).
Furthermore, they
highlight the ways in which we can construct political subjectivity in a
multiplicity of ways other than around economic class. In recent decades, the new social movements based on
gender, ethnicity, sexuality, or environmental degradation, have illustrated that class is not the only channel of social power, nor is it
the only foundation upon which resistance to power may be based (p. 159). The
authors also reject the Marxist model
of class struggle, where the working class faces off against the capitalist class in an all-or-
nothing, epochal struggle, like Godzilla battling Mothra over the fate of Tokyo. As an alternative to the Marxist
framework, Laclau and Mouffe offer a pluralist form of political action, where people actively build
chains of equivalence among different subject positions (p. 170). The creation of counter-hegemonic blocs
among subject positions is an active, discursive process. They term this a politics of radical democracy, where hegemony and
counter-hegemony are worked out in everyday struggles among a multiplicity of political actors (p. 176). Echoing Gramsci,
ideological power does not work as a monolithic system that subjugates the masses in the interests of the capitalist class. Hegemony
is always contested; we may only speak of the relative success of a particular hegemonic discourse. While Laclau and Mouffe work
from a Gramscian point of departure, their work has broad resonances with Foucault. The authors contribute to a theory of
discourse by focusing on the relationship between discourse, subjectivity and hegemony. As in the work of Foucault, Laclau and
Mouffe suggest that an acceptance of social inequality is produced as we incorporate hegemonic discourses into our individual
subjectivities. Discourse works on individual social actors while producing hegemonic effects across a multiplicity of social locations.
The authors also point to the multiplicity of subject positions, networks of power, and points of resistance beyond the confines of
economic class. Laclau and Mouffe also collapse the Marxist distinction between economic base and cultural superstructure by
absorbing everything into discourse. However,
their conception of discourse may seem so broad that it
embraces everything in the social world, leaving nothing outside discourse.
The affs commitment to undecidability undermines any serious political commitment
erecting an inevitable and antagonistic barrier of identity between self and other.
Real politics requires making risky decisions, they are just wafflers.
Rens Van Munster, 2004 Department of International Politics, University of Wales.
The Desecuritisation of Illegal Migration: The Case for a European Belonging without Community. Marie Curie
Working Papers, No 7

There is one crucial problem with the deconstructivist position, however. For while deconstructivism
embraces the objective of desecuritisation, its theoretical maxim that identity is always
constituted in the dialectics between two opposing terms which function as each others
negation hampers them in reaching this goal. For if one accepts, if only tacitly, that identity is always
constituted through an antagonistic relationship with the other, it becomes unclear how one can
envisage desecuritised ways of mediating belonging between self and other (cf. Fierke, 2001; Hansen, 1997).
Ole Wver observes in this context that [m]any [poststructuralist] authors including Campbell balance between, on the one hand, (formally)
saying that identity does not demand an Other, does not demand antagonism, only difference(s) that can be non-antagonistic and, on the other,
actually assuming that identity is always based on an antagonistic relationship to an other, is always constituted as an absolute difference (Wver,
1996: 122; cf. Fierke, 2001: 119). Indeed, the theoretical maxim that identity always requires a constitutive
outside logically entails that only the particular contents of a specific friend/enemy figuration
can be questioned, but never the antagonistic logic itself (see also Norval, 2000). If identity presupposes
otherness, then every positive articulation of identity will automatically lead to the
institutionalisation of a new, yet equally absolute, difference. Thus although deconstructivists
are right to stress the principle openness of all articulations of belonging, they have so far not
adequately theorised the reverse move from deconstruction to the decision as an ethical act. But
without a theory of how to break free from the us/them dichotomy, there is nothing to guarantee
that the deconstruction of a security story will contribute to political forms of identification that are
less exclusive towards the other (Wyn Jones, 1999; Wver, 2000). Thus while it is no doubt true that the
deconstruction of security stories is a necessary precondition for desecuritisation and the repoliticising
of belonging, it does not in itself provide a guarantee against totalising discourses of closure.
Hence Derridas claim that deconstruction is, in itself, a positive response to an alterity which
necessarily calls, summons or motivates it (cited in Campbell, 1998a: 182) makes little sense as long as it is
not supplemented theoretically with an account of how to bridge the gap between openness on
the one hand and closure on the other. For without such a theory, deconstructivism risks getting
caught on the abstract level of meta-politics in which its philosophical preferences for opening
up and transgression are translated as something equally desirable on the less abstract level of
politics (see also Wver, 2000: 283). Which is why Moran rightly objects that deconstruction runs the risk of appearing
either as a critical Puritanism or as a series of empty, if largely unobjectionable platitudes (Moran,
2002: 125). Hence the deconstructive emphasis on the importance of ontological openness/
undecidability as the necessary precondition for every closure/decision needs itself to be
supplemented with a theory of the decision if it is not appear either as substanceless cant or a
new moral absolutism (Moran, 2002: 129). For if without the radical structural undecidability that the deconstructive intervention
brings about, many strata of social relations appear as essentially linked by necessary logics, Laclau correctly observes that deconstruction in
turn requires hegemony, that is, a theory of the decision taken in an undecidable terrain: without a
theory of decision, that distance between structural undecidability and actuality would remain
untheorised (Laclau, 1996: 59-60). In a similar critique, Critchley who agrees with Laclau that deconstruction is a necessary move against
closure and for politics has pointed out that making politics possible is not the same as providing a politics. For
him, the gap between undecidability and actuality points to the limits of deconstructivism as a
political strategy: Decisions have to be taken. But how? And in virtue of what? How does one
make a decision in an undecidable terrain? (Critchley, 1992: 199 Prozorov, too, comes to similar conclusions. For him, the
idea that any decision presupposes contingency and undecidability is not just lamenting the
obvious; it is also problematic from an ethical point of view. For if it is true that every decision
requires undecidability, all decisions are responsible and hence ethical in Derridean terms. Yet, since all
decisions effect a closure of the radical openness , they are all equally irresponsible and hence unethical. Thus ,
while it was argued that security is undesirable because it performs its ordering function in an exclusionary way that closes off for alternative ways of
deciding on belonging, it is at the same time also ethical because, like any other decision, it passages through the moment of undecidability. As a result,
deconstructivism remains frustratingly caught above the abyss of undecidability in the desire to
refrain from the closure that every decision inaugurates (Prozorov, 2004: 13). What is needed,
therefore, is not only a deconstructivist position that highlights the impossibility of a decision,
but also a theory that can affirm the decision as an ethical act in a radically undecidable terrain.
To put this differently, in focusing upon the substance of the decision, a deconstructivist stance risks
ignoring the ethicality of deciding as such. Thus to move beyond deconstructivism, it is
necessary not focus too narrowly on the impossible attempt to establish the fact of ethicality of decision, but on affirming the
decision itself as an ethical act, whose authenticity is conditioned by going through both the
traversal of undecidability and its closure. The ethical injunction concerns not the substance
of the decision, but the responsibility for the decision as an act (Prozorov, 2004: 13). In contrast to
deconstructivist thought which explicitly separates the ethical (the unconditional injunction of undecidability)
from the domain of politics (the domain of practical interventions which always fail to live up to this ethical injunction), the move
towards desecuritisation as an act requires that we accept the inherently political character of
every ethical

The working class is capitalisms gravedigger, not its partner in hospitality. Their flight
from dialectics to the facile reformism of deconstruction depoliticizes class struggle.
Eagleton 81 Terry Eagleton, Professor of English Literature at Lancaster University, Marxism and Deconstruction, Contemporary
Literature, Vol. 22, No. 4, Marxism and the Crisis of the World (Autumn, 1981), pp. 477-488, aps.

The familiar deadlock between these two positions (Italian left politics might provide an interesting example) is one which
Marxism is able historically to understand. Social democracy and ultra-leftism (anarchism, adventurism, putschism
and so on) are among other things antithetical responses to the failure or absence of a mass revolutionary
movement. As such, they may parasitically interbreed: the prudent reformist may conceal a scandalous Utopian, enamoured of some
ultimate negation which must nonetheless be kept clear of Realpolitik. "Inside" and "outside" may thus form strange
permutations: in the figure of an Adorno, for example, a "negative dialectics" allergic to the slightest trace of
positivity can combine with an objectively reactionary stance. For traditional Marxism, the
epistemological problems of "inside/outside," transcendental sub- jects and subjects who are the mere
play of power and desire, Althusserian scientisms and Foucaultean relativisms, subjects who seem unhealthily replete and subjects of
an alarming Lacanian lean- ness-these problems cannot possibly be understood, let alone re- solved, outside of the
historical epoch, the specific modalities of class struggle, of which they are at once product and ideological in- strument.
(Nor, for that matter, can any "theory of the subject" hope to succeed if it has repressed from the outset that familiar mode of existence of the
object known to Marxism as "commodity fetish- ism.") What
deconstructs the "inside/outside" antithesis for Marxism
is not the Parisian left-intelligentsia but the revolutionary working class. The working class is the agent of
historical revolution not because of its potential "consciousness" (LukAcs), but because of that location
within the capitalist mode of production ironically assigned to it by capitalism itself. Installed on the
interior of that system, as one product of the process of capital, it is at the same time the class which
can potentially destroy it. Capitalism gives birth to its own gravedigger, nurturing the acolyte who will
one day stab the high priest in the back. It is capitalism, not Marxism, which has decreed that the prime
agent of its own transformation will be, not peasants, guerillas, blacks, women, or intellectuals, but the
industrial proletariat. Hardly anybody believes this nowadays, of course, at least in the academies, and
deconstructionism is among other things in effect of this despair, scepticism, indifference, privilege, or
plain lack of historical imagination. But it has not, for all that, abandoned trying to think through and
beyond the "inside/outside" polarity, even if it is fatally unable to deconstruct itself to the point where it
could be- come aware of the historical determinants of its own aporia. Deconstruction is in one sense an
ideology of left-reformism: it reproduces, at the elaborate level of textual "theory," the material
conditions in which Western hegemony has managed partially to in- corporate its antagonists-in
which, at the level of empirical "consciousness," collusion and subversion are so tightly imbricated that
all talk of "contradictions" falls spontaneously into the meta- physical slot. Because it can only imagine contradiction
as the ex- ternal warring of two monistic essences, it fails to comprehend class dialectics and turns instead to
difference, that familiar ideological motif of the petty bourgeoisie. Deconstruction is in one sense an extraordinarily
modest proposal: a sort of patient, probing re- formism of the text, which is not, so to speak, to be confronted over the barricades but
cunningly waylaid in the corridors and suavely chivvied into revealing its ideological hand. Stoically convinced of the unbreakable grip of the
metaphysical closure, the
deconstructionist, like any responsible trade-union bureaucrat confronting management, must settle
for that and negotiate what (s)he can with- in the leftovers and stray contingencies casually unabsorbed
by the textual power-system. But to say no more than this is to do deconstruction a severe injustice. For it ignores that other face of
deconstruction which is its hair-raising radicalism-the nerve and daring with which it knocks the stuffing out of every smug concept and leaves
the well-kempt text shamefully disheveled. It ignores, in short, the madness and violence of deconstruction, its
scandalous urge to think the unthinkable, the flamboyance with which it poses itself on the very brink of
meaning and dances there, crumbling away the cliff-edge beneath its feet and prepared to fall with it
into the sea of unlimited semiosis or schizophrenia. In short, deconstruction is not only reformist but ultra-
leftist, too. Nor is this a fortuitous conjuncture. Minute tenacity and mad "transcendence" are structurally related
moments, since the latter is the only conceivable "outside" to the closure presumed by the for- mer.
Only the wholesale dissolution of meaning could possibly offer a satisfactory alternative to a problematic
which tends to see meaning itself as terroristic. Of course, these are not the practical, working options for the
deconstructionist. It is precisely because texts are power-systems which ceaselessly disrupt themselves, sense
imbricated with non-sense, civilized enunciations which curse beneath their breath, that the critic must track a cat-and-mouse
game within and across them without ever settling quite for either signifier or signified. That, anyway, is
the ideology; but whoever heard of a de- constructionist as enthralled by sense as (s)he was by its
disruption? What would Hillis Miller do with a piece of agitprop? Not that such "literature" doesn't positively bulge with metaphysical
notions, to an embarrassingly unambiguous degree. Characters are continually stomping upon stage and talking
about justice. Feminist theatre today is distressingly rife with plenary notions of oppression, domination, exploitation. Brecht, it is true,
deconstructed himself a bit from time to time, but only got as far as dialectics; pre-Derridean that he
was, he failed to advance beyond rudimentary metaphysical oppositions, such as the proposition that
some social classes rip off others. He failed, consequently, to grasp the heterogeneity into which such
antinomies can be dissolved, known to Marxism as bourgeois ideology. Viewing such dramas, the deconstructionist
would no doubt wait, pen in hand, for the moments when literal and figurative discourses glided into one another to produce a passing in-
determinacy. (S)he would do so because we know, in a priori fashion, that these are the most important elements of a text. We just do know
that, as surely as previous critics have known that the most important textual elements are plot or mythological structure or linguistic
estrangement. Indeed we have been told by Paul de Man him- self that unless such moments occur, we are not dealing with litera- ture. It is
not, of course, that there is any "essence" called litera- ture-merely that there is something called literature which always and everywhere
manifests this particular rhetorical effect. De-
construction does indeed attend to both sense and non-sense, sig-
nified and signifier, meaning and language: but it attends to them at those points of conjuncture the
effect of which is a liberation from the "tyranny" of sense.
The only result of deconstruction is deaththeir termination of discernability ends in
death of the self as we seek to extinguish the antagonist while maintaining our own
invulnerability

Eagleton 81
Terry Eagleton, Professor of English Literature at Lancaster University, Marxism and Deconstruction, Contemporary Literature, Vol. 22, No. 4,
Marxism and the Crisis of the World (Autumn, 1981), pp. 477-488, aps.

The mad anarchist professor of The Secret Agent has achieved the ultimate transcendence: he is prepared to blow himself up in the act of
destroying others. Thoroughly implicated in the general holocaust, he nevertheless transcends it by having set it in motion him- self. The
deconstructionist, similarly, is prepared to bring him/her- self down with the piece of cliff (s)he perches on.
Deconstruction practices a mode of self-destruction which leaves it as invulnerable as an empty page. As
such, it merely rehearses in different terms a gesture common to all ideology: it attempts to vanquish its antagon- ist while
leaving itself unscathed. The price it has to pay for such invulnerability, however, is the highest of all:
death. The collapse of classical epistemology has discredited those victories over the object which presuppose an untouched
transcendental subject; now the one surviving mode of security is to be contaminated by the object even unto death. Deconstruction is
the death drive at the level of theory: in dismembering a text, it turns its violence masochistically upon
it- self and goes down with it, locked with its object in a lethal complicity which permits it the final
inviolability of pure negation. No- body can "outleft" or outmaneuver a Derrida because there is nothing
to outleft or outmaneuver; he is simply the dwarf who will entangle the giant in his own ungainly strength and bring him toppling to
the earth. The deconstructionist never lieth because he nothing affirmeth. Like Polonius, (s)he is at once fool and state-lackey, ec- centrically
digressive yet a dispenser of metaphysical discourse. Either way you disown a "position:" by putting the skids under others, or by being-unlike
Polonius-a reluctant metaphysician, acknowledging the ineluctability of that discourse, "blaming" the very system you impudently subvert for
your inability to produce a positive standpoint. It is possible to spend quite a long time crossing from one of these fronts to the other,
depending on the direction of the fire. Yet it is not, of course, anything as final as death. Metaphysics will
live on, bloody but
unbowed; and deconstruction, as a "living" death, will regroup its forces to assault anew. Each agonist is
ever- slain and ever-resurrected; the compulsion to repeat, to refight a battle in which the antagonist
can never be destroyed because he is always everywhere and nowhere, to struggle towards a (self-
)killing which will never quite come, is the propelling dynamic of decon- struction. Because there is neither
outside nor inside, because the metaphysical enemy is always already within the gates, deconstruc- tion is kept alive by what
contaminates it, and can therefore reap the pleasures of a possible self-dissolution which, as one form of
in- vulnerability, is mirrored by another, the fact that it can never die because the enemy is within and
unkillable. The nonsense of "I killed myself" is the nonsense of deconstruction. If the metaphysical
enemy is everywhere and nowhere, so too is deconstruction, which is to say that it can never die and
has always died already, can never die because it has always died already and has always died already
be- cause it can never die. And the moment in which all of this occurs is of course the moment of
jouissance or petite mort.
The politics of deconstruction is facile in the face of the material contradictions and
inequalities in the debate community. They produce a terrain of politics that valorizes
and replicates of liberal bourgeois ideology and solutions
Eagleton 81
Terry Eagleton, Professor of English Literature at Lancaster University, Marxism and Deconstruction, Contemporary Literature, Vol. 22, No. 4,
Marxism and the Crisis of the World (Autumn, 1981), pp. 477-488, aps.

But it is not, historically speaking, the moment when it occurs. Historically

speaking, many of the vauntedly novel themes
of deconstructionism do little more than reproduce some of the most commonplace topics of bourgeois
liberalism. The modest disownment of theory, method, and system; the revulsion from the dominative,
totalizing, and unequivocally denotative; the privileging of plurality and heterogeneity, the recurrent
gestures of hesitation and indeter- minacy; the devotion to gliding and process, slippage and move- ment; the
distaste for the definitive-it is not difficult to see why such an idiom should become so quickly absorbed within the Anglo- Saxon academies.
From De Quincey to deconstruction is not, after all, a very long way, and it is doubtless pleasant to find one's spontaneous bourgeois-liberal
responses shorn of their embarrassing ec- lecticism and tricked out as the most explosive stuff around. It is not that these focuses of attention-
to the contingent and marginalized, to the duplicitous and undecidable-are in the least to be despised; one
has only to think of the
productive ways in which, in the hands of feminism, they can be used to deconstruct a paranoid, patriarchal Marxism which
reaches for its totality when it hears the word "residue." It is just that one can no longer doubt, watching
the remorseless centralizing of the contingent, the dogmatic privileging of what escapes over what
doesn't, the constant dissolution of dialectics, that one is in the presence of a full-blooded ideology. In
some ways it is not far from traditional bourgeois liberalism: there is much in common, for example, between deconstruction's well-
bred shuddering at "totality" and the shy distaste of a traditional liberal critic like John Bayley for the highroads of
history. In other ways, how- ever, deconstructionism signifies a radical mutation of the bourgeois-liberal
problematic, one forced upon it by historical de- velopments. If traditional bourgeois liberalism is
humanistic, deconstructionism is vehemently antihumanist; it is, if you like, a liberal- ism without the
subject, or at least without any subject which would be recognized by John Bayley. For that privileging of the unitary bourgeois
subject characteristic of the traditional liberalism of a Bayley or Trilling will clearly no longer do: that inviolable private space,
those strenuous ethical responsibilities and individualist auto- nomies begin to ring more and more hollow, to appear more and more politically
rearguard and implausible in the claustrophobic, all-penetrative arena of late monopoly capitalism. Nicos Poulantzas has reminded us that the
"private" is always a juridically demarcated space, produced by the very public structures it is thought to
delimit;3 and this fact is now more and more palpable in quoti- dian experience. Deconstructionism, then, can salvage some of
the dominant themes of traditional bourgeois liberalism by a desperate, last-ditch strategy: by
sacrificing the subject itself, at least in any of its customary modes. Political quietism and compromise are pre- served,
not by a Forsterian affirmation of the "personal," but by a dispersal of the subject so radical as to render it impotent as
any kind of agent at all, least of all a revolutionary one. If the proletariat can be reduced to text, trace,
symptom, or effect, many tedious wrangles can be overcome at a stroke.

Derridean ethics are structurally incompatible with understanding the totality of social
relations
Ebert 9 [Teresa, Associate Professor of English, State University of New York at Albany, THE TASK OF
CULTURAL CRITIQUE, pp. 17-22]
The most influential arguments for valorizing the concrete in contemporary cultural critique, however,
are found in the works of Jacques Derrida, even though he is formally opposed to the valorization of any term or practice because he sees it as quest for presence. He puts in
play all the terms of analysis, but the playfulness clears out all abstractions and their implied totalities: the apparatus by which he attempts to establish an equality of power between
opposites ( abstract/concrete : : presence/absence : : speech/writing) is itself a technology that privileges the concrete and the singular. Although I focus on one of his early texts, the

valori zation of the concrete singular is in fact the main object of later works such as A Taste for the Secret, in which Derrida
writes, for example, "I am not part of any group . . . . I do not identify myself with a linguistic community, a national community, a political party, or with
any group or clique whatsoever, with any philosophical or literary school. . . . I want to keep my freedom, always: this for me is the condition not only for being singular

and other, but for entering into relation with the singularity and alterity of others " !Derrida and Ferraris 27). Not only is the subject singular, but all

subjects are singularities, whereas abstractions ( such as party, nation, and language) form the
machinery of totalization. This is the core of the contemporary neoliberal ethics of capitalism, which is the main
reason for privileging the concrete, as I explain below. In contemporary cultural critique, then, the concrete becomes the discursive means for

legitimating the status quo, largely with the excuse of resisting totality, and any project for substantive
change is dismissed as an exercise in the will to truth, a totality that is indifferent to difference . Derrida's early
and widely read essay " Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences " ! Writing and Difference 278-9 3 ) deeply affected cultural critique . Here Derrida argues that
traditional critique is based on a centered structure whose goal is to produce presence through totality, as Levi-Strauss does in The Raw and the Cooked. Levi-Strauss contends that achieving
totality is an impossibility because the empirical is inexhaustible and therefore " totality is never complete" (Raw and the Cooked 7). In other words, totality cannot be mastered. He further
argues that totality is not necessary for systematic knowledge of a subject: a linguist does not know all the words added to a language since it was first spoken, nor does she have knowledge of
words and structures that may emerge in the future. Nonetheless, she is able to write the gramma r of that language . Totality is both impossible and unnecessary. Derrida critiques such a
view, arguing that Levi-Strauss's analytical relation to totality ! the fact that data are infinite and therefore cannot be completely assembled and analyzed) is not a critique of totality ( its
presence and logocentrism) but a recognition that it is difficult to achieve . For Derrida, Levi-Strauss's concerns about totality are themselves a totalization-a centered structure in search of

Totality, Derrida argues, cannot be mastered, not because the empirical is infinite but because
presence.

language, which is deployed in totalizing, is always in play. "If totalization no longer has any meaning, " he writes, "it is not because the
infiniteness of a field cannot be covered by a finite glance or a finite discourse, but because the nature of the field-that is, language and a fi nite language-excludes totalization. This field is in
effect that o f play, that is t o say, a field of infinite substitutions only because it is finite, that is to say, because instead of being an inexhaustible field, as in the classical hypothesis, instead of
being too large, there is something missing from it: a center which arrests and grounds the play of substitutions " ( Writing and Difference 2 8 9 ) . The concrete cannot b e totalized, not
because i t i s infinite but because it exceeds the structure of totality, and its excess cannot be brought to an end because whatever is used to end it is itself an excess in play. Derrida replaces
totalization with supplementarity, which recognizes the absence of totality within a seeming presence, because supplementarity is the " strange cohabitation" of two significations: it is an
addition that fills the missing in the plenitude, a "plenitude enriching another plenitude" ( Grammatology I 4 6 ), which is an acknowledgment of the absence in presence. The concrete, in other

Derrida's notion of the concrete singular ( variously articulated a s " differance, " " hymen, " "writing,
words, is not reducible to totality ( Derrida, Margins I I ).

is a resistance to abstraction ( totality) . In this sense it shares

" " trace, " " dissemination, " 1 1 democracy- to-come, " and " specter" )

certain features with modern uses of the concrete to fight the abstract, but epistemologically, it is an
entirely different order. Derrida's notion is antiessentialist. This means that unlike the modernist idea of the concrete ( found in the writings of, for example, Bacon, Hume,
or Berkeley), in Derrida's theory the concrete cannot become the foundation for a theory (totalization). These ideas of the concrete have radically different onto-epistemologies and play
different political roles in relation to the social relations of the time. Modern critics deployed the concrete to battle the abstractions of religion and metaphysics in which the power of the old
regime was legitimated. The concrete was the ground for a different social organization. Contemporary theory deconstructs the modem idea of the concrete as essentialist and deploys the
concrete as a threshold of differance by which it resists all totalization, including what it regards as the totalization of a 11new" society with a different social organization . Consequently, the
contemporary concrete, following Nietzsche 's practices-in-fragments, detotalizes the social into autonomous singularities and thus renders knowledge of social totality a fiction of presence.

In doing so, I argue, contemporary critiques-whether by Bataille, Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard, Agamben, ZiZek, or Badiou-all affirm the actually existing
social relations, in spite of their radical language of resistance to power. They help undermine social
change aimed not simply at cultural freedom but at freedom from necessity. The concrete becomes the essence of a new
antiessentialism for dealing with what is popularly represented as cutting-edge reality: a reality that is considered to be contingent and whose contingency is taken as a sign of its radical
concreteness-its singularity. The condition of contingency is even extended to science (abstraction). In The Sa vage Mind Levi-Strauss draws a distinction between the bricoleur ( a person who
uses "whatever is at hand " ( 17], the concrete, the different, and the practical) and the engineer (or scientist ), who works according to an abstract model of truth, a method. Derrida argues,
however, that the engineer or scientist, as a person who " supposedly breaks with all forms of bricolage, " is a " theological idea "; he, too, does not " construct the totality of his language,
syntax, and lexicon" but, like the bricoleur, "borrows " his concepts from the text of a " he ritage which is more or less coherent or ruined " ( Writing and Difference 2 8 5 ). Science, far from
being an instance of absolute rationality, is, like bricolage, a contingent practice, and it shares the conditions of bricolage as textual play, as difference . In contemporary critique, the most

Textuality
effective mode of knowing is no longer science but is assumed to be textuality, or science as a form of writing. (for example, Lenoir, Inscribing Science; Ross, Scien ce Wars ) .

is valorized because i t s rhetorical constitution is antiessentialist, or as Derrida puts it, "It deconstructs
it-self" ( " Letter to a Japanese Friend " 274 ) . But the very idea of antiessentialism is itself essentialist, as I have already suggested. In
contemporary cultural critique, the text is assumed to deploy its own rhetorical strategies to undo all
totalization-including its own-through the specificity of its tropics, which simultaneously assert and deny the authority of the text (de Man, Allegories 3-1 9 ) . In the new order of
knowledge, the concept ( totality as abstraction), which is the basis of all scientific knowledge, is considered to be a linguistic construct, and like all such constructs, it is perceived as a tropic
structure. The trope, in the new order of the concrete, is not simply an ornamental margin of language but " characterizes language as such" ( 1 0 5 ). The concrete, which in early modernity
was deployed as a weapon of science used against the abstraction of superstition, has now become a weapon against science. THE CONCRETE AND THE MATERIAL LOGIC OF CULTURE
Nietzsche's transvaluation of the concrete turned it into a means for containing equality and safeguarding the aristocracy by shifting the object of critique from class to culture. The tendency
to focus on culture as differences and singularities that resist totalization is more active in what used to be called postmodern critique but is not limited to it. This is because the

privileging of the concrete is a cultural response to the material logic that shapes all cultural products.
Cultural practices are shaped by the material base of culture in ways that normalize and validate its economic dynamic. Culture, in the words of Marx
and Engels, is the " expression of the dominant material relationships " as ideas, values, acts, attitudes, and affects ( German Ideology 5 9 ) . But once culture emerges from its material
conditions, it plays an important role in the way people understand and produce meanings in their lives, find purpose, and act. Culture, to put it differently, exercises "influence upon the

However, and this is where my views differ from the dominant theories, culture is not
course of historical struggles" (Engels, "Letter to Joseph Bloch " 3 9 5 ) .

autonomous. Culture is not, as Stuart Hall suggests, "primary and constitutive, determining its own shape and character as
well as its inner life " ( " Centrality of Culture" 21 5 ). Rather, through various formations and subtle articulations, the material conditions of culture

always assert themselves as necessary, no matter how thick and opaque these meditations might be. Although contemporary
cultural critique has, at times, acknowledged the crucial importance of materialism in cultural formations, it has been
preoccupied mainly with the materiality of technologies of representation in cultural mediations ( see, for
examples, works of Jameson and of Ronell cited in the bibliography) . In contrast, I argue that a transformative cultural critique should not be too distracted by these mediations and their

seductive, subtle, and delectable textual play in representations .A transformative critique needs to focus primarily on the ways in
which culture, in its concrete practices, is ultimately the articulation of the abstract: the material structures that actually
shape the concrete. If appearance and the real were identical, there would be no need for critique. Contemporary theory, however, has discredited as

essentialist any recognition of the alienation of appearance from the real. It has kept critique on the
surface, the appearance of the real and, furthermore, argued that the real is itself a construct of
representational events. The complications of representation-and the pleasures of engaging them-have obscured the depth of the alienation of contemporary reality. This
alienation and its causes should be the object of transformative critique. Existing social relations use the concrete for cultural

legitimization because these relations are fraught with fundamental class contra dictions that have to
be obscured in order for these social relations to have ethical authority and cultural confidence . The
concrete occludes antagonisms that cannot be solved within the governing class structures. To be clear, the
existing social relations are based on the appropriation of the surplus ( unpaid) labor of the working majority by a small owning minority. This contradiction-the exploitation of the many by the

structured
few in a democracy that declares itself to be for the equality of all-is constitutive of capitalism and is structured in the unequal exchange between labor and capital. This

inequality is a social relation. Understanding it therefore requires a knowledge of social totality, a grasp
of the underlying material logic that relates all parts of social life and culture and shapes their
specificities. This logic shows, for instance, the relation of class and heath care (Navaro, Dangerous to Your Health 5 3-70 ) and points to the ways in which one's education is
determined primarily by class standing but also by race and gender. Focusing on the concrete and analyzing the everyday in terms of

particular aspects of individual practices, while treating each as autonomous, conceals the working of
this structure and makes it more difficult, if not impossible, to comprehend the underlying relations of social life
and their material logic. The uses of the concrete, in other words, disperse social totality into endless
singularities and attribute to each its own internal " cultural logic. " Consequently, the organizing
contradiction of capitalism-the exchange of wages for labor power-is portrayed as an individual act, namely,
a " contract " between "free persons " ( Marx, Capital I : 28o), and the fact that this exchange is structural and takes place under the

" silent compulsion of economic relations " ( I : 8 9 9 ) is made invisible. The portrayal of social life as a set of unrelated practices, as
autonomous fragments and events, that are free from any regulatory determination (Foucault, Language, Coun terMemory I 3 9-64, 205-1 7 ) makes the exchange of wages for labor power
seem a s if they were the exclusive realm of Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham. Freedom, because both buyer and seller of a commodity, let us say of labourpower, are determined
only by their own free will. They contract as free persons, who are equal before the law. Their contract is the final result in which their joint will finds a common legal expression. Equality,
because each enters into relation with the other, as with a simple owner of commodities, and they exchange equivalent for equivalent. Property, because each disposes only of what is his
own. And Bentham, because each looks only to his own advantage. The only force bringing them together, and putting them into relation with each other, is the selfishness, the gain and the
private interest of each. Each pays heed to himself only, and no one worries about the others. (Marx, Capital, r : 2 80)
 LinkDiscourse

1AC perpetuates capitalism their focus on discourse trades off with a material focus
on labor relations
Eagleton 97 (Terry, Distinguished Professor of English Literature at Lancaster University, Professor of Cultural Theory at the National University of Ireland
and Distinguished Visiting Professor of English Literature at The University of Notre Dame, 1997, Where do Postmodernists Come from?, In Defense of History)

Imagine a radical movement that had suffered an emphatic defeat. So emphatic, in fact, that it seemed
unlikely to resurface for the length of a lifetime, if at all. As time wore on, the beliefs of this movement might begin to seem less false or ineffectual than simply irrelevant. For
its opponents, it would be less a matter of hotly contesting these doctrines than of contemplating them with something of the mild antiquarian interest one might have previously reserved for

Ptolemaic cosmology or the scholasticism of Thomas Aquinas. Radicals might come to find themselves less overwhelmed or out-
argued than simply washed up, speaking a language so quaintly out of tune with their era that, as with the language of Platonism or courtly love, nobody even
bothered any longer to ask whether it was true. What would be the likely response of the left to such a dire condition? Many, no
doubt, would drift either cynically or sincerely to the right, regretting their earlier views as infantile idealism. Others might keep the faith purely out of habit, anxiety, or nostalgia, clinging to an
imaginary identity and risking the neurosis that that may bring. A small clutch of left triumphalists, incurably hopeful, would no doubt carry on detecting the stirrings of the revolution in the

the ruling assumption of this

faintest flicker of militancy. In others, the radical impulse would persist, but would be forced to migrate elsewhere. One can imagine that

period would be that the system was, at least for the moment, unbreachable; and a great many of the
lefts conclusions could be seen to flow from this glum supposition. One might expect, for example, that
there would be an upsurge of interest in the margins and crevices of the systemin those ambiguous, indeterminate places
where its power seemed less secure. If the system could not be breached, one might at least look to those forces which

might momentarily transgress, subvert, or give it the slip. There would be, one might predict, much celebration of the
marginalbut this would be partly making a virtue out of necessity, since the left would itself have been rudely displaced from the mainstream, and might
thus come, conveniently enough, to suspect all talk of centrality as suspect. At its crudest, this cult of marginality would come down to a

simpleminded assumption that minorities were positive and majorities oppressive. .Just how minorities like fascist groups,
Ulst 6 Unionists, or the international bourgeoisie fitted into this picture would not be entirely clear. Nor is it obvious how such a position could cope with a previously marginal movementthe

The historical basis for this way of

ANC, for examplebecoming p0]jtj cally dominant, given its formalist prejudice that dominance was undesirable as such.

thinking would be the fact that political movements that were at once mass, central, and creative were
by and large no longer in business. Indeed, the idea of a movement that was at once central and subversive
would now appear something of a contradiction in terms. It would therefore seem natural to demonize
the mass dominant, and consensual, and romanticize whatever happened to deviate from them. It
would be, above all, the attitude of those younger dissidents who had nothing much, politically speaking,
to remember, who had no actual memory or experience of mass radical politics, but a good deal of
experience of drearily oppressive majorities. If the system really did seem to have canceled all opposition to itself, then it would not be hard to
generalize from this to the vaguely anarchistic belief that system is oppressive as such. Since there were almost no examples of attractive political systems around, the claim would seem

The only genuine criticism could be one launched from outside the system altogether; and
distinctly plausible.

one would expect, therefore, a certain fetishizing of otherness in such a period. There would be enormous interest in
anything that seemed alien, deviant, exotic, unincorporable, all the way from aard- varks to Alpha Centauri, a passion for whatever gave us a tantalizing glimpse of something beyond the logic

But this romantic ultra-leftism would coexist, curiously enough, with a brittle pessimismfor the
of the system altogether.

fact is that if the system is all-powerful, then there can be by definition nothing beyond it, any more than there can
be anything beyond the infinite curvature of cosmic space. If there were something outside the system, then it would be entirely unknowable and thus incapable of saving us; but if we could
draw it into the orbit of the system, so that it could gain some effective foothold there, its otherness would be instantly contaminated and its subversive power would thus dwindle to nothing.

Whatever negates the system in theory would thus be logically incapable of doing so in practice. Anything we
can understand can by definition not be radical, since it must be within itself; but anything which escapes the system could be heard by thC ^no more than a mysterious murmur. llS ,S.| thinking
has abandoned the whole notion of a system which is nally contradictorywhich has that installed at its heart which can '!lter tially undo it. Instead, it thinks in the rigid oppositions of inside

The typical style of thought of such a period,

and u tside where to be on the inside is to be complicit and to be on the outside to be impotent.

then, might be described as libertarian pessimismlibertarian, because one would not have given up on the dream of something quite other than
what we have; pessimism, because one would be much too bleakly conscious of the omnipotence of law and power to

believe that such a dream could ever be realized. If one still believed in subversion, but not in the existence of any flesh-and-blood agents of it, then it
might be possible to imagine that the system in some way subverted itself, deconstructed its own logic, which would then allow you to combine a certain radicalism with a certain skepticism. If
the system is everywhere, then it would seem, like the Almighty himself, to be visible at no particular point; and it would therefore become possible to believe, paradoxically enough, that
whatever was out there was not in fact a system at all. It is only a short step from claiming that the system is too complex to be represented to declaring that it does not exist. In the period we

some would no doubt be found clamoring against what they saw as the tyranny of a real
are imagining, then,

social totality, whereas others would be busy deconstructing the whole idea of totality and claiming that
it existed only in our minds. It would not be hard to see this as, at least in part, a compensation in theory for the
fact that the social totality was proving difficult to crack in practice. If no very ambitious form of political
action seems for the moment possible, if so-called micropolitics seem the order of the day, it is always
tempting to convert this necessity into a virtueto console oneself with the thought that ones political
limitations have a kind of objective ground in reality, in the fact that social totality is in any case just an
illusion. (Metaphysical illusion makes your position sound rather more imposing.) It does not matter if
there is no political agent at hand to transform the whole, because there is in fact no whole to be
transformed. It is as though, having mislaid the breadknife, one declares the loaf to be already sliced. But totality might also seem something of
an illusion because there would be no very obvious political agent for whom society might present itself
as a totality. There are those who need to grasp how it stands with them in order to be free, and who find that they can do this only by grasping something of the overall structure
with which their own immediate situation intersects. Local and universal are not, here, simple opposites or theoretical options, as they might be for those intellectuals who prefer to think big
and those more modest academics who like to keep it concrete But if some of those traditional political agents are in trouble, then so will be the concept of social totality, since it is those
agents need of it that gives it its force. Grasping a complex totality involves some rigorous analysis; so it is not surprising that such strenuously systematic thought should be out of fash- x ion,

When there is nothing in particular in it for you to

dismissed as phallic, scientistic, or what have you, in the sort of period Cf J we are imagining.

find out how you standif you are a professor in Ithaca or Irvine, for example you can afford to be
ambiguous, elusive, deliciously indeterminate. You are also quite likely, in such circumstances, to wax idealist
though in some suitably newfangled rather than tediously old-fashioned sense. For one primary way in which we know the
world is, of course, through practice; and if any very ambitious practice is denied us, it will not be long before we catch ourselves wondering whether there is anything out there at all. One
would expect, then, that in such an era a belief in reality as something that resists us (History is what hurts, as Fredric Jameson has put it) will give way to a belief in the constructed nature

This, in turn, would no doubt go hand in hand with a full-blooded culturalism which underestimated
of the world.

what men and women had in common as material human creatures, and suspected all talk of nature as an insidious mystification. It
would tend not to realize that such culturalism is just as reductive as, say, econo- mism or biologism. Cognitive and realist accounts of human consciousness would yield ground to various

Everything would become

kinds of pragmatism and relativism, partly because there didnt any longer seem much politically at stake in knowing how it stood with you.

an interpretation, including that statement itself. And what would also gradually implode, along with
reasonably certain knowledge, would be the idea of a human subject centered and unified enough to
take significant action. For such significant action would now seem in short supply; and the result, once more, would
be to make a virtue out of necessity by singing the praises of the diffuse, decentered, schizoid human subjecta subject
who might well not be together enough to topple a bottle off a wall, let alone bring down the state,
but who could nevertheless be presented as hair-raisingly avant-garde in trast to the smugly centered
subjects of an older, more classical phase pitalism. To put it another way: the subject as producer (coherent, disciplined, self-determining) would have
c0

yielded ground to the subject as consumer (mobile, ephemeral, constituted by insatiable desire). If the left orthodoxies of such a period were pragmatist,
relativist, pluralistic, deconstructive, then one might well see such thought-forms as dangerously radical. For does not capitalism need sure foundations,

stable identities, absolute authority, metaphysical certainties, in order to survive? And wouldnt the kind
of thought we are imagining put the skids under all this? The answer, feebly enough, is both yes and no.
It is true that capitalism, so far anyway, has felt the need to underpin its authority with unimpeachable moral foundations. Look, for example, at the remarkable tenacity of religious belief in
North America. On the other hand, look at the British, who are a notably godless bunch. No British politician could cause anything other than acute embarrassment by invoking the Supreme

It is not
Being in public, and the British talk much less about metaphysical abstractions like Britain than those in the United States do about something called the United States.

clear, in other words, exactly how much metaphysical talk the advanced capitalist system really requires; and it is
certainly true that its relentlessly secularizing, rationalizing operations threaten to undercut its own metaphysical claims. It is clear, however, that without

pragmatism and plurality the system could not survive at all. Difference, hybridity, heterogeneity,
restless mobility are native to the capitalist mode of production, and thus by no means inherently
radical phenomena. So if these ways of thinking put the skids under the system at one level, they
reproduce its logic at another. If an oppressive system seems to regulate everything, then one will
naturally look around for some enclave of which this is less truesome place where a degree of
freedom or randomness or pleasure still precariously survives. Perhaps you might call this desire, or
discourse, or the body, or the unconscious. One might predict in this period a quickening of interest in
psychoanalysisfor psychoanalysis is not only the thinking persons sensationalism, blending intellectual rigor with the
most lurid materials, but it exudes a general exciting air of radicalism without being particularly so politically. If

the more abstract questions of state, mode of production, and civil society seem for the moment too
hard to resolve, then one might shift ones political attention to something more intimate and
immediate, more living and fleshly, like the body. Conference papers entitled Putting the Anus Back into Coriolanus would attract eager crowds
who had never heard of the bourgeoisie but who knew all about buggery. This state of affairs would no doubt be particularly marked in those societies which in any case lacked strong socialist
traditions; indeed, one could imagine much of the style of thought in question, for all its suspiciousness of the universal, as no more than a spurious universalizing of such specific political

conditions.Such a concern with bodiliness and sexuality would represent, one imagines, an enormous political deepening and enrichment, at the same
a thoroughgoing displacement. And no doubt just the same could be said if one were to witness
time as it would signify

an increasing obsession with language and culturetopics where the intellectual is in any case more
likely to feel at home than in the realm of material production. One might expect that some, true to the
pessimism of the period, would stress how discourses are policed, regulated, heavy with power, while others
would proclaim in more libertarian spirit how the thrills and spills of the signifier can give the slip to the system. Either way, one would no doubt witness an

immense linguistic inflation, as what appeared no longer conceivable in political reality was still just
about possible in the areas of discourse or signs or textuality. The freedom of text or language would
come to compensate for the unfreedom of the system as a whole. There would still be a kind of utopian
vision, but its name now would be increasingly poetry. And it would even be possible to imagine, in an extremist variant of this style of thought,
that the future was here and nowthat utopia had already arrived in the shape of the pleasurable intensities, multiple selfhoods, and exhilarating exchanges of the marketplace and the

History would then most certainly have come to an endan end already implicit in the blocking
shopping mall.

of radical political action. For if no such collective action seemed generally possible, then history would
indeed appear as random and directionless, and to claim that there was no longer any grand narrative
would be, among other things, a way of saying that we no longer knew how to construct one effectively
in these conditions. For this kind of thought, history would have ended because freedom would finally have been achieved; for Marxism, the achievement of freedom would
be the beginning of history and the end of all we have known to date: those boring prehisto- rical grand narratives which are really just the same old recycled story of scarcity, suffering, and
struggle. (17-22)
 LinkEconomic Engagement

Economic engagement entrenches capitalism through diffusion of capacity building

and expertise. This designates any hindrance to the market as a threat which requires
elimination.
Essex, 8- Windsor political science professor (Jamey, The Neoliberalization of Development: Trade Capacity Building and Security at the
US Agency for International Development, Antipode, 40.2, March, ScienceDirect)

The term TCB is relatively new, and is meant to move the international system beyond the impasse between discredited but institutionally entrenched projects of
development and aggressive efforts at global trade liberalization. Initially emphasized by developing states in the context of the WTO's 2001 Doha Round of
negotiations, TCBhas been operationalized in ways that reinforce and extend neoliberalization, focusing
development resources on building political and economic capacity to participate in liberalized trade
and globalizing markets. In this view, the ability to prosper through free trade drives economic growth and allows the greatest possible flowering of
freedom and democracy. States and civil society must be brought into line with market mechanismscivil society

through active cultivation and states through limiting their functions to market facilitation and security
provision. Phillips and Ilcan (2004) describe capacity building as one of the primary political technologies
through which neoliberal govermentality is constructed and spatialized. They define neoliberal governance as the ways
of governing populations that make individuals responsible for changes that are occurring in their communities, with responsibility exercised and enforced through
markets, which increasingly emphasize skill acquisition, knowledge-generation, and training programs (Phillips and Ilcan 2004:397). This
perspective
highlights the ways in which discourses and practices of capacity building center on the creation and
reproduction of social categories that mark off populations as either responsible members of open,
market-based communities moving toward development, or irresponsible and potentially dangerous outliers (see
Roberts, Secor and Sparke 2003). Moving from the latter group to the former depends on acquiring the skills and

knowledge that permit individuals to practice responsible behavior and allow for discipline via the
marketplace. Diffusion of skills, knowledge, and traininginvestments in social capital and human
capitalare the driving forces of neoliberalizing development (Rankin 2004). It is in this context, Jessop (2003) points out,
that the networks praised by both Castells (1996) and Hardt and Negri (2000, 2004) become a seductive but ultimately empty (and even celebratory) metaphor for
understanding and challenging neoliberalization and neoimperialism. A more critical and useful analysis goes beyond recognizing the re-categorization of
populations and places along axes of responsibility, and, as noted in the above discussion of the strategic-relational approach to the state, also considers the role of
class-relevant social formations and struggles in the expansion and maintenance of political and economic power. A closer examination of how USAID has instituted
TCB, and what this means for state institutions' strategic selectivity relative to development and securitization, is one way to analyze the process of neoliberalization
and its significance for development and security. For USAID, adopting TCB comprises one means to revise the agency's mission and align it with the unique
combination of neoliberal and neoconservative doctrines that dominate US trade and foreign policies. With development understood as a national security issue,
USAID and its implementation of TCB have become central to the US state's articulation of the relationship between development, trade, and security. In a 2003
report on TCB, USAID (2003b:3) outlined a three-part framework for enacting successful development through TCB: participation in trade negotiations,
implementation of trade agreements, and economic responsiveness to new trade opportunities. USAID portrays this as the most effective way to incorporate
developing states into processes of globalization. This also poses new challenges for states, firms, and non-governmental organizations, however, as the rewards
for good policies and institutionsand the negative consequences of weak policies and institutionsare greater than ever, while economic globalization has also
created the need for better coordination and harmonization (USAID 2004b:7). USAID's three-part definition repositions development as a form of infrastructure,
institution, and network building that can ensure the success of trade liberalization efforts. Defining
development as the successful and
total integration of a state and its economy into the fabric of neoliberal globalization represents a
significant change in the cartography of development through which USAID works, and over which it has
great strategic influence. Though national states remain at the heart of this new cartography, USAID development programs now pivot on building
state institutions capable (primarily) of enacting and reproducing neoliberal economic policies within the context of capitalist internationalization. As the agency
stated in its 2001 TCB report, US development policy is committed to working in partnership with developing and transition economies to remove obstacles to
development, among which are barriers to trade (USAID 2001:3). The 2003 report likewise singles out trade negotiations as a powerful growth engine for
developing countries, so long as they are supported by sound institutions that can ensure transparency and predictability in economic governance, reinforcing
economic reforms that are critical for successful development (USAID 2003b:7). This follows from and reinforces the idea that state-managed foreign aid and
assistance, the staple of past USAID programs, must be supportive of, and not a substitute for, trade and economic self-help by developing countries. This position
echoes what USAID proclaimed at the development project's height, as discussed above, and relies on the idea that development progress is first and foremost a
function of commitment and political will directed at ruling justly, promoting economic freedom, and investing in people (USAID 2004b:11). USAID defines ruling
justly as governance in its various dimensions: voice and accountability, political stability and absence of violence; government effectiveness; regulatory quality;
rule of law; and control of corruption, while investing in people involves bolstering basic education and basic health services (USAID 2004b:11, fn 8). This
language draws from existing discourses of social capital and state effectiveness long favored by Washington Consensus institutions such as the World Bank and IMF
(Fine 2001; Peet and Hartwick 1999). How closely on-the-ground implementation of TCB hews to these conceptualizations is rather more problematic. The

invocation of political will, just rule, and state efficiency are hallmarks of neoliberal rhetoric, and
suggests that TCB is the latest in a long line of strategies designed to further capital internationalization
and the reproduction of the US-dominated international state system. Yet the vague, catch-all character of TCB in practice
indicates that it is less a fully coherent strategic blueprint than the repackaging of existing development activities, meant to bring USAID in line with state and
hegemonic projects predicated on the neoliberal doctrine of free trade and the neoconservative obsession with security. A USAID official remarked that initial
attempts to institute TCB cast a very wide net: [In the field] you would get these surveys from Washington, and they would say, we're trying to conduct an inventory
of all our trade capacity building activities. And in the beginningand I don't know how this has evolvedbut in the beginning of those surveys, I mean, it was sort
of ludicrous because virtually anything that we were doing in the economic growth sphere could be described as trade capacity building (interview with the author,
December 2004). The broad practical definition of TCB, coupled with the increased emphasis on international markets as a means of alleviating poverty and spurring
economic development, belies the continuity between the current focus on trade liberalization and previous development programs. The same USAID official
continued: My understanding was that [developed countries] would ask the developing countries, what do you need in terms of trade capacity building, to get
you ready to participate in the WTO and globalized trade regimes? And they would give these long laundry lists that would run into the hundreds of millions of
dollars, and the developed countries would go, whoa, we can't do all this So we started developing these inventories of all our trade capacity building
investments, and one of the objectives of those inventories was so we could talk to the developing world and tell them, look, we're doing all this stuff in trade
capacity building already (interview with the author, December 2004). Despite this, there are two important changes that have occurred with the agency's adoption
of TCB. The first relates to the institutional relations through which USAID operates; the second centers on changing understandings and practices of security and
state weakness. As
stated above, the emphasis now placed on ensuring that development is ideologically and
institutionally subordinate to trade liberalization places the onus for successful development on
responsible states that can adequately facilitate capitalist accumulation via free trade. This shift has
necessitated that USAID alter the character and intensity of the partnerships through which it plans and implements capacity building and other development
programs (see Lancaster and Van Dusen 2005, on USAID's subcontracting activities). This has meant changes in how USAID serves as both site and strategy for class-
relevant social forces institutionalized in and by the state. The most important partners with which USAID has strengthened or pursued relations to advance
capacity building programs have been the Office of the US Trade Representative (USTR), USDA's trade-focused Foreign Agricultural Service (FAS), and
internationalizing fractions of capital. TCB therefore must be analyzed not as technocratic jargon, but as a new means of reproducing and re-institutionalizing class-
relevant social struggles in and through the national state. The
danger USAID faces in so tightly intertwining itself with
market-oriented state institutions and capital arises from the continual narrowing of the agency's
strategic selectivityneoliberal doctrine serves as the basis for agency work, and further
neoliberalization is the intended outcome. The benefit comes in the form of larger budgets and even the reproduction of USAID itself, and
the agency has received large appropriations to implement TCB (see Table 1). While these numbers still represent a small portion of its total budget, TCB has moved
quickly up the list of agency priorities, and has gained prominence as a guidepost for continued and intensified neoliberalization (USAID 2004a). It is important to
note, however, that even as USAID funding for TCB projects has steadily increased, the agency's proportional share of overall US government spending on such
activities has decreased, due to increases in TCB funding channeled into sector-specific trade facilitation activities or into WTO accession, areas where capital and
USTR command greater expertise. Geographically, USAID has concentrated TCB funding in states where acceptable neoliberalization is already underway, in areas of
geostrategic importance, particularly the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and the former Soviet Union (USAID 2001:6, 2003c:2), and in those countries eager to engage
in free trade agreements. Since 2001, the agency's TCB funding to countries with which the US is pursuing Free Trade Agreements (Morocco, the Andean Pact,
CAFTA, and SACU) more than tripled, with much of this funding targeted at building institutions compatible with the requirements of WTO accession or specific
features of bilateral and regional agreements with the US (USAID 2004a).1 This differs from the geopolitical criteria previously underlying USAID development
funding primarily in that trade policy has moved to the center of agency strategies, though this is complicated by emerging national security discourses focused on
counter-terrorism and failing or failed states. The second strategically and institutionally important change accompanying USAID's adoption of TCB rests on the
altered relationship between development and security, as outlined in the 2002 and 2006 NSS. Here, development bolsters weak states that might otherwise
become havens for terrorist and criminal networks, which could then pose a threat to American interests abroad and domestically. USAID, the State Department,
and the White House have therefore identified development, along with defense and diplomacy, as the three pillars of US security strategies (USAID 2004b:8;
White House 2002, 2006). The focus on strengthening weak states in new development schema demonstrates how the neoliberal understanding of states as rent-
seeking regulatory burdens on market relations becomes strategically intertwined with the security concerns and objectives of neoconservatism (USAID 2004b:12;
on neoconservatism, see Lind 2004). Two points stand out here. First, recalling that neoliberalization does not only or even primarily imply the rolling back of the
state apparatus, the emphasis on TCB demands that weak states be strengthened by removing trade barriers and making economic and social policy sensitive to
liberalized global market signals. Second,
weakness here stems directly from states' inability or unwillingness to
properly insinuate themselves into the networks, flows, and institutions of neoliberal capitalism.
Distanciation and disconnectedness from internationalizing capital is not only economically
wrongheaded, but is the source of political and social weakness, producing insecurity that threatens
continued capitalist accumulation under the rubric of neoliberalization. Roberts, Secor and Sparke (2003:889) thus identify
an emphasis on enforced reconnection with the global capitalist system, mediated through a whole repertoire of neoliberal ideas and practices. TCB offers a
potential and enforceable technical fix for disconnectedness, as being outside neoliberalization is to be against neoliberalization, and thus to pose a security risk.
USAID Administrator Andrew Natsios made this clear in a May 2003 speech: For countries that are marginalized, that are outside the international system, that are
outside development, that are not developing, that are not growing economically, that are not democratizing, look at the different factors that lead to high risk in
terms of conflict. Income level is one of the highest correlations between marginalized states and risks in terms of conflicts (USAID 2003a:np). The agency's 2004
White Paper expanded on this to provide a more detailed strategic framework for development and aid programs, establishing a loose taxonomy of states according
to the need for development assistance, the commitment to initiate neoliberalization, and the degree to which states are capable and fair partners in the use of
development resources (USAID 2004b). This geographic categorization was updated and expanded further with the agency's 2006 Foreign Assistance Framework,
which bases its categories on criteria developed from the Millennium Challenge Corporation, a new (and thoroughly neoliberal) development institution established
in 2004 (USAID 2006; see Table 2). In these frameworks, USAID identifies relatively weak institutions, particularly those necessary to establish and maintain market
openness and political stability, as the crux of underdevelopment. Running across such taxonomies is a consideration of strategic states, a designation that
depends less on USAID objectives than on the geostrategic and foreign policy goals of the US executive and Congress. The agency recognizes that the determination
of which developing states are considered strategic is a matter for other US state institutions, but also notes: Increasingly, the primary foreign policy rationale for
assistance may be matched by or indistinguishable from the developmental or recovery objectives. Thus, the strategic allocation of ESF [Economic Support Fund]
and like resources will begin to benefit from the same principles of delineation, selectivity and accountability proposed in this White Paper (USAID 2004b:21).2
Incorporating developing states into networks of neoliberal globalization is, in this view, the essence of
producing and maintaining security in line with US foreign policy objectives. This understanding of the link between
development, trade, security, and state weakness is echoed in the strategies of other US state institutions, most notably the US Trade Representative (see US Trade
Representative 2001). USAID articulates development progress and improved security in terms of the facilitation of liberalized market relations by stable developing
state institutions. While more candid interviews with USAID officials indicate that not everyone at the agency is on board with this approach, it has nonetheless
become official strategy, and presents a serious contradiction, as development comes to depend on internationalizing and liberalized market forces, even as these
remain dominated by predatory finance capital (Harvey 2005; McMichael 1999, 2000a). Internationalizing
market relations are
fundamentally unstable and, as a means of achieving security outside the narrow concerns of
capitalist accumulation, completely insecure. A brief examination of how food security fits into USAID strategies regarding trade,
security, and state weakness demonstrates this.
 LinkEconomy

The aff aims to satisfy capitalism's urge for limitless growth - causes exploitation,
destruction of democracies, and destroys value to life while trying to stave off the
inevitable collapse
Clark 12 (Richard, OpEd News, 8/28/12, republished by WPF 4/3/14, " How and Why Is Global Corporate Capitalism Obsolete?",
http://wpfdc.org/blog/economics/19049-how-and-why-is-global-corporate-capitalism-obsolete)

What lies at the heart of this insanity? It is this: Commanding an implacable and steady increase of top-tier individual and
corporate wealth is the core principle of global corporate capitalism. Meanwhile, recognition of any social
concern, or relationship-to-the-natural-world, that transcends the goal of increasing capital accumulation for the few, does
not occur. Why not? It's because it is extrinsic to the system, and must therefore be ignored. Four critical problems
must then be recognized: Dependence on growth: Global corporate capitalism relies on limitless growth -- but the
natural resources essential to wealth production are finite, i.e. limited. Super-exploitation of resources is
exhausting those resources and destroying the ecosystems with which they are associated, thereby jeopardizing
human survival as well as that of other species. Propensity to war: Since the only goal of the power elite is to
accumulate (rather than more fairly distribute) wealth, the limited and shrinking resources that are essential to producing
that wealth must and will be fought over, and will be owned and controlled by the winners. For this reason,
high-tech, super-deadly warfare becomes inevitable. Intrinsic & growing inequity, and the consequently
inevitable disappearance of democracy: Without any constraining outside force or internalized principle of social
equity, capital accumulation leads almost exclusively to ever more accumulation by the few, which is to say that
ever larger amounts of capital are thereby concentrated in ever fewer hands. Problem is, democracies are corruptible: so this ever
greater concentration of wealth allows the purchase of the legal and political representation it needs to
get laws passed that facilitate the further accumulation and concentration of wealth in the hands of the
moneyed and powerful few. This means that as the concentration of wealth increases, democracy is degraded and
ultimately destroyed. Ironically, extreme capital accumulation is actually unproductive of real happiness:
Human happiness and wellbeing are demonstrably and empirically tied to factors other than capital
accumulation. The extreme poverty that results, for some, from this lopsided accumulation, is clearly unproductive of
happiness; but after a certain point of accumulation, so is wealth itself unproductive of ever more happiness. This
happens just as soon as wealth goes past a relatively modest level. This is not speculation: Through much study and gathering of data,
sociologists have found that happiness,
contentment and human fulfillment are most widespread in those
societies where: a) there are guarantees that basic needs will be met for all, b) wealth is more equitably distributed, and
c) bonds between people and the natural environment remain stronger than the desire to accumulate wealth.
 LinkHorizontalism
The AFF misses the forest for the trees, failure to isolate capital as the structural
antagonism as a starting form for their politics dooms them to replicate the
horizontalist politics of occupy
Marcus 2012 associate book editor at Dissent Magazine (Fall, David, The Horizontalists, http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/the-horizontalists)

an ethnographer traveling in India. Journeying up and down the Ganges Delta, he encounters a
There is a much-recycled and certainly apocryphal tale told of

fisherman who claims to know the source of all truth. The world, the fisherman explains, rests upon
the back of an elephant. But what does the elephant stand on? the ethnographer asks. A turtle.
And the turtle? Another turtle. And it? Ah, friend, smiles the fisherman, it is turtles all the
way down. As with most well-circulated apocrypha, it is a parable that lacks a clear provenance, but has a clear moral: that despite our
ever-dialectical minds, we will never get to the bottom of things; that, in fact, there is nothing at the
bottom of things. What we define as society is nothing more than a set of locally constructed practices
and norms, and what we define as history is nothing more than the passage of one set to the next. Although
we might find the picture of our universe as an infinite tower of tortoises rather ridiculous, as one reteller admitted, it only raises the question, Why do we think we know better?

Since the early 1970s we have wonderedwith increasing anxietywhy and if we know better. Social
scientists, literary critics, philosophers, and jurists have all begun to turn from their particular disciplines
to the more general question of interpretation. There has been an increasing uneasiness with universal
categories of thought; a whispered suspicion and then a commonly held belief that the sumsocieties, histories, identitiesnever amounts to more than its parts. New
analytical frameworks have begun to emerge, sensitive to both the pluralities and localities of life.
What we need, as Clifford Geertz argued, are not enormous ideas but ways of thinking that are
responsive to particularities, to individualities, oddities, discontinuities, contrasts, and singularities. This growing anxiety over the
precision of our interpretive powers has translated into a variety of political as well as epistemological
concerns. Many have become uneasy with universal concepts of justice and equality. Simultaneous toand in part
because ofthe ascendance of human rights, freedom has increasingly become understood as an individual

entitlement instead of a collective possibility. The once prevalent conviction that a handful of centripetal
values could bind society together has transformed into a deeply skeptical attitude toward general
statements of value. If it is, indeed, turtles all the way down, then decisions can take place only on a
local scale and on a horizontal plane. There is no overarching platform from which to legislate; only a
local knowledge. As Michael Walzer argued in a 1985 lecture on social criticism, We have to start from where we are, we
can only ask, what is the right thing for us to do? This shift in scale has had a significant impact on the Left over the past twenty to thirty years.
Socialism, once the name of our desire, has all but disappeared; new desires have emerged in its
place: situationism, autonomism, localism, communitarianism, environmentalism, anti-globalism. Often spatial in metaphor,
they have been more concerned with where and how politics happen rather than at what pace and to what end. Often
local in theory and in practice, they have come to represent a shift in scale: from the large to the small, from the vertical to

the horizontal, and fromwhat Geertz has calledthe thin to the thick. Class, race, and genderthose classic left themesare, to be sure, still potent categories. But they
have often been imagined as spectrums rather than binaries, varying shades rather than static lines of solidarity. Instead of society, there is now talk of

communities and actor networks; instead of radical schemes to rework economic and political
institutions, there is an emphasis on localized campaigns and everyday practices. The critique of capitalismonce heavily
informed by intricate historical and social theorieshas narrowed. The ruthless criticism of all, as Karl Marx once put it, has turned away from exploitative world systems to the pathologies
of an over-regulated life. As post-Marxists Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe declared in 1985, Left-wing thought today stands at a crossroads. The evident truths of the pastthe classical
forms of analysis and political calculation, the nature of the forces in conflict, the very meaning of the Lefts struggles and objectiveshave been seriously challenged.From Budapest to

from Kabul to the sequels of Communist victory in Vietnam and Cambodia, a question-mark has fallen more
Prague and the Polish coup dtat,

and more heavily over the whole way of conceiving both socialism and the roads that should lead to it. In many
ways, the Left has just been keeping up with the times. Over the last quarter-century, there has been a general fracturing of our
social and economic relations, a multiplication of, what one sociologist has called, partial societies
grouped by age, sex, ethnicity, and proximity. This has not necessarily been a bad thing. Even as the old Leftthe vertical
Leftfrequently bemoaned the growing differentiation and individuation, these new categories did, in
fact, open the door for marginalized voices and communities. They created a space for more diversity, tolerance, and inclusion. They
signaled a turn toward the language of recognition: a politics more sensitive to difference. But this turn was also not without its disadvantages. Gone was the Lefts

hope for an emerging class consciousness, a movement of the people seeking greater realms of freedom.
Instead of challenging the top-down structures of late capitalism, radicals now aspired to createwhat post-Marxists
were frequently callingspaces of freedom. If one of the explicit targets of the global justice movement of the late 1990s was the exploitative trade policies of the World

Trade Organization, then its underlying critique was the alienating patterns of its bureaucracy: the erosion of spaces for

self-determination and expression. The crisis of globalization was that it stripped individuals of their rights to participate, to act as free agents in a society that was
increasingly becoming shaped by a set of global institutions. What most troubled leftists over the past three or four decades was not the increasingly unequal distribution of goods and services
in capitalist societies but the increasingly unequal distribution of power. As one frequently sighted placard from the 1999 Seattle protests read, No globalization without participation!

Occupy Wall Street has come to represent the latest turn in this movement toward local and more horizontal spaces of freedom. Occupation was, itself, a matter of
recovering local space: a way to repoliticize the square. And in a moment characterized by foreclosure, it was also symbolically, and sometimes
literally, an attempt to reclaim lost homes and abandoned properties. But there was also a deeper notion of space at work. Occupy Wall Street sought out not only

new political spaces but also new ways to relate to them. By resisting the top-down management of
representative democracy as well as the bottom-up ideals of labor movements, Occupiers hoped to create a new
politics in which decisions moved neither up nor down but horizontally. While embracing the new reach of globalizationlinking arms and webcams with
their encamped comrades in Madrid, Tel Aviv, Cairo, and Santiagothey were also rejecting its patterns of consolidation, its limits on personal freedom, its vertical and bureaucratic structures

Time was also to be transformed. The general assemblies and general strikes were efforts to reconstruct, and make more autonomous, our
of decision-making.

assemblies insisted that decision-making was an

experience of time as well as space. Seeking to escape from the Taylorist demands of productivity, the

endless process. Who we are, what we do, what we want to be are categories of flexibility, and
consensus is as much about repairing this sense of open-endedness as it is about agreeing on a particular set of
demands. Life is a mystery, as one pop star fashionista has insisted, and Occupiers wanted to keep it that way. Likewise, general strikes were imagined as ways in which workers could take
back timeregain those parts of life that had become routinized by work. Rather than attempts to achieve large-scale reforms, general strikes were improvisations, escapes from the daily
calculations of production that demonstrated that we can still be happy, creative, even productive individuals without jobs. As one unfurled banner along New Yorks Broadway read during
this springs May Day protests, Why work? Be happy. In many ways, the Occupy movement was a rebellion against the institutionalized nature of twenty-first century capitalism and

Equally skeptical of corporate monopolies as it was of the technocratic tendencies of the state, it was
democracy.

ultimately an insurgency against control, against the ways in which organized power and capital deprived the individual of the time and space needed to
control his or her life. Just as the vertically inclined leftists of the twentieth century leveraged the public corporationthe welfare stateagainst the increasingly powerful number of private
ones, so too were Occupy and, more generally, the horizontalist Left to embrace the age of the market: at the center of their politics was the anthropological man in both his formshomo

faber and homo ludenswho was capable of negotiating his interests outside the state. For this reason, the movement did not fit neatly into
right or left, conservative or liberal, revolutionary or reformist categories. On the one hand, it was sympathetic to the most classic of
left aspirations: to dismantle governing hierarchies. On the other, its language was imbued with a
strident individualism: a politics of anti-institutionalism and personal freedom that has most often been
affiliated with the Right. Seeking an alternative to the bureaucratic tendencies of capitalism and socialism, Occupiers were to frequently invoke the image of autonomy: of
a world in which social and economic relations exist outside the institutions of the state. Their aspiration was a society based on organic,

decentralized circuits of exchange and deliberationon voluntary associations, on local debate, on

loose networks of affinity groups. If political and economic life had become abstracted in the age of globalization and financialization, then Occupy activists
wanted to re-politicize our everyday choices. As David Graeber, one of Occupys chief theoretical architects, explained two days after Zuccotti Park was
occupied, The idea is essentially that the system is not going to save us, so were going to have to save

ourselves. Borrowing from the anarchist tradition, Graeber has called this work direct action: the practice of circumventing, even on occasion subverting, hierarchies through
practical projects. Instead of attempting to pressure the government to institute reforms or seize state power, direct actions seek to build a new society in the shell of the old. By

creating spaces in which individuals take control over their lives, it is a strategy of acting and thinking as
if one is already free. Marina Sitrin, another prominent Occupier, has offered another name for this
politicshorizontalism: the use of direct democracy, the striving for consensus and processes in
which everyone is heard and new relationships are created. It is a politics that not only refuses
institutionalization but also imagines a new subjectivity from which one can project the future into the
present. Direct action and horizontal democracy are new names, of course, for old ideas. They descend
most directlyfrom the ideas and tactics of the global justice movement of the 1990s and 2000s. Direct Action Network was founded in 1999 to help coordinate the anti-WTO

protests in Seattle; horizontalidad, as it was called in Argentina, emerged as a way for often unemployed workers to organize during the financial crisis of
2001. Both emerged out of the theories and practices of a movement that was learning as it went along. The ad hoc working groups, the all-night bull sessions, the daylong actions, the
decentralized planning were all as much by necessity as they were by design. They were not necessarily intended at first. But what emerged out of anti-globalization was a new vision of
globalization. Local and horizontal in practice, direct action and democracy were to become catchphrases for a movement that was attempting to resist the often autocratic tendencies of a

But direct action and horizontal democracy also tap into a longer, if often neglected, tradition on
fast-globalizing capitalism.

the left: the anarchism, syndicalism, and autonomist Marxism that stretch from Peter Kropotkin, Emma Goldman, and Rosa Luxemburg to C.L.R. James,
Cornelius Castoriadis, and Antonio Negri. If revolutionary socialism was a theory about ideal possibilities, then anarchism

and autonomism often focused on the revolutionary practices themselves. The way in which the revolution was organized was the
primary act of revolution. Autonomy, as the Greco-French Castoriadis told Le Monde in 1977, demands not only the elimination of dominant groups and of the institutions embodying and
orchestrating that domination but also new modes of what he calls self-management and organization. With direct action and horizontal democracy, the Occupy movement not only
developed a set of new tactics but also a governing ideology, a theory of time and space that runs counter to many of the practices of earlier leftist movements. Unlike revolutionary socialism
or evolutionary social democracyMarxs Esau and JacobOccupiers conceived of time as more cyclical than developmental, its understanding of space more local and horizontal than
structural and vertical. The revolution was to come but only through everyday acts. It was to occur only throughwhat Castoriadis obliquely referred to asthe self-institution of society.
The seemingly spontaneous movement that emerged after the first general assemblies in Zuccotti Park was not, then, sui generis but an elaboration of a much larger turn by the Left. As
occupations spread across the country and as activists begin to exchange organizational tactics, it was easy to forget that what was happening was, in fact, a part of a much larger shift in the
scale and plane of Western politics: a turn toward more local and horizontal patterns of life, a growing skepticism toward the institutions of the state, and an increasing desire to seek out
greater realms of personal freedom. And although its hibernation over the summer has, perhaps, marked the end of the Occupy movement, OWS has also come to represent an important
and perhaps more lastingbreak. In both its ideas and tactics, it has given us a new set of desiresautonomy, radical democracy, direct actionthat look well beyond the ideological and

Its occupations and general assemblies, its flash mobs and street performances, its loose
tactical tropes of socialism.

network of activists all suggest a bold new set of possibilities for the Left: a horizontalist ethos that
believes that revolution will begin by transforming our everyday lives. It can be argued that horizontalism is, in
many ways, a product of the growing disaggregation and individuation of Western society; that it is a
kind of free-market leftism: a politics jury-rigged out of the very culture it hopes to resist. For not only
does it emphasize the agency of the individual, but it draws one of its central inspirations from a
neoclassical image: that of the self-managing societythe polity that functions best when the state is
absent from everyday decisions. But one can also find in its anti-institutionalism an attempt to speak in
todays language for yesterdays goals. If we must live in a society that neither trusts nor feels compelled
by collectivist visions, then horizontalism offers us a leftism that attempts to be, at once, both
individualist and egalitarian, anti-institutional and democratic, open to the possibilities of self-
management and yet also concerned with the casualties born out of an age that has let capital manage
itself for far too long. Horizontalism has absorbed the crisis of knowledgewhat we often call postmodernismand the crisis of collectivismwhat we often call
neoliberalism. But instead of seeking to return to some golden age before our current moment of fracture, it seeksfor better and worseto find a way to make leftist politics conform to
our current age of anti-foundationalism and institutionalism. As Graeber argued in the prescriptive last pages of his anthropological epic, Debt: The First 5,000 Years, Capitalism has
transformed the world in many ways that are clearly irreversible and we therefore need to give up the false choice between state and market that [has] so monopolized political ideology for

. But herein lies the problem. Not all

the last centuries that it made it difficult to argue about anything else. We need, in other words, to stop thinking like leftists

possible forms of human existence and social interaction, no matter how removed they are from the
institutions of power and capital, are good forms of social organization. Although it is easy to look enthusiastically to those
societiesancient or modern, Western or non-Westernthat exist beyond the structures of the state, they, too, have their own patterns of hierarchy, their own embittered lines of inequality

to select one form of social organization over the other is always an act of exclusion.
and injustice. More important,

Instituting and then protecting a particular way of life will always require a normative commitment in
which not every value system is respectedin which, in other words, there is a moral hierarchy. More
problematically, by working outside structures of power one may circumvent coercive systems but one does not

necessarily subvert them. Localizing politicsstripping it of its larger institutional ambitionshas, to be sure, its advantages. But without a larger
structural vision, it does not go far enough. Bubbles of freedom, as Graeber calls them, may create a larger variety of

non-institutional life. But they will always neglect other crucial avenues of freedom: in particular, those
social and economic rights that can only be protected from the top down. In this way, the anti-
institutionalism of horizontalism comes dangerously close to that of the libertarian Right. The turn to
previous eras of social organization, the desire to locate and confine politics to a particular regional
space, the deep skepticism toward all forms of institutional life not only mirror the aspirations of
libertarianism but help cloak those hierarchies spawned from non-institutional forms of power and
capital. This is a particularly pointed irony for a political ideology that claims to be opposed to the many injustices
of a non-institutional marketin particular, its unregulated financial schemes. Perhaps this is an irony deeply woven into the theoretical quilt of autonomy: a vision
that, as a result of its anti-institutionalism, is drawn to all sites of individual liberationeven those that are to be found in the marketplace. As Graeber concludes in Debt, Markets, when
allowed to drift entirely free from their violent origins, invariably begin to grow into something different, into networks of honor, trust, and mutual connectedness, whereas the maintenance
of systems of coercion constantly do the opposite: turn the products of human cooperation, creativity, devotion, love and trust back into numbers once again. In many ways, this is the result
of a set of political ideas that have lost touch with their origins. The desire for autonomy was born out of the socialistif not also often the Marxisttradition and there was always a guarded
sympathy for the structures needed to oppose organized systems of capital and power. Large-scale institutions were, for thinkers such as Castoriadis, Negri, and C.L.R. James, still essential if

every cook was truly to govern.To only try to create spaces of freedom alongside of the State meant, as Castoriadis was to argue later in his life, to
back down from the problem of politics. In fact, this was, he believed, the failure of 1968: the inability to set up new, different institutions and recognize
that there is no such thing as a society without institutions. This isand will bea problem for the

horizontalist Left as it moves forward. As a leftism ready-made for an age in which all sides of the political spectrum are arrayed against the regulatory state, it
is always in danger of becoming absorbed into the very ideological apparatus it seeks to dismantle. For it
aspires to a decentralized and organic politics that, in both principle and practice, shares a lot in
common with its central target. Both it and the free market are anti-institutional. And the latter will remain so
without larger vertical measures. Structures, not only everyday practices, need to be reformed. The revolution cannot happen only on the

ground; it must also happen from above. A direct democracy still needs its indirect structures, individual freedoms still need to be measured by their

collective consequences, and notions of social and economic equality still need to stand next to the desire for

greater political participation. Deregulation is another regulatory regime, and to replace it requires new
regulations: institutions that will limit the excesses of the market. As Castoriadis insisted in the years after 1968, the Lefts task is not only
to abolish old institutions but to discover new kinds of relationship between society and its institutions. Horizontalism has come to serve as an important break from the static strategies and
categories of analysis that have slowed an aging and vertically inclined Left. OWS was to represent its fullest expression yet, though it has a much longer back story and stillone hopesa
promising future. But horizontalists such as Graeber and Sitrin will struggle to establish spaces of freedom if they cannot formulate a larger vision for a society. Their vision is notas several on

the vertical left have suggestedtoo utopian but not utopian enough: in seeking out local spaces of freedom, they have confined their
ambitions; they have, in fact, come, at times, to mirror the very ideology they hope to resist. In his famous
retelling of the turtle parable, Clifford Geertz warned that in the search of all-too-deep-lying turtles, we have to be careful to not

lose touch with the hard surfaces of lifewith the political, economic, stratificatory realities within which men
are everywhere contained. This is an ever-present temptation, and one that, in our age of ever more stratification, we must resist.
 LinkHuman Rights

Human rights rhetoric is just another way to propagate neoliberal hegemony and
obscure the inequalities of capitalism
Douzinas 13 (Costas, Professor of Law and Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities at Birkbeck, University of London, 2013, Critical Legal
Thinking, Seven Theses on Human Rights: (3) Neoliberal Capitalism & Voluntary Imperialism http://criticallegalthinking.com/2013/05/23/seven-theses-on-human-
rights-3-neoliberal-capitalism-voluntary-imperialism/)

Social and political systems become hegemonic by turning their ideological priorities into universal
principles and values. In the new world order, human rights are the perfect candidate for this role. Their core
principles, interpreted negatively and economically, promote neoliberal capitalist penetration. Under a
different construction, their abstract provisions could subject the inequalities and indignities of late
capitalism to withering attack. But this cannot happen as long as they are used by the dominant powers
to spread the values of an ideology based on the nihilism and insatiability of desire. Despite differences in
content, colonialism and the human rights movement form a continuum, episodes in the same drama, which started with the great discoveries
of the new world and is now carried out in the streets of Iraq
and Afghanistan: bringing civilization to the barbarians.
The claim to spread Reason and Christianity gave western empires their sense of superiority and their
universalizing impetus. The urge is still there; the ideas have been redefined but the belief in the
universality of our world-view remains as strong as that of the colonialists. There is little difference
between imposing reason and good governance and proselytizing for Christianity and human rights. They
are both part of the cultural package of the West, aggressive and redemptive at the same time.
 LinkInternational Law/Credibility

International law recreates a public/private divide that perpetuates capitalism their

legal reforms exist solely to protect disputed capital interests
Chimni 99 (B.S., legal scholar, February 1999, Marxism and International Law: A Contemporary Analysis, Economic and political weekly, vol. 34 no. 6, pp.
337-349)

the global commons have been subjected to the process of privatisation. Consider the
Fourth,

developments in the Law of the Sea which regulates the use of the oceans. In 1982, after a decade of negotiations. the Third
United Nations Conference adopted the Law of the Sea Convention. It was widely welcomed by the international community - despite the scepticism of some of us - as a legal regime which

. Under the convention the principle of common heritage of (hu)mankind applies to the
was fair to all the participants

non-living resources of the ocean floor and its subsoil beyond the limits of the Exclusive Economic Zone (extending to 200 miles) and the
Continental Shelf. It is to be operationalised through a parallel regime which requires (vide Article 153) every exploitable site to be divided into two parts, one for the mi nng company that has

the
made a claim, and the other for UN's Enterprise, the operational arm of the International Sea-Bed Authority estab- lished by the convention. Writing in 1982 we had contended that

revolutionary concept of comnmon heritage of mankind harbored reactionary content as it essen- tially
envisaged the private exploitation of the resources of the seabed beyond national jurisdiction [Chimni 1982:407-
12]. But such criticism was rejected as the parallel regime envisaged the transferof technology from private

mining consortiums to the enterprise. In 1994, through a subsequent agreement, the obligations relating to the transfer of technology were however dropped
[Schrijver 1997: 191]. What is more the operations of the Enterprise have been constrained in other ways.24 Thus, as one observer puts it, "the ... international law with

respect to the global commons remains dominated by tlle rights of corporate property" [Teeple 1997:32]. Fifth, the
idea of the global commons is sought to be extended by the indus- tlialised world to the environment, inclu- ding resources (e g. forests) which are located within the territory of third world
countries [Imber 1994:58ff]. In addressing the issue intertemporal considerations are not given due weight implying a change in the distribution of property rights to the detriment of the third
world countries. For "as industrial countries developed, global private rights were granted to polluters; now, developing countries are asked to agree to a redistribution of those property rights
without compensation for already depleted resources" [Uimonen and WVhalley 1997:66]. This 'redistribution' of course goes hand in hand with an IPR regime which makes environment

friendly technology costly to access. On the other hand,there is a push to universalise northern regulatory norms since they
promote the interests of transnational capital: the leading 50 environmental corporations in the world are located in the advanced capitalist countries
[for details see Pratt and Montgomery 1997: 75-96]. Sixth, there have been established alternative dispute settlement mechanisms

which seek to eliminate the role of national courts in resolving disputes between TNCs and the state.
Today, international com- mercial arbitration is the preferred mode of settling disputes for TNCs. Since the l;tte 1970s
there has been a tremendous growth in the number of arbitration centres, arbitrators and arbitrations [Dezelay and Garth 1996]. "By the mid-1980s", according to a close observer, "it had

become recognised that arbitration was tle normal way of settlement of inter- national commercial disputes" [Lalive 1995:2]. International commercial
arbitration, it needs to be underlined, is essentially a private interests regime in which parties have 'autonomy' in terms of the selection of the arbitrators, the substantial law to be
applied, and the place of arbitration. Support for it rests on a certain assumption of the proper sphere of state activities. In fact it reproduces the public/private

divide in international law. Community policy comes into play only at the time of enforcement of an award and that too in the exceptional circumstance that the 'public
policy' of a state has been violated, a concept increasingly narrowly interpreted. While, without doubt, inter- national commercial arbitration has a significant role to play in routine cases
involving international business trans- actions, it is not a suitable method for resolving disputes in core areas of national economic life like, for example, the ex- ploration and exploitation of

For despite claims to the

natural resources [Sornarajah 1991:79]. Third world countries were therefore for long suspicious of international commercial arbitration (ibid).

'autonomy' of parties only a select and elite group of individuals serve as inter- national arbitrators and
the law applied is invariably traditional (colonial and im- perialist) international law with its clear bias in favour of
capital (ibid). But insti- tutions pursuing the interests of capital (the World Bank and the International Chamber of Commerce, for example)
have relentlessly promoted international commercial arbitration.25 'he increasing competition in recent years between third world
countries to promote foreign direct investment has helped this effort as it has pressurised them to accept the preferences of TNCs in dispute resolution.
 LinkLiberalism

Liberal capitalism is another name for totalitarianism of the market, another mode of
subjectivization
Lazzarato 13- sociologist and philosopher, Researcher @ Matisse / CNRS (Paris I University), member of the International College of
Philosophy in Paris [Maurizio, Governmentality in the current crisis, March, 2013, translation by Arianna Bove, lecture delivered in Berlin in
2013, http://www.generation-online.org/p/fp_lazzarato7.htm, DKP]

Disclaimer: In the time intervened between my work on the government of inequalities, written on the experience of events that unfolded between 2003 and 2007,
and the work I am presenting here, there has been a crisis of sovereign debts, which calls for a new reading of
governmentality and thus of Michel Foucaults thesis on liberalism. These two readings are different, but I dont think they are
contradictory. It is up to the reader to judge. Governmentality The financial crisis, which has turned into a crisis of sovereign
debts, imposes new modes of governmentality and new figures of the subject both on the side of the
governing (technical government) and on that of the governed (the indebted who expiates his own guilt through tax). The novelties
of the figures of these subjects are a manifestation of the true nature of governmental techniques and the

relation liberalism establishes with capital, one that is better and deeper than previously identified in the
period of the birth of neoliberalism. A critique of the liberal government of the crisis must confront Foucaults analysis in the two

lecture series on Territory, Security and Population and especially The Birth of Biopolitics, as they represent a significant advancement in

the analysis of models of control and government of populations. Foucaults research on liberal
governmentality is part and parcel of his development of a theory of power relations (from power as war and
strategy to power as government). Nonetheless, it seems that these lecture series introduce a weak interpretation of the

relation that Capital and its logic (in his words) entertains with liberalism. One might even say that the most
important limitation of the two lecture series on governmentality, especially the second on the birth of biopolitics, is that they take for
granted that liberalism and liberal techniques of government exist, or that they never existed in
opposition or as alternatives to the strategies of the State. Liberalism, as the practice and theory that posits itself between
capital and the state in order to defend and augment the freedoms of the market and society, should not to be taken for granted. In light of the neoliberal
management of the relation between state and capital in the crisis, I think it makes sense to put to the test a working hypothesis put forward by Deleuze and
Guattari in Anti Oedipus , where they set out the reasons that give capitalism the appearance, and illusion of liberalism. The radical conclusion they draw on these
premises is decisive to an interpretation of the current crisis and its consequences :
Capitalism was never liberal, it was always state
capitalism (1). The analysis of governmentality must not focus on the suspicion that one risks to govern
too much, or on the freedom that liberals allegedly produce and defend in principle against the state, but rather
on the alliance between State and Capital (between State and Market, to say it with the economists), and thus on state capitalism.
Rather than representing an alternative to state government, liberals are only one of the possible
modes of subjectivation of state capitalism, as the crisis is unequivocally demonstrating. There was never any struggle against the very
principle of state control (2). The action against state monopoly refers to a time past, when commercial and financial capital still made an alliance with the old
system of production, and where the nascent industrial capitalism could not ensure production and the market unless it obtained the abolition of privileges (3).
Moreover, rather than representing the freedom of society and the market against the state, liberals have
certainly given a fundamental contribution to the building of a state that is perfectly convenient to
capital. But what state and what capital are we talking about? Is the state capitalism that we can see operating in the crisis the same state capitalism of the
19th and 20th century? Can we still speak of state capitalism in Deleuze and Guattaris terms? Despite all its limitations, the work of Michel Foucault can be useful
so long as we interpret both Ordo-liberalism and neoliberalism as policies that work towards a new configuration of state capitalism, a new relationship between
state and market, and liberals as its subjective condition. Neoliberalism constitutes a new and foundational stage in the
integration of capital and state, and the governmentality of the current crisis can be seen as an
accomplishment of this integration. In any case, the main thesis going through both lecture series is deeply undermined not so much by the
critiques one might level against it, but by the events that have been shaking capitalism since 2007. This is the thesis that the problem with
liberalism is that it governs too much, that its critique focuses on the irrationality that characterises the excess of government, and that,
thus, one must govern as little as possible. This thesis is amply falsified by the crisis. The neoliberal government of the

current crisis operates a centralisation and a multiplication of authoritarian techniques of government

that compete with the policies of so-called totalitarian states. The claim that liberalism consists in
limiting as much as possible the forms and fields of action of government is indefensible not only for
today, but also for the past. How is it that liberals have suddenly shifted from governing as little as possible to wanting to govern everything? How
to explain that they deemed any form of government irrational, and yet since 2007 technical governments, Europe, the IMF, the ECB, and all the institutions of
liberal creed drew recovery plans for national budgets that span over ten years (the Fiscal compact requires at least twenty years of sacrifices to pay creditors),
plans of proliferations of control institutions supervised by experts, that verify the smallest administrative spending and prescribe cuts down to the smallest details,
that fix in an authoritarian way the time scales of balance recoveries, and literally dictate laws to parliaments and national governments? How does one explain that
the so-called minimal state of liberals before the crisis has been replaced, by those very same liberals, by a maximal state? How to account for this neoliberal
supranational big government that, after all, can unscrupulously do without democracy? Theres clearly something wrong in this opposition between a before
and an after, and it
would be absolutely reductive to think that the crisis imposes a change in the nature of
liberalism, that this intervention is conjunctural, and that, once the crisis is over, this centralising, authoritarian,
invasive government will go back to being liberal. The crisis has the role of revealing a historical truth: that capitalism was
never liberal, that there always and necessarily was a state capitalism., in its non-minimal version, intervenes, twice rather than once, to display
its function: the first time to save the banks, finance and the liberals; the second, to impose on populations that
they pay for the political and economic costs of the first intervention. First for the markets, second against society.
 LinkSecurityNeocleous

Security is a mask for bourgeois expansion

Neocleous, 8-Professor of Critique of Political Economy @ Brunel University [Mark, Critique of Security, Brunel University in the
Department of Government, Published 2008]

We are often and rightly told that security is intimately associated with the rise of the modem state. But we also need
to note that it is equally intimately bound up with the rise of bourgeois property rights and a liberal order-
building, and in later chapters we will see the extent of this intimacy. In this way liberalism's conception of
security was intimately connected to its vision of political subjectivitycentred 1 on the self-contained and property-
owning individual. The reason liberty is wrapped in the concept of security, then, is because security
is simultaneously wrapped in the question of property, giving us a triad of concepts which are
usually run so close together that they are almost conflated ('liberty, security, property'), a triad found in
Smith, j Blackstone, Paine, the French Declaration of the Rights of Man, and in various other formulations elsewhere.' Thus as liberalism
generated a new conception of 'the economy' as its founding political act, a conception which integrated
the wealth of nations, the world market and the labour of the population, its notion of liberty necessitated a particular
vision of security: the ideological guarantee of the egoism of the independent and self-interested pursuit
of property. It is for this reason Marx calls security [is] 'the supreme concept of bourgeois society'.' Marx spotted
that as the concept of bourgeois society, security plays a double role: The progress of social wealth,' says
Storch 'begets this useful class of society . . . which performs the most wearisome, the vilest, the most disgusting functions, which,
in a word takes on its shoulders all that is disagreeable and servile in life, and procures thus for other classes leisure, serenity of mind and
conventional' (c'est bon, ca) 'dignity of character'. Storch then asks himself what the
actual advantage is of this capitalist
civilization, with its misery and its degradation of the masses, as compared with barbarism. He can find
only one answer: security! One side of this double role, then, is that security is the ideological
justification for 'civilisation' (that is, capitalism) as opposed to 'barbarism' (that is, non-capitalist modes
of production); hence Locke's need to move from the 'state of nature' to the state of civil society. The other side is that security is
what the bourgeois class demand once it has exploited, demoralised and degraded the bulk of
humanity. For all the talk of 'laissez faire', the 'natural' phenomena of labour, wages and profit have to
be policed and secured. Thus security entails the concept of police, guaranteeing as well as presupposing
that society exists to secure the conservation of a particular kind of subjectivity (known as 'persons') and
the rights and property associated with this subjectivity." The non-liberal and non-capitalist may be 'tolerated' -
that other classically liberal concept which also functions as a regulatory power - but they will also be
heavily policed ... for 'security reasons'? The new form of economic reason to which liberalism gave
birth also gave new content to the idea of reason of state and thus a new rationale for state action: the
'free economy'. In other words, if security is the supreme concept of bourgeois society it is equally the
supreme concept of liberal ideology.
 LinkSingle IssueMcClaren

Its a prerequisite to the affsingle-issue focus within capitalism means nobody will
support the aff--- only moving beyond the material basis of production offers any
hope of creating a space for productive politics
McLaren, Critical Studies @ Chapman U, urban schooling prof @ UCLA, 1
(Peter, Rage and Hope: The Revolutionary Pedagogy of Peter McLaren an Interview with Peter
McLaren, Currculo sem Fronteiras, v.1, n. 2, p. xlix-lix)

McLaren: Let me try. Calls for diversity by politicians and educators and social reformers have brought historically
marginalized groups Latino/as, African-Americans, Asians, indigenous populations to the center of society in terms, at
least, of addressing the importance of addressing their needs, rather than actually addressing their needs,
or addressing their actual needs. In other words, this call for diversity has been little more than Enlightenment
rhetoric, certainly not practice. However, motivated by a lack of opposition to capitalist exploitation that has been fostered by neo-
liberal policies worldwide, multicultural education continues to defang its most emancipatory possibilities by
initiating what I believe are, for the most part, politically empty calls for diversity calls for diversity carried out in
antiseptic isolation from an interrogation of capitalisms center. This center is what gives ballast to the
production of sameness that I call the eternal recurrance of whiteness. This sameness constitutes the distillate of colonialism,
imperialism, and the ether of white lies that spikes the very air we breathe. It means that pluralism is secretly aligned
with assimilation. To be brought into the center without being permitted to critique that center is
tantamount to internalizing the codes of whiteness (without being granted the benefits of actually assuming the social
position of whiteness). There is a parallel here with some of the debates on social exclusion in the European Union. Eurocapitalist states
advance a rhetoric of social inclusion of the unemployed, of adults who cant read, of the disabled and other groups that simultaneously
stigmatizes the excluded as either victims or lacking in certain skills or attitudes, whilst claiming to want to include them as equals (with the
whole question of equality left up in the air). But this is cruel fantasy. In a sense, there
are no socially excluded: everyone is
included into capitals social universe but on differentially, obscenely unequal grounds. Possession of capital in
its money form excludes people to vastly differing degrees from buying all manner of goods, real human need going by the board. On
the other hand, capital includes us all, only to generate incredible differences between us on the basis of
money. Gender, race and other social and cultural differences are grounds within bourgeois metaphysics and ethics
for differentiating and fragmenting us on the basis of money. Capital drives us, therefore, against ourselves. Going
back to postmodernism, postmodernists given over to identity politics frequently overlook the centrality of social class as
an overarching identity that inscribes individuals and groups within social relations of exploitation. What identity
politics and pluralism fail to address is the fact that diversity and difference are allowed to proliferate and flourish, provided that
they remain within the prevailing forms of capitalist social arrangements, including hierarchical property
arrangements. Of course, I agree that class relations are most certainly racialized and gendered. I do not want to subordinate race, gender, or
sexuality to that of social class; rather I want to emphasize that without
overcoming capitalism, anti-racist, anti-sexist and
anti-homophobic struggles will have little chance at succeeding. Slavoj Zizek has said that in the Lefts call for
new multiple political subjectivities (e.g., race, class, feminist, religious), the Left in actuality asserts a type of all-pervasive
sameness a non-antagonistic society in which there room is made for all manner of cultural communities, lifestyles, religions, and sexual
orientations. Zizek reveals that this Sameness relies on an antagonistic split. As far as this split goes, I believe that it results, at least to a large
degree, from the labor-capital relation sustained and promoted by white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. In other words, I do not see the
central tension as one between the autochthonous and the foreign but between labor and capital. As you might be aware, I am very
sympathetic to the movement here in the United States known as the new abolitionists.
 LinkSingle IssueZizek

Their particular demand sugarcoats capitalism and prevents a universal rejection of

capitalism
Zizek 99 (Slavoj, Senior Researcher at the University of Ljubljana, 1999, Repeating Lenin
http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ot/zizek1.htm)

Today, we already can discern the signs of a kind of general unease recall the series of events usually listed under the name of Seattle. The 10 years honeymoon of the triumphant global
capitalism is over, the long-overdue seven years itch is here witness the panicky reactions of the big media, which from the Time magazine to CNN all of a sudden started to warn

about the Marxists manipulating the crowd of the honest protesters. The problem is now the strictly Leninist one how to ACTUALIZE the medias
accusations: how to invent the organizational structure which will confer on this unrest the FORM of the

universal political demand. Otherwise, the momentum will be lost, and what will remain is the marginal
disturbance, perhaps organized as a new Greenpeace, with certain efficiency, but also strictly limited
goals, marketing strategy, etc. In other words, the key Leninist lesson today is: politics without the
organizational FORM of the party is politics without politics, so the answer to those who want just the
(quite adequately named) New SOCIAL Movements is the same as the answer of the Jacobins to the Girondin compromisers: You want revolution

without a revolution! Todays blockade is that there are two ways open for the socio-political
engagement: either play the game of the system, engage in the long march through the institutions,
or get active in new social movements, from feminism through ecology to anti-racism. And, again, the
limit of these movements is that they are not POLITICAL in the sense of the Universal Singular: they are
one issue movements which lack the dimension of the universality, i.e. they do not relate to the social
TOTALITY. Here, Lenins reproach to liberals is crucial: they only EXPLOIT the working classes discontent to strengthen their position vis-a-vis the conservatives, instead of identifying
with it to the end.52 Is this also not the case with todays Left liberals? They like to evoke racism, ecology, workers grievances, etc., to

score points over the conservatives WITHOUT ENDANGERING THE SYSTEM. Recall how, in Seattle, Bill Clinton himself deftly
referred to the protesters on the streets outside, reminding the gathered leaders inside the guarded palaces that they should listen to the message of the demonstrators (the message which,
of course, Clinton interpreted, depriving it of its subversive sting attributed to the dangerous extremists introducing chaos and violence into the majority of peaceful protesters). Its the same

the systemic politics is always ready to listen to their demands,

with all New Social Movements, up to the Zapatistas in Chiapas:

depriving them of their proper political sting. The system is by definition ecumenical, open, tolerant,
ready to listen to all even if one insist on ones demands, they are deprived of their universal
political sting by the very form of negotiation. The true Third Way we have to look for is this third way between the institutionalized parliamentary
politics and the new social movements. The ultimate answer to the reproach that the radical Left proposals are utopian should thus be that, today, the true utopia is

the belief that the present liberal-democratic capitalist consensus could go on indefinitely, without
radical changes. We are thus back at the old 68 motto Soyons realistes, demandons l'impossible!": in order to be truly a realist, one must
consider breaking out of the constraints of what appears possible (or, as we usually out it, feasible)
 LinkSingle IssueMezaros
Single-issue movements will be co-opted by capitalismonly complete structural
challenges have any hope.
Meszaros, 95 -(Istivan, professor emeritus at the University of Sussex, Beyond Capital, pg. 39-40)

To aggravate the situation, everything is further complicated by the fact that it

is not feasible to find partial solutions to the
problems that must be faced. Thus, no single issue can be realistically considered a single issue. If nothing
else, this circumstance has been forcefully highlighted by the disconcerting marginalization of the Green movement on the success of which so
much hope has been placed in recent times, even among former socialists. In the past up to a few decades ago it was possible to squeeze out
of capital what appeared to be significant concessionssuch as relative gains for the socialist movement (which later turned out to be
reversible both as legislative measures for working class action and as gradually improving standard of living), obtained through the defensive
organizations of labour: its trades unions and parliamentary parties. These gains could be conceded by capital so long as they could be
assimilated and integrated by the system as a whole and turned to its productive advantage in the course of its self-expansion. Today, by
contrast, confronting
even partial issues with any hope of success implies the necessity of challenging the
capital system as such. For in our own historical epoch, when productive self-expansion is no longer a readily available way out of the
accumulating difficulties and contradictions (hence the purely wishful thinking of getting rid of the black hope of indebtedness by growing out
of it), the global capital system of necessity frustrates all attempts at interfering even to a minimal extent with its structural parameters. In this
respect the obstacles to be overcome are actually shared by labourthat is, labour as the radical alternative to capitals social metabolic
orderand the single issue movements. For the historic failure of social democracy clearly underlined that only integrable demands can gain
legitimacy under the rule of capital. Environmentalism by its very naturejust like the great historic cause of womens liberationis non-
integrable. Consequently no such cause will for the capital system conveniently fade way, irrespective of how many setbacks and defeats the
politically organized forms of single issue movements might have to suffer in the foreseeable future. However, historically/epochally defined
non-integrability, no matter how important for the future, cannot guarantee success on its own. Switching the allegiance of disappointed
socialists from the working class to so-called new social movements (praised now in opposition to, and by discarding altogether the
Single issue movements, even if they
emancipatory potential of, labour) must be considered, therefore, far too premature and nave.
fight for non-integrable issue, can be picked off and marginalized one by one, because they cannot lay claim to
representing a coherent and comprehensive alternative to the given order as a mode of social metabolic
control and system of societal reproduction. This is what makes focusing on the socialist emancipatory
potential of labour more important today than ever before. For labour is not only non-integrable (in
contrast to some historically specific political manifestations of labour, like reformist social democracy, which may be rightly characterized as
butprecisely as the only feasible structural
integrable and indeed in the last few decades also completely integrated),
alternative to capitalcan provide the comprehensive strategic framework within which all single issue
emancipatory movements can successfully make their common cause for the survival of humanity.
 LinkSpace

Space exploration is merely an outlet for the state to expand its capitalist grip
infinite wars will be fought over new resources
Dickens 9 Visiting Professor of Sociology at the University of Essex (Peter, The Cosmos as Capitalisms Outside, The
Sociological Review, 57: 6682)

The imminent conquest of outer space raises the question of outside and inside yet again.
Capitalism now has the cosmos in its sights, an outside which can be privately or publicly
owned, made into a commodity, an entity for which nations and private companies can compete. As such the cosmos
is a possible site of armed hostilities. This means, contra Hardt and Negri, that there is an outside after all, one into
which the competitive market can now expand indefinitely. A new kind of imperialism is therefore underway,
albeit not one attempting to conquer and exploit people outside since there are no consumers or labour power to exploit in other
parts of the solar system. Ferrying wealthy tourists into the cosmos is a first and perhaps most spectacular part of this process of
capital's cosmic expansion. Especially important in the longer term is making outer space into a source
of resources and materials. These will in due course be incorporated into production-processes, most
of which will be still firmly lodged on earth. Access to outer space is, potentially at least, access to an infinite
outside array of resources. These apparently have the distinct advantage of not being owned or used by any pre-existing
society and not requiring military force by an imperializing power gaining access to these resources. Bringing this outside
zone into capitalism may at first seem beneficial to everyone. But this scenario is almost certainly not so
trouble-free as may at first seem. On the one hand, the investment of capital into outer space would be a
huge diversion from the investments needed to address many urgent inequalities and crises on Earth. On
the other hand, this same access is in practice likely to be conducted by a range of competing imperial powers. Hardt and Negri
(2000) tell us that the history of imperializing wars is over. This may or may not be the case as regards imperialism on earth. But
old-style imperialist, more particularly inter-imperialist, wars seem more likely than ever, as growing
and competing power-blocs (the USA and China are currently amongst the most likely protagonists) compete for
resources on earth and outer space. Such, in rather general terms, is the prospect for a future, galactic, imperialism
between competing powers. But what are the relations, processes and mechanisms underlying this new phenomenon? How
should we understand the regional rivalries and ideologies involved and the likely implications
of competing empires attempting to incorporate not only their share of resources on earth but on global society's outside?
Social crises, outer spatial fixes and galactic imperialism Explanatory primacy is given here to economic mechanisms driving this
humanization of the universe. In the same way that they have driven imperializing societies in the past to expand their economic
bases into their outsides, the social relations of capitalism and the processes of capital-accumulation
are driving the new kind of outer space imperialisms. Such is the starting-point of this paper (See alsoDickens
and Ormrod, 2007). It is a position based on the work of the contemporary Marxist geographer David Harvey (2003) and his notion
of spatial fixes. Capitalism continually constructs what he calls outer transformations. In the context of the over-accumulation of
capital in the primary circuit of industrial capital, fresh geographic zones are constantly sought out which
have not yet been fully invested in or, in the case of outer space, not yet been invested in at all. Outer spatial
fixes are investments in outer space intended to solve capitalism's many crises. At one level they may
be simply described as crises of economic profitability. But economic can cover a wide array of issues such as crises of resource-
availability and potential social and political upheavals resulting from resource-shortages. Furthermore, there is certainly no
guarantee that these investments will actually fix these underlying economic, political and social crises.
The fix may well be of a temporary, sticking-plaster, variety.

Global capital makes neutrality in space impossiblethe AFF isnt about exploration,
its about exploitation
Dickens 10 *Visiting Professor of Sociology at the University of Essex
(Peter, The Humanization of the Cosmos To What End?, Monthly Review Vol 62, No 6, November 2010)

Instead of indulging in over-optimistic and fantastic visions, we should take a longer, harder, and more critical look at
what is happening and what is likely to happen. We can then begin taking a more measured view of
space humanization, and start developing more progressive alternatives. At this point, we must return to
the deeper, underlying processes which are at the heart of the capitalist economy and society, and which
are generating this demand for expansion into outer space. Although the humanization of the
cosmos is clearly a new and exotic development, the social relationships and mechanisms underlying
space-humanization are very familiar. In the early twentieth century, Rosa Luxemburg argued that an outside
to capitalism is important for two main reasons. First, it is needed as a means of creating massive
numbers of new customers who would buy the goods made in the capitalist countries.7 As outlined earlier, space
technology has extended and deepened this process, allowing an increasing number of people to
become integral to the further expansion of global capitalism. Luxemburgs second reason for imperial expansion is
the search for cheap supplies of labor and raw materials. Clearly, space fiction fantasies about aliens aside,
expansion into the cosmos offers no benefits to capital in the form of fresh sources of labor power.8 But expansion into the
cosmos does offer prospects for exploiting new materials such as those in asteroids, the moon,
and perhaps other cosmic entities such as Mars. Neil Smiths characterization of capitals relations to nature is useful at this
point. The reproduction of material life is wholly dependent on the production and reproduction of surplus value. To this end,
capital stalks the Earth in search of material resources; nature becomes a universal means of
production in the sense that it not only provides the subjects, objects and instruments of production, but is also in its totality an
appendage to the production processno part of the Earths surface, the atmosphere, the oceans, the geological substratum or the
biological superstratum are immune from transformation by capital.9 Capital is now also stalking outer space in
the search for new resources and raw materials. Nature on a cosmic scale now seems likely to be
incorporated into production processes, these being located mainly on earth. Since Luxemburg wrote, an increasing
number of political economists have argued that the importance of a capitalist outside is not so much that of creating a new pool of
customers or of finding new resources.10 Rather, an outside is needed as a zone into which surplus capital can
be invested. Economic and social crisis stems less from the problem of finding new consumers, and
more from that of finding, making, and exploiting zones of profitability for surplus capital.
Developing outsides in this way is also a product of recurring crises, particularly those of declining
economic profitability. These crises are followed by attempted fixes in distinct geographic regions. The word fix
is used here both literally and figuratively. On the one hand, capital is being physically invested in new regions. On the other hand,
the attempt is to fix capitalisms crises. Regarding the latter, however, there are, of course, no absolute
guarantees that such fixes will really correct an essentially unstable social and economic system.
At best, they are short-term solutions. The kind of theory mentioned above also has clear implications for the humanization
of the cosmos. Projects for the colonization of outer space should be seen as the attempt to make
new types of spatial fix, again in response to economic, social, and environmental crises on earth. Outer
space will be globalized, i.e., appended to Earth, with new parts of the cosmos being invested in by
competing nations and companies. Military power will inevitably be made an integral part of
this process, governments protecting the zones for which they are responsible. Some influential commentators argue that the
current problem for capitalism is that there is now no outside.11 Capitalism is everywhere.
Similarly, resistance to capitalism is either everywhere or nowhere. But, as suggested above, the
humanization of the cosmos seriously questions these assertions. New spatial fixes are due to
be opened up in the cosmos, capitalisms emergent outside. At first, these will include artificial fixes such as satellites,
space stations, and space hotels. But during the next twenty years or so, existing outsides, such as the moon and
Mars, will begin attracting investments. The stage would then be set for wars in outer space
between nations and companies attempting to make their own cosmic fixes.
 LinkState Demands

Describing what the government should do ignores personal responsibility and

assumes a false neutralityonly the alt can break the cycle of demands
Herod 1 (James, A Stake, Not a Mistake: On Not Seeing the Enemy, October, 2001,
http://www.jamesherod.info/index.php?sec=paper&id=9&print=y&PHPSESSID=4387a9147ad42723ea101944dd538914)

Let's take another example. Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman, otherwise very sensible writers, complain that "bombing a desperately
poor country under the yoke of a repressive regime is a wrongheaded response [to the "unspeakable acts of violence" committed on Sept.
11]."The U.S. bombing of Afghanistan should cease immediately," they say. They discuss three reasons: "1. The policy of bombing increases the
risk of further terrorism against the United States. 2. The bombing is intensifying a humanitarian nightmare in Afghanistan. 3. There are better
ways to seek justice." All three statements are true of course, but irrelevant, because seeking justice, avoiding humanitarian nightmares, and
reducing the risk of terrorism do not enter into the calculations of US policy makers. Quite the contrary, US policy makers create injustice,
humanitarian nightmares, and terrorism, throughout the world, in pursuit of the imperial objective of making profit, and this has been
thoroughly documented in thousands of scholarly studies. So for Mokhiber and Weissman to talk in this way, and phrase the
problem in this way, exposes their failure to really comprehend the enemy we face, which in turn
prevents them from looking for effective strategies to defeat that enemy, like so many other opponents of the
"war". Hence all the moralizing, the bulk of which is definitely directed at the rulers, not at the ruled. That is,
it is not an attempt to win over the ruled, but an attempt to win over the rulers. [4] It's what I call the "we should" crowd -- all
those people who hope to have a voice in the formation of policy, people whose stances are basically that of
consultants to the ruling class. "We" should do this, "we" shouldn't do that, as if they had anything at all
to say about what our rulers do. This is the normal stance among the bootlicking intelligentsia of course.
But what is it doing among progressives and radicals? Even if their stance is seen to be not exactly that
of consultants, but that of citizens making demands upon their government, what makes them think
that the government ever listens? I think this attitude -- the "we should" attitude -- is rooted in part at least in
the fact that most progressives still believe in nations and governments. They believe that this is "our"
country, and that this is "our" government, or at least should be. So Kevin Danaher says that "we should get control of
the government." They identify themselves as Americans, or Germans, or Mexicans, or Swedes. So they are constantly advising
and making demands that 'their' government should do this and that. If they would reject nationalism
altogether, and states and governments, they could begin to see another way.
 LinkStarting Points

Materialism explains reality focus on the discursive/symbolic obfuscates that

relation and makes oppression inevitable. The affirmatives focus on the
discursive/symbolic reveals the extent to which they have given up on actually
challenging the structures of oppression. But far from being a post-capitalist age in
which all social experience is textually or discursively produced, it is a material world.
Only the alternatives endorse of a materialist method can account for the ways in
which certain classes create and deploy rhetoric to legitimize a capitalist mode of
social relations.
Cloud 1 (Prof of Comm at Texas) [Dana, The Affirmative Masquerade,
p. online:
http://www.acjournal.org/holdings/vol4/iss3/special/cloud.htm]
At the very least, however, it is clear that poststructuralist discourse theories have left behind some of
historical materialisms most valuable conceptual tools for any theoretical and critical practice that aims
at informing practical, oppositional political activity on behalf of historically exploited and
oppressed groups. As Nancy Hartsock (1983, 1999) and many others have argued (see Ebert 1996; Stabile, 1997; Triece, 2000; Wood, 1999 ),
we need to retain concepts such as standpoint epistemology (wherein truth standards are not absolute or universal
but arise from the scholars alignment with the perspectives of particular classes and groups) and fundamental, class-based
interests (as opposed to understanding class as just another discursively-produced identity). We
need extra-discursive reality checks on ideological mystification and economic contextualization of
discursive phenomena. Most importantly, critical scholars bear the obligation to explain the
origins and causes of exploitation and oppression in order better to inform the fight against
them. In poststructuralist discourse theory, the "retreat from class" (Wood, 1999) expresses an unwarranted
pessimism about what can be accomplished in late capitalism with regard to understanding and
transforming system and structure at the level of the economy and the state. It substitutes
meager cultural freedoms for macro-level social transformation even as millions of people
around the world feel the global reach of capitalism more deeply than ever before. At the core of the issue is
a debate across the humanities and social sciences with regard to whether we live in a "new economy," an allegedly
postmodern, information-driven historical moment in which, it is argued, organized mass movements are no longer
effective in making material demands of system and structure (Melucci, 1996). In suggesting that global capitalism has so innovated its strategies that
there is no alternative to its discipline, arguments
proclaiming "a new economy" risk inaccuracy, pessimism,
and conservatism (see Cloud, in press). While a thoroughgoing summary is beyond the scope of this essay, there is a great deal of
evidence against claims that capitalism has entered a new phase of extraordinary innovation,
reach, and scope (see Hirst and Thompson, 1999). Furthermore, both class polarization (see Mishel, Bernstein, and Schmitt,
2001) and the ideological and management strategies that contain class antagonism (see Cloud, 1998;
Parker and Slaughter, 1994) still resemble their pre-postmodern counterparts. A recent report of the Economic Policy
Institute concludes that in the 1990s, inequality between rich and poor in the U.S. (as well as around the
world) continued to grow, in a context of rising worker productivity, a longer work week for
most ordinary Americans, and continued high poverty rates. Even as the real wage of the median CEO rose nearly 63
percent from 1989, to 1999, more than one in four U.S. workers lives at or below the poverty level. Among these workers, women are disproportionately
represented, as are Black and Latino workers. (Notably, unionized workers earn nearly thirty percent more, on average, than non-unionized workers.)
Meanwhile, Disney workers sewing t-shirts and other merchandise in Haiti earn 28 cents an hour. Disney CEO Michael Eisner made nearly six hundred
million dollars in 1999--451,000 times the wage of the workers under his employ (Roesch, 1999). According to United Nations and World Bank sources,
several trans-national corporations have assets larger than several countries combined. Sub-Saharan Africa and the Russian Federation have seen
sharp economic decline, while assets of the worlds top three billionaires exceed the GNP of all of the least-developed countries and their combined
population of 600 million people (Shawki and DAmato, 2000, pp. 7-8).
In this context of a real (and clearly bipolar) class
divide in late capitalist society, the postmodern party is a masquerade ball, in which theories
claiming to offer ways toward emancipation and progressive critical practice in fact encourage
scholars and/as activists to abandon any commitment to crafting oppositional political blocs with
instrumental and perhaps revolutionary potential. Instead, on their arguments, we must recognize agency as an
illusion of humanism and settle for playing with our identities in a mood of irony, excess, and profound
skepticism. Marx and Engels critique of the Young Hegelians applies equally well to the postmodern discursive turn: "They are only
fighting against phrases. They forget, however, that to these phrases they themselves are only
opposing other phrases, and that they are in no way combating the real existing world when they
are merely combating the phrases of this world" (1976/1932, p. 41). Of course, the study of "phrases" is
important to the project of materialist critique in the field of rhetoric. The point, though, is to
explain the connections between phrases on the one hand and economic interests and systems
of oppression and exploitation on the other. Marxist ideology critique, understands that classes,
motivated by class interest, produce rhetorics wittingly and unwittingly, successfully and
unsuccessfully. Those rhetorics are strategically adapted to context and audience. [contd] [cont;d] Yet
Marxist theory is not nave in its understanding of intention or individual agency. Challenging individualist humanism, Marxist ideology critics regard
people as "products of circumstances" (and changed people as products of changed circumstances; Marx, 1972b/1888, p. 144). Within
this
understanding, Marxist ideology critics can describe and evaluate cultural discourses such as that of racism or
sexism as strategic and complex expressions of both their moment in history and of their class basis. Further, this
mode of critique seeks to explain both why and how social reality is fundamentally, systematically oppressive and
exploitative, exploring not only the surface of discourses but also their often-complex and multi-vocal motivations
and consequences. As Burke (1969/1950) notes, Marxism is both a method of rhetorical criticism and a rhetorical formation itself (pp. 109-110).
There is no pretense of neutrality or assumption of transcendent position for the critic. Teresa Ebert (1996) summarizes the purpose of materialist
ideology critique: Materialist critique is a mode of knowing that inquires into what is not said, into the
silences and the suppressed or missing, in order to uncover the concealed operations of power and the socio-
economic relations connecting the myriad details and representations of our lives. It shows that
apparently disconnected zones of culture are in fact materially linked through the highly differentiated, mediated, and
dispersed operation of a systematic logic of exploitation. In sum, materialist critique disrupts what is to
explain how social differences--specifically gender, race, sexuality, and class--have been systematically produced
and continue to operate within regimes of exploitation, so that we can change them. It is the
means for producing transformative knowledges. (p. 7)

The 1ACs focus on discourse is a form of ludic anti-materialism that dematerializes

power by decoupling domination from exploitation and viewing power as a diffuse
practice. This precludes a focus on production as the determinant of social relations.
Zavarzadeh in 95
(Masud, prolific writer and expert on class ideology, post-ality: Marxism and postmodernism, post-ality the (dis)simulations of cybercapitalism)

The matterist theories of consumptionism are all founded upon the ludic assumptions of the
Foucauldian social theory in which "the discursive" is not simply a separate level or an isolated
dimension of the social but, as Laclau puts it, "co-extensive with the social as such" ("Populist Rupture and Discourse" 87).
This is another way of saying that "every social practice is production of meaning" (Laclau 87). Consequently, in the post-al dogma, the
social is constituted not by forces of production and the social relations that they make possible, but
by meaning. In other words, as Fiske puts it, "All the commodities of late capitalism are 'goods to speak with" (Understanding Popular Culture
34). What matters for ending capitalist domination, in other words, is not control of the means of
production but the control of the means of signification. The substitution of "consumption" for
"production" then is really not an epistemological move: it is done not because such a displacement (as it is
claimed) will provide a more accurate understanding of radical structural changes in capitalism but because such a reversal erases

"revolution" from the map of social struggle and puts in its place a discursive difference that can be
negotiated. Politics, in the "consumption paradigm," is a matter of changing representations and
meaningsdiscourseswhich are post-al nodes of power. This view of politics dematerializes power by
decoupling "domination" from "exploitation" and retheorizing power as a diffuse and discursive
practice. The post-al theory of power goes beyond Foucault and is based on the notion that the structures of postal capitalism have become so
layered, complex and abstract that one cannot locate a single fixed center from which power issuesmoreover power is not even "real." Power in
the post-al moment has become so abstract, it is believed, that not even such classic postmodern

theories of power (as diffused discourse) put forth by Foucault can account for it. In Forget Foucault, one of
Baudrillard's main critiques of Foucault is that although Foucault responded to newer forms of
power in his critique of the Marxist notion of power, Foucault's own idea of power has become irrelevant in the
post-al moment since power, for Foucault, is still an actuality: lines of force in his institutional analysis are treated as
realities. However, in the "consumer society," there are, according to Baudrillard, no "real" lines of force but
simply simulations of power: signs that parody power (61). This ludic power is available to all users of signs.
The political conclusion is that not only is capitalism not growing more powerful, but it has, in
fact, become a source of power-assimulation for the people. Power in the post-al moment is simulational, and
every instance of power is said to give rise to "resistance" which leads to a new form of empowerment within the existing relations of
exploitation. Women, people of color, and the queer, in post-al theory, can be empowered without the need to overthrow

the system of exploitation that deploys socially produced differences (gender, sexuality, race ... ) to
legitimate higher and higher ratios of extraction of surplus labor. The displacing of "exploitation" by "domination"
is justified because, as Fiske puts it "The productivity of consumption is detached from wealth or class" (35). In fact, the post-al knowledge industry has
"invented" a whole new interdiscipline called "cultural studies" that provides a new alibi for the regime of profit by shifting social analytics from
"production" to "consumption" on the grounds that as de Certeau puts it consumption is simply a "different kind of production" (The Practice of
Everyday Life 31). Consumption of goods as the deployment of textwares whose "speech potential is not affected by economics" (Fiske 34) is a "festive
energizing of the body" (Baudrillard, Mirror 44). Post-al "Cultural Studies" has increasingly become the mapping of these festivals of the body
(Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies; Angela McRobbie, Postmodernism and Popular Culture; bell hooks, Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations
especially her text "Power to the Pussy"). To
prove its "progressiveness," post-al theory devotes most of its
energies to demonstrating how "Every act of consumption is an act of cultural production, for
consumption is always the production of meaning" (Fiske 35; see the writings of Constance Penley, Michael Berube, Henry
Louis Gates, Jr., John Fiske, Andrew Ross, Stuart Hall, Fredric Jameson, Kobena Mercer and Rachel Bowlby among many others). In post-al cultural
studies, the politics of production is suppressed through various "reading" moves in favor of a poetics of consumption or what de Certeau calls poiesis,
which is the trope of the post-al for "invention." Matterist
theories, as I have critiqued in detail in Theory and its Other, take
consumption as poiesis to be an act of resistance to capitalism. Briefly, the consumer is placed in
a scenario of resistance in which he turns consumption into a practice of "poaching" (de Certeau 31). The consumer, like
"indigenous Indians" who diverted the "spectacular victory of Spanish colonization," by the "uses" they made of it "even when they were subjected"
(32), can
subvert the system of production and power "from within" and "divert" it "without
leaving it" (32). Shoplifting and "moving the price tag from a lower-to a higher-priced item before taking to the cashier" (Fiske 39) are among the
tactics of resistance as is the practice of "two secretaries spending their lunch hour browsing through stores with no intention to buy. They try on
clothes, consume their stolen images in the store mirror and in each other's eyes, turn the place of boutique into their lunch time space, and make
tactical raids upon its strategically placed racks of clothes, shoes, accessories" (Fiske 39). But
the repertoire of resistance is not
exhausted by such acts of transgression. Another "inventive" form of consuming as producing is to intervene into the very
existence of the commodities. Since "whole" jeans are connoted with powers that one opposes, "disfiguring them" becomes a way of resisting those
powers (Fiske 4). The shift from "production" to "consumption" is a shift then from "labor" as the
constitutive practice of human societies to "pleasure" (of using what is produced) as the post-al shaping
force of history. It is done in the name of foregrounding the agency of the subject (who freely chooses and
thus resists a monolithic system), but it is in actuality an alibi to divert the subject away from "making" and
taking control of the means of making toward what de Certeau posits (29-42) as the ultimate form of post-al resistance,
"making do": working within the system and with what the system provides rather than attempting to
transform it. It is an ethics of adjustment rather than revolution; it focuses on ways of making
do with the world as it exists. All post-al theories of "consumption" as the axis of "social analysis" and
"political rallying" and as a marker of what is "most free" and "most truly" ourselves (Robbins, Secular
Vocations 39), are apparatuses of solving the contradictions of the free-market. In their ruthless
competition against their rivals for profit, capitalists produce in an unplanned way. The cycles of
crisis (recessions, for example) are the effects of this unplanned "overproduction." Theories of consump-
tion legitimate a subject who is always consumingregardless of needand in doing so provides a safety
net for the capitalist. Consumptionist theories, in short, are devices to reduce overproduction and in
doing so help to realize the capitalist's profit. Theories of post-industrialism, post-capitalism, post-Fordism,
are theories that use the alibi of radical structural change within capitalism in order to put forth
an argument for the outdatedness of the class-struggle and revolution and instead advocate a
consensus for a permanent bourgeois democracy. <19-22>
 LinkState/Sovereignty

The AFFs state-centered approach to politics is derived from a concept of sovereignty

that no longer existspower is centered entirely in capital, of which the state is
merely another product
Lazzarato 13-sociologist and philosopher, Researcher @ Matisse / CNRS (Paris I University), member of the International College of
Philosophy in Paris [Maurizio, Governmentality in the current crisis, March, 2013, translation by Arianna Bove, lecture delivered in Berlin in
2013, http://www.generation-online.org/p/fp_lazzarato7.htm, DKP]

Governmentality (of which liberals are nothing but one of the subjective modalities) first entailed a composition of this heterogeneity, then a subordination and a
reconfiguration of the state principles in line with the process of capitalist valorisation. One of the most important aspects of this process of subordination is the
formation of a social state, which Ordo-liberals and Carl Schmitt radically theorise in the clearest way. The introduction of the German constitution of the social
state has historical and current significance, in so far as the building process of European institutions and of the Euro seem to refer back to these Ordo-liberal
techniques of development of a new kind of state. Carl Schmitt, the author who was used to promote the autonomy of the political, is
someone who,
on the contrary, demonstrates that the social state signals the irreversible decline of the sovereign state as
Europe had known it. The social state has no longer any political autonomy because it is occupied by the social

and economic forces of capitalism. Now the state is entirely traversed by class struggle, its conflicts and interests,
and for this reason it can no longer represent the general interest, the destiny of a people, the ethics of a
nation. It can no longer be super partes because it is also the object of political economic struggles and conflicts. The
neoliberals do not oppose the state merely to defend the freedom of society; they also work to mould it, to
transform it from top to bottom, so that it can perfectly suit capital and its accumulation. This new sequence in
the transformation of state capitalism is perfectly described in The Birth of Biopolitics through an analysis of the relationship between the Ordo-liberals and the
German state at the time of its re-foundation after the war. Here we simply interpret it differently, in light of Deleuze and Guattaris analysis and what the crisis
allows us to see clearly. The defeat of Bismarcks state in World War One and of the Nazist state in World War Two opens up a new field for the foundation of a
new kind of state, as Carl Schmitt named it. Foucault asks: Given a state that does not exist, how can we get it to exist
on the basis of this non-state space of economic freedom?. Through its permanent genealogy, a
permanent genesis of the state from the economic institution, so that the economy creates public law
(5). This beginning is not spontaneous. Such a state needs to be built with an anchor to the functioning of

the market, and this is the main task of governmentality, according to Ordo-liberalism. The economy, rather than
being other from politics, is its generative force, what leads and legitimates it. The market, rather than
limiting itself to being a self-regulating automatism, is the founding political ground on which the sovereignty of the state

rests. The economy, economic development and economic growth, produces sovereignty; it produces political
sovereignty through the institution and the institutional game that, precisely, make this economy work. (6)

The economy must not be understood in economistic terms, and reduced to a mechanism of production
(factory) and automatic exchange (market), but as a centre or centres of power, or more precisely as a power relation

amongst powers. Foucault does nothing but confirm the analyses Schmitt put forward at the very moment of the constitution of the social state: the
sovereign state, the nation state, the transcendent state, is dead, and in its place is built an economic
state. In contemporary Germany we have what we can say is a radically economic state, taking the word radically in the strict sense, that is to say, its root is
precisely economic(7). And here we can see the emergence of a new concept of sovereignty, where the economy of

the state, political power and the power of capital are indistinguishable. The sovereignty of the new state does

not derive from the people, democracy, or the nation, but from capital and its development, which gives
rise to a radical renewal of the concept of state capitalism. Rather than governing as little as possible, governmentality must aim to build

the social state, an economic state at the service of a valorisation that invests primarily society. Germany and Japan did not witness
the economic miracle because they had to fund an army (the military-industrial complex never prevented capitalist valorisation, on
 they did because they built a state
the contrary, the realisation of surplus value finds fertile ground in these investments); more probably,

that, after WWII, was completely compliant to the exigencies of the market. In contemporary Europe, the German
model prevails and is at the foundation of the Euro. We hear talk of the German economy, but the
economy is inseparable from the state, or, rather, in contemporary capitalism one cannot distinguish the
state and the economy from society. These three realms are transversally invested by capital, and governmentality works towards making
them combine and cohere.

Neoliberal economic power has become hegemonicsovereignty and democracy

are only functions of the economynegative state actions only serve to smooth
neoliberal
Lazzarato 13- sociologist and philosopher, Researcher @ Matisse / CNRS (Paris I University), member of the International College of
Philosophy in Paris [Maurizio, Governmentality in the current crisis, March, 2013, translation by Arianna Bove, lecture delivered in Berlin in
2013, http://www.generation-online.org/p/fp_lazzarato7.htm, DKP] gender modified

The shift from Ordo-liberalism to American neoliberalism would deepen and specify this new organisation of
state capitalism. The process of integration and subordination of the state to economic logic would
continue, and the state would wholly take on its new nature, and become produced by the economy, relinquishing
whole parts of its old sovereignty to it. The two principles of action and legitimation of the state, the
management of the population and the representative system of the formation of popular sovereignty,
become definitively integrated in the economy in so far as they are reshaped as devices of neoliberal
governance. The work of transformation of the representative system carried out since the 1980s, where the
differences between parties of (centre) right and (centre) left become imperceptible, does not seem to suffice in the
crisis. There needs to be [wo]men of capital at the head of the state. Through the action of technical
or elected government, both completely aligned, anyhow, to the capitalist logic, the representative system
is suspended; parties are deprived of all power, and the parliament is reduced to a chamber where the
orders dictated by the institutions of world capitalism are recorded. Angela Merkel summed up the meaning of
this process by invoking, in her own words, a democracy that conforms to the market. The shift from the market (of
goods) of the Ordo-liberals to the markets (of shares) of the neoliberals attests to the hegemony that finance enjoys over other forms of

capital, and in particular over industrial capital. Popular sovereignty is subordinated because the only will that counts is

that of the markets, of the international financial institutions that express, day by day, their political will in real time through
the stock markets and the spread. If the people vote like these great voters, then the vote is legitimate; otherwise there must be a new vote or a way of going
around this democracy that is devoid of all powers. The American version of this process is
even more directly oligarchical and
plutocratic. The Republicans and the Democrats have turned into lobbies of large corporations who compete
to finance their electoral campaigns. Liberalism has turned the democratic maxim one person, one vote, into one

dollar, one vote. The barriers to become a candidate in the American presidential elections are as high as piles of millions of dollars. The new
stage in the subordination of the administration and welfare to the valorisation of capital, inaugurated by the neoliberalism of the 1980s, is not a
minimal state, but a state free from the control of workers, the unemployed, women, the poor. A state
free from the concessions (in terms of rights, social services and legislation) that the social state was forced to grant to the
working class, to the institutions of the working class movement and to the new social movements of the post war era. As the crisis is
demonstrating, the minimal state is wholly compatible with neoliberalism, so long as the appropriation
it carries out through taxes and spending (distributions) favour the rich and corporations, so long as the
sovereign functions of currency management and issuing, and of tax collection, are completely
safeguarded from Keynesian ambitions of full employment, of relative distribution of wealth, and prosperity. Neoliberal economy carries on the
way paved by Ordo-liberalism, to reconfigure
the sovereignty of the state. On the one hand, governmentality must
continue to progressively weaken political sovereignty in favour of the economy, in particular when it comes to
monetary sovereignty, which undergoes a process of privatisation, and tax collection, another royal function of the state that collects on behalf of the creditors
and their supranational institutions. The two functions of the state, issuing money and collecting taxes, are still managed by the
state, but are no longer the expression of the power of the state as representative of the general
interest, as guarantor of the unity of the nation. Instead, they are articulations of the supranational government of capital. On the other hand,
governmentality must stay vigilant and make sure that the economic state guarantees a full and
intensive exercise of sovereignty over the population and society as a modality of political control of
capital over class conflict and the comportment of the governed.
Impact
 FramingEthics

A-Priori ethical obligation to reject capitalism

Zizek & Daly 4-(Slavoj, PhD in Philosophy @ the University of Ljubljana, Senior Research in Sociology @ the University of Ljubljana,
Professor of Philosophy and Psychoanalysis @ the European Graduate School, has been a visiting professor @ University of Chicago, Columbia
University, Princeton, University of London, and NYU, International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, president of the
Society for Theoretical Psychoanalysis, and Glyn, has been a Professor @ Essex University and Manchester University, Conversations with Zizek
page 14-16)

For Zizek it is imperative that we cut through this Gordian knot of postmodern protocol and recognize that our ethico-political
responsibility is to confront the constitutive violence of todays global capitalism and its obscene
naturalization / anonymization of the millions who are subjugated by it throughout the world. Against the standardized positions of
postmodern culture with all its pieties concerning multiculturalist etiquette Zizek is arguing for a politics that might be called radically
incorrect in the sense that it break with these types of positions 7 and focuses instead on the very organizing principles of todays social
For far too long, Marxism has been
reality: the principles of global liberal capitalism. This requires some care and subtlety.
bedeviled by an almost fetishistic economism that has tended towards political morbidity. With the likes
of Hilferding and Gramsci, and more recently Laclau and Mouffee, crucial theoretical advances have been made that
enable the transcendence of all forms of economism. In this new context, however, Zizek argues that the
problem that now presents itself is almost that of the opposite fetish. That is to say, the prohibitive
anxieties surrounding the taboo of economism can function as a way of not engaging with economic
reality and as a way of implicitly accepting the latter as a basic horizon of existence. In an ironic Freudian-
Lacanian twist, the fear of economism can end up reinforcing a de facto economic necessity in respect of
contemporary capitalism (i.e. the initial prohibition conjures up the very thing it fears). This is not to
endorse any kind of retrograde return to economism. Zizeks point is rather that in rejecting economism we should not lose sight of the
systemic power of capital in shaping the lives and destinies of humanity and our very sense of the possible. In particular we should not
overlook Marxs central insight that in order to create a universal global system the forces of capitalism seek to conceal the politico-
discursive violence of its construction through a kind of gentrification of that system. What is persistently denied by neo-liberals such as
Rorty (1989) and Fukuyama (1992) is that the gentrification of global liberal capitalism is one whose universalism fundamentally
reproduces and depends upon a disavowed violence that excludes vast sectors of the worlds populations. In this way, neo-liberal
ideology attempts to naturalize capitalism by presenting its outcomes of winning and losing as if
they were simply a matter of chance and sound judgment in a neutral market place. Capitalism does indeed create a
space for a certain diversity, at least for the central capitalist regions, but it is neither neutral nor ideal and its price in terms of social
exclusion is exorbitant. That is to say, the
human cost in terms of inherent global poverty and degraded life-
chances cannot be calculated within the existing economic rationale and, in consequence, social exclusion
remains mystified and nameless (viz. the patronizing reference to the developing world). And Zizeks point is that this mystification is
magnified through capitalisms profound capacity to ingest its own excesses and negativity: to redirect (or misdirect) social antagonisms
and to absorb them within a culture of differential affirmation. Instead of Bolshevism, the tendency today is towards a kind of political
boutiquism that is readily sustained by postmodern forms of consumerism and lifestyle. Against this Zizekargues for a new
universalism whose primary ethical directive is to confront the fact that our forms of social existence
are founded on exclusion on a global scale. While it is perfectly true that universalism can never become Universal (it will
always require a hegemonic-particular embodiment in order to have any meaning), what is novel about Zizeks universalism is that it
would not attempt to conceal this fact or reduce the status of the abject Other to that of a glitch in
an otherwise sound matrix.
 FramingStructural Violence Outweighs

Prefer the slow violence over big-stick impacts capitalism produces suffering
unrecognizable by traditional yardsticks of measurement
Nixon 11 (Rob Nixon, a Professor of English at University of Wisconsin at Madison; has a PhD from Columbia University Slow Violence
and the Environmentalism of the Poor, Published 2011, pages 65-67)

Looking back at Chernobyl, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Bhopal, Petryna laments how "many persons who
have survived these large-scale technological disasters have been caught in a long-term and vicious
bureaucratic cycle in which they carry the burden of proof of their physical damage while experiencing
the risk of being delegitimated in legal, welfare, and medical institutional contexts."59 Such people, the
illiterate poor above all, are thrust into a labyrinth of self-fashioning as they seek to fit their bodily
stories to the story lines that dangle hope of recognition (possibly, though elusively), even recompense. In so doing, the
poor face the double challenge of invisibility and amnesia: numerically, they may constitute the majority,
but they remain on the margins in terms of visibility and official memory. From an environmental
perspective, this marginality is perpetuated, in part, by what Davis terms "the dialectic of ordinary disaster," whereby a calamity is
incorporated into history and rendered forgettable and ordinary precisely because the burden of risk falls unequally on the
unsheltered poor.60 Such disasters are readily dismissed from memory and policy planning by framing
them as accidental, random, and unforeseeable acts of God, without regard for the precautionary
measures that might have prevented these catastrophes or have mitigated their effects. At stake here is the
role of neoliberal globalization in exacerbating both uneven economic development and the uneven development of official memory. What
we witness is a kind of fatal bigotry that operates through the spatializing of time, by off-loading risk
onto "backward" communities that are barely visible in the corporate media. Contemporary global politics, then,
must be recognized "as a struggle for crude, material dominance, but also (threaded ever closer into that struggle) as a battle for the control
over appearances."61 That battle over spectacle becomes especially decisive for public memoryand for the
foresight with which public policy can motivate and execute precautionary measureswhen it comes to
the attritional casualties claimed, as at Bhopal, by the forces of slow violence. We have seen, in recent
years, some excellent analytical books about the plight of the international urban underclass by Davis,
Jeremy Seabrook, and Jan Breman, among others. However, the kind of visibility such books afford is very different
from the visibility offered by a picaresque novel. For even the most eloquent social scientific accounts of
the underclass, like social scientific accounts of environmental disaster, veer toward the anonymously
collective and the statistical. Such accounts thus tend to be in the same gesture humanizing and
dehumanizing, animating and silencing. The dilemma of how to represent the underclass, the infrahombres, stands at the heart
of the picaresque tradition. Like GraceLand, Chris Abani's superb picaresque novel about ingenious desperation in a Lagos shanty-town,
Animal's People stages a disaggregated irruption of a vivid individual life. Animal, speaking his life story into the Jarnalis's tape recorder, is all
charismatic voice: his street-level testimony does not start from the generalized hungers of the wretched of the earth, but from the devouring
hunger in an individual belly. If the novel gradually enfolds a wider community Animal's peopleit does so by maintaining at its emotional
center Animal, the cracked voiced soloist, who breaks through the gilded imperial veneer of neoliberalism to announce himself in his
disreputable vernacular.62 His is the antivoice to the new, ornate, chivalric discourse of neoliberal "free trade" and "development." Through
Animal's immersed voice, Sinha is able to return to questions that have powered the picaresque from its beginnings. What does it mean to be
reduced to living in subhuman, bestial conditions? What chasms divide and what ties bind the wealthy and the destitute, the human and the
animal? What does it mean, in the fused imperial language of temporal and spatial dismissal, to be written off as "backward"?63 In Animal's
day-to-day meanderings, the impulse for survival trumps the dream of collective justice. Yet through his somatized foreign burden and
through the intrepid, blighted lives around himSinha exhumes from the forces of amnesia not just the memory of a long-ago disaster but the
present and future force of that disaster's embodied, ongoing percolations. The infrahombresthose who must eke out an existence amidst
such percolationsare, the novel insists, also of this earth. Through his invention of the environmental picaresque, Sinha summons to the
imaginative surface of the novel the underclass's underreported lives, redeeming their diverse quirks and hopes and quotidian terrors from
what, almost half a millennium ago, Lazaro recognized as "the sepulcher of oblivion."64
 FramingBody Count

Capitalism causes incalculable deathsnothing can outweighthis is war

Herod 7-Social Activist since 1968, owns an awesome website, Attended Columbia University and spent a year abroad at the University
of Beirut (Lebanon) (James, 2007, Getting Free Pg. 22-23)

We must never forget that we are at war, however, and that we have been for five hundred years. We are involved in class warfare.
This defines our situation historically and sets limits to what we can do. It
would be nice to think of peace, for example, but
this is out of the question. It is excluded as an option by historical conditions. Peace can be achieved only by
destroying capitalism. The casualties from this war, on our side, long ago reached astronomical sums. It is
estimated that thirty million people perished during the first century of the capitalist invasion of the
Americas, including millions of Africans who were worked to death as slaves. Thousands of peasants died in the
great revolts in France and Germany in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. During the enclosures movement in England
and the first wave of industrialization, hundreds of thousands of people died needlessly. African slaves died by the millions (an
estimated fifteen million) during the Atlantic crossing. Hundreds of poor people were hanged in London in the early
nineteenth century to enforce the new property laws. During the Paris uprising of 1871, thirty thousand communards
were slaughtered. Twenty million were lost in Joseph Stalins gulag, and millions more perished during the 1930s when
the Soviet state expropriated the land and forced the collectivization of agriculture an event historically comparable to the enclosures in
England (and thus the Bolsheviks destroyed one of the greatest peasant revolutions of all time). Thousands of militants were
murdered by the German police during the near revolution in Germany and Austria in 1919. Thousands of workers and
peasants were killed during the Spanish Civil War. Adolf Hitler killed ten million people in concentration camps
(including six million Jews in the gas chambers). An estimated two hundred thousand labor leaders, activists, and
citizens have been murdered in Guatemala since the coup engineered by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in 1954.
Thousands were lost in the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. Half a million communists were massacred in Indonesia in
1975. Millions of Vietnamese were killed by French and U.S. capitalists during decades of colonialism
and war. And how many were killed during British capitals subjugation of India, and during capitalist Europes colonization of Asia and
Africa? A major weapon of capitalists has always been to simply murder those who are threatening
their rule. Thousands were killed by the contras and death squads in Nicaragua and El Salvador. Thousands were murdered in Chile by
Augusto Pinochet during his counterrevolution, after the assassination of Salvador Allende. Speaking of assassinations, there is a long list:
Patrice Lumumba, Rosa Luxemburg, Antonio Gramsci (died in prison), Ricardo Flores Magon (died in prison), Che Guevara, Gustav
Landauer, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., Fred Hampton, George Jackson, the Haymarket anarchists, Amilcar Cabral, Steve Biko, Karl
Liebnicht, Nat Turner, and thousands more. Thousands are being murdered every year now in Colombia. Thousands die every
year in the workplace in the United States alone. Eighty thousand die needlessly in hospitals annually in the United
States due to malpractice and negligence. Fifty thousand die each year in automobile accidents in the United States, deaths directly due to
intentional capitalist decisions to scuttle mass transit in favor of an economy based on oil, roads, and cars (and unsafe cars to boot).
Thousands have died in mines since capitalism began. Millions of people are dying right now, every
year, from famines directly attributable to capitalists and from diseases easily prevented but for
capitalists. Nearly all poverty-related deaths are because of capitalists. We cannot begin to estimate
the stunted, wasted, and shortened lives caused by capitalists, not to mention the millions who have
died fighting their stupid little world wars and equally stupid colonial wars. (This enumeration is very far from
complete.) Capitalists (generically speaking) are not merely thieves; they are murderers. Their theft and
murder is on a scale never seen before in history a scale so vast it boggles the mind. Capitalists make
Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Genghis Khan, and Attila the Hun look like boy scouts. This is a terrible
enemy we face.
 FramingTry or Die

Its try or die for the negative

Robinson 14 (William I., professor of sociology, global and international studies, and Latin American studies, @ the University of
California-Santa Barbara, 5/27/14, Global Capitalism: Crisis of Humanity and the Spectre of 21st Century Fascism,
http://www.worldfinancialreview.com/?p=1799, aps)

Most commentators on the contemporary crisis refer to the Great Recession of 2008 and its aftermath. Yet the
causal origins of
global crisis are to be found in over-accumulation and also in contradictions of state power, or in what
Marxists call the internal contradictions of the capitalist system. Moreover, because the system is now global, crisis in any
one place tends to represent crisis for the system as a whole. The system cannot expand because the
marginalisation of a significant portion of humanity from direct productive participation, the downward pressure on
wages and popular consumption worldwide, and the polarisation of income, has reduced the ability of the world market to absorb
world output. At the same time, given the particular configuration of social and class forces and the correlation of these forces worldwide,
national states are hard-pressed to regulate transnational circuits of accumulation and offset the explosive contradictions built into the system.
Is this crisis cyclical, structural, or systemic? Cyclical crises are recurrent to capitalism about once every 10 years and involve recessions that act
as self-correcting mechanisms without any major restructuring of the system. The recessions of the early 1980s, the early 1990s, and of 2001
were cyclical crises. In contrast, the 2008 crisis signaled the slide into astructural crisis. Structural crises reflect deeper contradictions that can
only be resolved by a major restructuring of the system. The structural crisis of the 1970s was resolved through capitalist globalisation. Prior to
that, the structural crisis of the 1930s was resolved through the creation of a new model of redistributive capitalism, and prior to that the
structural crisis of the 1870s resulted in the development of corporate capitalism. A systemic crisis involves the replacement of a system by an
entirely new system or by an outright collapse. A structural crisis opens up the possibility for a systemic crisis. But if it actually snowballs into a
systemic crisis in this case, if it gives way either to capitalism being superseded or to a breakdown of global civilisation is not predetermined
and depends entirely on the response of social and political forces to the crisis and on historical contingencies that are not easy to forecast. This
is an historic moment of extreme uncertainty, in which collective responses from distinct social and class forces to the crisis are in great flux.
Hence my concept of global crisis is broader than financial. There are multiple and mutually constitutive dimensions economic, social,
political, cultural, ideological and ecological, not to mention the existential crisis of our consciousness, values and very being. There is a crisis of
social polarisation, that is, of social reproduction. The system cannot meet the needs or assure the survival of millions of people, perhaps a
majority of humanity. There are crises of state legitimacy and political authority, or of hegemony and domination. National states face spiraling
crises of legitimacy as they fail to meet the social grievances of local working and popular classes experiencing downward mobility,
unemployment, heightened insecurity and greater hardships. The
legitimacy of the system has increasingly been called
into question by millions, perhaps even billions, of people around the world, and is facing expanded
counter-hegemonic challenges. Global elites have been unable counter this erosion of the systems
authority in the face of worldwide pressures for a global moral economy. And a canopy that envelops all these
dimensions is a crisis of sustainability rooted in an ecological holocaust that has already begun, expressed in climate change and the impending
collapse of centralised agricultural systems in several regions of the world, among other indicators. By a crisis of humanity I mean a crisis that is
approaching systemic proportions, threatening the ability of billions of people to survive, and raising the specter of a collapse of world
civilisation and degeneration into a new Dark Ages.2 Global capitalism now couples human and natural history in such a way as to threaten to
bring about what would be the sixth mass extinction in the known history of life on earth. This crisis of humanity shares a number of aspects
with earlier structural crises but there are also several features unique to the present: 1.
The system is fast reaching the
ecological limits of its reproduction. Global capitalism now couples human and natural history in such a
way as to threaten to bring about what would be the sixth mass extinction in the known history of life
on earth. This mass extinction would be caused not by a natural catastrophe such as a meteor impact or
by evolutionary changes such as the end of an ice age but by purposive human activity. According to leading
environmental scientists there are nine planetary boundaries crucial to maintaining an earth system environment in which humans can exist,
four of which are experiencing at this time the onset of irreversible environmental degradation and three of which (climate change, the
nitrogen cycle, and biodiversity loss) are at tipping points, meaning that these processes have already crossed their planetary boundaries. 2.
The magnitude of the means of violence and social control is unprecedented, as is the concentration
of the means of global communication and symbolic production and circulation in the hands of a very
few powerful groups. Computerised wars, drones, bunker-buster bombs, star wars, and so forth, have changed the face of warfare.
Warfare has become normalised and sanitised for those not directly at the receiving end of armed
aggression. At the same time we have arrived at the panoptical surveillance society and the age of thought
control by those who control global flows of communication, images and symbolic production. The world of
Edward Snowden is the world of George Orwell; 1984 has arrived; 3. Capitalism is reaching apparent limits to its
extensive expansion. There are no longer any new territories of significance that can be integrated into
world capitalism, de-ruralisation is now well advanced, and the commodification of the countryside and
of pre- and non-capitalist spaces has intensified, that is, converted in hot-house fashion into spaces of
capital, so that intensive expansion is reaching depths never before seen. Capitalism must continually
expand or collapse. How or where will it now expand? 4. There is the rise of a vast surplus population inhabiting
a planet of slums, alienated from the productive economy, thrown into the margins, and subject to
sophisticated systems of social control and to destruction to a mortal cycle of dispossession-
exploitation-exclusion. This includes prison-industrial and immigrant-detention complexes, omnipresent policing, militarised
gentrification, and so on; 5. There is a disjuncture between a globalising economy and a nation-state based
system of political authority. Transnational state apparatuses are incipient and have not been able to play the role of what social
scientists refer to as a hegemon, or a leading nation-state that has enough power and authority to organise and stabilise the system. The
spread of weapons of mass destruction and the unprecedented militarisation of social life and conflict across the globe makes it hard to
imagine that the system can come under any stable political authority that assures its reproduction. Global Police State How have social and
political forces worldwide responded to crisis? The crisis has resulted in a rapid political polarisation in global society. Both right and left-wing
forces are ascendant. Three responses seem to be in dispute. One is what we could call reformism from above. This elite reformism is aimed
at stabilising the system, at saving the system from itself and from more radical responses from below. Nonetheless, in the years following the
2008 collapse of the global financial system it seems these reformers are unable (or unwilling) to prevail over the power of transnational
financial capital. A second response is popular, grassroots and leftist resistance from below. As social and political conflict escalates around the
world there appears to be a mounting global revolt. While such resistance appears insurgent in the wake of 2008 it is spread very unevenly
across countries and regions and facing many problems and challenges. Yet another response is that I term 21stcentury fascism.5 The ultra-
right is an insurgent force in many countries. In broad strokes, this project seeks to fuse reactionary political power with transnational capital
and to organise a mass base among historically privileged sectors of the global working class such as white workers in the North and middle
layers in the South that are now experiencing heightened insecurity and the specter of downward mobility. It involves militarism, extreme
masculinisation, homophobia, racism and racist mobilisations, including the search for scapegoats, such as immigrant workers and, in the West,
Muslims. Twenty-first century fascism evokes mystifying ideologies, often involving race/culture supremacy and xenophobia, embracing an
idealised and mythical past. Neo-fascist culture normalises and glamorises warfare and social violence, indeed, generates a fascination with
domination that is portrayed even as heroic.
 ImpactDeath Drive

Capitalism results in a death drive that makes structural violence and sacrificial
genocide
Santos 3 (Boaventura de Sousa, director of the Center for Social Studies at the University of Coimbra, EUROZINE, COLLECTIVE SUICIDE OR GLOBALIZATION
FROM BELOW, http://www.eurozine.com/article/2003-03-26-santos-en.html) *Note this card had been modified for suicide metaphors

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[n] 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 be
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 [destruction]*, 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 [destruction]* 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 against Iraq and in the three months after (this is without there being civil war or a nuclear attack); the war will cost 100
billion dollars, - and much more if the costs of reconstruction are added - enough to pay the health costs of the world's poorest countries for
four years.
 ImpactEnvironmental Collapse

Capitalism is quickly approaching an ecological Armageddon a global

environmental crisis manifesting in uncontrollable climate change, ocean acidification,
water shortages, all culminating in planetary extinction
Foster & Clark 12 (John Bellamy Foster, professor of sociology at University of Oregon, and Brett Clark, assistant professor of sociology at the
University of Utah., The Planetary Emergency, Monthly Review, December 2012, vol. 64, issue 7)

Capitalism today is caught in a seemingly endless crisis, with economic stagnation and upheaval circling the
globe.1 But while the world has been fixated on the economic problem, global environmental conditions
have been rapidly worsening, confronting humanity with its ultimate crisis: one of long-term survival.
The common source of both of these crises resides in the process of capital accumulation. Likewise the common
solution is to be sought in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, going beyond the regime of capital.2 It is still possible for humanity to avert what

economist Robert Heilbroner once called ecological Armageddon.3 The means for the creation of a just and sustainable world currently exist, and are to be found lying
hidden in the growing gap between what could be achieved with the resources already available to us, and what the prevailing social order allows us to accomplish. It is this latent potential for

Science today tells us

a quite different human metabolism with nature that offers the master-key to a workable ecological exit strategy. The Approaching Ecological Precipice

that we have a generation at most in which to carry out a radical transformation in our economic
relations, and our relations with the earth, if we want to avoid a major tipping point or point of no
return, after which vast changes in the earths climate will likely be beyond our ability to prevent and will be irreversible.4 At that point it will be impossible
to stop the ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland from continuing to melt, and thus the sea level from
rising by as much as tens of meters.5 Nor will we be able to prevent the Arctic sea ice from vanishing
completely in the summer months, or carbon dioxide and methane from being massively released by the decay of organic matter
currently trapped beneath the permafrostboth of which would represent positive feedbacks dangerously accelerating

climate change. Extreme weather events will become more and more frequent and destructive. An article in the
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences demonstrated that the record-breaking heat wave that hit the Moscow area in 2010 with disastrous effect was made five times more likely, in
the decade ending in that year as compared with earlier decades, due to the warming trend, implying an approximate 80% probability that it would not have occurred without climate
warming. Other instances of extreme weather such as the deadly European heat wave in 2003 and the serious drought in Oklahoma and Texas in 2011, have been shown to be connected to

Hurricane Sandy, which devastated much of New York and New Jersey at the end of October 2012, was impacted and amplified to a
earth warming.

considerable extent by climate change.6 The point of irreversible climate change is usually thought of as a 2C (3.6F) increase in global average temperature,
which has been described as equivalent at the planetary level to the cutting down of the last palm tree on Easter Island. An increase of 2C in global average temperature coincides roughly
with cumulative carbon emissions of around one trillion metric tons. Based on past emissions trends it is predicted by climate scientists at Oxford University that we will hit the one trillion
metric ton mark in 2043, or thirty-one years from now. We could avoid emitting the trillionth metric ton if we were to reduce our carbon emissions beginning immediately by an annual rate of

all the recent

2.4 percent a year.7 To be sure, climate science is not exact enough to pinpoint precisely how much warming will push us past a planetary tipping point.8 But

indications are that if we want to avoid planetary disaster we need to stay considerably below 2C. As a
result, almost all governments have signed on to staying below 2C as a goal at the urging of the UNs Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. More and more, 2C has come to symbolize
the reality of a planetary point of no return. In this sense, all the discussions of what the climate will be like if the world warms to 3C, or all the way to 6C, are relatively meaningless.9 Before
such temperatures are attained, we will have already reached the limits of our ability to control the climate- change process, and we will then be left with the task of adapting to apocalyptic
ecological conditions. Already Arctic sea ice experienced a record melt in the summer of 2012 with some scientists predicting an ice-free Arctic in the summer as early as 20162020. In the
words of James Hansen, the worlds leading climatologist, we are facing a planetary emergencysince if we approach 2C we will have started a process that is out of humanitys
control.10 Given all of this, actually aiming for the one trillion metric ton mark in cumulative carbon emissions, or a 2C increase in global temperature, would be courting long-term disaster.
Some prominent climate analysts have proposed a target of staying below 750 billion cumulative metric tons of carbonestimated to provide a 75 percent chance of staying below the
climate-change tipping point. At current rates of carbon emissions it is calculated that we will reach the 750 billion metric tons mark in 2028, or sixteen years. We could avoid emitting the 750
billionth metric ton if we were to reduce our carbon emissions beginning immediately at an average annual rate of 5.3 percent.11 To get some perspective on this, the Stern Review on The
Economics of Climate Change issued by the British government in 2007, which is generally seen as representing the progressive side of the carbon debate, argued that a reduction in emissions

any thought that the Great

of more than a 1 percent annual rate would generate a severe crisis for the capitalist economy and hence was unthinkable.12 M

Financial Crisis would result in a sharp curtailment of carbon emissions, helping to limit global warming. Carbon
emissions dipped by 1.4 percent in 2009, but this brief decline was more than offset by a record 5.9 percent growth
of carbon emissions in 2010, even as the world economy as a whole continued to stagnate. This rapid increase has been attributed
primarily to the increasing fossil-fuel intensity of the world economy, and to the continued expansion of emerging economies, notably China.13 In an influential article published in Nature

Climate Change, Asymmetric Effects of Economic Decline on CO2 Emissions, Richard York used data for over 150 countries between 1960 and
2008 to demonstrate that carbon dioxide emissions do not decline in the same proportion in an economic
downturn as they increase in an economic upturn. Thus for each 1 percent in the growth of GDP per capita, carbon emissions grew by 0.733 percent,
whereas for each 1 percent drop in GDP, carbon emissions fell by only 0.430 percent. These asymmetric effects can be attributed to built-in infrastructural conditionsfactories, transportation

networks, and homesmeaning that these structures do not disappear during recessions and continue to influence fossil-fuel consumption. It follows of necessity that
a boom-and-bust economic system cannot reduce carbon emissions; that can only be achieved by an
economy that reduces such emissions on a steady basis along with changes in the infrastructure of
production and society in general.14 Indeed, there is reason to believe that there is a strong pull on capitalism in its current monopoly-
finance phase to seek out more fossil-fuel intensive forms of production the more deeply it falls into the stagnation trap, resulting in

repeated attempts to restart the growth engine by, in effect, giving it more gas. According to the Low Carbon Index, the carbon
intensity of world production fell by 0.8 percent in 2009, and by 0.7 percent in 2010. However, in 2011 the carbon intensity of world production rose by 0.6 percent. The economic

recovery, where it has occurred, has been dirty.15 The notion that a stagnant-prone capitalist growth economy (what Herman Daly calls a failed growth economy) would
be even more intensively destructive of the environment was a thesis advanced as early as 1976 by the pioneering Marxist environmental sociologist Charles H. Anderson. As Anderson put it,

as the threat of stagnation mounts, so does the need for throughput in order to maintain tolerable
growth rates.16 The hope of many that peak crude oil production and the end of cheap oil would serve to limit carbon emissions has also proven false. It is clear that in the age of
enhanced worldwide coal production, fracking, and tar sands oil there is no shortage of carbon with which to heat up the planet. Todays known stocks of oil, coal,

and gas reserves are at least five times the planets remaining carbon budget, amounting to 2.8 gigatons
in carbon potential, and the signs are that the capitalist system intends to burn it all.17 As Bill McKibben observed in
relation to these fossil-fuel reserves: Yes, this coal and oil is still technically in the soil. But its already economically aboveground.18 Corporations and governments

count these carbon resources as financial assets, which means they are intended for exploitation. Not too long
ago environmentalists were worried about the world running out of fossil fuels (especially crude oil); now this has been inverted by climate-change concerns. As bad as the

climate crisis is, however, it is important to understand that it is only a part of the larger global ecological
crisissince climate change is merely one among a number of dangerous rifts in planetary boundaries arising
from human transformations of the earth. Ocean acidification, destruction of the ozone layer, species
extinction, the disruption of the nitrogen and phosphorus cycles, growing fresh water shortages, land-
cover change, and chemical pollution all represent global ecological transformations/crises. Already we have
crossed the planetary boundaries (designated by scientists based on departure from Holocene conditions) not only in relation to climate change, but also with
respect to species extinction and the nitrogen cycle. Species extinction is occurring at about a thousand times the background

rate, a phenomenon known as the sixth extinction (referring back to the five previous periods of mass extinctions in earth historythe most recent of which, 65 million years ago,
resulted in the extinction of the dinosaurs). Nitrogen pollution now constitutes a major cause of dead zones in oceans. Other

developing planetary rifts, such as ocean acidification (known as the evil twin of climate change since it is also caused by carbon emissions), and chronic loss of

freshwater supplies, which is driving the global privatization of water, are of growing concern. All of this raises basic questions
of survival: the ultimate crisis confronting humanity.19 The Ultimate Crisis The scale and speed of the emerging
ecological challenge, manifested not only in climate change but also in numerous other planetary rifts, constitutes irrefutable evidence that
the root cause of the environmental problem lies in our socioeconomic system, and particularly in the
dynamic of capital accumulation. Faced with such intractable problems, the response of the dominant interests has
always been that technology, supplemented by market magic and population control, can solve all problems, allowing for unending capital
accumulation and economic growth without undue ecological effects by means of an absolute decoupling of growth from environmental throughput. Thus, when asked about

the problems posed by fossil fuels (including tar sands oil, shale oil and gas, and coal) President Obama responded: All of us are
going to have to work together in an effective way to figure out how we balance the imperative of
economic growth with very real concerns about the effect were having on our planet. And ultimately I
think this can be solved with technology.20 Yet, the dream that technology alone, considered in some abstract sense, can
solve the environmental problem, allowing for unending economic growth without undue ecological effects through an absolute decoupling of one from the other,
is quickly fading.21 Not only are technological solutions limited by the laws of physics, namely the second law of thermodynamics
(which tells us, for example, that energy is partially dissipated upon use), but they are also subject to the laws of capitalism itself.22

Technological change under the present system routinely brings about relative efficiency gains in energy use, reducing the energy and raw
 Yet, this seldom results in absolute decreases in environmental throughput at the
material input per unit of output.

aggregate level; rather the tendency is toward the ever-greater use of energy and materials. This is captured by
the well-known Jevons paradox, named after the nineteenth-century economist William Stanley Jevons. Jevons pointed out that gains in energy efficiency almost invariably increase the
absolute amount of energy used, since such efficiency feeds economic expansion. Jevons highlighted how each new steam engine from Watts famous engine on was more efficient in its use of
coal than the one before, yet the introduction of each improved steam engine nonetheless resulted in a greater absolute use of coal.23
 Impact-Imperialism

Capitalism has created financial institutions whose power exceeds that of states
globalization has brought a new phase of ultra-imperialism
Balibar 13-Professor Emeritus at Universit de Paris X Nanterre, and teaches at Columbia University and Kingston University [tienne,
Politics of the Debt, Project Muse, Postmodern Culture, Volume 23, Number 3, May 2013,
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/postmodern_culture/v023/23.3.balibar.html, DKP]

In the early 20th century, Hilferding, Lenin, Luxemburg and other Marxist
theorists of imperialism proposed a theory linking the
division of the world among hegemonic (powerfully militarized) nation-states to the new domination of
finance capital, whose interests controlled the productive operations of many other capitals through the institution of holdings. The banks and
financial institutions, however, retained a national character (and sometimes a nationalist outlook, particularly based on their
essential link with colonization). But todays finance capitalism has seen the emergence of multinational
private firms whose power exceeds in several respects that of most states, and in any case largely autonomous with
respect to their policies, because they are able to organize a competition between States territories and services (though, it could be argued, with
considerable differences in their resulting dependency). For such neo-capitalism, the world has become largely

deterritorialized, but also fragmented into zones of unequal profitability whose value for investments is continuously
changing. The idea of an ultra-imperialist phase therefore acquires a new relevance. 1.2. It is questionable, however, that
this should lead to the assertionput forth by Antonio Negri, Michael Hardt, and their school, including Christian Marazzi and Lazzarato himselfthat global finance
capitalism has replaced profit with rent, with profit functioning as a new kind of rent based on external control and exploitation. According to this argument, finance
capital uses diverse means of coercion, including wars and insecurity, to extoll surplus-value, without being able to organize productive activities themselves. As a
consequence, productions collective agents, i.e., laborers in the general sense, have become virtually autonomous in their activity.2 Although I admit it is necessary
to link finance capital and the debt economy to a new regime of exploitation, this notion of rent is far from clear in my eyes. It is true that the power of finance
capital no longer consists only in concentrating stocks or shares of industrial or commercial firms; it now also consists in the accumulation of debts arising from
different sources (such as private firms, states, public agencies, and households) that are then transformed into derivative products supplied on the financial
market.3 But the power of finance capital also produces a generalized surplus-value whose sources can be
anywhere in the world (or can become easily delocalized because of advances in transportation systems and digital communication), and makes
possible the extreme mobility of financial products (or fictive capital). Financial capital, in fact, now chooses the places
and methods of exploitation in the first place be it the exploitation of labor or the exploitation of natural resources.
The turning point came when it was no longer industrial capital that calculated its debts towards the
banks as financial costs affecting the rate of profit, but rather finance capital (the so-called financial industry) that continuously
measured the profitability of its investments in any sector, with the ability to decide which industries to enhance and which to suppress
(together with their installations, accumulated experience, and employees).4 The extent to which strategies of exploitation are

directly subjected to the movements and cycles of financial concentration is not only an economic
question; it is also a crucial political question, because banks and financial operators can become omni-
competent only inasmuch as they escape or loosen public regulations. This involves a balance of power
with the State qua incarnation of the public authority. As Franois Chesnais has written: Since the 1990s, big banks have
progressively become transformed into diversified financial groups, which merge the activities of credit and investment (17). This is due to the abolishment of
regulations such as the Glass-Steagall act (part of a more general class of antitrust legislations resulting from New Deal policies in 1933), which had forced banks to
remain specialized in either of the two activities or to divide their capital into separate stocks. Indeed a considerable part of the speculative operations of banks are
now performed on their behalf by hedge funds and other operators of shadow banking that are not controlled at all. The distance between banks, speculative
funds, and stockbrokers has been reduced to a minimum, if not annulled. Correlatively, the
States loss of power to regulate finance has
become, as we will see, the power of finance to control the State and dictate its policies. And finally, a generalized
surplus-value is also linked to genuine changes in civilization that have anthropological significance. This
value is produced not only through the exploitation of a collective labor-force (that nevertheless remains an important
basis of accumulation), but also through the organization of mass consumption on credit (and therefore involves a
multiplication of popular debts). Mass
consumption on credit in fact combines overconsumption with
underconsumption, in the form of an imposition of massive low-quality products and a distortion or
neglect of basic needs (health care being a good example). More than before, this value also accrues from the destructive
exploitation of natural resources, which ranges from the development of bio-capitalism to the discovery of new energy
sources and raw materials, making transformations of the environment a direct responsibility of
finance capital.5 1.3. Global finance capitalism and the debt economy are characterized by the increasing
pressure put on economic units (individual or corporate firms) to yield continuously exceptional rates of profit (or
returns on investments) as far above the average rate of profit as possible. If, as David Harvey in particular has argued, the neo-liberal forms of management that
accompany its hegemony have not proved particularly effective in generating growth, this profitability can be achieved only on the condition that many other
investments are forced to accept losses or low returns. One
can anticipate, from this point of view, the destructive character of
contemporary capitalism with respect to many forms of social life, ranging from the de-industrialization of old regions
of production to a new wave of elimination of non-capitalist economic and social activities such as culture,

education, and security. The normal profits from the financial sphere must now include short-term profits, which cover high financial costs (in
particular the liquidities for repaying debts) and the continuously rising salaries and bonuses of managers (allegedly justified by the greater complexity of the skills
needed for financial operations and the risks of todays business careers). Adding
to the unequal distribution of profits and the
accumulation by dispossession, there must also arise a new wave of proletarization, including the ruin
of the working classes that, over the twentieth century in the core regions of the world-economy, had acquired social rights and social welfare in the
framework of a labor society (socit salariale).6 This arises from permanent shifting between employment and

unemployment (a transition from stable wage labor to precarious jobs) and a continuous intensification of individual labor.
Together they generate high levels of exclusion and the elimination of useless or disposable
humans. And this extremely violent situation (or situation of normalized insecurity) is made acceptable
globally partially through a fierce competition among territories, populations, and anthropological
categories (young versus aged, men versus women, migrants versus the geographically stable). This competition is the concrete face of
the risk society theorized by some sociologists since Ulrich Beck.
 ImpactRace

Capitalism must be the starting pointrace is only an indicator of exploitation, used

to fragment the working class. Race-based criticisms are rooted in the philosophical
traditions of the bourgeois elite
Young 2006 (Robert, Former Associate Professor of English at the University of Alabama. Putting Materialism Back into Race Theory, Red Critique,
http://www.redcritique.org/WinterSpring2006/puttingmaterialismbackintoracetheory.htm)

This essay advances a materialist theory of race. In my view, race oppression dialectically intersects with the
exploitative logic of advanced capitalism, a regime that deploys race in the interest of surplus
accumulation. Thus, race operates at the (economic) base and produces cultural and ideological effects at
the superstructure; in turn, these effectsin very historically specific waysinteract with and ideologically justify the
operations at the economic base.1 In a sense, then, race encodes the totality of contemporary capitalist social relations, which is why race cuts across a range of seemingly disparate social
sites in contemporary U.S. society. For instance, one can mark race difference and its discriminatory effects in such diverse sites as health care, housing/real estate, education, law, the job market, and many other social sites.

, I do not isolate these social sites and view race as a local problem, which
Unlike many commentators who engage race matters, however

would lead to reformist measures along the lines of either legal reform or a cultural-ideological battle to win the hearts and minds of people and thus keep the
existing socioeconomic arrangements intact; instead, I foreground the relationality of these sites within
the exchange mechanism of multinational capitalism. Consequently, l believe, the eradication of race oppression also
requires a totalizing political project: the transformation of existing capitalism-a system that produces
difference (the racial/gender division of labor) and accompanying ideological narratives that justify the resulting social
inequality. Hence, my project articulates a transformative theory of race-a theory that reclaims revolutionary class politics in the interests of contributing to a postracist society. In other words, the transformation from actually
existing capitalism into socialism constitutes the condition of possibility for a postracist society-a society free from racial and all other forms of oppression. By freedom, I do not simply mean a legal or cultural articulation of

I theorize freedom as a material effect of emancipated economic forms. I

individual rights, as proposed by bourgeois race theorists. Instead,

foreground my (materialist) understanding of race as a way to contest contemporary accounts of race, which erase any determinate connection to economics. For instance , humanism and
poststructuralism represent two dominant views on race in the contemporary academy. Even though
they articulate very different theoretical positions, they produce similar ideological effects: the
suppression of economics. They collude in redirecting attention away from the logic of capitalist
exploitation and point us to the cultural questions of sameness (humanism) or difference (poststructuralism). In developing my project, I
critique the ideological assumptions of some exemplary instances of humanist and poststructuralist accounts of race, especially those accounts that also attempt to displace Marxism, and in doing so I foreground

the historically determinate link between race and exploitation. It is this link that forms the core of what I am calling a transformative theory of race. The
transformation of race from a sign of exploitation to one of democratic multiculturalism ultimately requires the transformation of capitalism. Within contemporary black humanist

discourses, the focus remains on the subject. Hence, diverse intellectual inquiries such as Afrocentricism (Molefi Kete Asante), black feminism (Patricia
Hill Collins), and neoconservative culturalism (Shelby Steele) share a philosophical-ideological commitment to the subject. As Asante once put it in a
representative formulation, Afrocentricism presents "the African as subject rather than object" ("Multiculturalism" 270). The preoccupation with the subject highlights Asante's rather conservative humanist philosophical position, a
position powerfully critiqued by Louis Althusser.2 In reifying the subject, Asante abstracts the (African) subject from history and posits an "essentialized" identity within an "essentialized" historical period that is unproblematically
recuperable through an Afrocentric paradigm. Asante takes the essence of the subject for a universal quality, and as Althusser argues, this means that concrete subjects must exist as an absolute given, which implies an empiricism
of the subject (For Marx 218). Furthermore, Althusser continues. If the concrete subject is to be a subject, then each must carry the entire essence in himself or herself, and this implies an idealism of the essence (Pbr Marx 228),
Thus, Asante's philosophical location provides the basis for the transcendental subject: the always already (self) present black subject, from ancient Egypt to the modern black American. What one needs, quite simply, is an

project occludes the historical contradictions

Afrocentric methodology, and this Asante grounds in an idealist metaphysic. As in Eurocentric practices, Asante`s

constitutive of any social formation and, far from advancing a distinctive Afrocentric epistemology,
Asante's humanism puts him squarely within the dominant bourgeois philosophical tradition, and his discourse
produces similar effects. Under the guise of the transcendental subject, class divisions within the black community are suppressed, and this, in

turn, advances the class interests of the elites, whose interests are silently embedded in the project. As in Eurocentric historical narratives, Afrocentricism reclaims the history
of the (African) elites. In this way, Afrocentric discourse is knowledge for middle- and upper-class blacks, since it naturalizes their class privilege; for which other class could afford to see "symbol imperialism" (Asante, Ahofentrif

Bourgeois philosophical assumptions haunt the Afrocentric project and, in

Idea, 56) as the major problem confronting multicultural societies?

the domain of black feminist theory, Patricia Hill Collins provides an instructive example of this intersection. In Black Feminist Thought, Collins posits the "special angle of vision" that black women bring to
the knowledge production process (21), and this "unique angle" (22) provides the "standpoint" for Afrocentric feminism, a feminism that she equates with humanism (37). As in the experiential metaphysics of black women's
standpoint theory, Collins situates Afrocentric feminist epistemology "in the everyday experiences of African-American women" (207). Consequently, Collins suggests that "concrete experience" constitutes a criterion of meaning
(208). But the experiential, the "real," does not equate to the "truth," as Collins implies. Collins rejects the "Eurocentric Masculinist Knowledge Validation Process" for its positivism but, in turn, she offers empiricism as the grounds
for validating experience. Hence, the validity of experiential claims is adjudicated by reference to the experience. Not only is her argument circular, but it also undermines one of her key claims. If race, class, gender, and the
accompanying ideological apparatuses are interlocking systems of oppression, as Collins suggests, then the experiential is not the site for the "true" but rather the site for the articulation of dominant ideology. On what basis, then,
could the experiential provide grounds for a historical understanding of the structures that make experience itself possible as experience? Asante and Collins assume that experience is self-intelligible and, in their discourse, it
 experience is a highly mediated frame of understanding. Though it is true
functions as the limit text of the real. I believe, however, that

that a person of color experiences oppression, this experience is not self-explanatory and, therefore, it
needs to be situated in relation to other social practices. Experience seems local, but it is, like all cultural and political practices, interrelated
to other practices and experiences. Thus, its explanation comes from its "outside." Theory, specifically Marxist
theory, provides an explanation of this outside. Experience does not bespeak the real, but rather it is the site of contradictions and, hence, in need of conceptual elaboration
to break from cultural common sense, which is a conduit for the dominant ideology. It is this outside that has come under attack by black humanist scholars through the invocation of the black transcendental subject. Indeed, the
discourse of the subject operates as an ideological strategy for fetishizing the black experience and, consequently, it positions black subjectivity beyond the reach of Marxism. For example, in The Afrocentric Idea, Asante dismisses
Marxism because it is Eurocentric (8); but are the core concepts of Marxism, such as class and mode of production, relevant only for European social formations? Are African and African American social histories/relations unshaped
by class structures? Asante assumes that class hierarchies do not structure African or the African American social experiences, and this reveals the class politics of Afrocentricity: It makes class invisible. Asante`s assumption, which
erases materialism, enables Asante to offer the idealist formulation that the "word creates reality" (Afroccntric Idea 70). The political translation of such idealism is, not surprisingly, very conservative. Asante directs us away from
critiquing capitalist institutions, in a manner similar to the ideological protocol of the Million Man March, and calls for vigilance against symbolic oppression. As Asante tellingly puts it, "symbol imperialism, rather than institutional
racism, is the major social problem facing multicultural societies" (Afrocentric Idea 56). In the realm of African American philosophy, Howard McGary Jr. also deploys the discourse of the (black) subject to mark the limits of
Marxism. For instance, in a recent interview, McGary offers this humanist rejection of Marxism: "l don't think that the levels of alienation experienced by Black people are rooted primarily in economic relations" (Interview 90). For

idealist assertion that "the sense of alienation experienced by Black

McGary, black alienation exceeds the logic of Marxist theory and thus McGary's

people in the U.S. is also rooted in the whole idea of what it means to be a human being and how that
has been understood" (Interview 90). McGary confuses causes and effects and then misreads Marxism as a
descriptive modality. Marxism is not as concerned with descriptive accounts, the effects, as it is with explanatory accounts; that is, it is
concerned with the cause of social alienation because such an explanatory account acts as a guide for
praxis. Social alienation is a historical effect, and its explanation does not reside in the experience itself;
therefore, it needs explanation and such an explanation emerges from the transpersonal space of
concepts. In theorizing the specificity of black alienation, McGary reveals his contradictory ideological coordinates. First, he argues that black alienation results from cultural "beliefs." Then, he suggests that these
cultural "norms" and "practices" develop from slavery and Jim Crow, which are fundamentally economic relations for the historically specific exploitation of black people. If these cultural norms endogenously emerge from the

economic systems of slavery and Jim Crow, as McGary correctly suggests, then and contrary to McGary's expressed position, black alienation is very much rooted in
economic relations. McGary's desire to place black subjectivity beyond Marxism creates contradictions in his text. McGary asserts that the economic structures of slavery and Jim Crow shape cultural
norms. Thus, in a postslavery, post-Jim Crow era, there would still be an economic structure maintaining contemporary oppressive norms-from McGary's logic this must be the case. McGary remains silent, however, on the
contemporary economic system structuring black alienation: capitalism. Apparently, it is legitimate to foreground and critique the historical connection between economics and alienation but any inquiry into the present-day
connection between economics and alienation is off limits. This other economic structure-capitalism-remains the unsaid in McGary`s discourse, and consequently McGary provides ideological support for capitalism-the exploitative
infrastructure that produces and maintains alienation for blacks as well as for all working people. ln a very revealing moment. a moment that confirms my reading of McGarys procapitalist position, McGary asserts that "it is

possible for African-Americans to combat or overcome this form of alienation described by recent writers without overthrowing capitalism" (Ran: 10), Here, in a most lucid way, we see the ideological
connection between the superstructure (philosophy) and the base (capitalism). Philosophy provides
ideological support for capitalism, and in this instance, we can also see how philosophy carries out class
politics at the level of theory (Althusser, Lenin, 18). McGary points out "that Black people have been used in ways that white
people have not" (Interview 91). McGary's observation may be true, but it does not mean that whites have not also been "used"; yes, whites maybe "used" differently,
but they are still "used" because that is the logic of exploitative regimes-people are "used," that is to say, their labor is commodified and
exchanged for profit. McGary's interview signals what I call an isolationist view. This view disconnects black alienation from other social relations;

hence, it ultimately reifies race and, in doing so, suppresses materialist inquiries into the class logic of
race. That is to say that the meaning of race is not to be found within its own internal dynamics but rather in dialectical relation to and as an ideological justification of the exploitative wage-labor economy. This isolationist
position finds a fuller, and no less problematic, articulation in Charles W. Millss Racial Contract, a text that undermines the possibility for a transracial transformative political project. Mills evinces the ideological assumptions and
consequent politics of the isolationist view in a long endnote to chapter 1. Mills privileges race oppression, but, in doing so, he must suppress other forms of oppression, such as gender and class oppression. Mills acknowledges that
there are gender and class relations within the white population, but he still privileges race, as if the black community is not similarly divided along gender and class lines, Hence, the ideological necessity for Mills to execute a
double move: He must marginalize class difference within the white community and suppress it within the black community. Consequently, Mills removes the possibility of connecting white supremacy, a political-cultural structure,
to its underlying economic base. Mills's empiricist framework mystifies our understanding of race. If "white racial solidarity has overridden class and gender solidarity" (138), as Mills proposes, then what is needed is an explanation
of this racial formation. If race is the "identity around which whites have usually closed ranks" (Mills 138), then why is this the case? Without an explanation, it seems as if white solidarity reflects some kind of metaphysical alliance.
White racial solidarity is a historical articulation that operates to defuse class antagonism within white society, and it is maintained and reproduced through discourses of ideology. The race contract provides whites with an
imaginary resolution of actual social contradictions, which are not caused by blacks but by an exploitative economic structure. The race contract enables whites to scapegoat blacks, and such an ideological operation displaces any
understanding of the exploitative machinery. Hence, the race contract provides a political cover that ensures the ideological reproduction of the conditions of exploitation, and this reproduction further deepens the social
contradictions-the economic position of whites becomes more and more depressed by the very same economic system that they help to ideologically reproduce. Mills points out that the Racial Contract aims at economic
exploitation of black people, and this is certainly the case, but it also exploits all working people-a notion suppressed within Mills`s black nationalist problematic, From Mills`s logic,it seems that all whites (materially) benefit from
the Racial Contract, but if this is true, then how does he account for the class structure within the white community? His argument rests upon glossing over class divisions within American and European communities, and I believe
this signals the theoretical and political limits of his position. The vast majority of white Europeans are workers and therefore subjected to capitalist exploitation through the extraction of surplus value, and this structural
relationship operates irrespective of race/ethnicity/gender/sexuality. In other words, neither whiteness nor the Race Contract places whites outside the logic of exploitation. Indeed, the possibility for transracial collective praxis
emerges in the contradiction between the (ideological) promise of whiteness and the actual oppressed material conditions of most whites. The class blindness in Mills is surprising because he situates his discourse with- in "the best
tradition of oppositional materialist critique" (129), but that tradition foregrounds political economy. Mills undermines his materialism through the silent reinscription of idealism. For example, he argues that "The Racial Contract is
an exploitation contract that creates global European economic domination and national white privilege" (31). Indeed, for Mills "the globally-coded distribution of wealth and poverty has been produced by the Racial Contract"
(37). The "Racial Contract" does not create global European economic domination, this results from control of capital by the international ruling class, but the RacialContract ideologically legitimates the "color-coded distribution of
wealth and poverty." Thus, the race contract effectively naturalizes a racial division of labor, and of course this operation fractures (multiracial) class solidarity. As Cheryl I. Harris insightfully puts it, "It is through the concept of

if whites organize around race, as Mills

whiteness that class-consciousness among white workers is subordinated and attention is diverted from class oppression" (286), Therefore,

asserts, then this is only because of an always already ideological interpellation (to "whiteness") and not a divine
(racial) mandate, even though it has the appearance of obviousness. Indeed, the very aim of ideology is to produce cultural
obviousnesses; hence the project of materialist analysis involves a critique of ideology and not the
reification of common sense. Contrary to Mills, I believe a more effective materialist class analysis foregrounds
exploitative social-economic structures and the consequent class struggle between the international ruling class and the international proletariat. My project situates race in relation
 . Race emerges historically and within specific political-economic coordinates. These
to the international division of labor

coordinates link the logic of race to the logic of capitalist exploitation. In other words, race is implicated
in the historic and ongoing (class) struggle to determine the ratio of surplus value. For me, then, race signals a marking for
exploitation, and this economic assignment, in turn, generates an accompanying ideological machinery to justify and increase that exploitation. Any understanding of this
economic assignment, which represents a historically objective positionality, has been removed from
the contemporary intellectual scene. Race represents not just a cultural or political category, as many critics attest,
but it represents a historic apparatus for the production, maintenance, and legitimation of the
inequalities of wage labor. As in other modes of social difference, like gender and sexuality, race participates in naturalizing asymmetrical
social relations.
 ImpactSubjectivity

The bloodthirsty expansion of capital erases identity and destroys subjectivitythat

outweighs
Wiltgen 5 (Professor of History and Critical Theory at CalArts, [James, "Sado-Moneatrism or Saint Fond Saint Ford", in Consumption in
the Age of Information, ed. Cohen and Rutsky, BERG, 2005, New York, p. 107-10 6 [NN])

How does digital capitalism intertwine with the concept of uncertainty? What key changes have taken place in
the structuring of the world, via the digital and the biotechnological, what forces have emerged or coalesced, and
nally, how do they affect the realm of subjectivity and consumption? Here, Arthur Kroker has transposed McLuhan into
the twenty-rst century, performing an interrogation of what he calls the digital nerve, basically the exteriorization of the human sensorium
into the digital circuitry of contemporary capitalism (Kroker, 2004: 81). This
(in)formation, streamed capitalism, rests not
exclusively onexchange value, nor material goods, but something much more immaterial, a post market, post
biological, post image society where the driving force, the will to will, has ushered in a world
measured by probability. In other words, this variant of capitalism seeks to bind chaos by ever-increasing
strictures, utilizing an axiomatic based on capture and control, with vast circuits of circulation as the
primary digital architecture. This system runs on a densely articulated composition, similar to the earlier addressed concept of
sado-monetarism, based upon extensive feedback loops running between exchange value and abuse value. This assemblage,
however, has multiple levels, and not all are connected to the grid at the same speeds; a number of different times exist within this formation,
including digital time, urban time, quotidian time, transversal time, etc. Spatially, the structure relies not on geography but strategic digital
nodes for the core of the system, and connectivity radiates out from these nodal points (Kroker, 2004: 125). For example, a key site for these
points would be the Net corporation, dened as as a
self-regulating, self- reexive platform of software intelligence providing a
privileged portal into the digital universe (Kroker, 2004: 140). Indeed, his mapping of digital
capitalism has clear parallels with the shifts
Katherine Hayles analyzes, in particular the underlying, driving mechanism whereby information severs itself
from embodiment. Boredom and acquisitiveness become the principle markers of this new form of capitalism, which provides a
rationale, or a new value set for the perpetual oscillation between the two poles, producing an insatiable desire for both objects and a
continuing stream of fresh and intense experience. Perhaps the most densely argued assessment of capitalism, whose obvious parallel would
be Marxs Capital, is the two volumes by Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus. With all the concern over the theoretical
concepts developed in these books, it remains extremely important to understand the analysis as possessing a
fundamental focus on the question of political economy. Capitalism forms, via its structural and affective
matrix, a system capable of unparalleled cruelty and terror, and even though certain indices of well
being have increased, exploitation grows constantly harsher, (and) lack is arranged in the most
scientic ways (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983: 373). Their framework for analysis targets the global, where the deepest law of capitalism sets
limits and then repels those limits, a process well known as the concept of deterrorialization. Capitalism functions, then, by
incessantly increasing the portion of constant capital, a deceptively concise formulation that has
tremendous resonance for the organization of the planet resources continually pour into the
technological and machinic apparatus of capture and control, to the increased exclusion of the human
component (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987: 4667). In other words, it not only thrives on crisis but one of the principle
denitions of capitalism would be to continually induce crisis; nostalgia for a lost Sado-Monetarism or Saint Fond-
Saint Ford 109 time only drives these processes. The planet confronts the fourth danger, the most violent and destructive of
tendencies, characterized as a turning to destruction, abolition pure and simple, the passion of abolition (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987: 229).
Deleuze and Guattari make clear this fourth danger does not translate as a death drive, because for
them desire is always assembled, a creation and a composition; here the task of thinking becomes to
address the processes of composition. The current assemblage, then, has mutated from its original organization of total war,
which has been surpassed toward a form of peace more terrifying still, the peace of Terror or Survival (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987: 433).
Accordingly, the worldwide war machine has entered a post fascist phase, where Clausewitz has been dislocated, and this
war machine now targets the entire world, its peoples and economies. An unspecied enemy becomes the continual
feedback loop for this war machine, which had been originally constituted by states, but which has now
shifted into a planetary, and perhaps interstellar mode, with a seemingly insatiable drive to organize
insecurity, increase machinic enslavement, and produce a peace that technologically frees the
unlimited material process of total war (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987: 467).7 Deleuze has analyzed these tendencies extensively in
his own work, in particular with his dissection of active and reactive forces in his book on Nietzsche but also in his work on Sade and Masoch,
where he points to a type of sadism that seems capable of attempting a perpetually
effective crime, to not only destroy
(pro)creation but to prevent it from ever happening again, a total and perpetual destruction, one produced by
a pervasive odium fati, a hatred of fate that seeks absolute revenge in destroying life and any possible recurrence. (Deleuze, 1989: 37). This
tendency far outstrips what Robert Jay Lifton has described as the Armageddonists, in their more commonly analyzed religious variant and in
what he calls the secular type, both of which see the possibility of a world cleansing, preparing the way for a new world order, be it religious
or otherwise (Lifton, 1987: 59). Embedded within the immanence of capitalism, then, one can nd forces which would make fascism seem like
child precursors, and Hitlers infamous Telegram 71 would be applied to all of existence, perpetually. (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987: 467). One
nal complication in terms of currently emerging subjectivities, the well-known analysis in Anti-Oedipus where capitalism, as basically
driven by a certain fundamental insanity, oscillates between two poles of delirium, one as the
molecular schizophrenic line of escape, and the other as paranoiac molar investment (Deleuze & Guattari,
1983: 315).8 These two markers offer dramatically different possibilities for the issues of subjectivities and
agency, and questions of consumption and the political can be posed within their dense and complex
oscillations.
 ImpactSimonivic ;)

Capitalism causes extinction and destroys value to life

Simonovic 7 [Ljubodrag, Ph.D. in Philosophy; M.A. in Law; author of seven books, 2007, A New World is Possible, Basis of
contemporary critical theory of capitalism.] Gender edited

The final stage of a mortal combat between [hu]mankind and capitalism is in progress. A
specificity of capitalism is that, in contrast to "classical" barbarism (which is of destructive, murderous and plundering nature), it
annihilates life by creating a "new world" a "technical civilization" and an adequate, dehumanized and
denaturalized man. Capitalism has eradicated man from his (natural) environment and has cut off the roots through which he had
drawn life-creating force. Cities are "gardens" of capitalism where degenerated creatures "grow". Dog excrement, gasoline and
sewerage stench, glaring advertisements and police car rotating lights that howl through the night - this is the environment of the
"free world" man. By destroying the natural environment capitalism creates increasingly extreme
climatic conditions in which man is [people are] struggling harder and harder to survive and
creates artificial living conditions accessible solely to the richest layer of population, which cause
definitive degeneration of man [people] as a natural being[s]. "Humanization of life" is being
limited to creation of micro-climatic conditions, of special capitalistic incubators - completely commercialized artificial living
conditions to which degenerated people are appropriate. The most dramatic truth is: capitalism can survive the death of man as a
human and biological being. For capitalism a "traditional man [person]" is merely a temporary means of
its own reproduction. "Consumer-man [person]" represents a transitional phase in the capitalism-
caused process of mutation of man towards the "highest" form of capitalistic man: a robot-man.
"Terminators" and other robotized freaks which are products of the Hollywood entertainment industry which creates a "vision of the
future" degenerated in a capitalist manner, incarnate creative powers, alienated from man, which become vehicles for
destruction of man and life. A new "super race" of robotized humanoids is being created, which should clash with "traditional
mankind", meaning with people capable of loving, thinking, daydreaming, fighting for freedom and survival
- and impose their rule over the Earth. Instead of the new world, the "new man" is being created - who has been reduced to a level of
humanity which cannot jeopardize the ruling order. Science and technique have become the basic lever of capital for the destruction
of the world and the creation of "technical civilization". It is not only about destruction achieved by the use of technical means. It is
about technicization of social institutions, of interpersonal relations, of the human body. Increasing transformation of
nature into a surrogate of "nature", increasing dehumanization of the society and increasing denaturalization of man are
direct consequences of capital's effort, within an increasingly merciless global economic war, to achieve
complete commercialization of both natural and the social environment. The optimism of the
Enlightenment could hardly be unreservedly supported nowadays, the notion of Marx that man imposes on himself only such tasks
as he can solve, particularly the optimism based on the myth of the "omnipotence" of science and technique. The race for profits has
already caused irreparable and still unpredictable damage to both man and his environment. By the creation of "consumer society",
which means through the transition of capitalism into a phase of pure destruction, such a qualitative rise in destruction
of nature and [hu]mankind has been performed that life on the planet is literally facing a
"countdown ". Instead of the "withering away" (Engels) of institutions of the capitalist society, the withering away of life is
taking place.
 ImpactWarming

Capitalism makes meaningful greenhouse gas emission reduction impossible

increased economic growth is incompatible with stopping warming
Smith 2014 [Richard, economic historian, University of California at Los Angeles, Green Capitalism: The God That Failed, http://truth-
out.org/news/item/21060-green-capitalism-the-god-that-failed]

The science, however, sharply contradicts such optimistic scenarios. Stern's Review has been criticized on many grounds, not least for overestimating the mitigation potentials of renewables and underestimating rising future

science clearly demonstrates that perpetual growth is unsustainable. (33) For

demands in a misguided effort to support perpetual growth when the

the cost of reducing greenhouse gas emissions to three-quarters of current levels by

a start, when the Stern Review claims that

2050 will cost around $1 trillion or roughly 1.0 percent of GDP in that year, it says this is to stabilize CO2
emissions at between 500 and 550 ppm (which would cause average temperatures to increase at least 3 degrees Celsius (5.4 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels). (34) But this target is
well above what climate scientists consider safe. In 2008, Hansen and his colleagues at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies wrote that: "If humanity
wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which most life on
earth is adapted, paleoclimate evidence and ongoing climate change suggest that CO2 will need to be
reduced from its current 385 ppm to at most 350ppm."(35) Climate scientists, including the IPCC, have been lobbying governments strenuously to do everything possible to keep CO2 emissions below 400 ppm (with 450
ppm the absolute maximum), while Hansen and his colleagues at NASA have even gone farther and argued for pushing them back below 350 ppm, because climate scientists fear that once if they climb into the 400s, this could set
off all sorts of positive feedback loops, breaching critical tipping points that could accelerate global warming by releasing the huge quantities of methane trapped in the frozen tundra of Siberia and in the methane hydrates in the
bottom of the Arctic Ocean, with catastrophic implications.(36) In his powerful book Storms of My Grandchildren, Hansen, generally considered the world's pre-eminent climate scientist, writes that the speed of climate change,
especially the speed of temperature increase in relation to CO2 ppm levels and the shocking speed of Arctic and Antarctic melting, has taken even climate scientists by surprise such that they have had to their revise worst-case

scientists used to think that we could tolerate warming up to 2 degrees Celsius

scenarios of only a few years ago, in 2007. Whereas

without too much damage, "Unfortunately, what has since become clear is that a 2-degree Celsius global
warming, or even a 1.7 degree warming, is a disaster scenario." Hansen now believes that we have to have "a carbon dioxide target of no more than 350
ppm" to avoid ice sheet disintegration, massive species extinction, loss of mountain glaciers and freshwater supplies, expansion of the subtropics, increasingly extreme forest fires and floods, and destruction of the great
biodiversity of coral reefs. (37) CO2 levels of 400 ppm or 450 ppm will drive temperatures to 2 degrees or 3 degrees warmer than today. That is not a world we want to see: The last time the Earth was 2 or 3 degrees warmer than
today, which means the Middle Pliocene, about three million years ago, it was a rather different planet. Sea level was about 25 meters (80 feet) higher than today. Florida was under water. About a billion people now live at
elevations less than 25 meters. It may take a long time for such large a sea level rise to be completed - but if we are foolish enough to start the planet down that road, ice sheet disintegration likely will continue out of our control.
(38) Given the enormous dangers that such a high target implies, critics have asked why Stern is so reluctant to aim for a safer target? Marxist ecologist John Bellamy Foster and his colleagues suggest that the answer is to be found

a radical mitigation of the problem should not be attempted.

in Stern's economics, not the science: The Stern Review is very explicit, however, that such

The costs to the world economy of ensuring that atmospheric CO stabilized at present levels or
below would be prohibitive, destabilizing capitalism itself. "Paths requiring very rapid emissions cuts," we
are told, "are unlikely to be economically viable. " If global greenhouse gas emissions peaked in 2010, the annual emissions reduction rate necessary to stabilize CO2e at 450 ppm, the
Stern Review suggests, would be 7 percent, with emissions dropping by about 70 percent below 2005 levels by 2050. This is viewed as economically insupportable. (39) Stern asserted, "The world does not have to choose between

averting climate change and promoting growth and development."(40) But if the science is right that we need to keep emissions below 400
ppm, or even get them back below 350 ppm, then more growth is out of the question. Indeed, we would have to make
radically deeper cuts in GDP than even the 7 percent reduction per year that Stern calculates would be necessary just to get us down to 450 ppm. Because, under capitalism, a contraction of

economic output on anything like that scale would mean economic collapse and depression, it is difficult
to see how we can make the reductions in greenhouse gases we have to make to avoid climate
catastrophe unless we abandon capitalism. This is the dilemma. So far most scientists have tended to avoid getting into the contentious economic side of the question. But
with respect to the issue of growth, the science is unequivocal: Never-ending growth means the end of
civilization, if not humanity itself - and in the not-so-distant future. For a summary of the peer-reviewed science on this subject, read a few chapters of
Mark Lynas' harrowing Six Degrees. (41) Global warming is surely the most urgent threat we face, but it is far from the only

driver of global ecological collapse. For even if we switched to clean renewable electric power
tomorrow, this would not stop the overconsumption of forests, fish, minerals, fresh water. It would not
stop pollution or solve the garbage crisis or stop the changes in ocean chemistry. Indeed, the advent of cheap, clean energy could
even accelerate these trends. (42) Numerous credible scientific and environmental researchers back up what the climate

scientists have been telling us, to demonstrate why perpetual growth is the road to collective social
suicide. For example:
Attempts at reform only render us unable to deal with the crisis of warming
capitalism proposes only half-way solutions that preserve the capitalist system but
guarantee ecological destruction down the line.
Foster 07 professor of sociology @ University of Oregon
(John Bellamy, A New War on the Planet?, 8/06/07, http://www.monthlyreview.org/mrzine/foster080607.html)

During the last year the global warming debate has reached a turning point . Due to the media hype
surrounding Al Gore's film An Inconvenient Truth, followed by a new assessment by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change (IPCC), the climate skeptics have suffered a major defeat. Suddenly the
media and the public are
awakening to what the scientific consensus has been saying for two decades on
human-induced climate change and the dangers it poses to the future of life on
earth. Proposed solutions to global warming are popping up everywhere, from the
current biofuels panacea to geoengineering solutions such as pumping sulfur particles into the
stratosphere to shade the earth from the sun to claims that a market in carbon dioxide emissions is the invisible hand that will save
the world. "Let's quit the debate about whether greenhouse gases are caused by mankind or by natural causes," President Bush said
It is characteristic of the
in a hastily organized retreat. "Let's just focus on technologies that deal with the issue."
magic-bullet solutions that now pervade the media that they promise to defend our
current way of life while remaining virtually cost free. Despite the fact that economists have long
insisted that there is no such thing as a free lunch, we are now being told on every side -- even by Gore --
that where global warming is concerned there is a free lunch after all. We can
have our cars, our industrial waste, our endlessly expanding commodity economy,
and climate stability too. Even the IPCC, in its policy proposals, tells us that climate change can be stopped on the
cheap -- if only the magic of technology and markets is applied. The goal is clearly to save the planet -- but
only if capitalism can be fully preserved at the same time. Hence, the most
prominent proposals are shaped by the fact that they are designed to fit within the
capitalist box. There can be no disruption of existing class or power relations. All
proposed solutions must be compatible with the treadmill of production. Even
progressive thinkers such as George Monbiot in his new book Heat: How to Stop the Planet Burning have gotten into the act.
Monbiot pointedly tells us that the rich countries can solve the global warming problem without becoming "Third World" states or
shaking up "middle-class" life -- or indeed interfering with the distribution of riches at all. Politics is carefully excluded from his
analysis, which instead focuses on such things as more buses, better insulated homes, virtual work, virtual shopping and improved
cement. Corporations, we are led to believe, are part of the solution, not part of the
problem. Less progressive, more technocratic thinkers look for substitutes for
hydrocarbons, such as biofuels or even nuclear power, or they talk of floating white plastic islands
in the oceans (a geoengineering solution to replace the lost reflectivity due to melting ice). The dominant answers to
global warming thus amount to what might be thought of as a new declaration of
war on nature. If nature has "struck back" at capitalism's degradation of the
environment in the form of climate change, the answer is to unleash a more
powerful array of technological and market innovations so that the system can
continue to expand as before. As Hannah Arendt, one of the leading political philosophers of the 20th century,
explained: "Under modern [capitalist] conditions not destruction but conservation spells ruin." Hence, capitalism, faced
by natural obstacles, sees no alternative to a new assault on nature, employing
new, high-tech armaments. The ecological irrationality of this response is evident
in the tendency to dissociate global warming from the global environmental crisis
as a whole, which includes such problems as species extinction, destruction of the
oceans, tropical deforestation, desertification, toxic wastes, etc. It is then possible, from this
narrow perspective, to promote biofuels as a partial solution to global warming -- without acknowledging that this will accelerate
world hunger. Or it is thought pragmatic to dump iron filings in the ocean (the so-called Geritol solution to global warming) in order
to grow phytoplankton and increase the carbon absorbing capacity of the ocean -- without connecting this at all to the current
oceanic catastrophe. The fact that the biosphere is one interconnected whole is downplayed in favor of mere economic expediency.
What all of this suggests is that a real solution to the planetary environmental
crisis cannot be accomplished simply through new technologies or through
turning nature into a market. It is necessary to go to the root of the problem by
addressing the social relations of production. We must recognize that today's ecological
problems are related to a system of global inequality that demands ecological
destruction as a necessary condition of its existence. New social and democratic solutions need to be
developed, rooted in human community and sustainability, embodying principles of conservation that are essential to life. But
this means stepping outside the capitalist box and making peace with the planet --
and with other human beings.
 ImpactTerrorism

Capitalism is the root cause of terror

Slater 6 [Philip, author of the bestseller, The Pursuit of Loneliness, and nine other nonfiction books, The Root Causes of Terrorism and Why No One Wants to
End Them, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/philip-slater/the-root-causes-of-terror_b_32466.html]

For of all capitalist enterprises, the extractive industries are probably the most deserving of the abuse
heaped on them over the years. The possessors of the earth's treasures believe, apparently, that the
luck, wealth, or political corruption that allowed them to own land containing such riches is a sign of
divine favor, while the poverty of those around them indicates celestial disgust. Terrorists are people
who have lost hope--hope for the possibility of peacefully creating a better world. They may be middle-class and educated, as
many terrorist leaders are, but their despair is one of empathy for the plight of their people as a whole. The root

causes of terrorism are pathological inequalities in wealth--not just in Saudi Arabia but all over the Third World. Even in
our own country Republican policies have in recent decades created inequalities so extreme that while a
few have literally more money than they can possibly use, the vast majority are struggling to get by. A
society that impoverishes most of its population in order to enrich a few neurotically greedy individuals
is a sick society. As Jared Diamond has shown, societies in which a few plunder the environment at the expense of the
many are headed for collapse. Fundamentalist religions and radical ideologies are the common refuge of
people without hope. Christianity has played this role for centuries. The rich encourage the poor to
accept the misery of this world as a passport to heaven, despite the fact that according to Jesus they
don't have a prayer of getting in themselves. This isn't really surprising. The rich wouldn't be caught dead in a place
where they let poor people in. Islamic fundamentalism is the latest drug being offered the poor and desperate. It has the added appeal that you can not only get into
heaven but also take vengeance at the same time. Terrorism will never end until caps are placed on inequality. At this point Republicans

usually start screaming about communism and destroying 'freedom'. But no one's talking about ending capitalism. Capitalism is here to stay, but like any

system it will self-destruct without limits. Pure greed is not a sufficient basis for a viable social system, and a pure free market system will self-destruct as
surely as pure communism. As Lewis Mumford pointed out years ago, no system can survive without contradictions, because humans

are much more complex than their ideologies. A completely pure, unrestrained free market, for example, would end by poisoning its consumers, starving
its workers to death, exhausting all the earth's resources, and turning into a single giant monopoly that no longer had anything to sell, no one to make its product, and no one who could afford
to buy it--perhaps no one even alive on an uninhabitable planet. Government regulation exists not only to protect the consumer, the worker, and the environment, it exists also to protect
capitalism from destroying itself. For there is absolutely nothing in free market ideology that provides for long-range thinking. Capitalism is the most dynamic and powerful force in the world
today. The only political question is what to do with its tendency to get into positive feedback loops and self-destruct. Republicans tend to act in ways to heighten this tendency, to feed those

Placing caps on wealth through taxation or

loops and help it along the path to self-destruction. Democrats tend to act to curb its self-destructiveness.

other means--an idea that provokes screams of horror from Republicans--is absolutely necessary for our
survival. Not because it's obscene for some people to have incomes of a million dollars a day while millions of equally able--but less neurotic--people are
a single hospital stay away from homelessness. Not because excess wealth can't buy anything except power--
the ability to corrupt the political process and destroy democracy, as it already largely has in the United
States. But because it tends to stifle creativity, suck money from the future (the education of children) to the present (short-
term profits for the already wealthy), and decimate the middle class. In other words, to kill hope.
Alternative
 2NC Solvency Ext

Capitalism causes inevitable crises, inequality, and dehumanizationthe alternative is

a class-based critique of the systempedagogical spaces are the crucial staging
ground for keeping socialism on the horizon
McLaren 2004, Distinguished Fellow Critical Studies @ Chapman U and UCLA urban schooling prof,
and Scatamburlo-DAnnibale, associate professor of Communication U Windsor (Peter and Valerie,
Class Dismissed? Historical materialism and the politics of difference, Educational Philosophy and
Theory Vol. 36, Issue 2, p. 183-199)
For well over two decades we have witnessed the jubilant liberal and conservative pronouncements of the demise of socialism. Concomitantly,
history's presumed failure to defang existing capitalist relations has been read by many self-identified radicals as
an advertisement for capitalism's inevitability. As a result, the chorus refrain There Is No Alternative, sung by
liberals and conservatives, has been buttressed by the symphony of post-Marxist voices recommending that we
give socialism a decent burial and move on. Within this context, to speak of the promise of Marx and socialism may appear
anachronistic, even nave, especially since the post-al intellectual vanguard has presumably demonstrated the folly of doing so. Yet we
stubbornly believe that the chants of T.I.N.A. must be combated for they offer as a fait accompli, something which progressive Leftists
should refuse to acceptnamely the triumph of capitalism and its political bedfellow neo-liberalism, which have
worked together to naturalize suffering, undermine collective struggle, and obliterate hope. We concur with
Amin (1998), who claims that such chants must be defied and revealed as absurd and criminal, and who puts the challenge
we face in no uncertain terms: humanity may let itself be led by capitalism's logic to a fate of collective suicide
or it may pave the way for an alternative humanist project of global socialism. The grosteque conditions
that inspired Marx to pen his original critique of capitalism are present and flourishing. The inequalities of wealth and the gross
imbalances of power that exist today are leading to abuses that exceed those encountered in Marx's day (Greider,
1998, p. 39). Global capitalism has paved the way for the obscene concentration of wealth in fewer and fewer hands and
created a world increasingly divided between those who enjoy opulent affluence and those who languish in
dehumanizing conditions and economic misery. In every corner of the globe, we are witnessing social disintegration as
revealed by a rise in abject poverty and inequality. At the current historical juncture, the combined assets of the 225 richest people
is roughly equal to the annual income of the poorest 47 percent of the world's population, while the combined assets of the three richest
people exceed the combined GDP of the 48 poorest nations (CCPA, 2002, p. 3). Approximately 2.8 billion peoplealmost half of the
world's populationstruggle in desperation to live on less than two dollars a day (McQuaig, 2001, p. 27). As many as
250 million children are wage slaves and there are over a billion workers who are either un- or under-
employed. These are the concrete realities of our timerealities that require a vigorous class analysis, an
unrelenting critique of capitalism and an oppositional politics capable of confronting what Ahmad (1998, p. 2)
refers to as capitalist universality. They are realities that require something more than that which is offered by the prophets of
difference and post-Marxists who would have us relegate socialism to the scrapheap of history and mummify Marxism along with Lenin's
corpse. Never before has a Marxian analysis of capitalism and class rule been so desperately needed. That is not to
say that everything Marx said or anticipated has come true, for that is clearly not the case. Many critiques of Marx focus on his
strategy for moving toward socialism, and with ample justification; nonetheless Marx did provide us
with fundamental insights into class society that have held true to this day. Marx's enduring relevance lies in his
indictment of capitalism which continues to wreak havoc in the lives of most. While capitalism's cheerleaders have attempted to hide its sordid
underbelly, Marx's description of capitalism as the sorcerer's dark power is even more apt in light of contemporary historical and economic
conditions. Rather
than jettisoning Marx, decentering the role of capitalism, and discrediting class analysis,
radical educators must continue to engage Marx's oeuvre and extrapolate from it that which is useful
pedagogically, theoretically, and, most importantly, politically in light of the challenges that confront us. The urgency
which animates Amin's call for a collective socialist vision necessitates, as we have argued, moving beyond the
particularism and liberal pluralism that informs the politics of difference. It also requires challenging the
questionable assumptions that have come to constitute the core of contemporary radical theory,
pedagogy and politics. In terms of effecting change, what is needed is a cogent understanding of the
systemic nature of exploitation and oppression based on the precepts of a radical political economy
approach (outlined above) and one that incorporates Marx's notion of unity in difference in which people share widely common material
interests. Such an understanding extends far beyond the realm of theory, for the manner in which we choose to
interpret and explore the social world, the concepts and frameworks we use to express our sociopolitical
understandings, are more than just abstract categories. They imply intentions, organizational practices,
and political agendas. Identifying class analysis as the basis for our understandings and class struggle as the basis for
political transformation implies something quite different than constructing a sense of political agency around
issues of race, ethnicity, gender, etc. Contrary to Shakespeare's assertion that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, it
should be clear that this is not the case in political matters. Rather, in politics the essence of the flower lies in the name by
which it is called (Bannerji, 2000, p. 41). The task for progressives today is to seize the moment and plant the
seeds for a political agenda that is grounded in historical possibilities and informed by a vision committed to
overcoming exploitative conditions. These seeds, we would argue, must be derived from the tree of radical political
economy. For the vast majority of people todaypeople of all racial classifications or identities, all genders and
sexual orientationsthe common frame of reference arcing across difference, the concerns and aspirations that are
most widely shared are those that are rooted in the common experience of everyday life shaped and constrained by
political economy (Reed, 2000, p. xxvii). While post-Marxist advocates of the politics of difference suggest
that such a stance is outdated, we would argue that the categories which they have employed to analyze the
social are now losing their usefulness, particularly in light of actual contemporary social movements. All over the globe,
there are large anti-capitalist movements afoot. In February 2002, chants of Another World Is Possible became the theme of
protests in Porto Allegre. It seems that those people struggling in the streets havent read about T.I.N.A., the end of
grand narratives of emancipation, or the decentering of capitalism. It seems as though the struggle for basic survival
and some semblance of human dignity in the mean streets of the dystopian metropoles doesnt permit much time or opportunity to read the
heady proclamations emanating from seminar rooms. As E. P. Thompson (1978, p. 11) once remarked, sometimes experience walks in without
knocking at the door, and announces deaths, crises of subsistence, trench warfare, unemployment, inflation, genocide. This, of course, does
not mean that socialism will inevitably come about, yet a sense of its nascent promise animates current
social movements. Indeed, noted historian Howard Zinn (2000, p. 20) recently pointed out that after years of single-issue
organizing (i.e. the politics of difference), the WTO and other anti-corporate capitalist protests signaled a turning
point in the history of movements of recent decades, for it was the issue of class that more than anything bound
everyone together. History, to paraphrase Thompson (1978, p. 25) doesnt seem to be following Theory's script. Our vision is informed
by Marx's historical materialism and his revolutionary socialist humanism, which must not be conflated with liberal humanism. For left politics
and pedagogy, a
socialist humanist vision remains crucial, whose fundamental features include the creative
potential of people to challenge collectively the circumstances that they inherit. This variant of humanism seeks
to give expression to the pain, sorrow and degradation of the oppressed, those who labor under the ominous and ghastly cloak of globalized
capital. It calls for the transformation of those conditions that have prevented the bulk of humankind from fulfilling its potential. It
vests its
hope for change in the development of critical consciousness and social agents who make history, although
not always in conditions of their choosing. The political goal of socialist humanism is, however, not a resting in difference but rather the
emancipation of difference at the level of human mutuality and reciprocity. This would be a step forward for the discovery or creation of our
real differences which can only in the end be explored in reciprocal ways (Eagleton, 1996, p. 120). Above all else, the
enduring
relevance of a radical socialist pedagogy and politics is the centrality it accords to the interrogation of
capitalism. We can no longer afford to remain indifferent to the horror and savagery committed by capitalist's barbaric machinations. We
need to recognize that capitalist democracy is unrescuably contradictory in its own self-constitution.
Capitalism and democracy cannot be translated into one another without profound efforts at manufacturing empty idealism. Committed
Leftists must unrelentingly cultivate a democratic socialist vision that refuses to forget the wretched of the earth, the
children of the damned and the victims of the culture of silencea task which requires more than abstruse convolutions and striking ironic
poses in the agnostic arena of signifying practices. Leftists must illuminate the little shops of horror that lurk beneath globalizations shiny
faade; they must challenge
the true evils that are manifest in the tentacles of global capitalism's reach. And, more than
this, Leftists must search for the cracks in the edifice of globalized capitalism and shine light on those
fissures that give birth to alternatives. Socialism today, undoubtedly, runs against the grain of received
wisdom, but its vision of a vastly improved and freer arrangement of social relations beckons on the
horizon. Its unwritten text is nascent in the present even as it exists among the fragments of history and the shards of
distant memories. Its potential remains untapped and its promise needs to be redeemed.

Solutions animated by capital lock in serial policy failure by playing into internal
contradictions a complete break is key to resolve the metabolic rift
Zhang 2013 (Yonghong, associate professor of sociology at Sun Yat-sen University, People's Republic of China "Capitalism and Ecological Crisis." Journal of Sustainable Society 2.3
(2013): 69-73)

The global reach of capital is creating an ecological crisis all over the world. But, capitalism can't solve
this problem by itself. Just as Brett Clark and Richard York (2008) clearly revealed: A fundamental structural crisis cannot be
remedied within the operations of the system. This is because that capital shows no signs of slowing down, given its rapacious character. The current
ecological crisis has been in the making for a long time and the most serious effects of continuing with business as usual will not fall on present but rather future generations.

Capitalism is incapable of regulating its social metabolism with nature in an environmentally

sustainable manner. Its very operations violate the laws of restitution and metabolic restoration. The
solution to each environmental problem generates new environmental problems (while often not curtailing the old ones). One
crisis follows another, in an endless succession of failure, stemming from the internal contradictions of
the system. In this case, if we are to solve our environmental crises, we need to go to the root of the problem: the social relation
of capital itself, given that this social metabolic order undermines the vital conditions of existence. Brett Clark and Richard York, then, came to a conclusion that to
resolve the ecological crisis requires a complete break with the logic of capital and the social
metabolic order it creates. They are not alone in this conclusion. Professor Fred Magdoff (2013) stated more categorically that capitalism, the system of the
accumulation of capital, must gosooner rather than later. He further pointed out: just radically transcending a system that harms the environment and many of the worlds people is not
enough. In its place people must create a socio-economic system that has as its very purpose the meeting of everyones basic material and nonmaterial needs, which, of course, includes
healthy local, regional, and global ecosystems. This system, without doubt, will has the creation of a harmonious civilization as its goal; it will get rid of all the troubles and problems capitalism
causes. In Fred Magdoff's opinion (2012), the harmonious civilization exactly consists in socialism, in which economy and politics are under social control. Its characteristic of this civilization
and socialism that communities strive for self regulation by meaningful democratic processes; self sufficiency for critical life needs; economic equality in which everyone has their basic human
material needsbut no moremet; and application of ecological approaches to production, living, and transportation. In construction of a harmonious civilization, to correctly handle the

One of the
relationship between [hu]man[s] and nature is closely related to human survival and development, and also involves the country's sustainable economic development.

main problems of the highly developed western countries is that they can't effectively handle the conflict between the
boundless demands of [hu]man[s] and the environmental carrying capacity and the finiteness of natural resources. Only by
properly handling the relationship between[hu]man[s]and nature, and scientific development and planned control, could we find a way out for the future. This, indeed, is the very reason why

Contemporary ecological crisis has caused a series of

humans take socialism as the necessary and inevitable alternative to capitalism. Conclusion

serious global problems: global warming, ozone depletion, acid rain, water shortages, soil degradation, solid waste pollution, species extinction, loss of forests and so on; All
these problems have threatened human survival and development. The harsh reality forces people to re-examine the relationship

between [hu]man[s] and nature, rethink the behavior of human beings, to explore the root causes of the
ecological crisis. The appearance of the ecological crisis is not only linked with natural relations in practice, but also with social
relations. In the primitive communist society, people lived in the original relationship of equality and there was no interest differentiation. People worked together and enjoyed things
together. In this social relationship, antihuman phenomenon generally didn't occur in nature, so there existed no ecological crisis. With the emergence of private ownership, the society split up
into a variety of social classes, strata and groups, and each person could do anything for his own interests, thus inevitably strengthening nature's anti-human tendency and leading to ecological

By its very nature, capitalism is an expansive system, so capitalism's

crisis. This situation has developed to its peak under capitalism.

pursuit of capital and value accumulation is limitless. To eliminate the ecological crisis, human beings
must try to eliminate private ownership, class divisions, and interest antagonism. In such a social relationship, all the
people's activities will be aimed at human free and all around development, resulting in a harmonious relationship between [hu]man[s] and nature, and in the long run, the ecological crisis will
be controlled and overcome.
 AlternativeEgalitarian Terror

The alternative is to refuse the affirmative in favor of an endorsement of egalitarian

terror.

There is no freedom under capitalism without mounting a challenge to the totality of

system. We must prioritize a universal rejection of global capitalismanything else
only reproduces the basic coordinates of the current socio-political order.
Daly 10 [Glyn, Senior Lecturer in Politics in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at University College, Northampton. Causes for
Concern: ieks Politics of Loving Terror International Journal of iek Studies Vol 4, No 2
http://www.zizekstudies.org/index.php/ijzs/article/view/259/337]

De-politicized Radicalism - Whats class got to do with it? In his debate with Laclau and Butler, iek draws attention to how todays culture of radicalism gives rise
to a basic impasse: either we must blind ourselves to the necessary ultimate failure of our endeavour regress to naivety, and let ourselves be caught up in the
enthusiasm or we must adopt a stance of cynical distance, participating in the game while being fully aware that the result will be disappointing? (iek in Butler et
al, 2000: 316-317). In Defense can be seen as a full-blooded attempt to transcend, or perhaps break out of, this impasse. In this undertaking, iek addresses the
ways in which the contemporary Left imaginary is increasingly combined with the themes of multi-
culturalism and radical democracy. The issue of liberal democracy is central. For radical democrats, the main priority is
to deepen and sharpen the principles of the liberal-democratic imagination as a way of taking on not
only capitalist repression but anti-democratic power structures in general. iek takes the opposite view, arguing that
we should resist such an imagination precisely on the grounds that it tends to reproduce a neutralist, or
de facto, end of history with infinite potential; a kind of last conceptual revolution for the last
(democratic) men and women. The problem is that in seeking to inscribe historicity, the radicalisation of liberal-democracy
becomes forgetful of its own position within the historical conjuncture. From a iekian viewpoint, one of the problems with
radical democracy is that it does not provide a systematic account of todays symptoms: i.e. of those who
are in a position to hold up the mirror to cosmopolitan capitalism. In arguing for equivalences to be
established between all disaffected groups within the terms of the democratic imaginary, the propensity
exists for radical democracy to become removed from the more basic and constitutive forms of
exclusion and to become increasingly entangled in endless cycles of socio-political networking. On that
basis political subjectivity would become prone to hyperactivity - endlessly fascinated by its own
positions, continually refining itself and so forth but incapable of acting as such. So the danger exists that
radical democracy could devolve into a rather empty proceduralism: regulating the provisional character
of all political engagement, repeatedly marking the empty place of the universal, always reinforcing its
own prohibition concerning the privileging of one democratic struggle over another and so on. In addition, the
reticence over prioritising certain political struggles and identifying concrete objectives other than a general flourishing of democratic culture arguably renders
this perspective aloof and somewhat beautiful soul in outlook. The radical democratic process of articulating chains of equivalence could become an end-in-itself
a process of enchainment with little real (or Real) political momentum. As in Coleridges famous characterisation of Hamlet, there is a problem of continually
resolving to do, yet doing nothing but resolve. (reference here) This hyperactive inactivity is increasingly a feature of our culture. The website Facebook, for
example, operates a kind of self-driving centrifuge. People sign up to it because others are already signed up; it thereby becomes a medium for communication, self-
expression, flirtation, competition and so on. More than a mere cyber diary, Facebook becomes the means for playing out ones life in the collective eye
accumulating more and more friends, joining more and more (often eccentric) groups, recording thoughts and observations in real time and so on. Facebook
provides a space for expressing lifes rich tapestry of differences in the same way. This certainly does not mean that we should reject cyber-space as a potential site
of resistance indeed it is through the sharing of music, information, technology, supplies of every kind in cyber-space that a new sense of the commons might be
reinvented. The point is rather that we should be alive to the ways in which participation can be manipulated towards particular outcomes. With Facebook there
has been a rapid increase in commercialisation and there are plans to introduce fees. Moreover, if the level of participation for person x is no t deemed to be
satisfactory then Facebook informs their contacts that x is only 42% active and advise the contacts that they should write something on xs wall, suggest friends for
them, write them an email and so on. This implicit injunction to participate in an inconsequential manner is inscribed further in todays ethical forms of
consumption. Not only should we buy appropriate Green/Fair Trade goods, but increasingly there is the expectation that the act of purchasing should
simultaneously involve charity (online donations, supermarket tokens to express your preferred charitable organisation etc.). In this way consumption and ethical
participation become symbiotic aspects of, are already taken care of in, todays collective conscience. This also applies to democracy and its central showpiece,
elections. With increasing levels of apathy and non-voting, there is a real risk that elections will become reduced to the status of an irrelevant sham and, more
importantly, that the mythical hold of democracy will start to disintegrate. It is in this context that we can understand the growing authoritarian tendency in
democracies, across the globe, to embrace various forms of compulsory voting. On the one hand, this can be seen as a way of attempting to neutralize populist
excesses (especially in Latin America where compulsory voting is widespread) by eradicating the distinction between demos (conceived as voters) and the people.
On the other hand, it can be seen as something which gives a nightmarish twist to the Rousseauian idea of forcing people to be free: that is to say, compulsory
voting (forcing people to participate in political freedom) becomes a way of trying to prevent people from directing their critical energies in more challenging and
subversive directions.. As with the myth of market freedom, the contemporary myth of democratic freedom is something which is beginning to require more and
Todays political weapon of collective discipline is not so much the Foucauldian one (on
more political intervention to sustain it.

a straightforward reading) of state prohibition/repression but precisely participation. It is (acceptable)

participatory critique and subversion that sustains the dynamic life of a totality. It is in this context that
we can make sense of ieks reference to the Melville character, Bartleby, and his I would prefer not
to. Thus what is being is affirmed is a strategic form of non-intervention and a refusal to participate in what
iek calls the rumspringa of resistance: that is, a refusal of all the forms of resisting which help the

system to reproduce itself by ensuring our participation in it (iek, 2006: 381-385). The problem is not so much
direct participation in the system but rather the implicit forms of participation in the hegemonic
practices and rituals that are expected of contemporary democratic-multiculturalist left resistance: it is this
type of resistance (resistance-assurrender) that needs to be resisted. So what needs to be developed is a kind of aggressive-

passivity along the lines of I would prefer not to give to charity to support a Black orphan in Africa,
engage in the struggle to prevent oil-drilling in a wildlife swamp, send books to educate our liberal-
feminist-spirited women in Afghanistan (iek, 2006: 383). And here I think that Stavrakakis misses his target when he criticises iek for
arguing the case for political withdrawal: (s)urely to do nothing does not make sense as a remedy against those who supposedly argue that nothing should
happen (Stavrakakis, 2007: 133). ieks argument needs to be read in terms of the discourse of the obsessive-neurotic in which there is engagement in all kinds of
frantic activity (filling up the gaps/silences) precisely in order that nothing Real should happen. So what
we have is rather a paradox wherein
the possibility of genuine transformation is repressed through hyperactivity; an activism without action.
The point is that we (i.e. the Left) should not participate in the terms of todays dominant ethos of
obsessive-neurosis and its hyperactive culture of political inaction. To avoid misunderstanding, the argument is not that we are
obliged to choose between choosing and not-choosing or between capitulation and full scale assault on the existing mode of choosing. There is more ambiguity
than may appear at first sight. A particular choice may be officially permitted and yet implicitly prohibited (e.g. the declaration of atheism in American public life)
and thus the making of that choice within an existing modality may very well have the effect of undermining the modal logic. Equally, refusing
to engage
in making decisions or, what amounts to the same thing, making impossible demands without any real
substance can very quickly evoke a beautiful-soul-syndrome and an intrinsic passivity/inaction in the
face of existing states of affairs. Insurrection, as Engels argued, is an art: it is a process where, quoting Danton, one
must dare, dare and dare again (Engels in Marx & Engels, 1969: 377). Such an art, I would argue, involves the subversion of
subversion: that is to say, the development of forms of subversion that do not condone existing logics of
subversion but which seek rather to undermine and repudiate the latter and to thereby open up new
spaces of political possibility and creativity. It would mean not only breaking with the implicit grammar and interdictions of political
discourse (the veiled agreements over the need for low corporate taxation, for re-capitalizing global markets, for continuing with providing incentives for
financiers-investors and so on), but also more direct, and even violent, forms of confrontation as well. Both are ultimately aspects
of the same undertaking: the deidentification with due process and the existing horizons of possibility and
political choice. Through subtlety, force and inspiration the modal logics themselves become subject to a radical historicity. This marks the approach to
what Lacan calls the act, and to what Badiou identifies as the evental. It is here too that the notion of class needs to be revived and perhaps re-worked. Postmarxist
thought has provided strong grounds for rejecting the Marxist idea of class: (i) the relative homogeneity of the working class in early capitalism has virtually
dissolved; (ii) the political orientation of class cannot be guaranteed in advance (see Laclau & Mouffe, 2001: 75-85). Class has little/no analytical content and will not
play the role that classical Marxism intended for it. Laclau and Mouffe consequently reject the Marxist view of class because it presents a closed and necessitarian
picture of identity that does not reflect the true nature of contingent undecidable identities and their basic materialism. Yet it is precisely this distinction that is
under question. To
affirm the authenticity of contingent-plural identities against the falsity of class necessity is
perhaps already to adopt a certain socio-political gaze and to disavow the nature of capitalism as a
power-totality (iek in Butler et al, 2000: 319-320; iek, 2004: 99-102; iek, 2006: 55-56). From a iekian perspective, class should not be
thought so much as a positive agency (the bearer of a historic mission) but more as a kind of non-position: the
outcast, the drudges, the slum-dwellers (ieks living dead of capitalism) and all those who do not count
and/or who cannot (or will not) be named or integrated within capitalist logics. (Zizek 2008, 295, 413, 427-428) So
while postmarxism is right to critique the positivistic status of class, what it tends to overlook is a view of class as symptomatically resistant to a modern capitalism
striving to realise itself as a necessity. In this sense we might say that class functions as a kind of objectified unconscious: the collective markers of constitutive
repression inherent to the reproduction of the global political economy. Class struggle should not be thought of as an
infrastructural datum to which all politics can be reduced ultimately, but precisely the opposite. Class
struggle is the part of no part (an indigestible bone in the throat of global capitalism) that manifests the
irreducible nature of politics (iek, 2008: 295). Class struggle, in this sense, is testimony to the thoroughly political,
and non-all, character of the capitalist totality. Far from comprising a positive category, class struggle marks the dimension of the Real and
persists as a radical undecidable. It is on this basis that iek speculates that at the most extreme edges of class resistance-blockage

the rise of mega-networks of slums there is real potential for the development of new forms of
political subjectivity; subjectivity that will be created ex nihilo as the part of no part. The Four Antagonisms of the
Apocalypse In the concluding chapter of In Defense iek identifies four central antagonisms in which capitalist logics are threatening to implode: (i) Ecological the
radical character of bio-environmental intervention which cannot be circumscribed by any cunning of reason and which brings us face-to-face with the immanent
possibilities of our annihilation. (ii) Intellectual property the commodification of knowledge to such a degree that speculative thought and creativity will be
effectively privatised out of existence. (iii) Bio-genetics the extent to which the science and technology of genetic manipulation is realizing (literally) the de-
grounded character of human being. (iv) Global apartheid the rise of new walls of exclusion (detention centres, migrant labour camps etc.) and, in particular, the
rapid expansion of slums attached to the emerging megalopolises (there are currently estimated to be around a billion slum-dwellers rising to two billions in 2030).
Such slums confront us increasingly with the geo-political reality of the systematic generation of legions of humanity that are reduced to the part of no part. The
three central strands of ieks thought are clearly in evidence here. As a Hegelian dialectician, iek is concerned crucially to show how the different dimensions of
the capitalist milieu (including its auto-reflexive forms of subversion) function as a totality. And as he stresses repeatedly, such a totality is non-all. This is where
Marxism and psychoanalysis the other two lost (as in struggling) theoretical causes come in. In identifying the four central antagonisms, what iek is alluding
to are the ways in which the symbolic-organic purchase of this structure is being undermined and even exposed at key (nodal) points. With ecology, what is
emerging is an ecology (of bio-technological intervention) without cosmic-rational limitation; with biogenetics, it is the possibility of humanity without a naturalistic
human being or destiny; with intellectual property, it is the possibility of knowledge without ownership; with the megalopolitan slums, is the possibility of a
collective without a community. In each of these cases we see an ongoing decline of todays big Other and its ability to maintain consistency. What this decline is
opening up is the terrifying abyss of freedom. And yet could we not add a fifth antagonism of the apocalypse: that of the drive of capital itself? As we are drawn
into a world of financial literacy (as mortgage recipients, pension and trust holders, debtors of every kind, stockholders and so on), is there not a growing
realization that virtual capitalism is faithless and makes a fool of every attempt at economic organization (including national and international organization)? In
other words, what we are forced increasingly to confront is the traumatic Marxist knowledge of money (value) without trust. In this regard, In Defense provides
compelling grounds for an effective theoretico-political reinvention of the left in todays world. Unlike radical democracy, it does
not flinch from prioritizing certain struggles or from seeking to define the terrain substantial political
engagement. ieks political allegiance is not to any group that, in the sense of Laclau (Laclau in Critchley & Marchart, 2004: 297), occupies the position of
underdog in democratic struggle (this is precisely where the progressive hegemonic practices can get caught up in the

acceptable forms of subversion i.e. what is overlooked is the extent to which todays forms of
hegemony tend to be already hegemonized in assuming the rules/grammar of the existing political
game). For iek, the Left does indeed need to privilege a particular group, namely the de-structured masses
(the slum-dwellers and the radically excluded) who stand for universality and for the indictment of todays failed

universalism. Put in other terms, the Left should be less democratic in the sense of simply accepting the
mythical terms of contemporary democratic engagement and more dialectical in the sense of waging
a ruthless and divine prosecution of the structural causes responsible for such mass exclusion. At stake here
are distinctive approaches to the Lacanian idea of traversing the fantasy. It is against this background that distinct approaches to the Lacanian traversing of the
fantasy emerge. In radical democratic thought, the lesson of the traversal is one that tends to imply that we should assume a proper distancing in order to avoid
getting caught up in the cataclysmic desire of fantasy (Stavrakakis, 2007: 282). The problem therefore is one of adopting the right predisposition: to detach
ourselves from object (a) and to thereby affect a condition where we can really enjoy our partial enjoyment (Stavrakakis, 2007: 282).8 Radical politics should
consequently restrict itself to revolutionary-reform rather than revolution as such. In general political engagement should not be excessive but should avoid
substantial projects of overhaul in favour of the finite, provisional and pragmatic. Yet for iek traversing the fantasy does not mean to proceed to a non-
fantasmatic or even a post-fantasmatic universe defined simply in terms of a containment and/or domestication of excess (this in itself would be something of a
fantasy). There is no transcendence of the fantasmatic (the structuring of desire) as such. Traversal in this sense is the opposite of exorcism. The point is not simply
to expel excess but rather to inflect/assume the latter: to take responsibility for the inherency of excess that is integral to human drive. Traversal, in this sense, puts
one in touch with the object of drive the hole presupposed by all demand and around which Being revolves. The freedom which is gained here is thus not one of
overcoming alienation (or the fantasmatic) but precisely a freedom through alienation in its most radical sense: i.e. the acceptance of the fact that the
imbalance/excess is our most basic condition towards which we cannot exercise any pregiven partiality or disposition. Traversing the fantasy means assuming the
responsibility for, taking account of, the excesses that emerge as symptoms this is precisely the Freudian wo es war. It also means coming to terms with a basic
terrifying freedom. While we can never escape, or domesticate, the fantasmatic we are nonetheless free essentially to change the direction and composition of the
latter; we are, in effect, free to choose our fate(s). This, in essence, functions as a sublime monstrosity within the order of the human. It is in this context that iek
broaches the taboo of terror. We reject terror only at the cost of accepting implicitly the violence and terror
contained in the global capitalist logics and the fantasmatic structures that support them. Traversal and terror are
fundamentally linked here. Just as the analysands sense of self/agalma is terrorised in psychoanalysis, a politics that aims at traversing the

fantasmatic structures of capitalism is one that would seek to dislodge-terrorise the nodal points that
are central to the reproduction of those structures. This means identifying with our symptoms-excess in a relentless unforgiving way in
order to find (construct) common cause between the symbolic classes and the radically excluded. On these grounds, iek argues the need for a new type of

egalitarian terror which, following Badiou, would consist of four basic elements: egalitarian justice (universal
standards); terror (universal punishment of violations); voluntarism (collective decisions); and trust in
the people (the idea that the majority would support such measures). While these are pitched at a rather general level (and
perhaps necessarily so), their main thrust is clear: to render explicit the implicit terror and violence of our socio-economic

systems, and to wrest the execution of such terror and violence away from private-corporate interests
and to place them within the domain of the commons (the control and regulation of violence is always a
primary constitutive act). In this regard, I would say that the fourth aspect, trust in the people, is the most interesting and perhaps the most
problematic. Do not all ideological groups, from radical anarchists to neo-fascists, claim to place their trust in the people? Does it not thereby raise the
spectre of populism that iek has tried to distance himself from? Trust in the people is simultaneously a construction of the latter. What iek appears to be
utilizing here isthe logic of the future anterior: i.e. an affirmation of the idea of the people as if a future
construction of the people was already in place. It is certainly not the populism of Laclau. If it is a populism at all, it is more a populism-
without-a-people. In fact, it might be more accurate to characterize it as the idea of a people without populism. That is to say, its first

allegiance is a negative one: that is, an allegiance to the universality of the excluded. There is evidence of this all
around. As well as slum-dwellers who, in different (and non-idealized) ways, are being forced to adapt and to develop new kinds of social initiative, there are

numerous groups who may be said to reflect, at some level, a non-systematised universality. With all the
ambiguity that surrounds the functioning of todays charities, there are other types of groups
especially those that have developed along self-help lines care, shelter, food, information, health,
informal networks of common support that reflect a universality that is in excess of existing
universality and show precisely the limits and failure of the latter.
 AlternativeExhaustion

Prefer exhaustionTheir attempt to invest debate with symbolic activity only

strengthens the hands of neoliberal economics.
Bifo '11 (Franco Berardi, Professor of Social History and Communication at the Academia di belle Arti in Milan and Founder of A/Traverse,
After the Future, ed. Genesko%26Thoburn, AKPress, p. 135-139)

Time is in the mind. The essential limit to growth is the mental impossibility to enhance time (Cybertime)
beyond a certain level. I think that we are here touching upon a crucial point. The process of re-composition, of conscious and
collective subjectivation, finds here a new paradoxical way. Modern radical thought has always seen
the process of subjectivation as an energetic process: mobilization, social desire and political activism,
expression, participation have been the modes of conscious collective subjectivation in the age of the revolutions. But in our
age energy is running out, and desire which has given soul to modern social dynamics is absorbed in the black hole of virtualization and financial games, as Jean
Baudrillard (1993a) argues in his book Symbolic Exchange and Death, first published in 1976. In this book Baudrillard analyzes the hyper-realistic stage of capitalism,
and the instauration of the logic of simulation. Reality itself founders in hyperrealism, the meticulous reduplication of the real, preferably through another,
reproductive medium, such as photography. From medium to medium, the real is volatilized, becoming an allegory of death. But it is also, in a sense,

reinforced through its own destruction. It becomes reality for its own sake, the fetishism of the lost object: no longer the object of
representation, but the ecstasy of denial and of its own ritual extermination: the hyperreal. [] The reality principle corresponds to a certain stage of the law of
value. Today the whole system is swamped by indeterminacy, and every reality is absorbed by the hyperreality of the code and simulation. The principle of
simulation governs us now, rather that the outdated reality principle. We feed on those forms whose finalities have disappeared. No more ideology, only simulacra.
We must therefore reconstruct the entire genealogy of the law of value and its simulacra in order to
grasp the hegemony and the enchantment of the current system. A structural revolution of value. This genealogy must cover
political economy, where it will appear as a second-order simulacrum, just like all those that stake everything on the real: the real of production, the real of
signification, whether conscious or unconscious. Capital no longer belongs to the order of political economy: it operates with political economy as its simulated
model. The entire apparatus of the commodity law of value is absorbed and recycled in the larger apparatus of the structural law of value, this becoming part of the
third order of simulacra. Political economy is thus assured a second life, an eternity, within the confines of an apparatus in which it has lost all its strict determinacy,
but maintains an effective presence as a system of reference for simulation. (Baudrillard 1993a: 2) Simulation is the new plane of consistency of capitalist growth:
financial speculation, for instance, has displaced the process of exploitation from the sphere of material production to the sphere of expectations, desire, and
immaterial labor. The simulation process (Cyberspace) is proliferating without limits, irradiating signs that go everywhere in the attention market. The
brain is
the market, in semiocapitalist hyper-reality. And the brain is not limitless, the brain cannot expand and
accelerate indefinitely. The process of collective subjectivation (i.e. social recomposition) implies the development
of a common language-affection which is essentially happening in the temporal dimension. The semiocapitalist
acceleration of time has destroyed the social possibility of sensitive elaboration of the semio-flow. The proliferation of simulacra in the info-sphere has saturated
the space of attention and imagination. Advertising
and stimulated hyper-expression (just do it), have submitted the
energies of the social psyche to permanent mobilization. Exhaustion follows, and exhaustion is the only way of escape:
Nothing, not even the system, can avoid the symbolic obligation, and it is in this trap that the only
chance of a catastrophe for capital remains. The system turns on itself, as a scorpion does when encircled by the challenge of death. For it
is summoned to answer, if it is not to lose face, to what can only be death. The system must itself commit suicide in response to the multiplied challenge of death
and suicide. So hostages are taken. On the symbolic or sacrificial plane, from which every moral consideration of the innocence of the victims is ruled out the
hostage is the substitute, the alter-ego of the terrorist, the hostages death for the terrorist. Hostage and terrorist may thereafter become confused in the same
sacrificial act. (Baudrillard 1993a: 37) In these impressive pages Baudrillard outlines the end of the modern dialectics of revolution against power, of the labor
movement against capitalist domination, and predicts the advent of a new form of action which will be marked by the sacrificial gift of death (and self-annihilation).
After the destruction of the World Trade Center in the most important terrorist act ever, Baudrillard wrote a short text titled The Spirit of Terrorism where he goes
back to his own predictions and recognizes the emergence of a catastrophic age. When the code becomes the enemy the only strategy can be catastrophic: all the
counterphobic ravings about exorcizing evil: it is because it is there, everywhere, like an obscure object of desire. Without this deep-seated complicity, the event
would not have had the resonance it has, and in their symbolic strategy the terrorists doubtless know that they can count on this unavowable complicity.
(Baudrillard 2003: 6) This goes much further than hatred for the dominant global power by the disinherited and the exploited, those who fell on the wrong side of
global order. This
malignant desire is in the very heart of those who share this orders benefits. An allergy to
all definitive order, to all definitive power is happily universal, and the two towers of the World Trade
Center embodied perfectly, in their very double-ness (literally twin-ness), this definitive order: No need,
then, for a death drive or a destructive instinct, or even for perverse, unintended effects. Very logically
inexorably the increase in the power heightens the will to destroy it. And it was party to its own destruction. When the
two towers collapsed, you had the impression that they were responding to the suicide of the suicide-planes with their own suicides. It has been said that Even
God cannot declare war on Himself. Well, He can. The West, in position of God (divine omnipotence and absolute moral legitimacy), has become suicidal, and
declared war on itself. (Baudrillard 2003: 6-7) In Baudrillards catastrophic vision I
see a new way of thinking subjectivity: a reversal
of the energetic subjectivation that animates the revolutionary theories of the 20th century, and the
opening of an implosive theory of subversion, based on depression and exhaustion In the activist view
exhaustion is seen as the inability of the social body to escape the vicious destiny that capitalism has
prepared: deactivation of the social energies that once upon a time animated democracy and political
struggle. But exhaustion could also become the beginning of a slow movement towards a wu wei
civilization, based on the withdrawal, and frugal expectations of life and consumption. Radicalism could
abandon the mode of activism, and adopt the mode of passivity. A radical passivity would definitely
threaten the ethos of relentless productivity that neoliberal politics has imposed. The mother of all the
bubbles, the work bubble, would finally deflate. We have been working too much during the last three
or four centuries, and outrageously too much during the last thirty years. The current depression could be the beginning of
a massive abandonment of competition, consumerist drive, and of dependence on work. Actually, if we think of the geopolitical struggle of the first decade the
struggle between Western domination and jihadist Islam we recognize that the
most powerful weapon has been suicide. 9/11 is
the most impressive act of this suicidal war, but thousands of people have killed themselves in order to
destroy American military hegemony. And they won, forcing the western world into the bunker of
paranoid security, and defeating the hyper-technological armies of the West both in Iraq, and in
Afghanistan. The suicidal implosion has not been confined to the Islamists. Suicide has became a form of political action
everywhere. Against neoliberal politics, Indian farmers have killed themselves. Against exploitation hundreds of workers and employees have killed
themselves in the French factories of Peugeot, and in the offices of France Telecom. In Italy, when the 2009 recession destroyed one million jobs, many workers,
haunted by the fear of unemployment, climbed on the roofs of the factories, threatening to kill themselves. Is it possible to divert this implosive trend from the
direction of death, murder, and suicide, towards a new kind of autonomy, social creativity and of life? I think that it
is possible only if we start
from exhaustion, if we emphasize the creative side of withdrawal. The exchange between life and
money could be deserted, and exhaustion could give way to a huge wave of withdrawal from the sphere
of economic exchange. A new refrain could emerge in that moment, and wipe out the law of economic
growth. The self-organization of the general intellect could abandon the law of accumulation and
growth, and start a new concatenation, where collective intelligence is only subjected to the common
good.
 AlternativeRevolution

Every push for freedom and justice builds the strength of the anti-capitalist movement
the struggle against capitalism creates the class to overthrow it
Lebowitz, 12 (Michael A. Lebowitz is professor emeritus of economics at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. What Makes the Working Class a Revolutionary Subject?
http://monthlyreview.org/2012/12/01/what-makes-the-working-class-a-revolutionary-subject)

What makes the working class a revolutionary subject? Not Hegelian mysticismthat it is the universal
class or the vulgar copy of the Absolute Spirit. Nor is the working class a revolutionary subject because of its physical
locationthat it is strategically placed to stop the wheels of industry. From the sublime to the crudethere can be little surprise that
these explanations convince few. Of course, there are some who had better explanations as to why the working class was

revolutionary but who now say that the working classs time has come and gone. For instance, some suggest
that once upon a time, capital concentrated workers, allowed them to come together and to organize
and struggle; today, though, capital has decentralized workers and turns them against each other in a way that
prevents them from struggling together. Once upon a time, the working class had nothing to lose but its chains but now it

has been absorbed within capitalism, is a prisoner of consumerism and its articles of consumption own and consume it. Those who conclude
that the working class is not a revolutionary subject because capitalism has changed the working class
reveal that they do not understand the ABCs of Marxism. The working class makes itself a revolutionary
subject through its strugglesit transforms itself. That was always the position of Marxhis concept of revolutionary practice, which is the
simultaneous changing of circumstances and self-change. The working class changes itself through its struggles. It makes itself fit

to create the new world. But why do workers struggle? Underlying all the struggles of workers is what Marx called the
workers own need for development. We know that Marx understood that wage struggles in themselves were inadequate. But not to engage in them, he
recognized, would leave workers apathetic, thoughtless, more or less well fed instruments of production. In the absence of struggle, Marx argued that the workers would be a heartbroken,

a weak minded, a worn-out, unresisting mass. Struggles are a process of production: they produce a different kind of worker,
a worker who produces herself or himself as someone whose capacity has grown, whose confidence
develops, whose ability to organize and unite expands. But why should we think this is limited to wage struggles? Every struggle in
which people assert themselves, every struggle in which they push for social justice, every struggle to
realize their own potential and their need for self-development, builds the capacities of the actors. And, those struggles
bring us up against capital. Why? Because capital is the barrier that stands between us and our own
development. And it is so because capital has captured the fruits of all civilization, is the owner of all the products of the social brain and the social hand, and it turns our
products and the products of workers before us against usfor one sole purpose, which is its own gain,
profit. If we are to satisfy our needs, if we are to be able to develop our potential, we must struggle against capital and, in
doing so, we working people create ourselves as revolutionary subjects. But who are we? What is this working class that is the
revolutionary subject? You will not find the answer in Das Kapital. Marxs Capital was not about the working classexcept insofar as the working class was an object. What Capital

explains is the nature of capital, its goals and its dynamics. But it only tells us about the working class insofar as capital acts against the working
class. And, insofar as it does not present the working class as subject, it also does not focus on the way in which capital struggles against this subject. So, we have to look elsewhere in Marx for
his comments about how the capitalist class maintains its power by dividing and separating workers (specifically Irish and English workers). And, although Marx explicitly commented that the
contemporary power of capital rests upon the creation of new needs for workers, there is no place where he explored this question. Thus, this critical question of the nature of the

contemporary working class is one for which the answers will not be found in a book. We must develop the answers
ourselves. Who is not-capital today? Who is separated from the means of production and must approach capital as a supplicant in order to survive? Surely, it is
not only those who sell their labor power to capital but also those unable to sell their labor power to capitalnot only the exploited but the excluded. And surely, it includes

those who, in the context of a massive reserve army of the unemployed, work within the sphere of
circulation of capital but are compelled to bear the risks themselvesi.e., those who struggle to survive in the informal sector.
They may not correspond to that stereotype of the working class as male factory worker, but that
stereotype was always wrong.
 AlternativeUnflinching
Only an uncompromising rejection of capitalism solves movements against
capitalisms and its attendant conflicts and environmental destruction are developing
now we should seize onto them
Williams 13 (Chris Williams, 5/13/13, What is ecosocialism and how do we get there?, International Socialist Review Issue #89: Features)

I would argue that to expect this system to solve the crisis that it manufactured is utopian. The only rational way
out of this crisis is to get rid of the system, and this slogansystem change, not climate changehas resonance all across the world; it originated in
Copenhagen in 2009 as a way of expressing the fact that whether youre anticapitalist or not you recognize, particularly after 2008, and the ongoing

economic crisis that there are deep, structural, fundamental problems about this economic system, which are

not just destroying our lives individually, but destroying the entire planet on which we ultimately
depend. This is something that evades completely the thought processes of mainstream economists. I picked this up just the other day, wasted some money, but the National Review
the cover of the National Review is Wonderland: The Miracle of Canadas tar sands. Its not a joke. Where do you go with that? Because clearly the power of the oceans the power of
,

tides, the power of scientific rationality is not enough to get capitalism to change course. In fact, you can bury one of the
most iconic cities in the world under a thirteen-foot wall of water, and you still dont get the problem mentioned by the two people running for president. In other words, Hurricane Sandy
does not get mentioned, climate change does not get mentioned, even though New York City was under several feet of water, people were homeless, theres no running water, theres no
transportation system, but we can carry on. We can continue to extract fossil fuels, etc. The distortions that go on under capitalism are so obscene its hard to wrap your head around it
sometimes, on a micro level as well as a macro level. I was riding on the subway and I took a couple of trains and I was looking at the ads. The average American sees about 3,000 ads a day.
One ad was for a credit card, and this is the slogan for the credit cardLess plastic, more humanDiscover it is human. Discover is the card that they were advertising. In other words, you
can actually be more human by having this type of credit card. Another ad, and this gets to the quality of life, that I pass by was about online delivery of foodhow you can order online
instead of having to phone somebodyand the ad read, Youve perfected the odds of getting to third base faster. Food delivery date night. The obscenity and depravity of capitalism knows
no depths to which it will not plumb. This is something that Karl Marx talked about quite a bit. He was speaking at the anniversary of the Peoples Paper in 1856, and I think this resonates far

more with us now than it did even in his time. On the one hand, there have started into life industrial and scientific forces, which no
epoch of the former human history had ever suspected. On the other hand, there exist symptoms of
decay, far surpassing the horrors recorded of the latter times of the Roman Empire. That kind of sense of decay pervades our world as it is
currently structured. He goes on: In our days, everything seems pregnant with its contrary: Machinery, gifted with the
wonderful power of shortening and fructifying human labor, we behold starving and overworking it; The

newfangled sources of wealth, by some strange weird spell, are turned into sources of want; The victories of art seem bought by the loss of
character. At the same pace that mankind masters nature, man seems to become enslaved to other men or to

his own infamy. Even the pure light of science seems unable to shine but on the dark background of ignorance. All our invention and progress seem to

result in endowing material forces with intellectual life, and in stultifying human life into a material force. This antagonism
between modern science and industry on the one hand, and social misery and disillusion on the other
hand is the epoch that we are currently living through. Actually theres a debate going on that has been going on for a little while among scientists
and geologists about whether we have entered a new geological epoch. This will take a while to resolve, but scientists are starting to lean towards the idea

that the answer is yes. This is a big decision for science, because a geological epoch is measured in tens of thousands of years. You have to have a way of

measuring the impact of human society over not just a few hundred years, but hundreds of thousands of years. What
would be the impact on that kind of scale? Civilization collapses, all the buildings disappear under sand and dirt and erosion and whatever else, and whats
left? We are currently living in the Holocene, or have been since the last ice age. It is being argued that we are now entering a new epoch of the Anthropocenethe age of manbecause we
cause such a level of disruption to the environment. How are we going to measure where we start the Anthropocene? Geologists and scientists congregate around the year 1945, because
thats when the atom bombs dropped and the testing started and we will be able to measure the difference in the isotopic fractionation of the atmosphere for tens of thousands of years. So
the most long-lived legacy of this so-called civilization might be the irradiation of the atmosphere. How despicable is that as a testament to the human race. Clearly we have to have a real
alternative. Can you guess who the only ones planning for climate change in this country are? The Pentagon. The Pentagon is actively planning for climate change and theyve got answers.
Major General Michael Lehnert, who was part of the Marine Corps and who operated on a few different bases (he has worked at Guantnamohe must be a nice guy), he says, A country
worth defending is a country worth preserving. Environmentalists need large open expanses of space where endangered species can recover and thrive. The military needs large open
expanses of space so they can train. What can possibly go wrong having a nature reserve thats also a bombing range? Of course they could coexist. Why is the navy in particularwhich is
about to sail a so-called great green fleet on the basis of bio-fueled and nuclear-powered warshipswhy are they so invested in it? Where are naval bases? On the coastline. They know they
are going to be under water, so theyve got to take evasive action, as it were. The navy, along with the army, is taking this very seriously. The navys new slogan is A global force for good.
They found out through some research that trying to sign young people up to What do you want to do with your lifego kill people in large numbers was not a good selling point, so they
changed it to A global force for good. We need to ask ourselves much broader questions. To quote Carolyn Merchant about how consumer capitalism envisions nature and the environment:

The twentieth-century Garden of Eden is the enclosed shopping mall decorated with trees, flowers, and fountains in which
people can shop for nature at the Nature Company, purchase natural clothing at Esprit, sample organic foods and rainforest crunch in kitchen gardens, buy twenty-
first-century products at Sharper Image, and play virtual reality games in which SimEve is reinvented in Cyberspace. . . . The mall, enclosed by the desert of the parking lots surrounding it, is

With their engineered

covered by glass domes reaching to heaven, accessed by spiral staircases and escalators affording a vista over the whole garden of shops. . . .

spaces and commodity fetishes, they epitomize consumer capitalisms vision of the recovery from the
Fall. We need a much bigger vision. To quote James Baldwinhe had an argument in the 1950s with William Faulkner about whether they should go slow and be patient on the question
of civil rights. He wrote an essay from which Ill quote: Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always

known it, the loss of all that gave one an identity, the end of safety. And at such a moment, unable to
see and not daring to imagine what the future will now bring forth, one clings to what one knew, or dreamed
that one possessed. Yet, it is only when a man is able, without bitterness or self-pity, to surrender a dream he has long cherished or a privilege he has long possessed that he is set freehe has

set himself freefor higher dreams, for greater privileges. We need to fight on every front available to us. We are engaged in a struggle to stop the
Keystone XL. Its not like we havent won some things with regard to that fight. If we hadnt already been fighting the Keystone XL in Canada and here, it would already have been approved.
Weve already delayed that decision, and the demonstration in Washington, DC was another way of delaying it further. Obama is trying to get his ducks in a row to make sure they can sell the
sellout to enough liberal organizations to get them to hum and hah, and I think thats where we need to go as a real left wing and argue that we are going to call a demonstration immediately
if he approves it, and organize to build it as widely as possible and march on the White House. The divestment campaignis it everything we want? Obviously not. But its a campaign and we
should join it and be involved to the fullest extent that we can. Because, as I mentioned in another workshop, and as people are probably well aware, we need to win some victories to buy
ourselves some time. We also need to win some victories to gain confidence that we can win more things and build our organizations. Because if its the one thing that we lack, its the

One way of seeing

question of organization and how do we strengthen the networksin this city, between cities, between countriesto build a better future.

capitalismapart from insaneis as a global simplification project. What works best for capitalism is massive
economies of scale, a huge concentration of wealth, and ever-larger multinational and transnational
corporations, to the extent that biodiversity is viewed as an impediment to capital accumulation. Its
much better if they have monocultures vast acres of monocultures. Its much better for capitalists if we live off four animals or four grains or four fish. Its
much more efficient from a capitalist perspective, and efficiency for capitalism means only the fastest
accumulation of money possible. What is the alternative? There was a recent article in Scientific American by Mark Jacobson, a professor at Stanford, which
cited a report saying by 2030 we could have the whole world powered by wind, water, and solar power. He has come up with a new plan for New York State for how we can do the same thing
by 2030. We would be reducing energy consumption by 37 percent, because it is more efficient to use renewable than fossil fuels. There would be 4,000 fewer mortalities in New York State in
a year, because we wouldnt be breathing the stuff we are currently breathing. There would be more people at work, and we would save $33-billion a year. He was asked in a recent interview
what the main obstacles are for achieving this. He says, Im not an advocate, Im a scientist, this is what I do. But he said the main obstacles are political and socialgetting politicians on
board. There are always local zoning issues. I am sure there will be a big push by the gas lobby and the oil lobby against this. If society is going to do it, at least we know its technically and
economically feasible. Whether it actually happens depends on the political will. I dont know whether people saw it, there was a recent article in Time magazine titled "The revenge of Marx."
They keep announcing him dead and somehow he keeps magically coming back. The article starts off, and this is in the business world finance section of Time, Karl Marx was supposed to be

political and
dead and buried. Thats how it begins. But then it goes on: From the floor of the U.S. Congress to the streets of Athens to the assembly lines of Southern China,

economic events are being shaped by escalating tensions between capital and labor to a degree unseen
since the communist revolutions of the twentieth century. How this struggle plays out will influence the
direction of global economic policy, the future of the welfare state, political stability in China, and who
governs from Washington to Rome. Thats Time magazine a couple of weeks ago. They quote a couple of different Chinese workers, one of whom says, The way the rich get money is
through exploiting the workers. Communism is what we are looking forward to. Another worker says, Workers will organize more. All the workers should be united. There is

clearly a new mood in the world, and I think were heading into a new period. We have really been in one since 2011 with the Arab Spring
and Wisconsin and Occupy, and all the things that weve been fighting for, in particular since 2009. There is clearly a new era that were into, which is an

era of revolt, rebellion, and revolution. What is it that we really want to fight for? Going back to that study that I quoted on how New York State could be wind,
water, and solar powered in 20 years time. The author takes everything that currently exists and assumes that it will still exist and he still thinks its possible. In other words, the transportation

We wont be taking any other measures; we will be just

will still remain based on private transportation and not public transportation.

changing one form of supplying energy for a less polluting form of supplying energy. I think we need a much
,much bigger vision. Because as one of the speakers in the food panel mentioned, what it means to put wind turbines in Mexico is an increase in poverty, because they kick people
off the land in order to put in the wind turbines. So we have to talk about not just changing energy systems, but about changing the social and political power in this country and around the

world. Were not going to get positive ecological change without some positive social change, which means
putting front and center questions of fighting racism, sexism, and fighting homophobia, along with
fighting

rearranging the social and political policies. The pendulum of power has swung so far to one side that we
need to urgently form a movement to pull it back, and ultimately get rid of the entire pendulum, if that analogy
really works. Marx had quite a lot to say about the lack of time, and about the concept of ownership. The concept of yours versus mine is one of the

most distorting and alienating concepts that we currently have to live withthe possession and
ownership of things and the way we see our basic human fulfillment through the prism of ownership of
things. I can feel more fulfilled if I can only buy more stuff and get the next generation of iPhone or whatever it is, and I would be feeling more human than I did before once Ive acquired
this. If you have the ability to do that, you very quickly find yourself unfulfilled, empty. As J. K. Galbraith said, capitalism is the production of manufactured
discontent. We are continually unhappy in our distorted lives, and we obviously have no idea what it means to be fully human in any real
sense. This is really a 10,000-year struggle the culmination of which is to privatize the entire planet. Thats really what
its aboutto the extent that they have now managed to privatize even words. McDonalds has a patent on 114 different words and phrases in the English language. Or think about patenting

how do we go
genes and all the rest of it. One of the first things they privatized 10,000 years or so ago at the beginning of civilization, class society, was the female body. So

back and via revolution open up such questions of sexuality, gender, our relationships to each other, and
our relationship to nature? These are questions I think, very large questions, that we need to address. What we really are talking about is
changing our relationship to each other and the planet. Were not talking about in relationship to things,
which is deeply alienating, were talking about our relationship to each other and the planet, and how we form a
movement that would be for those things. So its not just a question of energy; its not just a question of public ownership or public transportationalthough we

want all those things. Its a question of what Marx talked aboutovercoming the metabolic rift where were completely

separated off from nature. In fact there are three real separations, because capitalism has put animals in one place, crops and
plants in another, humans somewhere else, and then created this insanely energy-intensive, water- intensive
pollution system which is entirely linear: waste comes out at every point. And as far as the capitalists are concerned, that doesnt
really matter. Do we really need to own anything? I think this is one of the limitations of talking about how we change our consumption patterns, because its clearly not about

changing just our consumption. If we see ourselves as just buying different things, then we actually fall into the
trap laid by capitalism, because we start to see ourselves as consumers as opposed to producers, as opposed to valuable
human beings. You have to own your own individual washing machine, dryer, any number of other thingsthat could all be socialized and, as Joel Koval was saying, held in
common. Because the future is about holding things together, in common, and producing things for what we

need, not for what makes money. In fact, expanding on that, we dont even need money. You dont actually need money. In a
society based on cooperation and real democracy, and producing things that you need, then you can cooperate and
coordinate in order to exchange those things without the need for money, without the constant
expansion that is inherent to capitalism. How can we just make the things that we need so that everybody is satisfied, and we are not working every God-
given hour in order to do so? We are actually reversing the equation that is capitalismreplacing people with machinesand thinking about how we can have a much more meaningful way of
living by working a lot, lot less. Why do you need lines on maps called countries? Ultimately why arent we living in a world where there are no nation states, in fact there are no states as such?

Why cant we organize cooperatively and collectively to solve the problems that are bequeathed to us
by capitalism, and move forward in a way that is truly human and worthy of the kind of immense,- amazing
cultural things that weve managed to do even under capitalism or under feudalism, and other forms of class society? How can
we take deep ecological insights of indigenous cultures around the world and connect those to some of the technological
know-how that weve accumulated at the same time, and take the best from both worlds in order to make sure that we can have ecological farming on a human
scale, that is putting our species and other species at the forefront of everything that we do? This was a concept that Martin Luther King, Jr was coming to towards the end of his life. Having
won political rights, the next question for him was, what about economic rights? The right to vote obviously is important, and people died just to get the right to vote. But once wed won the

We must honestly face the fact that the movement must

right to vote, where do we go from there? And this is what he said in 1967 in his speech, Where Do We Go From Here?:

address itself to the question of restructuring the whole of American society. There are 40-million poor people here [now thats 50-million], and
one day we must ask the question: why are there 40-million poor people in America? And when you ask that

question you are raising a question about the economic system, about a broader distribution of wealth. When you ask that question,
you begin to question the capitalistic economy. And you see my friends, when you deal with this, you begin to ask the question: who owns the oil? You
begin to ask the question: who owns the iron ore? You begin to ask the question: why is it that people have to pay water bills in a world thats two-thirds water? Marx talked a lot about how
ownership distorts us. He also talked a lot about time, and how one of the major aspects of living in a truly human societyone based on cooperation, real democracy, and production for
needis the immense amounts of time we will have to develop ourselves spiritually, intellectually, and culturally. The word spirit from the Latin means to breathe. If we are going to really
breathe on this planet, we are going to need every kind of awakening possible in order to fight for a movement, because theres no sense in which they are going to turn around, the 1%.

Warfare is endemic to capitalism; racism is endemic to capitalism; and so is sexism. If we are going to
live in a completely different world without those things, we need to get rid of capitalism. We need to fight for
reforms right now, but we also need a vision of a completely different world, where were living in equality and freedom, and
we have the time and the energy to replant our crops, rethink how we live, reimagine what food is and our relationships, not in terms of the things

that we can accumulate, but the ways in which we can accumulate friends, relationships, and investigate nature.
Capitalism posits that there is a fundamental separation between humans and the environment. Thats why
they use the word environment, because it sees the environment as somewhere else and we are humans . If you talk about ecology, then you talk

about what humans really are. We are as much a part of nature as anything else is, and our investigation
of nature is about uncovering something about ourselves. Our ability to investigate and find things out shouldnt be just based on, as it primarily
is under capitalism: What can we use it for? What is it good for? How much money can I make from it? But purely for the sense of serene beauty that we get from knowing the universe better
because by knowing the universe in nature better we actually know ourselves better. That is the dialect of nature. And to follow off from Epicurus, the kind of age, or epoch, that I would like to
go into is the Oikeiotocene, which doesnt sound too sexy, and is a little difficult to pronounce. It is the age of conformity to nature, and that is the age that I think we urgently need to fight

we can go on to win some victories and slow

for. Im very, very happy to be part of a movement that is growing, and that there is an emerging left wing as part of it, and I think

down the capitalist death train that is leading us over the carbon cliff, to ultimately derail it, and get rid of the idea that we
need to be hurtling towards oblivion at a faster and faster place, accumulating more and more stuff . Then we can start to find out years and generations post-

revolution how we can recognize and live as fully human beings in a world that we are not exterminating, but

of which we see ourselves as beneficiaries, as bona pater familias, tenders of the household, as Marx called it, for future generations. And I think that is the
kind of vision that we need in order to go forward
 Alternative-Refusal-Herod

Vote negative to reject the affirmative as a refusal to participate in activities which

support capitalism. We must hollow out capitalist structures by refusing to invest
our energy in reforms and rescue operationsavoids transition wars
Herod 4-Social Activist since 1968, owns an awesome website, Attended Columbia University and spent a year abroad at the University of
Beirut (Lebanon) [James, Getting Free, 2004, http://site.www.umb.edu/faculty/salzman_g/Strate/GetFre/06.htm]

It is time to try to describe, at first abstractly and later concretely, a strategy for destroying
capitalism. This strategy, at its most basic,
calls for pulling time, energy, and resources out of capitalist civilization and putting them into building a new
civilization. The image then is one of emptying out capitalist structures, hollowing them out, by draining wealth,
power, and meaning out of them until there is nothing left but shells. This is definitely an aggressive strategy. It
requires great militancy, and constitutes an attack on the existing order. The strategy clearly recognizes that capitalism is the enemy and must
be destroyed, but it is not a frontal attack aimed at overthrowing the system, but an inside attack aimed at gutting it, while simultaneously
replacing it with something better, something we want. Thus capitalist
structures (corporations, governments, banks, schools, etc.)
are not seized so much as simply abandoned. Capitalist relations are not fought so much as they are
simply rejected. We stop participating in activities that support (finance, condone) the capitalist world and
start participating in activities that build a new world while simultaneously undermining the old. We create a new pattern of social relations
alongside capitalist relations and then we continually build and strengthen our new pattern while doing everything we can to weaken capitalist
relations. In this way our new democratic, non-hierarchical, non-commodified relations can eventually
overwhelm the capitalist relations and force them out of existence. This is how it has to be done.
This is a plausible, realistic strategy. To think that we could create a whole new world of decent social arrangements overnight, in the
midst of a crisis, during a so-called revolution, or during the collapse of capitalism, is foolhardy. Our new social world must grow
within the old, and in opposition to it, until it is strong enough to dismantle and abolish capitalist relations.
Such a revolution will never happen automatically, blindly, determinably, because of the inexorable, materialist laws of history. It will
happen, and only happen, because we want it to, and because we know what were doing and know how we want to live, and
know what obstacles have to be overcome before we can live that way, and know how to distinguish between our social patterns and theirs.
But we must not think that the capitalist world can simply be ignored, in a live and let live attitude, while we try to build new lives elsewhere.
(There is no elsewhere.) There is at least one thing, wage-slavery, that we cant simply stop participating in (but even here there are ways we
can chip away at it). Capitalism must be explicitly refused and replaced by something else. This constitutes War, but it is
not a war in the traditional sense of armies and tanks, but a war fought on a daily basis, on the level of everyday life, by
millions of people. It is a war nevertheless because the accumulators of capital will use coercion, brutality, and murder, as they have always
done in the past, to try to block any rejection of the system. They have always had to force compliance; they will not hesitate to continue doing
so. Nevertheless, there are many concrete ways that individuals, groups, and neighborhoods can gut capitalism, which I will enumerate shortly.
We must always keep in mind how we became slaves; then we can see more clearly how we can cease being slaves. We were forced into wage-
slavery because the ruling class slowly, systematically, and brutally destroyed our ability to live autonomously. By driving us off the land,
changing the property laws, destroying community rights, destroying our tools, imposing taxes, destroying our local markets, and so forth, we
were forced onto the labor market in order to survive, our only remaining option being to sell, for a wage, our ability to work. Its quite clear
then how we can overthrow slavery. We must reverse this process. We must begin to reacquire the ability to live without working for a wage or
buying the products made by wage-slaves (that is, we must get free from the labor market and the way of living based on it), and embed
ourselves instead in cooperative labor and cooperatively produced goods. Another clarification is needed. This
strategy does not
call for reforming capitalism, for changing capitalism into something else. It calls for replacing
capitalism, totally, with a new civilization. This is an important distinction, because capitalism has proved impervious to
reforms, as a system. We can sometimes in some places win certain concessions from it (usually only
temporary ones) and win some (usually short-lived) improvements in our lives as its victims, but we
cannot reform it piecemeal, as a system. Thus our strategy of gutting and eventually destroying
capitalism requires at a minimum a totalizing image, an awareness that we are attacking an entire
way of life and replacing it with another, and not merely reforming one way of life into something
else. Many people may not be accustomed to thinking about entire systems and social orders, but everyone knows what a lifestyle is, or a way
of life, and that is the way we should approach it. The thing is this: in order for capitalism to be destroyed millions and millions of people must
be dissatisfied with their way of life. They must want something else and see certain existing things as obstacles to getting what they want. It is
not useful to think of this as a new ideology. It is not merely a belief-system that is needed, like a religion, or like Marxism, or Anarchism. Rather
it is a new prevailing vision, a dominant desire, an overriding need. What must exist is a pressing desire to live a certain way, and not to live
another way. If
this pressing desire were a desire to live free, to be autonomous, to live in democratically
controlled communities, to participate in the self-regulating activities of a mature people, then capitalism could be
destroyed. Otherwise we are doomed to perpetual slavery and possibly even to extinction.
 Resistance is Life Affirming

No, really (of course youll fail with that attitude!)

Proust 2k-Fall 2000. Franoise-agrege in Philosophy, was a program director at the Collge Internationale de Philosophie, in addition to her
post at the Universit de Paris I. Her work centered on the problem of how to think politics and political action today. She is the author of Kant
et le ton d'histoire (1991), L'Histoire contretemps: Le temps historique chez Walter Benjamin (1994), Point de Passage (1994), and De la
Resistance (1997).

every force, while it is affected by another force,

We are indebted to Michel Foucault for having generalized, while also displacing, the physical law of resistance:

provokes a resistance which thwarts the action of the first force, while falling short of stopping it.
Necessarily, forces enter into relations not of opposition or contradiction (which are rare and precarious cases) but of dissymmetric
contrariety. Each and every force doubles and is doubled by another force. While it continually accompanies the exercizing of that force, it also counters
it, and so destabilizes and deregulates it. Foucault concentrated his/her discovery on relations of power. In a remarkable way he established that relations of power develop and deploy around, about, and between themselves like

Relations of power are subject

a map, or a diagram of points, a complex and reversible battlefield of intensive forces which "play the role of . . . target, support, or handle" (Foucault 1980, 95).

to a resistance and a counter-resistance which are more heterogeneous than homogeneous, more
unstable and multiple than stable and delimited, more aleatory and singular than regulated and
regular. Relations of power delineate variable configurations, where aggregations and agglomerations of forces decompose under the effect of a force, or of forces which are subtle and entwined. They graft
onto others, contaminate them, and find themselves in turn affected. Elsewhere and otherwise they recompose [End Page 18] other blocks of
relations (Deleuze 1988). Resistance is the name of this simultaneously dense and fissured arrangement, this

strategic apparatus where powers play, obscurely, freely, at once with and against other powers. As an "a
priorist positivist," Foucault established a cartography of power. As "transcendentalists" we might want to elaborate an analytic of resistance. This would be the transcendental of

every resistance, whatever kind it be: resistance to power, to the state of things, to history; resistance to
destruction, to death, to war; resistance to stupidity, to peace, to bare life. Resistance is not a task or
a necessity. It is a law of being. It is internal and immanent to its object. From the moment that being is given, takes form and figure,
consists of and insists in, from the moment there is being or a state, it incurs and bumps up against a resistance which irresistibly twists it and irreversibly fissures it. Say that a rule is a fragile stabilization and a heteroclite
conglomeration of relations of force, law, compromise, and justice. Accordingly, it is always on its way to being deregulated and altered. In the same way, life is not a substance, a given, or a value. It is a subtle disposition, plotting
in a fragile way with the power of destruction which constantly accompanies it and which forms a life-death complex that is precarious and reversible. Similarly, in a general way, every state is flanked by its double, which limits it
and pressures it from the interior. Resistance is internal and coextensive with the instance. Every being strikes against its counter-being. That counter-being is neither non-being, nor nothingness, nor another kind of being, nor a
power of annihilation, nor the least of beings. 2 It is being itself, which, in its deployment and its extension, turns against itself, and affects its "inside" with an "outside" that it has itself activated and incurred. One can calculate
several essential features of resistance from this logic of the double, this law of "countering." Immanent to its object, resistance is not created "in the name of" principles, values, ideals (truth, good, law, honor, dignity, etc). We are
not presupposing some heaven of ideas, nor confusing the transcendental with transcendence, nor contenting ourselves with tautology (resistance is good where it resists that which is bad, resistance is bad where it resists the

Resistance is a fact, not an obligation. It is included within

good). So every principle is deduced, every ideal is posed, and every value is valorized before being valorizing.

being, it is not the "should-be." It is indeed that which signifies history. From the moment that power
appears, resistance immediately accompanies it. Principles evoked might have been variable, its modalities changeable, and its occasions multiple. While resistance
against power and stupidity, against death and time has never ceased, neither has it ever been explicitly manifest, except in eclipses and brief flashes. In this regard, resistance is no more (and evidently no less) in question today
than yesterday or tomorrow. It is simply that the forms invented, at the same time as induced, by the apparatus of the era and of the contemporary situation are partially new. Perhaps, faced with the appearance [End Page 19] of
capital and manufacture which devales working tools and knowledge, one responds with sabotage and luddism. But faced with globalization and the extension over the whole planet of the laws of capital which render work and
working conditions precarious, we respond by agitating for the "thirty hour week, and an equal salary for all." Perhaps, confronted with expulsions to the country, inspections in the cities and neighborhoods, and the drive to put
everybody to work, one resists with calls for "less work!" and for our "right to leisure." But at the time when lawful states give themselves the mission of controlling population flows and singling out those with rights, one responds

with calls for the "civil legalization of everybody!" etc.In a general way, there is no just resistance, except as adjusted-to, and justice
is not that which "in the name of" one resists. It is an idea (and an affect) which wakens and awakens
because one resists. And it disappears if, or to the extent that, nobody resists. Eras vary and if one must evaluate and hierarchize them (one need not), it is in terms of their possible maneuvering margins
for resistance and so of the possibilities they allow for turning around a situation. Every resistance is a mixture of reactivity and activity, of

conservation and invention, of negation and affirmation. If it is archaic, it is so necessarily. It responds to a situation, it reacts to an event, it is therefore
posterior, secondary, and subordinated to that which it resists. However, one cannot deduce from this, contrary to what is sometimes supposed, that it is passive or backwards looking, or that it constitutes an obstacle to be
removed or a regression to be overcome for the responsible agent who might accept and assume this. Still less should we say that to speak of resistance is to adopt the point of view of the "victim" (see Badiou 1993, 13), as if evil,

in speaking of
misfortune, and universal suffering ruled over the world without exception and as if the sufferers must sacrifice themselves on the battlefield if not consenting or being resigned to misfortune. True,

resistance we have to suppose that history turns always and "naturally" towards the bad and only
wins on the backs of the losers. But it is not a matter of idealizing the victors nor of deeming defeats heroic. For if the losers resist, it is to gain
space and time, to turn around and reroute the present look of things. History inevitably takes bad
turns, but good turns have inevitably responded to these, as played by certain vigilant, watchful
minoritarians, who are always ready to leap in, to intervene and to cry: "Enough! Something else
now! Some air! Some breathing space!" Such stances are declarative, affirmative. More precisely, resistance imperceptibly
modifies its reactive position. The response can turn into the active stance of reply, riposte, and retort. It can invent new game rules while occupying a place on the chess-board or playing the adversary's game. This kind

of invention requires strategy: the art of borrowing, of miming, and of understudying. To make a rejoinder is to steal and
to fit out anew the adversary's arms, turn them inside out like a glove and offer them up in return. [End Page 20] In this way their impasses and dangers, concealed until now, are made clear--as are chances and new possibilities

which might previously have been unthinkable and impossible. This is the immanent criteria of judgment and evaluation of resistance. There
are no good resistances to badness (ethics) or to regression (individual or collective history), nor bad resistances to the good, or to progress. There are reactive resistances which deny, conserve, and restore the state of things and

If it is true that resistance is born from

active resistances which activate reactivity and draw from this diversion the joy of invention and the affirmation of the something different.

the thwarted affecting of one force by another, then resistance is a matter of affect, passion, and
heart. It issues neither from free choice nor from reasoning. At once wild and strategic, resistance does not require a theory of the will--rather (to speak classically), some kind of "Treatise of the Passions," in other words, of
liberty. Why does one resist? Because lived life is not livable, because the state of things is not tolerable. A

resistance is always punctual and local, always precise and limited. Here, some forces respond, in that particular locale, and at that particular
moment, to those particular forces in a complex and duplicit play where each resists the resistance of the other. The forces of resistance are blind and obstinate, deaf and stubborn, and seem devoid of the least intelligence: the

same forces are at work in death and life, in resistance and counter-resistance. However, as attested by the fact that one resists as much with and for
others as alone and for oneself, these same forces search for air and the outside. They experiment with the new, they are subject to aleatory variations and to contingent encounters; they
make use of turns and deviations about which it is risky to decide if it is a matter of a ruse of the same or a complicated strategy to elude the same. This is why resistance is an

experience of subjectivization: it is the experimentation of freedom. Freedom is not the faculty

requisite to an explanation of why some resist and not others. It takes courage to draw on one's anger
at the unacceptable in order to glean the energy necessary to combat it. It takes courage to reroute the power of existing which is
unleashed by one's combative indignation in order to cultivate and multiply powers worthy of existence. All this takes a sense of risk and perseverance. 3 And resistance, like ethics, is

nothing other than the courage of freedom. Resistance is a particular combat. It doesn't confront the enemy in order to impose
defeat. It struggles with adversity, of which the adversary is only a stand-in to weaken it and make it weaken its hold. Resistance does not seek victory, it does not

engage in battle, still less war. But, through a lateral and duplicit strategy it disarms the enemy with the enemy's own arms. Deregulating the rules of war that it had imposed, resistance
constrains it to displace its domain and its method of play. [End Page 21] Combative, strategic, duplicit resistance is neither the naked power

of triumphant life, be it in failure or death, nor this "unnamable" "thing" 4 which would form like a
bedrock, a residue, or an abyssal remainder on which any enterprise of life, of any kind, would
founder. If the same forces are at work in the resistance of death and in the resistance to death, it is because death and life are complex and precarious combinations of identical elements which only differ in intensity,
ingeniosity, complexity, and inventivity. There is, in today's era, a multiplication of examples of these life-death compositions where the living, thought of as a tactician, defies the death which constantly doubles it: grafts, long
survivals, etc. Where death perseveres indefectibly in being, whether conserving or destroying, life simultaneously rebounds, patiently and impatiently, on those obstacles it encounters, ties with them new knots of which one will

The being of life is nourished by counter-being. What is to be

only ever know after the fact whether they confine or release new possibilities.

done? How to divert from it the noxious and reactive force? The resistance of life is nothing other
than its capacity to play on and thwart irresistible resistances.
2NC Answers
 Cap Unsustainable

Collapse is coming by 2060most recent data proves

Mason 14 (Paul, The Guardian, 7/7/14, The best of capitalism is over for rich countries and for the poor ones it will be over by 2060,
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jul/07/capitalism-rich-poor-2060-populations-technology-human-rights-inequality)

We, the deluded masses, may have to wait for decades to find
One of the upsides of having a global elite is that at least they know what's going on.

out who the paedophiles in high places are; and which banks are criminal, or bust. But the elite are supposed to know in
real time and on that basis to make accurate predictions. Just how difficult this has become was
shown last week when the OECD released its predictions for the world economy until 2060. These are that
growth will slow to around two-thirds its current rate; that inequality will increase massively; and that there is
a big risk that climate change will make things worse. Despite all this, says the OECD, the world will be four times

richer, more productive, more globalised and more highly educated. If you are struggling to rationalise the two
halves of that prediction then don't worry so are some of the best-qualified economists on earth.
World growth will slow to 2.7%, says the Paris-based thinktank, because the catch-up effects boosting growth in the developing world

population growth, education, urbanisation will peter out. Even before that happens, near-stagnation in advanced

economies means a long-term global average over the next 50 years of just 3% growth, which is low . The
growth of high-skilled jobs and the automation of medium-skilled jobs means, on the central projection, that inequality will rise by 30%. By 2060

countries such as Sweden will have levels of inequality currently seen in the USA: think Gary, Indiana, in the suburbs of
Stockholm. The whole projection is overlaid by the risk that the economic effects of climate change begin

to destroy capital, coastal land and agriculture in the first half of the century, shaving up to 2.5% off world GDP and 6% in
south-east Asia. The bleakest part of the OECD report lies not in what it projects but what it assumes . It

assumes, first, a rapid rise in productivity, due to information technology. Three-quarters of all the
growth expected comes from this. However, that assumption is, as the report states euphemistically, "high compared with
recent history". There is no certainty at all that the information revolution of the past 20 years will cascade
down into ever more highly productive and value-creating industries. The OECD said last year that, while the internet had
probably boosted the US economy by up to 13%, the wider economic effects were probably bigger, unmeasurable and not captured by the market. The veteran US economist Robert

the productivity boost from info-tech is real but already spent. Either way, there is a fairly big
Gordon has suggested

risk that the meagre 3% growth projected comes closer to 1%. And then there's the migration problem.
To make the central scenario work, Europe and the USA each have to absorb 50 million migrants between now and 2060, with the rest of the developed world absorbing another 30

The main risk the OECD models is that developing

million. Without that, the workforce and the tax base shrinks so badly that states go bust.

countries improve so fast that people stop migrating. The more obvious risk as signalled by a 27% vote for the Front
National in France and the riotous crowds haranguing migrants on the California border is that developed-world populations will not accept

it. That, however, is not considered. Now imagine the world of the central scenario: Los Angeles and Detroit
look like Manila abject slums alongside guarded skyscrapers; the UK workforce is a mixture of old white people and newly arrived young
migrants; the middle-income job has all but disappeared. If born in 2014, then by 2060 you are either a 45-year-old barrister or a 45-year-old barista.

There will be not much in-between. Capitalism will be in its fourth decade of stagnation and then if we've done nothing about carbon

emissions the really serious impacts of climate change are starting to kick in . The OECD has a clear

message for the world: for the rich countries, the best of capitalism is over. For the poor ones now experiencing the glitter and haze of
industrialisation it will be over by 2060. If you want higher growth, says the OECD, you must accept higher inequality. And vice versa.
Even to achieve a meagre average global growth rate of 3% we have to make labour "more flexible", the economy more globalised. Those migrants scrambling over the fences at the
Spanish city of Melilla, next to Morocco, we have to welcome, en masse, to the tune of maybe two or three million a year into the developed world, for the next 50 years. And we have to

Oh and there's the tax problem. The report points out that, with the polarisation between
achieve this without the global order fragmenting.

we will have to move as Thomas Piketty suggests to taxes on wealth. The problem here, the OECD points out,
high and low incomes,

is that assets whether they be a star racehorse, a secret bank account or the copyright on a brand's logo tend to be intangible and therefore
held in jurisdictions dedicated to avoiding wealth taxes. The OECD's prescription more globalisation,
more privatisation, more austerity, more migration and a wealth tax if you can pull it off will carry weight. But not with
everybody. The ultimate lesson from the report is that, sooner or later, an alternative programme to "more of the same"
will emerge. Because populations armed with smartphones, and an increased sense of their human rights, will not accept a future of high inequality and low growth.
 Cap UnsustainableNo Future

Speed itself has been internalized as a political technology as we are never able to be
outside of speed. Every inch of the planet has been colonized and the illusion of a
future world better than the present has been vanquished.
Bifo 11. Franco Bifo Berardi, Professor of Social History of Communication at the Accademia di Belle
Arti of Milan, After the Future, pg. 16-8

Because of this change political power has changed its nature. When the machine was external the State had to regulate the body and for this
used the law. Agencies of repression were used in order to force the conscious organisms to submit to that rhythm without rebellion. Now the political

domination is internalized and is undistinguishable from the machine itself. Not only the machine but also the machinic
imagination undergoes a mutation during this passage. Marinetti conceived the machine in the modern way, like an external enhancer. In the bio-social

age the machine is difference of information: not exteriority but linguistic modeling, logic and cognitive
automatism, internal necessity. A hundred years on since the publication of the Futurist Manifesto, speed too has been
transferred from the realm of external machines to the information domain. Speed itself has been
internalised. During the 20th century, the machine of speed accomplished the colonisation of global space; this
was followed by the colonisation of the domain of time, of the mind and perception, so that the future
collapsed. In the acceleration of psychic and cognitive rhythm is rooted the collapse of the future. Thanks
to the external machine the colonization of the space of the planet has been accomplished: transportation tools have made us reach every inch of the Earth, and
have given us the possibility of knowing, marking, controlling and exploiting every single place. The machines have made it possible to displace fast, to penetrate the
bowels of the Earth, to exploit the underground resources, to occupy every visible spot with the products of technical reproduction. As
long as the
spatial colonization was still underway, as far as the external machine could go towards new territories,
a future was conceivable, because the future is not only a dimension of time, but also a dimension of
space. The future is the space that we do not yet know; we are yet to discover and exploit it. When every inch of the planet has been
colonized, the colonization of the temporal dimension has began, i.e., the colonization of mind, of
perception, of life. Thus began the century with no future. The question of the relationship between an unlimited expansion of
cyberspace and the limits of cyber time opens up here. Being the point of virtual intersection of the projections generated by countless issuers, cyberspace is
unlimited and in a process of continuous expansion. Cybertime, which is the ability of social attention to process
information in time, is organic, cultural and emotional, therefore it is everything but unlimited.
Subjected to the infinite acceleration of the info-stimuli, the mind reacts with either panic or de-
sensitisation. The concept of sensibility (and the different but related concept of sensitivity) are crucial here: sensitivity is the ability of the
human senses to process information, and sensibility is the faculty that makes empathic understanding
possible, the ability to comprehend what words cannot say, the power to interpret a continuum of non-
discrete elements, non- verbal signs and the flows of empathy. This faculty, which enables humans to understand
ambiguous messages in the context of relationships, might now be disappearing. We are witnessing now the development of a generation of
human beings lacking competence in sensibility, the ability to empathically understand the other and decode signs that are not codified in a binary system.
When the punks cried No Future, at the turning point of the year 1977, that cry seemed a paradox not
to be taken too seriously. Actually, it was the announcement of something quite important: the
perception of the future was changing. Future is not a natural dimension of the mind, rather it is a
modality of perception and imagination, a feature of expectation and attention, and its modalities and
features change with the changing of cultures. Futurism is the artistic movement that embodies and asserts the accomplished modernity
of the future. The movement called Futurism announces what is most essential in the 20th century because this century is pervaded by a religious belief in the
future. We do not believe in the future in the same way. Of course, we know that a time after the present is going to come, but we dont expect that this time will
fulfill the promises of the present. The Futurists and the moderns in general thought that the future is reliable and trustworthy. In the first part of the century
Fascists and Communists and the supporters of Democracy held very different ideas, and followed divergent methods, but all of them shared the belief that the
future will be bright, no matter how hard the present. Our
post-futurist mood is based on the consciousness that the future
is not going to be bright, or at least we doubt that the future means progress.Modernity started with the reversal of
the theocratic vision of time as Fall and distancing from the City of God. Moderns are those who live time as the sphere of a progress towards perfection, or at least
towards improvement, enrichment, and rightness. Sincethe turning point of the century that trusted in the future and I like to
place this turning point in the year 1977 humankind has abandoned this illusion. The insurgents of 68 believed that they were fulfilling the
Modern Hegelian Utopia of the becoming true of thought, the Marcusean fusion of reason and reality. By the integration of Reality and Reason (embedded in social
knowledge, information and technology) turned history into a code-generated world. Terror and Code took over the social relationship and utopia went dystopic.
The century that trusted in the future could be described as the systematic reversal of utopia into
dystopia. Futurism chanted the utopia of Technique, Speed and Energy, but the result was Fascism in
Italy and totalitarian communism in Russia.
 AT Perm

Perm is a new linkit masks capitalist violence and makes the impact inevitable
Prudham 2009 (Scott, Department of Geography and Center for Environment, University of Toronto, 2009, Pimping Climate Change: Richard Branson, Global Warming, and the Performance of Green
Capitalism. Environment and Planning A, Vol 41, Pages 1594-1613)

`green capitalism' to refer to a tightly woven mix

Green capitalism, metabolism, the production of capitalist nature, and accumulation for accumulation's sake I use the term

of faith in nominally free markets and market-based instruments, enclosures of various kinds, and
capital investment and entrepreneurial innovation, all aimed at redressing environmental problems
(however defined and measured). The actual term has been used by others (eg Friedmann, 2005; Watts, 2002), but the substantive content of what I mean is much more widely recognized and problematized by critical scholars. In

green capitalism refers to the increasing incorporation and internalization of ecological

the most abstract rendering,

conditions into the circuits of capital accumulation via the production, commodification, and even real
subsumption of nature (Boyd et al, 2001; Kloppenburg, 2004; O'Connor, 1998; Prudham, 2005; Smith, 1984). This is attended by forms of calculation, expertise, and environmental governance. But it also
includes the manner in which environmental politics become semiotically and ideologically tethered to the reproduction of the conditions of accumulation, via what Smith 2008 [1984]) theorizes as the proliferation of the abstract

green capitalism comes in many forms and, like the more general neoliberal turn of which it is one
second (produced) nature of exchange value (see also O'Connor, 1993). As such,

facet, has complex intellectual and political origins. Under the rubric of green capitalism , for instance, should be

included a widespread turn in recent decades to so-called market-based mechanisms such as tradeable
pollution permits. This approach is now becoming central in climate policy, particularly but not only in the EU (Bailey, 2007a; 2007b; Bailey and Rupp, 2005) in the form of both state-coordinated and voluntary
offset markets in carbon dioxide emissions (Bumpus and Liverman, 2008). The intellectual foundation of market-based mechanisms, particularly tradable emissions or cap-and-trade systems, in one sense relies simply on the

A closely related idea

argument that this is the most economically efficient (ie cheapest) way to achieve given environmental quality objectives (for discussion see Ekins and Barker, 2001; Tietenberg, 1980).

animates the neoclassical theory of the `backstop technology'. When full costs are paid, the argument
goes, informed entrepreneurs will adjust to (accurate) price signals by diverting investment away from
environmentally damaging technologies and toward more green technoeconomic strategies (Pearce and Turner, 1990;
for critique of price as a measure of scarcity, see Norgaard, 1990). But deeper foundations lie in an underlying faith in private decision making:

thus, the conservation-privatization connection articulated famously by Hardin (1968), and before him (and more rigorously) by Gordon (1954). In turn, all of
these draw on a lineage of faith in `greed' (bolstered by strong, exclusive private property rights) as socially desirable. For example, Malthus (1993 [1798]), in addition to his
(in)famous embrace of famine and disease as `natural' or what he called `preventive' checks on population growth, also stated that: it appears, that a society constituted according to the most beautiful form that imagination can
conceive, with benevolence for its moving principle, instead of self-love, and with every evil disposition in all its members corrected by reason and not force, would, from the inevitable laws of nature, and not from any original
depravity of man [sic], in a very short period degenerate into a society constructed upon a plan not essentially different from that which prevails in every known state at present; I mean, a society divided into a class of proprietors,
and a class of labourers, and with self-love the main-spring of the great machine (Malthus, 1993 [1798], pages 64 ^ 65). There is, of course, much more to be said about green capitalism, its origins, and a proliferation of market
fundamentalism in contemporary environmental policy making (see eg Goldman, 2005; Heynen et al, 2007; Krueger and Gibbs, 2007; Liverman, 2004; McAfee, 1999; Mansfield, 2004a; 2004b; 2007). But the point is that markets,
more or less accurate prices, enclosures of various kinds, a faith in the choices of ostensibly independent and rational individuals, and investment of capital by innovative entrepreneurs constitute the ubiquitous tropes of green
capitalism. A pithy but by no means atypical endorsement of the green capitalist approach is encapsulated, for instance, in the following Heritage Foundation energy policy statement: U.S. energy policy should be based on the
creativity of free enterprise. Congress and the Administration should rely on the private sector's research and development capabilities to deliver traditional supplies and viable new energy sources rather than mandates,

This kind of approach to environmental regulation has become emblematic of a

regulations, subsidies, and directed research.'' (1)

plethora of like-minded think tanks and lobby groups, particularly in the US. It is consistent with a
reinvigorated turn to the mix of utopian economic and political doctrines of freedom that constitute the
rhetorical and ideological core of neoliberalism (Harvey, 2005), and very consistent with a more general shift in
recent decades from `managerialism to entrepreneurialism' (Harvey, 1989) in social regulation. Green capitalism
thus reflects and reinforces transformations of governance, and specifically environmental governance, with so-called command-and-control approaches giving way
to mechanisms such as ``eco-taxes, `best practices' environmental management, green consumer activism, community-driven environmental regulation, and more collaborative models of
environmental governance'' (Watts, 2002, page 1315). Markets, privatization, commercialization, and outright commodification have

become central elements (as opposed to the objects) of environmental regulation, evident not only in the prescriptions of neoliberal think tanks but also in those of a
whole generation of environmental NGOs and government policy makers (Bakker, 2005; Heynen et al, 2007; McCarthy and Prudham, 2004; Mansfield, 2007). So, what does any of this have to do with Richard Branson? In some
ways, everything. Despite the fact that the venerable BBC described Branson's September 2006 announcement as one in which he was pledging US $3 billion to `fight global warming', this is not quite right. Branson did spin it this
way, but the announcement specifically targeted ``schemes to develop new renewable energy technologies'', and to divert profits from Virgin Airlines and Virgin Trains into a financial arm of the Branson empire called,
appropriately enough, Virgin Fuels. Virgin Fuels, in turn, will use these funds as part of its planned investments in the alternative energy sector, investments that already include backing a California company called Cilion, making
ethanol from corn. This is very much consistent with the broader emergence of so-called `biofuels' as an alternative to fossils, a strategy that is garnering considerable momentum thanks to endorsements by the likes of Al Gore,
and to widespread subsidies in the US and elsewhere aimed at pulling farm crop cultivation into the circuits of biofuel production (on US subsidies see Koplow, 2007). It is consistent with Branson's declared hope that biofuels can
displace fossil fuels burned in conventional air and train travel in the foreseeable future. This, too, is quintessentially green capitalism, a technical fix for an ostensibly technical problem, propelled by an entrepreneur looking to
sustain profitability in the context of threats to existing markets. But, if this is green capitalism, examining Branson's approach more closely points to systematic problems with the green capitalist agenda. A supposed advantage of
biofuels is that they promise a less carbon-intensive fuel source for transportation (and other energy-using activities) since they will drastically reduce net carbon emissions to the atmosphere when burned. The obvious reason for
this is that the fuels come from green plants which, in turn, assimilate carbon dioxide from the atmosphere in their growth. While fossil fuel combustion transfers carbon from deep geological storage into the atmosphere in the
form of oxides of carbon, and contributes to an enhanced greenhouse effect, biofuels offer a lower carbon alternative and the possibility of a zero net carbon flux to the atmosphere, provided the plants take up as much or more
carbon dioxide when they grow as is released by the biofuels when they burn. Yet, there are elements of this strategy for offsetting carbon emissions which are not ideal. One is simply that the scheme obscures or deflects
attention from growth in the airline industry and in airline travel per se. Substituting fuels amidst continued growth in the industry means any ecological implications associated with the new fuel cycle will be, all other things being
equal, that much more pronounced. And, in the case of biofuels, there are reasons to be concerned about the substitution of one set of environmental problems for another as expansion in biofuels production offsets current and
growing demand for airline fuel. Only under highly restrictive and unlikely conditions could the switch to renewable fuels actually be renewable in a robust sense of the term. All of the energy generated from burning biofuels,
including efficiency and processing losses, would have to be offset by the production of energy from photosynthesis in the feed crop. This includes all of the energy inputs in the production process. It sounds feasible, intuitively
doable, and eminently appealing, but life-cycle assessments of intensive crop production regimes, whether for agriculture or for energy production, consistently point to large inputs of energy in the cultivation, harvesting, and
conversion stages, sometimes by many factors more than the energy yielded by the final product (Bayliss-Smith, 1982; Netting, 1986). These inputs include, for instance, fuel used for machinery in cultivation and processing,
chemical inputs such as fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides, etc. Will all of these inputs, simultaneously, be converted to renewable sources along with the fuel itself? It seems unlikely. For example, Pimentel and Patzek (2006)
offer some sobering numbers when it comes to one of the most commonly cited `solutions' to the fossil fuel problem, the conversion of corn (either directly or from biomass `waste') into ethanol. To start, all green plants in the
United States take up in one year through photosynthesis about the energy equivalent of half of current annual energy consumption in the US. If the entire US corn crop were converted into ethanol, it would offset a total of 6% of
current US fossil fuel combustion, and that ignores the fact that it takes 29% more energy to produce ethanol than is contained within it; for cellulose technologies (from high-intensity wood fibre plantations), that number is 50%
using current technologies. That energy input has to come from someplace, and it currently comes primarily from fossil fuels. In fact, the thermodynamics of converting plant biomass to liquid fuels is sobering even using the fastest
growing crops such as acacia and eucalyptus (Patzek and Pimentel, 2005). So a substitution to nominally renewable fuels can disguise important nonrenewable elements of renewable fuel cycles. Moreover, the discourse of
converting so-called agricultural `waste' (eg the unused plant material in corn production) into biofuels ignores the implications of this diversion of nutrients out of ecosystems, which may subsidize short-term energy supplies with
long-term soil productivity (Patzek and Pimentel, 2005). In addition, there is a suite of potentially negative repercussions of converting to biofuels on a large scale, including the diversion of food crops into biofuel production, the
appropriation of human and nonhuman forest habitat to intensive and industrialized crop cultivation regimes, and the production of particulate emissions from biofuel combustion itself. These concerns are becoming increasingly
evident, not least via a current international food crisis whose origins, in substantial measure, lie in rising prices driven by com- petition for food grains between the food system and the biofuels industry. And they point to the need
to think in terms of complex chains of causation that rework socio-natural relations across scales in the biofuel economy, connections that bring together voracious energy demand (particularly in affluent countries), multinational
capital, states and international development institutions, local and regional dynamics of deforestation, social marginalization and struggle, access to land, and food security (Cooke, 2002; Dennis and Colfer, 2006; McMorrow and

these specific problems with the political ecology of biofuel substitution

Talip, 2001; Wolford, 2004; see also Monbiot, 2005). I argue that

exemplify systematic challenges to the green capitalist agenda. Specifically, they point to systematic ways in
which biophysical nature is produced or metabolized in a capitalist political economy. These
particularities include growth dependence, but also a tendency to continuously transform the relations
and conditions of production (including, importantly, environmental conditions) propelled by the drive to accumulate capital as an
end in and of itselfwhat Marx called `accumulation for accumulation's sake'. At issue here, in part, is that capitalism is
a restless and growth-dependent political economy. And, despite the immediacy of current anxieties surrounding climate change and a host of other environmental
problems linked to relentless economic growth and transformation, the question as to whether capitalism can or cannot continue to grow ad infinitum is arguably as old as capitalism itself. It is one of the defining questions of
classical political economy taken up variously by the likes of Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and Thomas Malthus, all of whom were generally pessimistic about long- run raw material availability. By no means has this debate
disappeared, and, in fact, it was reinvigorated by the emergence of an increasingly globalist environmentalism in the 1960s and 1970s, and in the specific guise of a neo-Malthusian emphasis on the population-environment nexus
(see eg Ehrlich, 1968; Meadows and Club of Rome, 1972). The question of whether or not capitalism is or can be sustainable has also animated debates within the Marxist tradition, with, it must be said, no clear consensus (see eg

A recent contribution to this line of thinking, picked up from some of Marx's more obscure
Altvater, 1993; Benton, 1989; 1996; Leff, 1995; J O'Connor, 1998; M O'Connor, 1994).

and scattered direct comments on the matter, come in the guise of the notion of the metabolic rift. This idea is generating some considerable popular and scholarly
interest thanks primarily to the work of American sociologist John Bellamy Foster (1999; 2000). But, as Foster clearly indicates, it comes from Marx, who was inspired, in turn, by reading 19th-century agronomy and soil chemistry
literature. This includes the work of German chemist Justus von Liebig, who criticized intensive agronomic practices as forms of robbery. Liebig is thought to be the inspiration for Marx's famous statement in volume 1 of Capital

The idea of a more systemic metabolic

that ``all progress in capitalist agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the worker, but of robbing the soil'' (Marx, 1977, page 638).

rift between capitalist society and the nonhuman world is based in part on Marx's general notion that
the social relation to nature in all societies is essentially metabolic, meaning that there is a process of mutual
transformation between human and nonhuman nature through the transfer of matter and energy. As he wrote in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts:
Nature is man's [sic] inorganic bodythat is to say, nature insofar as it is not the human body. Man lives from natureie, nature is his bodyand he must maintain a continuing dialogue with it if he is not to die. (2) For Foster

social metabolism combined with his critique of capitalist agriculture underpin an

(1999), Marx's comments on

argument for a more systemic metabolic rift specific to and constitutive of capitalism. Having first traced the lineage of the
metabolism notion as it was picked up by the likes of Kautsky and Bukharin (but also dropped, notably in the Soviet tradition), in his subsequent book Foster (2000) extends the critique of capitalist agriculture into a more

Capitalism is unable to maintain the conditions

generalized critique of capitalist nature. In their elaboration, Clark and York (2005, page 399) put it as follows:

necessary for the recycling of nutrients. In this capitalism creates a rift in our social metabolism with
nature. In fact, the development of capitalism continues to intensify the rift in agriculture and creates rifts in other realms of the society-nature relationship, such as the introduction of artificial fertilizers.'' In their words,
drawing on Foster with a specific eye to theorizing global warming, the: metabolic rift refers to an ecological rupture in the metabolism of a system. The natural processes and cycles (such

as the soil nutrient cycle) are interrupted. The division between town and country is a particular geographical

manifestation of the metabolic rift, in regards to the soil nutrient cycle. But the essence of a metabolic rift is the rupture or interruption of a natural system'' (page 399). Considerable
focus in Foster's work (and in that of Clark and York) is directed at the debate over so-called `dematerialization'that is, the degree to which economic growth and capitalism more generally can be `decoupled' from energy and
material throughput to a sufficient degree to make sustainable capitalism possible. This debate has been central to the emergence of environmental sociology and the so-called `treadmill of production' theory. Scholars led by

growth effects tend to

Schnaiberg (1980; Schnaiberg and Gould, 1994) have challenged sanguine predictions, typically from economists and ecological modernization advocates, documenting that

swamp efficiency effects with little evidence of any absolute decline in energy and material
requirements even in the most affluent national economies. Foster draws on the work of 19th-century British political economist William Stanley Jevons in
calling this an example of the Jevons `paradox' (ie that increasing efficiencies can in some ways only encourage

increasing demand, but tend not to lead to decreasing amounts of throughput). The explanation for this apparent paradox, as Foster
as well as Clark and York argue, is the expanding scale of capitalism, founded, in turn, on the phenomenon of growth or

accumulation as ends in and of themselves (accumulation for accumulation's sake) in the context of a
prevailing metabolic rift. The metabolic rift as a critique of green capitalism seems highly germane to the case in hand since, as noted, Branson's announcements at best promise less carbon-intensive
development trajectories. Yet, to the extent that insight is to be drawn from broadly Marxian perspectives on environmental change in a capitalist political economy, the record is mixed. On the one hand, there are those who see
capitalism as `the problem' a la Foster or O'Connor and his second (ecological) contradiction argument (1988; 1998), but, on the other, there are those of a more Promethean disposition (for discussion see Foster, 1999; Goldman
and Schurman, 2000). On this, Harvey notes pointedly that ``It has ... proven hard to wean Marxism from a rather hubristic view of the domination of nature thesis''; yet, he continues, ``in those rare instances when Marxists have
taken the material biological and physical conditions of existence as foundational to their materialism, they have either lapsed into some form of environmental determinism ... or into a damaging materialist pessimism'' (1996,
page 193). Geographerswhose cross is also to bear the legacy of environmental determinism and the discipline's colonial historyof a generally Marxist uneven development bent have tended to downplay strict and static
notions of ecological `limits' in favor of the dynamic production of new conditions, the constant revolutionizing of production relations and conditions (Buck, 2007; Harvey, 1974; 1996), and, in this context, the material and semiotic
production of what is experienced as `nature' itself (Smith, 2008 [1984]).(3) It bears noting here too (2008 [1984) that much early political ecology (influenced by and influential on geographical debates) eschewed simple-minded
neo-Malthusianism and the so-called `pressure of population on resources' hypothesis, emphasizing instead unjust rights of resource access and control; contested meanings and understandings; and the dynamics of
commercialization and commodification as key factors propelling environmental degradation (Blaikie and Brookfield, 1987; Carney, 1993; Robbins, 2004; Turner, 1993; Watts, 1983). Limits, per se, were simply no longer the
question. As for nature itself, Smith (1996) summed it up rather nicely by noting that `nature' as it is conventionally understood and talked about is not a very relational and, therefore, Marxist category at all. However, redefining
the problem does not make the issue of `ecological limits' to capitalism go away entirely. I strongly suspect (in fact, I know) that many critical geographers simply cringe and look away when they see the phrase `ecological limits',
and many, I suspect, will have no truck with the notion of a systemic capitalist metabolic rift more generally. Maybe they are right. Yet, in the context of various calls to attend to the material action or `agency' of nonhuman beings
and processes in our geographical work (for syntheses see Bakker and Bridge, 2006; Braun, 2005), and as (3) the distinct categories of nature and culture become dissolved in favour of hybrids, assemblages, and socionatures (see
eg Castree, 2003; Gandy, 2002; Kaika, 2005; Latour, 1993; Swyngedouw, 1999; Whatmore, 2002), Harvey's challenge in Justice Nature and the Geography of Difference remains noteworthy: What I am proposing is a way of
depicting the fundamental physical and biological conditions and processes that work through all social, cultural, and economic projects to create a tangible historical geography and to do it in such a way as to not render those
physical and biological elements as a banal and passive background to human historical geography'' (1996, page 192). There is a genuine dilemma here: what are we to make of this nonhuman matter which constitutes our
geographies? Harvey's observation remains: on one side is the specter of a rigid, dualistic, and deterministic perspective on the nature-society or nature-culture nexus. On the other, however, is potential complicity with laissez-
faire neoclassical optimism, and thus with the green capitalism school itself. One direction to go in emphasizing dynamism, change, and the relentless production of new natures, of course, is to abandon engagement with
ecological conditions per se as a subset of material conditions. But I think this is not necessary or wise, particularly for geographers. The danger is not one of bad theory but of not taking seriously enough the material conditions of
immiseration that characterize the lives of literally millions (if not billions) of people in the contemporary world, and thus the socioecological aspects of uneven development. A way forward is to emphasize that the problem is not
only a quantitative one, but also a qualitative one. Indeed, as Neil Smith noted in Uneven Development (2008 [1984], page 87): ``[C]apital, and the bourgeois society which nurtures it, usher in not just a quantitative but also a
qualitative change in the relation with nature.'' That is, the metabolic rift originates not only from increasing total amounts of material and energy throughput (as important as these flows may be), but also from the relentless and

In transforming and redefining material

chaotic transformation of relations and conditions of production (including ecological conditions) in geographically specific ways.

conditions and `limits', capitalism also transforms, redefines, and produces new `socioecological'
temporal and spatial scales (Robbins and Fraser, 2003; Sayre, 2005). All that is solid may well melt into air. What an interesting phrase in the context of the current discussion! Need we then
consider the complex constituents of newly produced air into which that which was previously solid has now melted? How does it change the valence of this celebrated phrase if we include, for instance, a proliferation of persistent
organic pollutants volatized and dispersed through the atmosphere, condensed disproportionately in colder climes, and bioaccumulated in arctic and Antarctic food webs, to say nothing of the accumulation of greenhouse gases as

a whole suite of political ecological relations is caught up in and

driving forces in the changing composition of the atmosphere? In the case at hand,

reworked in the emerging economy and geography of biofuels and carbon offsets. Returning again to the pages of Uneven
Development, Smith (page 88) goes on to note in a prescient reference to the implications of climate change that ``the industrial production of carbon dioxide and sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere have had very uncontrolled
climatic effects ... [t]he most complete and elaborate of human productions, the capitalist system, is at the same time the most anarchic ... . The production process is quite deliberate, but its immediate goal, profit, is reckoned in
terms of exchange-value, not use-value'' (emphasis added). Critically, where green capitalism is concerned, this must include an account of the role of the entrepreneurial, bourgeois subject propelling accumulation on an expanded
scale. For Marx, one of the signature features of capitalism is the central figure presented by the capitalist, driven to expand the scale and scope of accumulation as an end in and of itself. Marx offers the following striking
characterization of the phenomenon of accumulation for accumulation's sake, and its embodiment in the very identity of the archetypal capitalist (who, it should be noted, Marx unfortunately makes uniquely male): ``in so far as he
is capital personified, his motivating force is not the acquisition and enjoyment of use-values, but the acquisition and augmentation of exchange-values. He is fanatically intent on the valorization of value; consequently he ruthlessly
forces the human race to produce for production's sake. In this way he spurs on the development of society's productive forces, and the material conditions of production which alone can form the real basis of a higher form of
society, a society in which the full and free development of every individual forms the ruling principle. Only as a personification of capital is the capitalist respectable. As such, he shares with the miser an absolute drive toward self-
enrichment. But what appears in the miser as the mania of an individual is in the capitalist the effect of a social mechanism in which he is merely a cog. Moreover, the development of capitalist production makes it necessary
constantly to increase the amount of the capital laid out in a given industrial undertaking, and competition subordinates every individual capitalist to the immanent laws of capitalist production, as external coercive laws. It compels
him to keep extending his capital, so as to preserve it, but extend by means of progressive accumulation'' (1977, page 729, emphasis added). There is a lot to digest in this quote. For this discussion, I note four elements of the
passage. First, there is certainly at least a hint of the Prometheanism of Marx, his sense that capitalism unleashes productive powers that will eventually lead to a `higher form of society'. Second, however, the bourgeois subject
propels the production of new material conditions, among them new socionatures produced in, through, and even in some cases for commodity production, such as genetically modified crops in agriculture. This dynamic underpins
the production of first and second nature, as crucially redefined by Smith (2008 [1984]), through material transformation but also, more abstractly, through the proliferation of nature as exchange value (second nature). Third, Marx
observes that, while the bourgeois subject is defined by almost fanatically eschewing self-gratification in use-values, this is somewhat of an imposed compulsion, what Marx calls a `social mechanism'. As is made clear elsewhere in
Capital (1977), this compulsion originates in the need to expand the scale of production merely in order to maintain a constant volume (not rate) of profit for any given individual capitalist; in short, the capitalist must run to stay in
place (see also Harvey, 1982). There is, of course, much to be said on these topics. But, for the purposes of this discussion, note finally that Marx makes the suggestive observation here that maintaining a nondeclining volume of
profit (again, based on an expanding scale of production) as capital personified is the only manner in which the bourgeois subject is validated or made respectable, albeit in relation to a largely presumed wider social and cultural
field. In short, this is the capitalist's identity, compelled to expand even if only to stay in place economically, but also compelled by a politics of cultural recognition in a capitalist society that valorizes his or her social role only
through the `valorization of value'. But now this phrase must be understood in a double sense as both the expansion of value through exploitation of commodified labor power in production, and cultural value or worth attributed
to the capitalist according to his or her ability to oversee this exploitation. If correct, this portrait of the bourgeois entrepreneurial subject presents a sobering problem for green capitalism. If capitalism produces all manner of
potentially progressive and liberating technologies and conditions of production (as seems to be the case), it also produces these according to a logic driven not by meeting those needs per se, but by the anarchic dynamics of
accumulation for accumulation's sake, in turn driven by a nihilistic bourgeois subject whose claim to fame is accumulation in and of itself, and, moreover, whose ability to merely reproduce himself or herself is predicated on
accumulation on an ever expanding scale. While a market-centered discourse of environmentalism fixates on the most efficient ways to meet given environmental targets, it ignores the systemic production of new environmental

If growth may be
problems (new natures) for which there may be no social regulation and no targets, and which leaves unchallenged a political economy whose mantra is growth as an end in itself.

required to lift millions if not billions out of grinding poverty, growth in a capitalist economy is fuelled
not by meeting human needs per se, but by accumulation for accumulation's sake, and, with it, not just expansion, but anarchic
transformation, of social relations, of technology, and of biophysical nature. This systematically violates any robust version of the precautionary

principle, interpreted generally as `do no harm', since it places society in a position of reacting ex ante to
the changing character of produced nature. To be clear, this is not to say that all forms of socionatural change produced through accumulation for accumulation's sake are
necessarily destructive or undesirable. Rather, it is to say that the production of socionature, under green capitalism, is subordinated to

the will of the entrepreneur whose ethos is accumulation as an end in itself. Historical examples of the
phenomenon may include numerous beneficial technologies, but they also include the development of a
range of new chemicals for applications in agriculture, industrial processes, and consumer goods, not least in the form of synthetic organics and hybrid
organic/inorganic chemicals such as polychlorinated and polybrominated biphenyls (Colborn et al, 1996). Rachel Carson (1994) made these the focus of her life's work. Polychlorinated biphenyls, first manufactured commercially by

Monsanto, are perhaps the poster child of the phenomenon, a boon across a
one of the parent companies of what became

range of industrial and commercial applications, but also at the heart of an almost unparalleled toxic
legacy whose implications continue to unfold. Moreover, and this is the main point I am trying to emphasize here, these and other chemicals are the direct products of
innovative capital striving to make use of its formerly wasted by-products in the absence of knowledge about or regulation of the effects of introducing new substances into commodity circulation, food chains, and the environment
more generally. If this is a seldom celebrated form of `industrial ecology', it is also quintessentially green capitalism. I am generally in agreement with and informed by O'Connor (1998) on capitalism's second, ecological,
contradiction here except that I am emphasizing not only the underproduction of the (ecological) conditions of reproduction, but also the systemic production of new ecological conditions that may be (and, indeed, have been)

The
highly destructive to human and nonhuman life. To advocate the desirability of such outcomes or a faith in the social foundations of their genesis, as green capitalism requires, seems rather perverse indeed.

Branson case actually epitomizes and encapsulates this rather well. Here, a private entrepreneur
proposes to invest money from companies he controls into new, private, profit-seeking ventures which
ostensibly redress an existing set of environmental dilemmas (ie climate-change-inducing effects of fossil fuel combustion) by introducing a new set of fuels
for profit-driven transportation services and an attendant set of new environmental problems, many as yet unspecified or not well known. Hardly an example of the harnessing of

capital to the green cause, Branson's announcement from this perspective exemplifies many of the
reasons to be concerned with the very possibility of or limits to a `green capitalism'. Green capitalism as performance
Green capitalism relies on the role of the entrepreneurial bourgeois subject as a price-guided innovator
propelling more environmentally friendly technoeconomic development. But the success of green capitalism and the central role of the
entrepreneur rests on more than the `objective' (quantitative and qualitative) characteristics of resulting produced natures. Rather, green capitalism must also be accepted as legitimate. In order for this to happen, the

entrepreneur must be seenin political and cultural termsto be an architect of, rather than an obstacle to, a greener future. On the one hand, this
wider social sanction is consistent with the existing status of entrepreneurs as elites through the cultural worth and politics of recognition ascribed to accumulation for its own sake, as indicated by Marx in the extended quote

it requires both extension and qualification of the scope of the entrepreneur's expertise
above. But, on the other hand,

into matters pertaining to environmental change. Specifically, accumulation as an end in itself is no longer (if it ever really was) adequate; rather, the viability of
investment schemes, and with them the legitimacy of the green entrepreneur, turns on the realization of value in a market, which requires some form of social sanction (formal or otherwise) of the commodities produced by green

for green capitalism to

capitalists. How a politics of worth articulates with commodities in the circulation and realization of value is a complex matter indeed (see eg Henderson, 2004; Sayer, 2003). But,

`work', environmentalism and capitalism must be understood not as antagonisms but, rather, as a
combatable fusion embodied in technoeconomic trajectories, as well as in the figure of the bourgeois subject himself or herself. In some ways, this
curious combination is the most remarkable feature of green capitalism as a cultural logic. There are parallels here
between green capitalism and aspects of what have come to be called `neoliberalism'. I have contributed previously to arguments that the reworking of long-standing political and economic variants of liberalism in relation to
socionatural relations, the politics of environmental change, and environmentalism is constitutive of what we have come to understand as neoliberalism (Heynen et al, 2007; McCarthy and Prudham, 2004). But therein lies

we must attend to the specific ways in which what we understand to be the

something of the problem. Both analytically and politically,

`core' of neoliberalism comes to articulate with such disparate projects and outcomes, and how it is that
political subjectivities are reworked in ways that undermine any sense that neoliberalism is simply
something that `they' are doing to `us' (Larner, 2003). The alternative is to treat these combinations and
permutations as self-evident manifestations of an all-encompassing neoliberalism without ever
bothering to even seek explanation for how `it' happened. As Larner (2000)drawing on Hall (1988)correctly observed, this is exactly a problem of hegemony,
and thus of exploring how what would seem in some ways odd or counterintuitive comes (eventually) to seem normal and even common sense. This requires engaging in some understanding of the politics of legitimacy, to see how
it is that particular discursive formations, institutional arrangements, social movements, actors, and material practices come to constitute the terrain of consent. Thinking along similar lines, Brown examines the relationship

neoliberal capitalism as ``a rationality that is expressly amoral at

between neoliberalism and neoconservatism, (2006, page 692) and asks how it is that

the level of both ends and means'' can be made to articulate and combine with one ``that is expressly
moral and regulatory'' (ie neoconservatism). The same question pertains to green capitalism. How is it that the entrepreneurial subject, the capitalist, comes to have the foundation of his or her elite
status extended beyond the scope of accumulation as an inherent good, so that expanded rounds of capital accumulation and social decision making led in significant measure by the entrepreneur comes to constitute a pivotal part
of the solution in meeting the challenges of environmental change and environmentalism? This is a political problem for the would-be green capitalist such as Branson; it is also a question for critics of green capitalism to grapple
with, more so perhaps than has been the case to date. Obviously, this is a complex question. Yet, as in Brown's analysis, it points to the need to understand the reworking of political rationalities in relation to state and society, in
this context focusing on how a cultural politics of the green entrepreneurial subject comes to have coherence.
 AT Perm (Deconstruction Tradeoff)

They specifically displace a dialectical understanding of capitalism diverting critics in

debate to contingent reformism and pseudo psychology
Bedggood 99 [David, Senior lecturer in sociology at the University of Auckland, Saint Jacques: Derrida and the Ghost of Marxism,
Cultural Logic Volume 2, Number 2, Spring 1999, http://clogic.eserver.org/2-2/bedggood.html]

69. The concerns of the "new International" are those of liberal democracy -- poverty, ecological destruction, crimes against humanity -- and so on -- which are
caused by the "de facto takeover of international authorities" by nation states and capital. Thus the authority of the law which is being 'taken over' is that which
represents bourgeois right as freedom and equality ie. bourgeois citizenship rights and civil society. While Soros can talk of the aberration of finance capital, and
Giddens of fundamentalism against citizenship, Derrida provides the political philosophy of the hyper-decadent bourgeois
ego. Like Stirner in his day Derrida conjures up a philosophical apology for private property and the "freedom of labour". And as with any common liberal it seems
that Derrida subscribes to such norms and conventions of bourgeois society when he defends them against the challenge of "crimes" and "oppression" of capital.
However, in
rejecting the method and theory of Marxism as "totalitarian", and wishing to renew Marxism as a "weak
messianic power", Derrida is advocating a "new" reformist International that subscribes to an ideology
of distributional social justice posing as "natural" justice. Since this is the way the fetishised social relations of capital appear in daily
life, there is no necessity for a "new International" which is organised around a revolutionary programme. . . . The "New International" is not only that which is
seeking a new international law through these crimes. It is a link of affinity, suffering, and hope, a still discreet, almost secret link, as it was around 1848, but more
and more visible, we have more than one sign of it. It is an untimely link, without status, without title, and without name, barely public even if it is not clandestine,
without contract, "out of joint", without coordination, without party, without country, without national community (International before, across, and beyond any
national determination), without co-citizenship, without common belonging to a class. The name of the new International is given here to what calls to the
friendship of an alliance without institution among those who, even if they no longer believe or never believed in the socialist-Marxist International, in the
dictatorship of the proletariat, in the messiano-eschatological role of the universal union of the spirits of Marx or Marxism (they now know that there is more than
one) and in order to ally themselves, in a new, concrete, and real way, even if this alliance no longer takes the form of a party or a workers' international, but rather
of a kind of counter-conjuration, in the (theoretical and practical) critique of the state of international law, the concepts of State and nation, and so forth: in order
to renew this critique, and especially to radicalise it.106 70. Derrida's new International is nothing like a Marxist international and more like a Masonic order.107
By basing itself on the ideal to which capitalism aspires in its fetishised form of equal exchange, he seeks to render this ideal real for each individual. The spirit of
Marx he has recovered is actually that of Stirner's "free ego" who is alienated not by society-in-general, but by capitalist social relations. To express this freedom as
a intellectual critique or a "radicalisation" of Marxism is a retreat to a subjective idealism in which the bourgeois subject aspiring to Stirner's "unique" remains
71. So in
his misappropriation of Marx, Derrida offers the young
trapped in performativity as consumption of its alienated identity.

idealists of today a brand of anarchism they can consume in the belief that their actions constitute rebellion
for "democracy" and "emancipation" against the dehumanising norms and conventions that alienate them. Just as Stirner's "association of egoists" was a
figment of his "Thought", Derrida's new International has the potential to divert a new generation of alienated youth

into discursive acts against the symptomatic phrases rather than the materialist substance of capitalist crisis.
72. In his response to his critics who deride the idea of an "international" without class he replies: Whenever I speak of the New International in Specters of
Marx, emphasising that, in it, solidarity or alliance should not depend, fundamentally and in the final analysis, on class affiliation, this in no wise signifies, for me, the
disappearance of "classes" or the attenuation of conflicts connected with "class" differences or oppositions (or, at least, differences or oppositions based on the
new configurations of social forces for which I do in fact believe that we need new concepts and therefore, perhaps new names as well) . . . the disappearance of
power relations, or relations of social domination . . . . At issue is, simply, another dimension of analysis and political commitment, one that cuts across social
differences and oppositions of social forces (what one used to call, simplifying, "classes"). I would not say that such a dimension (for instance, the dimension of
social, national, or international classes, or political struggles within nation states, problems of citizenship or nationality, or party strategies, etc.) is superior or
inferior, a primary or a secondary concern, fundamental or not. All that depends, at every instant, on new assessments of what is urgent in, first and foremost,
singular situations and of their structural implications. For such an assessment, there is, by definition, no pre-existing criterion or absolute calculability; analysis
must begin anew every day everywhere, without ever being guaranteed by prior knowledge. It is on this condition, on the condition constituted by this injunction,
73. In other words, the term "international" is a
that there is, if there is, action, decision and political responsibility -- repoliticization.108

mystique. It covers for a nihilistic cult. Its Marxist meaning is inverted; just as messianicity is messianism
without a given messiah -- because everyone is one's own messiah. There is no prior knowledge that can
guide any collective action because that pre-anything (society, religion, etc.) is spectral, is the unfilled "void".
There are only irreducible acts which individuals perform at any given moment by personally attempting
to calculate, on the spot as it were, which of many "dimensions" or "forces" immediately concern them,
"responsibly" and in the name of "justice" (whose gift?). If there is one name to apply to this contingent conjunction of "forces" which tries to

"name" the "new" it is as I have argued above, performativity.109 Moreover, as I set out to prove, Derrida's performativity is the idealist
philosophical license for the political/social concept of reflexivity as developed by Soros and Giddens to
express their abstract understanding of the 'structure-agency' problem in the new global economy.110
Teamed-up, as performo-reflexivity, we could not get a better prescription for "demobilising" and "depoliticising" the

masses in the face of the current world crisis of capitalism. 83. This proves, as Trotsky said, that if we don't
"recognise" dialectics, dialectics nevertheless "recognises" us: "that is, extends its sway" over us.119 In the same way that the
"visor effect" blocks off the ghost's identity yet the ghost sees right through us.120 So in the end, it is dialectics -- finally the contradiction between

use-value and exchange value -- that is the ghost that haunts capitalism. No amount of tinkering with the
system will stop the capitalist market as a historically time bound mechanism from collapse (though if the proletariat pushes it will not fall in
on them). The market and the new millenarian hype cannot magic away the "specter" of Marxism. It cannot be conjured out of existence. The Dialectic is the ghost's
re-visit. The Spectre of Marx re-materialises Derrida's hauntology. Millenerianism or Materialism? 84. Today, after more than 200 years of capitalist expansion
all over the world, we face the dawn of another century. Will it herald a conflict free age of social advancement, or an age of growing social disorder and
international class conflict? By itself a new century offers no hope to the billions of workers and peasants whose lives are ruined or destroyed by the ruthless
capitalist market. It will only offer hope, if they can shed all their religious and superstitious illusions about the past and the future, and destroy the social system
that denies them hope in this life. The
promise of the new millennium for the masses is not the re-born Marx of Derrida, but
the dialectical method of the German Ideology and of Lukacs, Lenin and Trotsky. Only such a real-world Marxism
shows them how to root out the causes of their poverty and misery and to overcome their alienation from themselves
and others and to take the power over production and society in the name of humanity. 85. I think that Marx was already a materialist dialectician in the German
Ideology.121 Not in spite of, but because of Hegel. This shows up clearly in his critique of Stirner. The contradiction of the relations and forces of production was
already at the centre of Marx's method. Unfortunately Western Marxism aping radical bourgeois ideology split and fetishised the forces or the relations into a one-
sided fatalism or voluntarism. This is the trap of Western Marxism laid by the petty bourgeois intellectuals with no life in the class struggle but who want to
(p)reserve an indeterminate cultural space for their own historical "com-edification". Benjamin was a victim of this failure of dialectics, but no more than the various
"communist" internationals that failed to apply materialist dialectics and thus the method of Bolshevism. Within this tradition only Lukacs powerful ana lysis of
bourgeois irrationalism (that splits subject and object) succeeds in uniting theory and practice in the party.122 86. Lenin and Trotsky revived the dialectical
method in the form of the revolutionary party. The contradictory unity of objective and subjective reality was realised in the revolutionary programme by means of
revolutionary practice. Here we find bourgeois idealism subjected to the revolutionary critique of practice. The weapon
of critique becomes the critique of weapons. Freedom is not posed as the fear of necessity expressed as "metaphysics"

only to be 'overcome' by the authentic irrational acts of isolated individuals. Real freedom is the
recognition of necessity. First, as the theory of the historic social relations which determine social life and which alienate bourgeois subjects from their
labour and from themselves. Second, as the practice that allows necessity to be transcended by social revolution.123
 AT Framework

Our framework is key to create revolutionary pedagogical spaces to push back against
the sanitized reality perpetuated by capitalismsurrendering to capitalisms lies
makes unending violence and inequality inevitable
McLaren et al 4 (Peter is a prof and Gregory Marlin and Nathalia Jaramillo are doctoral students, Division of Urban Schooling of the Graduate School of Education and
Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, Ramin Farahmandpur is an assistant professor in the Department of Educational Policy, Foundations, and Administrative Studies
at Portland State University, Portland, Oregon, Winter 2004, Teaching in and against the Empire: Critical Pedagogy as Revolutionary Praxis, Teacher Education Quarterly)

Of course, the problem goes well beyond the crony capitalism of corporate insiders and the CEOs of Enron or WorldCom. Like the
ACEs (Amtoured Combat Earth movers) that the U.S. army employed in the last Gulf War to sever the arms, legs, and heads of Iraqi soldiers protruding from the sand after being buried alive by

capitalism today tries to sanitize its crimes so that the body count seems lower and less
bulldozers attached to tanks,

dramatic to American citizens, many of whom get their political education from the likes of CNN, FOX
News or their local newspapers. The victims of capitalism are rendered faceless and soul-less by
transforming them into unemployment statistics, or by demonizing the poor in media reports of urban
violence and crime. Our prosaic odyssey through the charnel house of global capitalism is not the result of mistakes made by
the higher echelon of the corporate world, or by desperate measures taken by the powerless and poor, but is a priori defined by the
antagonism between capital and labor. Our position, which we have time to rehearse only briefly here, is that capital grounds all social
mediation as a form of value, and that the substance of labor itself must be interrogated because doing
so brings us closer to understanding the nature of capital's social universe out of which our subjectivities
are created. Because the logic of capitalist work has invaded all forms of human sociability, society can
be considered to be a totality of different types of labor. We stress that it is urgently necessary for
educators to examine the particular forms that labor takes within capitalism. In other words, value needs to be
approached as a social relation, not as some kind of accounting device to measure rates of exploitation
or domination. As a result, educators should not take value as simply as a "given" category, but should
render it an object of critique, and examine it as an abstract social structure. We need to remember here that the production of
value is not the same as the production of wealth. The production of value is historically specific and emerges whenever labor assumes its dual character. This is most clearly explicated in
Marx's discussion of the contradictory nature of the commodity form and the expansive capacity of the commodity known as labor-power. In this sense, labor power becomes the supreme
commodity, the source of all value (see Rikowski, 2002). For Marx, the commodity is highly unstable, and non-identical. Its concrete particularity (use value) is subsumed by its existence as
value-in-motion or by what we have come to know as "capital' (value is always in motion because of the increase in capital's productivity that is required to maintain expansion). Abstract
universal labor linked to a certain organization of society under capitalism is the type of labor that creates value. The dual aspect of labor within the commodity (use value and exchange value)
enables one single commodity - money - to act as the value measure of the commodity. Money becomes the representative of labor in its abstract form. Thus, the commodity must not be
considered a thing, but a social relationship. Capitalist production in this sense involves the extraction from living labor of all the unpaid hours of labor that amounts to surplus value or profit. If

we realize that capitalism is not something that

this is the case, and we have argued elsewhere that it is (see McLaren & Farahmandpur. 2001, 2002),

can be fixed, or humanized, because its very "value form' is premised on the exploitation of human
labor. We are, in a way, tied to the mast like Ulysses as the sirens of consumption beckon us to a fool's paradise. Yet, even in progressive circles, scholars
on the parochial Anglo-American left have dismissed Marxist educators calling for a socialist democracy
as extremists or juvenile leftists. Consequently, critical revolutionary educators need to pose to their progressive liberal counterparts questions that include the
following: Can liberal reformers - even World Bank dissenters such as Jeff Sachs, George Soros and former

Senior Vice President and chief economist of the World Bank and Nobel Prize recipient, Joseph Stiglitz
(2002) - rebuild and redirect the capitalist financial system in the interests of the poor and powerless?
Can they prevent the rationality of financial capital - which is more interested in short term profits than
investing in fixed capital and long-term technological progress - from prevailing over what is rational
from the standpoint of society as a whole? Can they prevent the suffering of workers due to the dismantling of protectionist trade barriers? Can they stop
privatization from resulting in oligopolies and monopolies? Can they stop the IMF from bailing out international investors and granting elites the opportunity to protect their financial assets by
massive capital flight, while placing the burden of repaying loans, in the words of Tony Smith (2002), "on the very group that benefited least from them, working men and women"'? Do they
have the power to prevent the gangster capitalists of Russia, for instance, from buying up most of the privatized assets and natural resources of the country? Can they stop the multilateral
agencies from advancing the particular interests of the United States? Can they prevent new nation state-driven racisms that follow in the wake of the new U.S. phallomilitary warrior
nationalism currently providing ideological ballast for its practices of primitive accumulation via cluster bombing Iraq? Can they transcend the creation of plutocratic political subjectivities from
above in order to combat the uneven development of epidemics such as AIS and SARS in the equal opportunity inevitability of death? Can they reverse the damage to the poor that is a result
of financial market liberalization accompanied by high interest rates? Can they reverse the systematic tendencies to crises of over-accumulation and financial collapse or the structural
mechanisms generating uneven development? Can they prevent speculative bubbles from expanding and bursting? Can the balance of power in capital/wage labor relations shift in favor of

Can the fundamental dynamic of capitalist property relations be challenged? Questions such as
labor?

these cut to the roots of the capitalist system. From the perspective of our analysis, honest answers to
these questions will lead to a resounding "no." Liberal capitalist reformers in the main fail to
comprehend "that money is the alien form of appearance of abstract labor" and they refuse to challenge
the money fetish as the master trope of capitalist social relations (Smith, 2002). Of course, liberal reform efforts to make
global capitalism more `humane' are welcomed - such as debt relief and a more balanced trade agenda, adequate laws enforcing competition, the creation of adequate safety nets and job
creation programs, state expenditures to stimulate the economy, appropriate regulatory struct1u'cs for trade liberalization, making loans available to countries to buy insurance against
fluctuations in the international capital markets, cutting back on the bailout packages by the I.M.F., government oversight committees to ensure monopoly powers are not abused, restrictions
on speculative real estate lending - but it still remains the case that in the last instance they cannot prevent financial disaster from being visited upon developing countries or the poor in
general because these problems are inherent in the system of property and productive relations that constitute the very blood and gristle of the capitalist system (Smith, 2002). The key point

here is that liberal capitalist democracy sustains the alibi that the corrupt behavior of corporate bosses is an
aberration and not the "spectral double' of law abiding business leaders; it sustains the myth that the "real' American corporate
leader is a church-going philanthropist who wants to contribute to making the United States a better place for working men and women. Liberal democracy occludes

the fact that violence (of corporate leaders, police, criminals) is a symptom of liberal democracy's failure to respond to the
suffering of others (Zizek, 2002). If we see liberal democracy as a totality then we can recognize it as a
dialectical unity of itself and its other. The notion that we live in a meritocracy is the form of
appearance of its very opposite: the absence of equality in a society divided by race and class. Liberal
democracy, as a master signifier of "America' constitutes an imaginary supplement or, in Lacanian terms, a "big Other' that acts on behalf of all citizens, an excess that serves ideologically to

This "supplement' enables U.S. citizens to endure

justify all acts in its name on the basis that it is ultimately for the common good of humanity.

America's unbearable contradictions such as its lack of medical insurance for the poor, its growing
homeless population, its corporate scandals, its institutionalized forms of racism, its torture training center at the School of
the Americas in Fort Benning, Georgia, past support of a long list of fascist dictatorships in Guatemala, El Salvador, Iran, Indonesia and Chile, its past funding and training of the Contra
terrorists, its invasions of Panama and Grenada, and its recent role in the coup attempt in Venezuela, not to mention its massive financial and military aid to the ruthless Colombian military

Drawing attention to these horrors has attracted the condemnation of conservative "patriots'
regime.

who feel that this is tantamount to anti-Americanism. Far from justifying the terrorist attacks against the
United States on September 11, 2002, it is meant to signal how we should be in solidarity with all victims
of terror. As Slavoj Zizek (2002) writes: We do not yet know all the consequences this event will have for the economy, ideology, politics, warfare, but one thing is certain: The USA
which, hitherto, perceived itself as an island exempt from this kind of violence, witnessing this kind of thing only from the safe distance of the TV screen - is now directly involved. So the
alternative is: will the Americans decide to fortify their sphere further, or will they risk stepping out of it? Either America will persist in - even strengthen - the deeply immoral attitude of "Why
should this happen to us? Things like this just dont happen here!," leading to more aggressivity towards the threatening Outside - in short to a paranoid acting-out. Or America will finally risk
stepping through the fantasmatic screen separating it from the Outside World, accepting its arrival in the Real world, making the long overdue move from "A thing like this shouldn`t happen
here!" to "A thing like this shouldn`t happen anywhere!" That is the true lesson of the attacks: the only way to ensure that it will not happen here again is to prevent it happening anywhere
else. In short, America should learn humbly to accept its own vulnerability as part of this world, enacting the punishment of those responsible as a sad duty, not as an exhilarating retaliation.
(pp. 243-244) If we refuse to endorse the "blatantly ideological position of American innocence under attack by Third World Evil" (Zizek, 2002, p. 244), we must be careful that we do not fall
into the trap of blaming the victim. To do this, we can follow Zizek's (2000) advice and adopt the category of totality and refuse to support both Arab terrorism and U.S. innocence
simultaneously, which draws us up against the limit of moral reasoning: "from the moral standpoint, the victims are innocent, the act was an abominable crime; however, this very innocence is

The
not innocent - to adopt such an "innocent' position in today's global capitalist universe is in itself a false abstraction" (Zizek, 2002, p. 244). Critical Pedagogy and Anti-War Efforts

following characterization of the United States by John Bellamy Foster (2001) may be unsettling to some, but it is
certainly not far-fetched to anyone acquainted with the United States Cold War history over the past half century: "By any objective standard, the
United States is the most destructive nation on earth. It has killed and terrorized more populations
around the globe than any other nation since the Second World War" (p. 8). It is precisely this question that
critical educators need to engage, as morally repellent as it may be to some. As U.S. tanks roll over the dead and dying in Baghdad and other Iraq cities, we assert
that one of the principle contradictions today is between the criminal ruling class of U.S. imperialism, along with its international coalition of big (Britain) and little imperialists (Australia) on the
one side, and the exploited and oppressed peoples, nations around the world, on the other. Regardless of the recent so-called Shock and Awe victory of Bush and his quislings in Iraq, we
argue that the working out of this contradiction constitutes one of the major forms of motion that will eventually determine human history and geography. Admittedly, the sobering truth is
that following the mass slaughter in Iraq a cloud of pessimism will no doubt temporarily engulf the Arab world (do not forget, the Gaza strip is already littered with bodies and ruins) as well as

we are already beginning to see the moral

hope-deprived workers in oppressed nations around the world. That is the bad news. The good news is that

and political limits of the United States 'old fashioned` use of imperialist power in its bloody territorial
struggles. Even before the invasion of Iraq, a massive anti-war movement developed internationally both in the neo-
colonies as well as in the home citadels of imperialism such as the United States and Britain. Whilst the outcome of
the anti-war movement is much too difficult to determine in advance, it is clear that in distributing an Old Testament form of moral retribution and imperialist aggression in defiance of
international law, Bush has shocked and enraged a broad array of social forces including a whole new generation of youth who are now bristling with militancy and taking the first steps to

Although some of the more politically conscious and active youth already had a profound
becoming politically active.

loathing of U.S. imperialism and its cruelties (e.g., the anti-sweatshop movement), many more young people including students
are now for the first time looking not only for an explanation of what has taken place, but also a
program to fight for and a strategy to win (Martin, 2002). They are asking: "What can we do to stop the United States?" This is a question of
special importance to those of us living in the homeland of U.S. imperialism, especially given its long history of violent
expansionism, gunboat diplomacy and racist oppression that has provided the perks and comforts everyone here gets to enjoy (most people on this planet earn under $2.00 per day).

Recognizing that our political representatives (including those in the "lesser evil` Democrat party) respond primarily to the
commands of a tiny, corrupt and unaccountable cabal, we argue that the only historic force that can put
an end to U.S. imperialism is the multi-racial, gendered working class and radical youth in the United
States, who increasingly have nothing left to lose. Let us be clear. We are not advocating the overthrow of the government or
encouraging anyone to engage in illegal activities. But we do believe that the effects of the anti-war
movement are just one indication of the latent but explosive potential to create broad opposition to
imperialism in the United States. Events like this provide a glimpse of how a mass uprising of people might be developed to weaken U.S. imperialism and to get rid of production for
profit along with its attendant antagonisms including patriarchy, national oppression (e.g., Black, Chicano, Puerto Rican, Native American, Hawaiian and other oppressed and indigenous

In creating
peoples), and white supremacy. It was, after all, the genocide of indigenous peoples and the theft of their lands that provided the material foundation for U.S. empire.

the conditions for social change, then, the best pedagogy recognizes the limits of traditional
"pragmatist' reformist pedagogical practice by prioritizing the need to question the deeper problems,
particularly the violent contradictions (e.g., the gap between racism and the American Dream), under which students are forced to live. This means confronting the

anti-intellectual thuggery that pervades teacher education programs, particularly the kind that "rejects
"theory' (the knowledge of totality)" (Zavarzadch & Morton, 1994, p. 3). Acknowledging that capitalist education acts as a drag on
the development of "critical' or "class' consciousness by presenting a lifeless world empty of
contradictions, we argue for a Marxist theory of the "big picture, which enables people to translate their daily free-floating frustrations
with the "system' into a set of ideas, beliefs and practices that provide the basis not only for coherence and explanation but also action (Zavarzadeh & Morton, 1994, p. 3). Against

tremendous odds, the challenge over the last several decades has been to humanize the classroom environment
and to create pedagogical spaces for linking education to the praxiological dimensions of social justice
initiatives and to that end we are indebted to critical pedagogy. Yet, faced with the urgency for change, approaching social transformation
through the optic of revolutionary critical pedagogy ratchets up the struggle ahead. R evolutionary critical pedagogy dilates the aperture that

critical pedagogy has struggled to provide teachers and students over the last several decades by further
opening up the pedagogical encounter to its embeddedness in globalized social relations of exploitation
and also to the revolutionary potential of a transnational, gender-balanced, multiracial, anti-imperialist struggle. A revolutionary critical pedagogy raises the following questions for
consideration by teachers, students, and other cultural workers: how can we liberate the use value of human beings from their subordination to exchange-value? How can we convent what is
least functional about ourselves as far as the abstract utilitarian logic of capitalist society is concerned ~ our self-realizing, sensuous, species-being - into our major instrument of self-
definition? How can we make what we represent to capital - replaceable commodities subordinate to who we have also become as critical social agents of history? How can we make critical
self-reflexivity a demarcating principle of who we are and critical global citizenship the substance of what we want to become? How can we make the cultivation of a politics of hope and
possibility a radical end in itself? How can we de-commodify our subjectivities? How can we materialize our self-activity as a revolutionary force and struggle for the self-determination of free
and equal citizens in a just system of appropriation and distribution of social wealth? How can we make and remake our own nature within historically specific conventions of capitalist society
such that we can make this self-activity a revolutionary force to dismantle capitalism itself and create the conditions for the development of our full human potential? How can we confront our

Completely
"producers' (i.e.. social relations of production, the corporate media, cultural formations and institutional structures) as an independent power?

revolutionizing education does not depend upon the great white men that capitalist education teaches
us are our presidents, heroes and role models. It relies upon the broad masses of people recognizing
that the whole system is worthless and must be transformed to reflect their interests. This is the
strength of a revolutionary critical pedagogy, that it is an orientation of fighting for the interests of the multi-racial, gendered working class and indigenous
peoples all the way through. It seeks to transform schools into political and cultural centers, where crucial questions - from international affairs to

education policy -~ are debated and struggled over openly. It is a pedagogy that not only conjures up
the audacious urges of the oppressed but also enables them to fight back against the system's repeated
attacks by raising people`s understanding of their political opponents and developing their organization
and fighting position. It is a call to battle, a challenge to change this monstrous system that wages permanent warfare against the world and the planet, from
cost-effectiveness state terror in the "homeland, to the dumping of toxic chemicals on Native American lands and communities of color and the devastating bombing campaigns against

It is a pedagogy of hope that is grounded in the unfashionable "reality,' history, and

sovereign nations.

optimism of oppressed peoples and nations inside and outside of this country. It is a pedagogy against
empire. Because of this, we will settle for nothing less.
 AT Framework-Method First

Education disadFiat is fake but cultivating revolutionary consciousness is realthe

judge should be a critical intellectual assessing competing political strategies
Giroux 6/19/12 [Henry, Global TV Network Chair Professorship at McMaster University in the English and Cultural Studies Department,
Beyond the Politics of the Big Lie: The Education Deficit and the New Authoritarianism June 6, 2012 http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/9865-
beyond-the-politics-of-the-big-lie-the-education-deficit-and-the-new-authoritarianism]

While a change in consciousness does not guarantee a change in either one's politics or society, it is a
crucial precondition for connecting what it means to think otherwise to conditions that make it
possible to act otherwise. The education deficit must be seen as intertwined with a political deficit, serving to make many oppressed
individuals complicit with oppressive ideologies. As the late Cornelius Castoriadis made clear, democracy requires "critical
thinkers capable of putting existing institutions into question.... while simultaneously creating the
conditions for individual and social autonomy."(41) Nothing will change politically or economically until
new and emerging social movements take seriously the need to develop a language of radical reform and
create new public spheres that support the knowledge, skills and critical thought that are necessary
features of a democratic formative culture. Getting beyond the big lie as a precondition for critical
thought, civic engagement and a more realized democracy will mean more than correcting distortions,
misrepresentations and falsehoods produced by politicians, media talking heads and anti-public intellectuals. It will also require
addressing how new sites of pedagogy have become central to any viable notion of agency, politics
and democracy itself. This is not a matter of elevating cultural politics over material relations of power
as much as it is a rethinking of how power deploys culture and how culture as a mode of education
positions power. James Baldwin, the legendary African-American writer and civil rights activist, argued that the big lie
points to a crisis of American identity and politics and is symptomatic of "a backward society" that has
descended into madness, "especially when one is forced to lie about one's aspect of anybody's
history, [because you then] must lie about it all."(42) He goes on to argue "that one of the paradoxes of
education [is] that precisely at the point when you begin to develop a conscience, you must find
yourself at war with your society. It is your responsibility to change society if you think of yourself as
an educated person."(43) What Baldwin recognizes is that learning has the possibility to trigger a critical engagement with oneself,
others and the larger society - education becomes in this instance more than a method or tool for domination but a politics, a fulcrum for
democratic social change. Tragically, in our current climate "learning" merely contributes to a vast reserve of manipulation and self-inflicted
ignorance. Our education deficit is neither reducible to the failure of particular types of teaching nor the decent into madness by the
spokespersons for the new authoritarianism. Rather, it is about how matters of knowledge, values and ideology can
be struggled over as issues of power and politics. Surviving the current education deficit will depend
on progressives using history, memory and knowledge not only to reconnect intellectuals to the everyday needs of ordinary people,
but also to jumpstart social movements by making education central to organized politics and the quest
for a radical democracy.
 AT Policy Real World

Policy debate is overly restricting, the AFFs attempt to construct a regime of truth is
self-aggrandizing and anti-educational
Smith, professor of political science at the University of Wales, 97 (Steve, Review of International Studies, Cambridge journals online)

By focusing on the policy debate, we restrict ourselves to the issues of the day, to the tip of the political
iceberg. What politics seems to me to be crucially about is how and why some issues are made intelligible as
political problems and how others are hidden below the surface (being defined as economic or cultural or private).
In my own work I have become much more interested in this aspect of politics in the last few years. I spent a lot of time dealing with policy
questions and can attest to the buzz that this gave me both professionally and personally. But I became increasingly aware that the realm of
the political that I was dealing with was in fact a very small part of what I would now see as political. I therefore spent many years working on
epistemology, and in fact consider that my most political work. I am sure that William Wallace will regard this comment as proof of his central
claim that I have become scholastic rather than scholarly, but I mean it absolutely. My current work enquires into how it is that we can make
claims to knowledge, how it is that we know things about the international political world. My main claim is that International Relations relies
overwhelmingly on one answer to this question, namely, an empiricist epistemology allied to a positivistic methodology. This gives the
academic analyst the great benefit of having a foundation for claims about what the world is like. It makes policy advice more saleable,
especially when positivisms commitment to naturalism means that the world can be presented as having certain furniture rather than other
furniture. The problem is that in my view this is a flawed version of how we know things; indeed it is in fact a
very political view of knowledge, born of the Enlightenment with an explicit political purpose. So much follows politically from
being able to present the world in this way; crucially the normative assumptions of this move are hidden in a false and
seductive mask of objectivity and by the very difference between statements of fact and statements of
value that is implied in the call to speak truth to power. For these reasons, I think that the political is a far wider arena
than does Wallace. This means that I think I am being very political when I lecture or write on epistemology. Maybe that does not seem political
to those who define politics as the public arena of policy debate; but I believe that my work helps uncover the regimes of truth within which
that more restricted definition of politics operates. In short, I think that Wallaces view of politics ignores its most political aspect, namely, the
production of discourses of truth which are the very processes that create the space for the narrower version of politics within which he works.
My work enquires into how the current politics get defined and what (political) interests benefit from that disarming division between the
political and the non-political. In essence, how
we know things determines what we see, and the public realm of
politics is itself the result of a prior series of (political) epistemological moves which result in the political
being seen as either natural or a matter of common sense.
 AT Roleplaying

Their politics is a form of passivity that cultivate tyranny and ressentiment

Antonio 1995 [Robert; Professor of Sociology at the University of Kansas; Nietzsches Antisociology: Subjectified Culture and the End of
History; American Journal of Sociology; Volume 101, No. 1; July 1995]

According to Nietzsche, the

"subject" is Socratic culture's most central, durable foundation. This prototypic
expression of ressentiment, master reification, and ultimate justification for slave morality and mass
discipline "separates strength from expressions of strength, as if there were a neutral substratum . . .
free to express strength or not to do so. But there is no such substratum; there is no 'being' behind the doing, ef- fecting, becoming; 'the doer'
is merely a fiction added to the deed" (Nietzsche 1969b, pp. 45-46). Leveling of Socratic culture's "objective" foundations makes its "subjective" features all the
more important. For example, the subject is a central focus of the new human sciences, ap- pearing prominently in its emphases on neutral standpoints, motives as
causes, and selves as entities, objects of inquiry, problems, and targets of care (Nietzsche 1966, pp. 19-21; 1968a, pp. 47-54). Arguing that subjectified culture
weakens the personality, Nietzsche spoke of a "re- markable antithesis between an interior which fails to correspond to any exterior and an exterior which fails to
correspond to any interior" (Nietzsche 1983, pp. 78-79, 83). The "problem of the actor," Nietzsche said, "troubled me for the longest time."'12 He

considered "roles" as "external," "surface," or "foreground" phenomena and viewed close personal
identification with them as symptomatic of estrangement. While modern theorists saw differentiated roles and professions as a
matrix of autonomy and reflexivity, Nietzsche held that persons (especially male professionals) in specialized occupations overidentify with their

positions and engage in gross fabrications to obtain advancement. They look hesitantly to the opinion of
others, asking themselves, "How ought I feel about this?" They are so thoroughly absorbed in simulating
effective role players that they have trouble being anything but actors-"The role has actually become
the character." This highly subjectified social self or simulator suffers devastating inauthenticity. The
powerful authority given the social greatly amplifies Socratic culture's already self-indulgent "inwardness." Integrity, decisiveness, spontaneity,

and pleasure are undone by paralyzing overconcern about possible causes, meanings, and consequences
of acts and unending internal dialogue about what others might think, expect, say, or do (Nietzsche 1983, pp. 83-
86; 1986, pp. 39-40; 1974, pp. 302-4, 316-17). Nervous rotation of socially appropriate "masks" reduces persons to

hypostatized "shadows," "abstracts," or simulacra. One adopts "many roles," playing them "badly and
superficially" in the fashion of a stiff "puppet play." Nietzsche asked, "Are you genuine? Or only an actor? A representative
or that which is represented? . . . [Or] no more than an imitation of an actor?" Simulation is so pervasive that it is

hard to tell the copy from the genuine article; social selves "prefer the copies to the originals" (Nietzsche 1983, pp. 84-86; 1986, p. 136;
1974, pp. 232- 33, 259; 1969b, pp. 268, 300, 302; 1968a, pp. 26-27). Their inwardness and aleatory scripts foreclose genuine attachment to others. This type

of actor cannot plan for the long term or participate in enduring networks of interdependence; such a person
is neither willing nor able to be a "stone" in the societal "edifice" (Nietzsche 1974, pp. 302-4; 1986a, pp. 93-94). Superficiality rules in the arid subjectivized
landscape. Neitzsche (1974, p. 259) stated, "One thinks with a watch in one's hand, even as one eats one's midday meal while reading the latest news of the stock
market; one lives as if one always 'might miss out on something. ''Rather do anything than nothing': this principle, too, is merely a string to throttle all culture. . . .
Living in a constant chase after gain compels people to expend their spirit to the point of exhaustion in continual pretense and overreaching and anticipating
others." Pervasive leveling, improvising, and faking foster an inflated sense of ability and an oblivious attitude about the fortuitous circumstances that contribute to
role attainment (e.g., class or ethnicity). The most mediocre people believe they can fill any position, even cultural leadership. Nietzsche respected the self-mastery
of genuine ascetic priests, like Socrates, and praised their ability to redirect ressentiment creatively and to render the "sick" harmless. But he
deeply
feared the new simulated versions. Lacking the "born physician's" capacities, these impostors amplify
the worst inclinations of the herd; they are "violent, envious, exploitative, scheming, fawning, cringing,
arrogant, all according to circumstances. " Social selves are fodder for the "great man of the masses." Nietzsche held that "the

less one knows how to command, the more urgently one covets someone who commands, who commands
severely- a god, prince, class, physician, father confessor, dogma, or party conscience. The deadly combination of desperate conforming

and overreaching and untrammeled ressentiment paves the way for a new type of tyrant (Nietzsche 1986, pp.
137, 168; 1974, pp. 117-18, 213, 288-89, 303-4).
 AT Essentialism/Racist

Historical material analysis doesnt exclude questions of racerather it indicates that

capitalist exploitation tends to amplify and construct racism through the axes of
alienation and oppression in order to divide the working class
Bakan 8 (Abigail B., Marxism and Antiracism: Rethinking the Politics of Difference. Rethinking Marxism: Journal of Economics, Culture & Society (14 March 2008) 20:2,238-256)
Exploitation for Marx is not a relationship between things, in the sense of crude economic measurement, but a social relationship that is
mediated through the process of production. Exploitation therefore interacts with various types and
forms of human difference, which serve to define and redefine certain human characteristics. As Resnick and
Wolff argue, The method of Marxian theory calls for constructing the connecting links between abstract concepts of class as process and the concrete conjuncture of social relationships,
social conflicts, and social change. This method does not collapse these links into the simplistic view that such relationships, conflicts, and change are the mere phenomena of classes as the

ultimate, last instance or final determinant (1987, 115). In the lived conditions of capitalism, economic and extraeconomic forms of surplus
extraction work together. Another way to think of this is that the system of capitalist exploitation and the capitalist state arise together; they are mutually dependent upon
one another. Exploitation is not the only factor in the continuation and expansion of capitalism. The processes

that are involved in maintaining a system of capitalist rule, or what Gramsci referred to as ruling-class hegemony, are not only economic but
are also social and political. The economic drive of capitalism tends to nullify differences among human
beings as commodified laborers, but these commodified laborers interact in a competitive relationship
for scarce means of reproduction and survival. The hegemonic state tends to emphasize differences. The
competitive individual is theorized as the universal man, articulated in liberal democracies through the principle of individual rights and freedoms, and asserting the abstract individual as
citizen (Bakan and Stasiulis 2005). The state in Western democracies has relied upon atomization as part of the way in which systemic relations of exploitation, as well as alienation and

Alienation and oppression are central to the reproduction of capitalist

oppression, are rendered invisible and reified.

exploitation. These are other concepts to explain and understand dynamic forms of differentiation that were
also part of Marxs original framework; they explain relationships that remain central to the ability of capitalism to continue to expand and reproduce itself. Alienation in Marx

Alienation, a concept drawn originally from Hegel and the German school of idealist philosophy, refers to the general distance of humanity
from its real potential. Unlike exploitation, which is, at least theoretically, materially measurable in terms of value production, alienation is not
quantifiable. It is, however, no less real in shaping how humans relate to one another: in ways that are either
solidaristic, which resist alienation, or competitive, which express and exacerbate alienation. For Marx, all those who live in class societyany form of class society,

not only capitalismsuffer from alienation. This concept is developed most clearly in the early writings of Marx and Engels in the 1840s, and later by Marx in the Grundrisse,
the notebooks that outline the foundations of Capital (Marx 1963, 1973a). While there has been significant debate regarding the place of Marxs original theory of alienation in his lifelong
intellectual development, it is without question that it was formative to his original contribution to contemporary thought (Althusser 1969; Althusser and Balibar 1970; Lukacs 1971;

Meszaros 1972; Rosdolsky 1977; Thompson 1995). Marx aimed to challenge the notion that human sufferingand human alienation,
specificallywere natural, the inevitable result of the will of God or a spiritual being outside the realm of human action. Unlike Hegel, alienation for Marx had
material roots in concrete historical conditions. The contradictions so starkly visible in capitalist societythe immense gap between potential and
realityindicate the extent of human alienation. For Marx, alienation arises from four sources. These are the distance of humanity from

the products of human labor; from the process of labor itself; from fellow human beings, where antagonisms
between classes and, importantly, within classes are endemic; and from what makes human beings unique, or what Marx called species being. This

can be understood through the lens of a politics of difference. For Marx alienation is rooted in the construction of several levels of
contradiction, or difference: between humanity and nature, between humanity as lived reality in specific historical conditions and humanity as potential, and between some humans and
others artificially separated and pitted against one another in the interests of the narrow material interests of an elite minority class (Cox 1998, 47-51). The centrality of alienation in Marxs
thought has received extensive attention in contemporary philosophical explorations. In regard to debates that address the politics of difference, however, it has received scant notice.
Alienation explains another form of human suffering, abstractly distinct from exploitation though in concrete terms interacting with it. Alienation is expressed in the distance between the
sense of self and the sense of other. This is not reducible to the geographic space of the workplace or the temporal space of the working day. Alienation creates a sense of aloneness and
isolation, grounded in a universalized experience of competition with other human beings. It is not bounded by class or defined by any totalizing laws of motion, but it remains endemic to class
society and takes an extreme form in capitalist society in particular. Competitive relations among individuals, cultivated by the fetishism of the market and the universalization of the
commodity form, compel a sense of alienation of one human being from another, without rational or apparent reason. This approach to the contradictions posed by various forms of
difference can explain not only the sense of distance from the other, but also the potential for the active creation of its opposite: a movement of solidarity and a vision of a world free of
human alienation. The ethos of individualism in bourgeois or liberal democracies combines with the lived, alienated experience of isolation and a sense of separate-ness, or difference, from
other individuals. Alienation, then, is not counterposed to exploitation, but is expressed within and through these other processes. So long as humanity has not achieved its full potential in a
society motivated by the satisfaction of human needwhat Marx considered a world of genuine socialismthen alienation will continue. Moreover, alienation affects all classes, so that the

racism can
oppressor and the oppressed alike are considered alienated from the human condition, a condition that for Marx is inherently social and collective. From this perspective,

be understood in part as an ideological codification and practical expression of extreme alienation, affecting
not only the oppressed other but the ascribed white hegemonic oppressor as well. Balibar similarly describes racism as an aggravating factor in contributing to a sense of mass
insecurity (Balibar 2002, 43). Racism divides human beings from other human beings in a manner that, as Miles rightly stresses, is entirely unfounded scientifically and in fact random, but it

, racism can be seen to be integrated into the process of

appears, feels, not to be random but meaningful. In Gramscis (1971) terms

capitalist hegemony so as to appear as common sense. Racism provides an organized, ostensibly

coherent ideology, and an institutionally enforced system of us and them, as if to have a rational element. Racism
serves to offer systematization, therefore, at least to some aspects of alienation. It provides a framework, defined by certain ascribed characteristics of physical or
cultural traits, that pits members of the exploited against other members of society, including members of their own class. The impact of racism in lowering wages, shaping reserve armies of

racism blurs class distinctions that

labor, and dividing labor markets is widely recognized (Galabuzi 2005; Agocs 2002; Allen 1994, 1997). At the same time,

might otherwise be more visible (Singh 2004). In this sense, racism can blur one form of differenceclass differencewhile cultivating differences that isolate
individuals from potential allies within the same classes. Alienation and Hegemonic Whiteness There is considerable debate in Marxist historiography regarding the specific nature of the

a Marxist
relationship between racism and the rise of capitalism. Though a detailed historical elaboration goes beyond the scope of this discussion, it is not hard to see how

notion of alienation is useful in explaining difference and racialization as manifest in globalized

processes of the subjugation of entire sections of humanity through conquest, colonization, and slavery.
Moreover, it is a matter of historical fact that mercantile capitalism and slavery, and the ideology of scientific

racism specifically associated with Atlantic slavery, develop and advance as part of a single,
simultaneous process (Baum 2006). For the purposes of this discussion, it is important to note simply that the racism of Atlantic slavery was
unique in linking the barbaric trade in human bodies to the capitalist notion of private property; and a specific
version of racist ideology emerged in this context that was understood to be compatible with the universal rights of man on the grounds that certain humans, defined by ascribed racial
characteristics, were in fact not to be considered human at all. Slaves, as chattel, were treated like animals that were bought, sold, and tamed in a way similar to or worse than the
treatment of cattle or horses. This ideological expression of extreme inhumanity legitimated the mass brutality and abuse dealt those of black skin and African origin. This is typical of the
period of the dominance in the Americas of the plantation slave system of production, in full ascendance between 1640 and 1715, and continued in the U.S. South until the Civil War (1861/5).
The English and French colonies in particular saw the construction of intensive systems of exploitation .... [based on] newly elaborated social distinctions and racial identities (Blackburn
1997, 311). With the dehumanization of blackness came the ascendancy of the white elite as defined by race, and exempt from the exploitation and oppression experienced by the slaves.
This separation, or construction of difference, as part of the making of the European ruling class, expressed the development of a culture, ideology, and mythology of whiteness as part of
the origins of capitalist expansion in Europe and throughout the Americas (Ignatiev 1995; Levine-Rasky 2000; Razack 2002; Baum 2006). Whiteness, though apparently neutral, became defined
and generalized at the same time and as the development of the other in racialized slavery. Peter Fryer (1984) traces the development of racism as a scientifically justified ideology
specifically in the oral tradition and diaries of the plantocracy of the British Caribbean from the seventeenth to eighteenth centuries. Racism, as one form of systematizing alienation and as a
central component of capitalist expansion, arose as part of a single historical process. Allen identifies the use of whiteness as a means for the development of a system of social control in the
antebellum south of the United States. Those who could not become employers or even long-term leaseholders could be recruited in the interests of social control by being promoted to the
white race. This was an elite response specifically to threatened unity between bond-laborers and the free poor. This is a graphic example of the emergence of hegemonic whiteness, and its
interaction with both exploitation and gender oppression, in the context of alienation. This arrangement was implemented by conferring on the poor European-Americans a set of white-skin
privileges; privileges that did not require their promotion to the class of property owners. Such were the civil rights to possess arms, to plead and testify in legal proceedings, and to move
about freely with the presumption of liberty. Thus, rights that were the birthright of every man in England, were passed off as privileges in America, but privileges that, by the principle of racial
oppression, necessarily excluded any person, free or bond, of any perceptible degree of African ancestry (the one-drop rule). Among these white race rights, was the right to marry.(The
diminishing proportion or European-American bond-laborers, being bound for a limited term of years, had marriage as a prospective right.) This right, however was denied to the African-
American hereditary bond-laborers who, in the eighteenth century, became the main labor force in the plantation colonies. The denial of coverture to African-American females, contributed
to the creation of the absolutely unique American form of male supremacism, the white-male privilege of any European-American male to assume familiarity with any African-American
woman or girl. Men of the employing classes have customarily always exercised this privilege with regard to women of the laboring classes. What the white race did that was unique was to
confer that privilege on an entire set of laboring-class men over the women of another set of laboring people, and underwrote the privilege by making it a capital offense for any African-

Racism has, of course, continued well beyond the period of

American man to raise his hand against any white man. (Scott and Meyerson 1998)

Atlantic slavery, and has proved to be an immensely adaptive source of division even in the most
democratic phase of capitalist development (Singh 2004). However, the centrality of the slave trade in the
original expansion of capitalism, and racism as a defining element of how really existing capitalism has
developed, is important in terms of understanding postslavery cultures of hegemonic whiteness. Racism as a
means of codifying and, in Gramscis terms, making sense of alienation, takes varied and diverse forms in specific moments of capitalist accumulation, not least in colonial and imperialist
occupation. Franz Fanons contributions can be understood to be pivotal to our understanding of this process, though he does not operate in a self-consciously or consistently Marxist
framework. In graphic detail, Fanon (1963) articulates the experience of deep alienation of the colonized, affecting the bodies, thoughts, and feelings of life under imperialist military, political,
economic, and social occupation. This could equally well be applied to the experiences of numerous populations that have been subject to conquest and oppression, the focus of many authors

specific racialized relationships within and between

influenced by the politics of difference and poscolonial studies (Loomba 2005). However,

classes can also be more refined than the broad notion of hegemonic whiteness serves to explain. The
complex adjustments of the U.S. ruling class, for example, to resistance to overt racism through limited accommodation to equality, while maintaining systemic oppression, is traced in detail

If alienation is like the background music, the specific performances on the stage need to
by Nikhil Pal Singh (2004).

be viewed through a more focused lens. Here, a Marxist concept of oppression can prove helpful. Marx on Oppression Marxs ideas regarding exploitation
have been amply addressed and debated in the Marxist literature, and his writings on alienation are well known in Marxist circles, if not normally considered in terms of their relevance to
antiracist theorization. Far less attention, however, has been given to Marxs views regarding processes of oppression. Oppression is the least complete in its theorization of all the forms of
human relations that Marx studied. And there is no doubt that neither Marx nor his lifelong collaborator Frederick Engels was free of certain prejudices of their time. Given that their lives and
experiences predated universal suffrage and the social movements against oppression that have contributed to the common sense of the Left today, this should not be surprising. The point
emphasized here, however, is that significant elements of an anti-oppression framework were nonetheless present in the method developed by Marx. This framework was not produced in a
single work, but is exemplified in various historical and analytical writings addressing slavery in the United States, the Irish question, the Jewish question, women and the family, and such
issues as poverty and suicide (Marx 1972; Anderson 1999; Bakan 2004). A detailed investigation of Marxs writings from the perspective of a theory of oppression cannot be accomplished in
this limited discussion. Generally, however, for Marx oppression includes both ideological and material elements. It is also historically specific, not subject to general, common laws of motion.
Like alienation and unlike exploitation, it defies quantification, but unlike alienation and like exploitation, it is a socially concrete category that can only be studied and understood in
 Oppression in Marx can be described as taking two distinct forms: class oppression; and the specific
historically specific conditions.

oppression of sections of classes, or what we may call special oppression. Class oppression is the lived form of the experiences of the

exploited, but can include those who are not directly exploited, such as the unemployed. Marx often referred, for example, to the oppressed classes, meaning the
proletariat, the unemployed, the peasantry, sharecroppers, slaves, serfs, and so on. What can be called
special oppression divides the working class or any other oppressed class within itself and, in turn,
obscures class differences by creating new lines of demarcation that are used as a means of subordination. Special oppression is particularly necessary where there is a
threat of unity among the oppressed classes against the hegemonic bloc. Special oppression forces a sense of competition among the

workers and thereby weakens their collective ability to resist. It is particularly important in conditions of advanced capitalist society,
working against the threatened universality of experience imposed by the system. The relations of production of capitalist society, of

exploitation and the drive for profit, by treating workers as common and unitary as commodified labor
power threatens to reduce difference and forge bonds of solidarity. There are then, regarding oppression, basic contradictory
tendencies within capitalism. Capitalism has tendencies both to divide workers on the grounds of special oppression within the class, and at the same time to press workers into a common
experience of oppression as a class, where their interests are shared. Workers are divided by special oppression, but this also serves to hide, or reify, the lived reality of each individual,
intensifying but also rendering alienation apparently rational. In the Poverty of Philosophy, Marx elaborates a distinction between class oppression, based on the common experiences of the
working class, which provides the basis for the formation of a class in itself, and the act of resisting class oppression, which depends upon the conscious self-emancipation of the working
class or becoming a class for itself. His argument, developed as a polemic challenging the views of his contemporary Proudhon, is made in the context of defending the rights of workers to
unite in early forms of trade union associations, or combinations. Marx saw the experience of collective workplace organization as an exercise in class organization and the development of
collective class consciousness, shaped through its conflict with capital. He saw this as a limited and defensive form of resistance, but also as a necessary and valuable step beyond efforts
merely to survive or to resist as individuals rather than collectively. Thus, [e]conomic conditions had first transformed the mass of the people of the country into workers. The combination of
capital has created for this mass a common situation, common interests. The mass is thus already a class as against capital, but not yet for itself. Marx notes the phenomenon of class
oppression, a distinct category from exploitation and its particular form in capitalist society. He notes that [a]n oppressed class is the vital condition for every society founded on the
antagonism of classes. The emancipation of the oppressed class thus implies necessarily the creation of a new society ... Of all the instruments of production, the greatest productive power is
the revolutionary class itself (1973b, 173-4). Class oppression compels the drawing together of workers in common conditions of labor as the system expands. It is organized through the
process of labor extraction, or exploitation, but it entails the vast realm of experiences from both in and away from the workplace. Limited access to employment, poor housing, limited access
to education and medical care, ideologies of elitism, and so forth can all be seen today as aspects of class oppression. The penetration of ruling-class ideology as part of the training and
socialization of the working class is also a feature of class oppression. In The German Ideology, Marx famously wrote that the ruling ideas of any age are the ideas of the ruling class (1970, 64).
It is worth reconsidering this view in the context of racist ideology. Racism, Class Oppression, and Special Oppression As the capitalist system has expanded, there has been a tendency to
universalize class oppression. As industrial expansion took place in Europe and North America, for a period of time this meant a tendency to treat all workers more like slaves than free
laborers. Marx identifies the connection in the ideas of some of the most competitive sections of the capitalist ruling classes. The labour of supervision and management, Marx writes, was
dependent upon the antithesis between labor and capital. And it was justified at least in part by reliance upon the racist ideology and practices learned by the ruling class in the period of
slavery. In the third volume of Capital, he addresses this reliance by citing a specific example to demonstrate how the U.S. ruling class learned from plantation slavery the importance of class
servitude, or class oppression. Marx sarcastically cites one particular champion of slavery in the United States, a lawyer named OConnor, at a meeting held in New York on December 19,
1859, under the slogan Justice for the South. Quoting OConnor, Marx indicates how the U.S. capitalist class learned the benefits of wage labor, as the wage-labourer, like the slave, must

The commonality of
have a master who puts him to work and rules over him (Marx 1959, 385). The condition of class oppression is not, however, one-dimensional.

experience as a class is contradicted by the differentiation imposed by special oppression, where groups within and
across classes, identified by ascribed characteristics, are subjected to specific discriminatory practices. Common class oppression is also affected

by the generalized condition of alienation, which provides the background to why sections of the
oppressed classes are receptive to racist and other oppressive ideas and practices. The notion of divide and rule was
originally used by the Roman Emperor Tiberius in the first century A.D., and has proved useful as a guiding principle of subsequent ruling classes (Callinicos 1993, 39). In an atmosphere of
competition, the most successful sections of the bourgeoisie learn to rule by divide-and-conquer tactics, where special oppression serves to hide common oppression as a class. Some forms of

Racial oppression has proved to be an

special oppression precede capitalist development, the oldest and most enduring being the oppression of women.

effective, and adaptable, mechanism for advancing capitalist interests. The core elements of the racist
ideology that defined the accumulation of capital during the period of Atlantic slavery, and that marked
the rise of the capitalist system on a global scale, is consistent with the ruling-class project of the
industrial phase of capitalist accumulation. This is not to suggest that racism has not evolved and changed. However, the elements of the racism of slavery,
the racism of colonialism, the racism of immigration controls, and the racism of post/9/11 clashes of civilizations bear more similarities than differences (Alexander 1987; Bakan 2005).
Ascribed characteristics of lower status, considered to be universal to a subset of humanity on the basis of characteristics of birth, whether part of biology or culture associated with land of
origin, have defined racialized ideologies over various historical periods. Though the biological basis of race has been repeatedly demonstrated to be an ideological construct without
scientific basis, the real, lived experience of overt and systemic discrimination grounded in the idea of race, and the commitment to racism, are no less incontrovertible. The twofold nature of
oppression for Marx is related to the contradictory relations associated with exploitation. Capitalism unites the working class in common labor removed from sources of subsistence other than
the wage economy, but it also compels competition among workers. This contradictory, dialectical pattern is described by Marx in his writings on the Irish question. Marx stresses the interplay
between capitalist class interests and the use of anti-Irish racism to divide the working class. Focusing on special oppression, Marx identifies how the ideology of anti-Irish prejudice projected
an artificial, cross-class identity between British workers and the British imperialist state (Callinicos 1993, 34/6). In a letter written 9 April 1870, regarding the relations of Irish oppression to
British capitalism, Marx summarizes how oppressionhere, racist oppression particularlyin combination with nationalism, operates within the capitalist system. Every industrial and
commercial centre in England possesses a working class divided into two hostile camps, English proletarians and Irish proletarians. The ordinary English worker hates the Irish worker as a
competitor who lowers his standard of life. In relation to the Irish worker he feels himself a member of the ruling nation and so turns himself into a tool of the aristocrats and capitalists of his
country against Ireland, thus strengthening their domination over himself. He cherishes religious, social and national prejudices against the Irish worker. His attitude is much the same as that
of the poor whites to the niggers in the former slave states of the USA. The Irishman pays him back with interest in his own money. He sees in the English worker at once the accomplice
and stupid tool of the English rule in Ireland. This antagonism is artificially kept alive and intensified by the press, the pulpit, the comic papers, in short by all the means at the disposal of the
ruling classes. This antagonism is the secret of the impotence of the English working class, despite its organization. It is the secret by which the capitalist maintains its power. And that class is

The tendency to divide workers in competitive relations with one another

fully aware of it. (in Marx and Engels 1965, 236-7)

takes the form of differential access to wages and labor rights, and the selective offering of, in the words
of W. E. B. Du Bois, a psychological wage (Du Bois 1969, 700/1). It also affects the lives of workers away from the site of exploitation, or the workplace,
regarding the distribution of the surplus. Discrimination in access to the distribution of the social wage (affecting services such as medical

care, public education, the justice system, etc.) is similarly affected by special oppression. Oppression is fluid, operating in part

to render the exploitation process opaque, reified, or fetishized, hiding the reality of the ruling classs
minority and exploitative status (Lukacs 1971, 83/222). It is also a means through which certain sections from
among the oppressor group, of the working class, can explain their sense of alienation from others who
are more like them than different but with whom they feel a sense of competition and distance. Through the
perpetuation of constructed ideological and institutional mechanisms of identifying with the ruling class , one section of the exploited can come to

believe that they are in fact superior to another section of workers.

 AT Transition Wars

Transition wars are limited and a peaceful transition and cant resolve capitals
internal antagonisms
Mszros 2008 Istvn, Prof Emeritus in Philosophy and Political Theory @ U of Sussex The Challenge and Burden of Historical Time,
310-311

The second blocked avenue is even more important. It concerns the removal of the possibility of solving the systems aggravating problems through an all-out war, as it was twice attempted in

the system has been

the world wars of the twentieth century. I wrote at the time of the onset of capitals structural crisis, toward the end of the Vietnam war that:

decapitated through the removal of its ultimate sanction: an all-out war on its real or potential
adversariesExporting violence is no longer possible on the required massive scale. Attempts at doing
so on a limited scalelike the Vietnam War37not only are no substitutes for the old mechanism but even
accelerate the inevitable internal explosions of the system. Nor is it possible to get away indefinitely
with the ideological mystification which represented the internal challenge of socialism: the only possible solution to
the present crisis, as an external confrontation: a subversion directed from abroad by a monolithic enemy. For the first time in history capitalism is

globally confronted with its own problems which cannot be postponed much longer, nor can they be
indeed transferred to the military plane in order to be exported in the form of an all-out war.38 I added in a note
to the last sentence that Of course such a war can happen, but its actual planning and active preparation in the

open cannot function as a vital internal stabilizer.39 This is so even if the neoconservative vision guys of the Pentagonwhose theories border on
insanity40are more than willing to think the unthinkable. But even such extreme forms of irrationality cannot undo the far-

reaching implications of this blocked avenue. For the underlying issue is an insoluble contradiction within
the reproductive framework of the capital system. A contradiction manifest, on the one hand, through
the ongoing relentless concentration and centralization of capital on a global scale, and on the other,
through the structurally imposed inability of the capital system to produce the required political
stabilization on a global scale. Even the most aggressive military interventions of global hegemonic
imperialismat present those of the United Statesin different parts of the planet are bound to fail in this respect. The
destructiveness of limited wars, no matter how many, is very far from being enough for imposing
everywhere on a lasting basis the unchallengeable rule of a single imperialist hegemon and its global governmentthe
only thing that would befit the logic of capital. Only the socialist hegemonic alternative can show a way out of this destructive contradiction. That is, an organizationally viable alternative that
fully respects the dialectical complementarity of the national and international in our time.
 AT Tech Solves

Small, technological fixes are just band-aid solutions only move crises around,
prolonging and intensifying existing problems
York and Clark 2010 (Richard, Professor, Sociology Department, University of Utah. Brett, Assistant
Professor, Sociology Department, Assistant Professor of Sustainability, Environmental Humanities
Graduate Program and Environmental & Sustainability Studies Program, University of Utah, 2010,
Nothing New Under the Sun? The Old False Promise of New Technology, FOOD, ENERGY,
ENVIRONMENT: CRISIS OF THE MODERN WORLD-SYSTEM, pp. 203-224)
ENVIRONMENTAL CRISES OLD AND NEW: TECHNOLOGICAL FIXES AND ECOLOGICAL RIFTS The social gravity of capitalism has organized social relations on the second tier of time since the "long" sixteenth century. Throughout this

period, the economic system has created numerous ecological rifts (or ruptures) in ecosystems. In response to
environmental problems or barriers, capital pursues a series of shifts and technological fixes. Here an
environmental problem is "solved" by incorporating new resources into the production process,
changing location of production, and/or developing new technologies to increase the efficiency of
production. Shifts and fixes operate on the first tier of time, marking specific changes within a mode of production. The social gravity of capitalism influences
how shifts and fixes are employed. Nevertheless, these "solutions" offer the illusion that the resolution
of crises is possible within the existing system, while often denying that changing the system itself is
possible. An important underlying issue is that one problem is often transformed into anothera shift in the type of ecological rift, such as when products made from wood are replaced with products made from plastic,
shifting the environmental impact from one of forest exploitation to one of fossil fuel dependence and the creation of new forms of waste. The constant drive to accumulate

capital demands the ceaseless exploitation of the physical world. Isolated metabolic rifts increase in scale, becoming generalized ecological rifts, as the
capitalist system threatens to violate planetary ecological boundaries. The persistent shifts, technological fixes, and ecological rifts are evident

when considering the historical development of food and energy production under capitalism. Increasingly, the
ecological crises associated with these two realms are intersecting. Capital has great mobility, which has allowed it to simply shift around

ecological problems rather than addressing them. One avenue for this is geographic displacement, which occurs
when resources in one region of the world are exhausted and extraction and production are shifted to a different location. Another approach by capital is to "solve," in the

short run, an environmental restriction by changing the type of production process. In this situation, new
environmental problems are often created without actually solving the initial ecological concern (Clark & York,
2008). For example, attempts to address the loss of soil nutrients throughout the nineteenth and twentieth

centuries illustrate the ecological rifts and shifts of capitalism. Drawing upon agricultural studies, Marx recognized that soil required specific nutrients
nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassiumto maintain its ability to produce crops, because as crops grow they take up these nutrients. In pre-capitalist societies, these nutrients

were often returned to the soil after consumptionin the form of agricultural, animal, and human
wastemaintaining soil fertility. The enclosure movement and the concentration of land created a
division between town and country, causing the urban population to grow. Food and fiber were shipped to distant markets, hundreds,
sometimes thousands of miles away, transferring the nutrients of the soil from the country to the city where they accumulated as waste, rather than being returned to the soil. This type of production

"disturbs the metabolic interaction between man and the earth" and "prevents the return to the soil of
its constituent elements consumed by man in the form of food and clothing," undermining "the lasting fertility of the soil" (Marx, 1976:
637). As a result, a metabolic rift was created in the nutrient cycle (Foster, 2000). The transfer of nutrients and the rift in the soil nutrient cycle was tied to the accumulation process. Intensive agricultural practices, associated with
large-scale agriculture, increased the yield of food and fiber, intensifying this rift, squandering the riches of the soil. One of the attempts to fix the metabolic rift of declining soil fertility in the 1800s was the development of an
international guano/nitrate trade. Guano (bird droppings)from islands, off the coast of Peru, on which were large seabird colonieshad high concentrations of phosphate and nitrogen. At the time, guano was determined to be
one of the best fertilizers, both enriching the soil and increasing crop yields. Millions of tons of guano were dug up by imported Chinese "coolies" in Peru under conditions worse than slave labor and exported to the United States
and European nations, where it was applied widely to enrich soils. The necessity to import fertilizer reflected a problem in capitalist agriculture, but it did not fundamentally mend the metabolic rift, as the historical background
conditions remained in place. As a result, guanoa natural resource that had been used for centuries to enrich the soils of Peruwas distributed on the global market, rapidly diminishing the reserves on the islands (Clark & Foster,
2009). Guano and nitrates provided a temporary means to replenish lost nutrients, but given the town and country divide and intensive agricultural production, the loss of soil nutrients was a persistent problem. As a result, soil
degradation continued to plague core nations. At the same time, the metabolic rift was extended to the international level with the further integration of regions into the capitalist world-system. For example, Peru increasingly
produced cash crops such as sugar and cotton for the international market, transferring the nutrients embodied in food and fiber to other nations. Harriet Friedmann and Philip McMichael (1989) explain that from the 1870s to the
1930s the first food regime was established, which included a geological shift, whereby food and livestock imports from colonies supported British industrial society. The soil, land, and people in distant regions were exploited; and
often a system of monoculture was imposed in accord with the demands of the core nations (McMichael, 2009). The concept of food regime serves as a means to assess the central role of food in all of its social relationships of
production and consumption in the global political economy. It also highlights the various contradictions associated with food that interrupt periods of relative stability, leading to transformations surrounding the production and
circulation of food within the world-system. This important concept identifies the major events on the first tier of time that alter everyday practices, trade, and production. The social gravity on the second tier of time persists,
ensuring that these transformations in food regimes in the end facilitate the further accumulation of capital. Furthermore, this conception of food regimes and the transition to new regimes illuminate some of the shifts,
 Perhaps the most important technological change in
technological fixes, and ecological rifts that are historically associated with food production.

agricultural production for the twentieth century was initiated just before the First World War, when
Fritz Haber devised a process for fixing nitrogen from the air. This innovation allowed for large quantities of artificial nitrogen fertilizer to be produced to
sustain yields. In the following decades, the use of inorganic fertilizers and pesticides helped shape the second food regime from the

1950s to the 1970s (McMichael, 2010). This food regime involved agricultural subsidies that helped make the United States

the breadbasket of the world, as surplus food was exported to Europe and the Third World. Industrialized agriculture
which is fossil fuel intensive served as the model for the Green Revolution that was exported to the global South. As is the norm, technological breakthroughs are frequently

presented as the basis to address each and every social and environmental problem that arises. Often, it
is assumed that humans are exempt from natural constraints and limits, as these proposed solutions
allow society to overcome whatever barriers it confronts without fundamental changes in the
organization of society. For instance, global hunger is often seen as a technical problem, rather than a
distribution problem. Thus, the Green Revolution, initiated in the mid-1900s, was offered as a way to increase global production of food, declaring that this would help stem international hunger. It was
also part of a development project that hoped to undercut revolutionary movements in the Third World. Rather than promoting the redistribution of land

through agrarian reform, to give people access to the means of production, a technical package was
promoted throughout the global South. High-yield varieties of cereal crops, which required massive
inputs of fertilizers and pesticides, and extensive systems of irrigation, were promoted (Shiva, 1991; Weis, 2007). This model
imposed the industrial-agricultural practices of the global North throughout the world. The Green Revolution geared agricultural production to specialization in exports. It furthered the concentration of land within nations, as the
new practices were expensive to operate and maintain. Altogether, the second food regime concentrated economic power within the food sector. Large fertilizer, chemical, and seed companies exerted monopoly control. Vertical

The Green
and horizontal integration concentrated power along the food chain, as far as butchering, processing, and distribution of food (Heffernan, 1998; Lewontin, 2000; Middendorf et al., 2000).

Revolution did increase global food production at a rate that surpassed population growth. However,
hunger, malnutrition, and famine persisted. This illustrates the important point that technological fixes
rarely solve problems that have their origin in larger social structures. Obviously, producing enough food for all
people is a necessary condition to avoid hunger, but it is far from a sufficient one. Thus, although society is faced with a technical
challenge of producing enough food, high food production will not in and of itself eliminate hunger. Over the course of the twentieth century, famines did not occur due to an absolute shortage of food (Sen, 1981), which points to
the fact that famines and hunger are not fundamentally technical problems, but rather stem from the social order. Famine and hunger are social problems rooted in the unequal distribution of resources, within a system that gives

This example illustrates that regardless of the problem

precedence to the accumulation of capital over human well-being (Magdoff, 2008b).

inequality in political involvement, hunger, or environ mental deteriorationthe same type of solution
is proposed, as if technological innovation will eliminate problems, without necessitating changes to the
social order. The second food regime enhanced the accumulation of capital, but it did not solve the ecological problems associated with food production. Industrial agriculture progressively separated agricultural
animals from croplands, leading to confined animal feeding operations that are dependent on grain from distant lands and that produce massive amounts of wastes that pollute waterways (Foster & Magdoff, 2000; Marks, 2001).
Here animal waste is not recycled back to the land, further rupturing the circulation of nutrients. Large tracts of land are often cleared for mechanized production of monoculture crops, destroying previously integrated ecosystems
and rupturing natural cycles, such as the hydraulic cycle (Magdoff, 2007). Capitalist agriculture is caught in a complex struggle to shift nutrients around (Mancus, 2007). Given the continuation of the metabolic rift in the nutrient
cycle, inorganic fertilizers are used to sustain agricultural production. Ironically, humans now "con tribute double the natural rate of terrestrial nitrogen fixation.... From 1960 to 2000, the use of nitrogen fertilizers increased" by
approximately 800% (Canfield, Glazer & Falkowski, 2010: 195). Scientists indicate that agricultural practices have "drastically disrupted the nitrogen cycle" (Canfield, Glazer & Falkowski, 2010: 192). Half of current fertilizer use
supports wheat, maize, and rice production. These crops use less than 40% of the nitrogen that is applied. Much of the remaining nitrogen is washed away and contributes to other ecological problems such as "dead zones" in gulfs
and seas (Fields, 2004; Glibert et al., 2005). To make matters worse, indus trial fixation of nitrogen increases the reliance of agriculture on fossil fuel, adding to the accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. In fact,

The industrial "solution" to the soil and food crises has

industrial agriculture is responsible for at least a quarter of greenhouse gas emissions.

contributed to the climate crisis, while agricultural land continues to be degraded. The historic pattern
with regard to addressing the depletion of soil nutrients is clear: each "solution" creates new problems,
new ecological rifts, without necessarily solving the old one. McMichael (2009; 2010) proposed that a third food regime may be emerging. The new regime
involves dispossessing peasants from their lands throughout the global South, in order to shift food production toward long "animal protein chains" and the supply of fresh fruits year round. It also entails the creation of an agrofuel
system, under the guise of solving both the energy and climate crises, by reducing carbon emissions through the use of a renewable resource. Currently between 1 and 2% of the world's arable land is devoted to the production of
agrofuels. By 2050, it is estimated that 20% will be employed to this end (Liversage, 2010). It is important to assess the ecological implications of agrofuel beyond the green veneer that has been attached to this industry. The
agrofuel complex is a "quick fix" to maintain "current excessive patterns of energy consumption" that also provides new investment opportunities for capital (White & Dasgupta, 2010: 595-96). Globally, agrofuel production has
encouraged deforestation, which undermines the carbon sequestration of forest ecosystems. Huge tracts of land are put into production, using unsustainable agricultural practices, such as the application of inorganic fertilizers and
pesticides, to grow crops to be used as fuel. David Pimentel (2003) points out that growing corn for ethanol production increases soil erosion and environmental degradation. This system of production continues to create
ecological rifts, whether it is in the nutrient, hydraulic, or carbon cycle. First generation agrofuels pose serious environ mental concerns, as more energy is consumed in the production of the fuel than is produced (Fargione et al.,
2008; Pimentel, 2001; 2003; Shattuck, 2009; Scharlemann & Laurance, 2008; White & Dasgupta, 2010). As a result, the production of agrofuel is actually increasing the accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere (Ernsting,
2007). Second generation agrofuel crops promise to be more technologically intensive, presenting further social and eco logical considerations as far as the control of capital. While the third food regime continues to take shape
with agrofuels as part of its reconfiguration, the ecological contradictions generated by the social gravity of the capitalist mode of production continue to manifest themselves, culminating in the ecological rift associated with global

Similar patterns of shifts, technological fixes, and ecological rifts in the capitalist relationship to
climate change.

nature are evident in the development of energy production technologies. In brief, the long history of energy
involves the burning of biomass, particularly wood, which has been one of the primary energy sources
humans have depended on throughout history. The smelting of metals and other energy-intensive production processes increased the energy demands of societies. Even
before the Industrial Revolution, vast stretches of forests were cleared to feed the fires. The new machinery of the industrial age required increasing amounts of fuel to operate on a growing scale. Wood became scarce. But,

since capitalists sought further accumulation, which came from energy intensive industrial production,
coal came to serve as the standard fuel of industry. Here capital sidestepped the fuelwood crisis by
incorporating the burning of fossil fuels as a technological fix to maintain and expand production. Nonetheless,
forests continue to fall as new demands on this resource emerge, decreasing the carbon sinks available to absorb the carbon dioxide released during
the combustion of coal and other fossil fuels. This technological shift to fossil fuel consumption continues to contribute to global

climate change, acid rain, and air pollution (Smil, 1994; Williams, 2003). In burning coal, natural gas, and oil, capital broke the solar income
budget, releasing massive quantities of carbon dioxide. The concomitant ecological degradation (e.g., deforestation)
that has accompanied economic growth has reduced available carbon sinks. As a result, the carbon metabolism of the economy has led to
the accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and cli mate change (Clark & York, 2005). The organizing forces on the second tier of time are threatening to cross the planetary boundaries that sustain the conditions of life,

public debate is hamstrung by the social gravity of capital. It is clear that human
creating a global ecological crisis. Nonetheless,

activities are the primary forces responsible for the warming of the earth's atmosphere (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change, 2007). Yet, today, the same false promises are put forward as solutions to these problems, without

questioning the underlying social relations. Technological optimism serves as the only legitimate action,
which allows for the social gravity to remain as an organizing force in society. Perhaps nowhere is this technological-fix approach more
evident than when considering energy and global climate change. Numerous "novel solutions" are proposed to address the ecological crisis, six of which we mention here. Each is noteworthy for how narrowly it conceives the

advocates extensive geoengineering to avoid climate

problem. First, Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen (2006), an important scientist who addressed ozone depletion,

change. He proposes injecting sulfur into the stratosphere to increase the albedo of Earth, which would make the atmosphere reflect more of the sun's energy back into space, countering the warming stemming from the
rising concentration of greenhouse gases. Secondly, there have been proposals to engage in widespread fertilizing of the world's

oceans with iron so as to stimulate phytoplankton blooms, which would absorb car bon. Thirdly, Freeman Dyson (2008), a well-known physicist, argues that
one-quarter of the world's forests should be replaced with genetically engineered carbon-eating trees in
order to increase the absorption capacity of forests. Fourth, it has been proposed that coal-burning power
plants can be designed to capture and store carbon within the earth itself. Fifth, in order to meet increasing
energy demands, nuclear power plants have been given the green light, assuming that this will facilitate a shift to a sustainable future. This
development has come about despite the unresolved concerns about how to store nuclear waste safely for long periods of time. Sixth, as addressed above, in order to overcome potential restrictions on oil consumption, high-tech

Many of the aforementioned solutions are rooted in a sincere concern to

agrofuels have been advocated as a "green" alternative.

address climate change. Each of these "new ideas" to attend to longstanding ecological contradictions
are based on the same approach that capitalism has always used to confront crises frame each crisis as a
technical problem that can be solved through modern technology, while ignoring the social barriers to
adoption and the underlying socio-ecological contradictions of the capitalist world-system (Carolan, 2009; Li, 2008; York &
Clark, 2010). This approach is very dangerous, given that if a problem is assumed solvable through technological development, it is also assumed that it is unnecessary to take actions to preserve forests, curtail the burning of fossil
fuels, transform agricultural production, and change the political-economic conditions that have created these problems. Each of the proposed solutions identified above entails numerous unintended ecological consequences and
would, therefore, likely set off another wave of environmental problems that would need to be addressed in the future. For instance, engineering the atmosphere in the manner noted above would generate acid rain. Replacing
portions of the world's forests with genetically engineered trees would have dramatic implications for bio diversity and ecosystems. Iron fertilization would have striking effects on the ecology of the oceans; it is highly impractical,
and it would have little effect on carbon concentration in the atmosphere (Strong et al., 2009). Expanding nuclear power plants generates an increasing stock of nuclear waste, which will remain dangerous for thousands of years
(Smil, 2003). Agrofuels further unsustainable industrial agricultural practices, increasing soil depletion and de forestation, without actually reducing carbon emissions (Fargione et al., 2008; Magdoff, 2008a; Searchinger et al., 2008).
Proposals for power plants that capture carbon and store it underground require technology that is not even in operation, and ignore the ecological destruction associated with extraction of fossil fuels (Kintisch, 2007; Palmer et al.,
2010; Schiermeier, 2006). Furthermore, even proponents acknowledge that there are many technical barriers to widespread development of carbon storage power plants and, even if successfully implemented on a large scale, it

These solutions fail to recognize

would take decades before these hypothetical power plants played much of a role in reducing carbon emissions to the atmosphere (Haszeldine, 2009).

the historical background conditions that are operating, preventing a systematic analysis of the social
relations that restrict social organization and action from genuinely addressing longstanding
ecological problems. Capitalism is inherently anti-ecological as it systematically subordinates nature in its pursuit of endless accumulation. Its
appetite is insatiable, as it attempts to overcome, surmount, and/or conquer whatever social and natural
obstacles it confronts in its development. Even if the proposed solutions were implemented, the social relations driving ecological degradation are still in place, continuing to
generate problems. The adoption of alternative fuels, such as agrofuels, does not necessarily displace the burning of fossil fuels, given the ongoing increase in energy consumption to support economic growth (York, 2006; 2007).

today's solutions follow the established path, promising the sky, but offering nothing new. For instance,
Thus,

another popular technological fix to alleviate global climate change is to improve energy efficiency,
which it is suggested will also address the energy crisis by reducing energy demands. More specifically, it is
proposed that the forces of modernization, such as further economic development, will lead to
technological advances that allow for the dematerialization of society and the decoupling of the
economy from energy and material consumption (Mol, 1997; Leadbeater, 2000). Here, new technologies replace old, inefficient ones. Joseph Huber (2009: 334-35) asserts
that "technological environmental innovations" such as "fuel-less" energy (e.g., "clean-burn hydro gen" and/or photovoltaics) and nanotechnology will "reduce the quantities of resources and sinks used," allowing society to

transcend environmental problems. The proposed "weightless society" has not materialized, in spite of technological
development and improvements in energy efficiency. The constant pursuit of short term profit, the law
that currently operates at the second tier of time, influences social relations, production, and
technological in novation. In 1865, William Stanley Jevons (1906) explained that as the efficiency of coal use improved, making it more cost effective as an energy source, total coal consumption
increased. Thus, it cannot be assumed that increasing efficiency leads to a decline in the demands placed on resources. According to the Jevons paradox, greater

efficiency in resource use often leads to increased consumption, as it helps further the expansion of
production, potentially outstripping any gains made in efficiency (Clark & Foster, 2001; Polimeni et al., 2008; York, 2006). This situation is clearly seen in
regard to carbon dioxide emissions, as the most affluent nations in the world generally have economies with much lower carbon intensity (higher efficiency) than developing nations, but they emit much more carbon dioxide per

capita (Roberts & Parks, 2007; York, Rosa & Dietz, 2003; 2004). Thus, "new" solutions offered by capitalism are really the same old failed
solutions. For something new under the sun to emerge, the social gravity operating at the second tier of
time must be transformed, allowing for the development of new social relationships that reorganize the metabolic interchange with nature. Here metabolic
restoration requires sustaining the efficiency of the energy flow through natural systems, maintaining
biodiversity, nourishing the self-sufficiency of ecosystems, ensuring the self-regulation of ecosystems,
and enhancing their resiliency (Magdoff, 2007). These guiding principles necessitate restructuring agriculture to reintegrate the internal strengths of ecosystems and provide the basis for sharing
knowledge throughout the labor process. When freed from the social gravity of capital, human society can pursue a social

metabolic order that sustains the conditions of life and that begins to mend the ecological rift (Foster, Clark & York,
2010). MAKING THE FUTURE Capitalism serves as a historical background condition that exerts social gravity that

influences social relations and organizations on the second tier of time. Its social laws encourage, enhance, and protect the accumulation of
capital. In this, its rapacious drive demands the constant exploitation of nature, creating metabolic rifts in ecosystems, undermining their

capacity to regenerate. When confronted by barriers it shifts to other regions and/or resources,
generating new ecological problems. Technological fixes aid this process, facilitating the ongoing
development of capital. Throughout the centuries, the same solutions, but in novel variations, are offered to address whatever problems arise, such as within agriculture and energy development. But
they offer "nothing new under the sun," as capital interests and needs take precedence. The eco logical rifts are often deepened as capital reproduces itself on an ever-larger scale. The various crises within capitalism, whether it is

"What has been done will be done again" characterizes the

the food, energy, or ecological crisis, are interrelated, given the social gravity of the system.

operation of capital. But what has been done could be the undoing of human history, as we know it,
given the increasing scale of ecological problems, as ecosystems are threatened with collapse.
Contemporary environmental problems are similar to those in the past, but today the scale is bigger and
the rifts are deeper. Diamond (2005) illuminates how environmental degradation has contributed to the collapse of numerous societies throughout history. We now face this
threat on a global scale, as the social gravity of capital impinges on the natural limits of the planet,
threatening to undermine the biogeophysical properties that help sustain the conditions of life.
 AT-Util-Dillon 99

The political calculation of subjects through security politics designates valuable and
invaluable groupsallowing any atrocity and destroying the value of life
Dillon 1999 [Michael, professor Politics and International Relations at the University of Lancaster Another Justice, Political Theory 27:2]

Philosophy's task, for Levinas, is to avoid conflating ethics and politics. The opposition of politics and ethics opens
his first major work, Totality and Infinity, and underscores its entire reading. This raises the difficult question of whether or not the political
can be rethought against Levinas with Levinas. Nor is this simply a matter of asking whether or not politics can be ethical. It embraces the
question of whether or not there can be such a thing as an ethic of the political. Herein, then, lies an important challenge to political
thought. It arises as much for the ontopolitical interpretation as it does for the under- standing of the source and character of political life
that flows from the return of the ontological. For Levinas the ethical comes first and ethics is first phi- losophy. But that leaves the political
unregenerated, as Levinas's own defer- ral to a Hobbesian politics, as well as his very limited political interventions, indicate.32 In this essay
I understand the challenge instead to be the necessity of thinking the co-presence of the ethical
and the political. Precisely not the subsumption of the ethical by the political as Levinas charges, then, but the belonging together of
the two which poses, in addition, the question of the civil composure required of a political life. Otherness is born(e) within
the self as an integral part of itself and in such a way that it always remains an inherent stranger to
itself.33 It derives from the lack, absence, or ineradicable incompleteness which comes from
having no security of tenure within or over that of which the self is a particular hermeneutical
manifestation; namely, being itself. The point about the human, betrayed by this absence, is
precisely that it is not sovereignly self-possessed and complete, enjoying undisputed tenure in and
of itself. Modes of justice therefore reliant upon such a subject lack the very foundations in the self that they most violently insist upon
seeing inscribed there. This does not, however, mean that the dissolution of the subject also entails the
dissolution of Justice. 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 ulti- mately 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.34 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.35 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."36 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. The event of this lack is not a negative experience. Rather, it
is an encoun- ter with a reserve charged with possibility. As possibility, it is that which enables life to be lived in excess without the
overdose of actuality.37 What this also means is that the human is not decided. It is precisely undecidable. Undecidability means being in a
position of having to decide without having already been fully determined and without being capable of bringing an end to the
requirement for decision. In the realm of undecidability, decision is precisely not the mechanical application of a rule or norm. Nor is it
surrender to the necessity of contin- gency and circumstance. Neither is it something taken blindly, without reflection and the mobilisation
of what can be known. On the contrary, know- ing is necessary and, indeed, integral to 'decision'. But it does not exhaust 'decision', and
cannot do so if there is to be said to be such a thing as a 'dec- ision'. We do not need deconstruction, of course, to tell us this. The manage-
ment science of decision has long since known something like it through the early reflections of, for example, Herbert Simon and Geoffrey
Vickers.38 But only deconstruction gives us it to think, and only deconstructively sensible philosophy thinks it through. To think decision
through is to think it as het- erogeneous to the field of knowing and possible knowing within which it is always located.39 And only
deconstruction thinks it through to the intimate relation between 'decision' and the assumption of responsibility, which effect egress into a
future that has not yet been-could not as yet have been-known: The instant of decision, if there is to be a decision, must be heterogeneous
to this accumu- lation of knowledge. Otherwise there is no responsibility. In this sense only must the per- son taking the decision not know
Ultimately one cannot know everything because one is advancing into a future which
everything.40
simply cannot be anticipated, and into which one cannot.
 AT-Cap Key to the Environment
Capitalism makes eco-collapse inevitable
Speth, law prof, 8Served as President Jimmy Carters White House environmental adviser and as head of the United Nations largest agency for
international development Prof at Vermont law school. Former dean of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies at Yale University . Former Professor
of Law at Georgetown University Law Center, teaching environmental and constitutional law. .Former Chairman of the Council on Environmental Quality in the
Executive Office of the President. Co-founder of the Natural Resources Defense Council. Was law clerk to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Hugo L. Black JD, Yale. (James
Gustave, The Bridge at the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability, Gigapedia, 6-9)

But the much larger and more threatening impacts stem from the economic activity of those of us participating in the modern, increasingly prosperous world

economy. This activity is consuming vast quantities of resources from the environment and returning to the environment vast
quantities of waste products. The damages are already huge and are on a path to be ruinous in the future. So, a fundamental 7
facing societies todayperhaps the fundamental questionis how can the operating instructions for the modern world economy be changed so that economic
activity both protects and restores the natural world? With increasingly few exceptions, modern capitalism is the operating system of the world economy. I use
modern capitalism here in a broad sense as an actual, existing system of political economy, not as an idealized model. Capitalism as we know it today
encompasses the core economic concept of private employers hiring workers to produce products and services that the employers own and then sell with the
intention of making a profi t. But it also includes competitive markets, the price mechanism, the modern corporation as its principal institution, the consumer
society and the materialistic values that sustain it, and the administrative state actively promoting economic strength and growth for a variety of reasons. Inherent
in the dynamics of capitalism is a powerful drive to earn profi ts, invest them, innovate, and thus grow the economy, typically at exponential rates, with the result
that the capitalist era has in fact been characterized by a remarkable exponential expansion of the world economy. The capitalist operating system, whatever its
shortcomings, is very good at generating growth. These features of capitalism, as they are constituted today, work together to produce an economic and political
reality that is highly destructive of the environment. An unquestioning society-wide commitment to economic growth
at almost any cost;
enormous investment in technologies designed with little regard for the environment; powerful corporate
interests whose overriding objective is to grow by generating profit, including profi t from avoiding the environmental costs they create;
markets that systematically fail to recognize environmental costs unless corrected by government; government that is
subservient to corporate interests and the growth imperative; rampant consumerism spurred by a worshipping of novelty and by sophisticated
advertising; economic activity so large in scale that its impacts alters the fundamental biophysical operations of the planetall

combine to deliver an ever-growing world economy that is undermining the planets ability to sustain life. The
fundamental question thus becomes one of transforming capitalism as we know it: Can it be done? If so, how? And if not, what then? It is to these questions that
this book is addressed. The larger part of the book proposes a variety of prescriptions to take economy and environment off collision course. Many of these
prescriptions range beyond the traditional environmental agenda. In Part I of the book, Chapters 13, I lay the foundation by elaborating the fundamental challenge
just described. Among the key conclusions, summarized here with some oversimplifi cation, are: The vast expansion ofeconomic activity that occurred
in the twentieth century and continues today is the predominant (but not sole) cause of the environmental decline that has

occurred to date. Yet the world economy, now increasingly integrated and globalized, is poised for unprecedented growth. The engine of this growth

is modern capitalism or, better, a variety of capitalisms. A mutually reinforcing set of forces associated with todays capitalism combines to
yield economic activity inimical to environmental sustainability. This result is partly the consequence of an ongoing political defaulta
failed politicsthat not only perpetuates widespread market failureall the nonmarket environmental costs that no one is payingbut exacerbates this market
failure with deep and environmentally perverse subsidies. The result is that our market economy is operating on wildly wrong market
signals, lacks other correcting mechanisms, and is thus out of control environmentally. The upshot is that societies now
face environmental threats of unprecedented scope and severity, with the possibility of various catastrophes,
breakdowns, and collapses looming as distinct possibilities, especially as environmental issues link with social inequities and tensions, resource scarcity, and

other issues. 9 Todays mainstream environmentalismaptly characterized as incremental and pragmatic problem solvinghas proven

insufficient to deal with current challenges and is not up to coping with the larger challenges ahead. Yet the approaches of modern-
day environmentalism, despite their limitations, remain essential: right now, they are the tools at hand with which to address many very pressing problems. The
momentum of the current systemfi fty-fi ve trillion dollars in output in 2004, growing fast, and headed toward environmental disaster is so great
that only powerful forces will alter the trajectory. Potent measures are needed that address the root
causes of todays destructive growth and transform economic activity into something environmentally benign and restorative. In short,
my conclusion, after much searching and considerable reluctance, is that most environmental deterioration is a result of systemic failures of the capitalism that we
have today and that long-term solutions must seek transformative change in the key features of this contemporary capitalism. In Part II, I address these basic
features of modern capitalism, in each case seeking to identify the transformative changes needed.
Growth cant solve fast enoughexternalities make the impact inevitable
Speth, law prof, 8Served as President Jimmy Carters White House environmental adviser and as head of the United Nations largest agency for
international development Prof at Vermont law school. Former dean of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies at Yale University . Former Professor
of Law at Georgetown University Law Center, teaching environmental and constitutional law. .Former Chairman of the Council on Environmental Quality in the
Executive Office of the President. Co-founder of the Natural Resources Defense Council. Was law clerk to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Hugo L. Black JD, Yale. (James
Gustave, The Bridge at the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability, Gigapedia, 51-54)

Each of these indicators measures environmental impact in some way, and each shows that impacts
are increasing, not declining. It is significant that
these growth rates of resource consumption and pollution are lower than the growth of the world economy. The eco-

efficiency of the economy is improving through dematerialization, the increased productivity of resource inputs, and the reduction of wastes
discharged per unit of output. However, eco-efficiency is not improving fast enough to prevent impacts from rising.

Donella Meadows summed it up nicely: things are getting worse at a slower rate.14 What the environment cares about,

moreover, is not the rate of growth but the total loading. These loadingsfor example, the amount of fi sh harvestedwere already huge

in 1980, so that even modest growth per decade produces large increases in environmental impactsimpacts that were already
too large. By 2004, the world was consuming annually 369 million tons of paper products, 275 million tons of meat, and 9 trillion tons of fossil fuels (in oil
equivalent). Freshwater for human use was being withdrawn from natural supplies at a rate of about a thousand cubic miles a year. Behind these numbers is the
phenomenon of exponential expansion. A dominant feature of modern economic activity is its exponential growth. A thing grows linearly when it increases by the
same quantity over a given time. If college tuition goes up three thousand dollars a year, the increase is linear. A thing grows exponentially when it increases in
proportion to what is already there. If college tuition goes 52 up 5 percent a year, the increase is exponential. The modern economy tends
to grow
exponentially because a portion of each years output is invested to produce even more output. The amount invested is
related to the amount of the economic activity. Food production, resource consumption, and waste generation also increase because they are linked to population
and output growth. Or so it has been thus far. But what of the future? The world economy is poised for explosive exponential economic growth. It could

double in size in a mere fi fteen to twenty years. So the potential is certainly present for large and perhaps catastrophic increases
in environmental impacts in a period when they should be decreasing rapidly. There are many good reasons for concern that future growth
could easily continue its environmentally destructive ways. First, economic activity and its enormous forward momentum can
be accurately characterized as out of control environmentally, and this is true in even the advanced industrial economies
that have modern environmental programs in place. Basically, the economic system does not work when it comes to protecting
environmental resources, and the political system does not work when it comes to correcting the economic system. Economist Wallace Oates has provided a clear
description of market failure, one reason the market does not work for the environment: Markets generate and make use of a set of prices that serve as signals
to indicate the value (or cost) of resources to potential users. Any activity that imposes a cost on society by using up some of its scarce resources must come with a
price, where that price equals the social cost. For most goods and services (private goods as economists call them), the market forces of supply and demand
generate a market price that directs the use of resources into their most highly valued employment. There are, however, circumstances where a market price may
not emerge to guide individual decisions. This is often the case for various forms of environmentally damaging activities. . . . The basic idea is straightforward and
compelling: the absence of an appropriate price 53 for certain scarce resources (such as clean air and water) leads to their excessive
use and results in what is called market failure. The source of this failure is what economists term an externality. A good example is the classic case of the
producer whose factory spreads smoke over an adjacent neighborhood. The producer imposes a real cost in the form of dirty air, but this cost is

external to the firm. The producer does not bear the cost of the pollution it creates as it does for the labor, capital, and raw materials that it employs.
The price of labor and such materials induces the fi rm to economize on their use, but there is no such incentive to control smoke

emissions and thereby conserve clean air. The point is simply that whenever a scarce resource comes free of charge (as is typically
the case with our limited stocks of clean air and water), it is virtually certain to be used to excess. Many of our environmental resources are
unprotected by the appropriate prices that would constrain their use. From this perspective, it is hardly surprising to fi nd that the environment is overused and
abused. A market system simply doesnt allocate the use of these resources properly.15 Political failure perpetuates, indeed magnifi es, this market failure.
Government policies could be implemented to correct market failure and make the market work for the environment rather than against it. But powerful economic
and political interests typically stand to gain by not making those corrections, so they are not made or the correction is only partial. Water could be conserved and
used more effi ciently if it were sold at its full cost, including the estimated cost of the environmental damage of overusing it, but both politicians and farmers have
a stake in keeping water prices low. Polluters could be made to pay the full costs of their actions, in terms of both damages and cleanup, but typically they do not.
Natural ecosystems give societies economic services of tremendous value. A developers actions can reduce these services to society, but rarely does the developer
pay fully for those lost services. Governments not only tend to shy away from correcting market 54 failure but exacerbate the
problem by creating subsidies and other practices that make a bad situation worse. In Perverse Subsidies, Norman Myers and Jennifer Kent estimate that
governments worldwide have established environmentally damaging subsidies that amount to about $850 billion annually. They conclude that the impact of these
subsidies on the environment is widespread and profound. They note: Subsidies for agriculture can foster overloading of croplands, leading to erosion and
compaction of topsoil, pollution from synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, denitrifi cation of soils, and release of greenhouse gases, among other adverse eff ects.
Subsidies for fossil fuels aggravate pollution eff ects such as acid rain, urban smog, and global warming, while subsidies for nuclear energy generate exceptionally
toxic waste with an exceptionally long half-life. Subsidies for road transportation lead to overloading of road networks, a problem that is aggravated as much as
relieved by the building of new roads when further subsidies promote overuse of cars; the sector also generates severe pollution of several sorts. Subsidies for
water encourage misuse and overuse of water supplies that are increasingly scarce. Subsidies for fi sheries foster overharvesting of already depleted fi sh stocks.
Subsidies for forestry encourage overexploitation at a time when many forests have been reduced by excessive logging, acid rain, and agricultural
encroachment.16 We live in a market economy where prices are a principal signal for guiding economic activity. When prices refl ect
environmental values as poorly as todays prices do, the system is running without essential controls. And there are other problems too,
discussed shortly. Todays market is a strange place indeed. At the core of the economy is a mechanism that does not recognize the most fundamental thing of all,
the living, evolving, sustaining natural world in which the economy is operating. Unaided, the market lacks the sensory organs that would
allow it to understand and adjust to this natural world. Its flying blind.

Jevons paradoxincreased efficiency just means increased consumption

Foster et al 10 (John Bellamy, is editor of Monthly Review and professor of sociology, University of Oregon, Brett Clark, assistant
professor of sociology, North Carolina State University, Richard York, co-editor of Organization & Environment and associate professor of
sociology, University of Oregon, Monthly Review, Capitalism and the Curse of Energy Efficiency: The Return of the Jevons Paradox,
http://monthlyreview.org/2010/11/01/capitalism-and-the-curse-of-energy-efficiency, July 2, 2012) ALK

Technological optimists have tried to argue

that the rebound effect is small, and therefore environmental
problems can be solved largely by technological innovation alone, with the efficiency gains translating
into lower throughput of energy and materials (dematerialization). Empirical evidence of a substantial
rebound effect is, however, strong. For example, technological advancements in motor vehicles, which have
increased the average m iles p er g allon of vehicles by 30 percent in the U nited S tates since 1980, have
not reduced the overall energy used by motor vehicles. Fuel consumption per vehicle stayed constant
while the efficiency gains led to the augmentation, not only of the numbers of cars and trucks on the roads (and the miles
driven), but also their size and performance (acceleration rate, cruising speed, etc.)so that SUVs and minivans now dot U.S. highways. At
the macro level, the Jevons Paradox can be seen in the fact that, even though the U nited S tates has managed to double its
energy efficiency since 1975, its energy consumption has risen dramatically. Juliet Schor notes that over the last
thirty-five years: energy expended per dollar of GDP has been cut in half. But rather than falling, energy demand
has increased, by roughly 40 percent. Moreover, demand is rising fastest in those sectors that have had the biggest efficiency gains
transport and residential energy use. Refrigerator efficiency improved by 10 percent, but the number of
refrigerators in use rose by 20 percent. In aviation, fuel consumption per mile fell by more than 40
percent, but total fuel use grew by 150 percent because passenger miles rose. Vehicles are a similar story. And
with soaring demand, weve had soaring emissions. Carbon dioxide from these two sectors has risen 40 percent, twice the
rate of the larger economy. Economists and environmentalists who try to measure the direct effects of
efficiency on the lowering of price and the immediate rebound effect generally tend to see the
rebound effect as relatively small, in the range of 10 to 30 percent in high-energy consumption areas such as home heating and
cooling and cars. But once the indirect effects, apparent at the macro level, are incorporated, the Jevons Paradox remains
extremely significant. It is here at the macro level that scale effects come to bear: improvements in energy efficiency can lower the
effective cost of various products, propelling the overall economy and expanding overall energy use.31 Ecological economists Mario
Giampietro and Kozo Mayumi argue that the Jevons Paradox can only be understood in a macro-evolutionary
model, where improvements in efficiency result in changes in the matrices of the economy, such that
the overall effect is to increase scale and tempo of the system as a whole. Most analyses of the Jevons Paradox
remain abstract, based on isolated technological effects, and removed from the historical process. They fail to examine, as Jevons
himself did, the character of industrialization. Moreover, they are still further removed from a realistic understanding of the
accumulation-driven character of capitalist development. An economic system devoted to profits,
accumulation, and economic expansion without end will tend to use any efficiency gains or cost
reductions to expand the overall scale of production. Technological innovation will therefore be
heavily geared to these same expansive ends. It is no mere coincidence that each of the epoch-making
innovations (namely, the steam engine, the railroad, and the automobile) that dominated the eighteenth, nineteenth, and
twentieth centuries were characterized by their importance in driving capital accumulation and the positive
feedback they generated with respect to economic growth as a whole so that the scale effects on the economy
arising from their development necessarily overshot improvements in technological efficiency.33 Conservation in the aggregate is impossible
for capitalism, however much the output/input ratio may be increased in the engineering of a given product. This is because all savings tend to
spur further capital formation (provided that investment outlets are available). This is especially the case where core industrial resources
what Jevons called central materials or staple productsare concerned. The Fallacy of Dematerialization The Jevons Paradox is the product
of a capitalist economic system that is unable to conserve on a macro scale, geared, as it is, to maximizing the throughput of energy and
materials from resource tap to final waste sink. Energy savings in such a system tend to be used as a means for further development of the
economic order, generating what Alfred Lotka called the maximum energy flux, rather than minimum energy production.34 The de-emphasis
on absolute (as opposed to relative) energy conservation is built into the nature and logic of capitalism as a system unreservedly devoted to the
gods of production and profit. As Marx put it: Accumulate, accumulate! That is Moses and the prophets!35 Seen
in the context of a
capitalist society, the Jevons Paradox therefore demonstrates the fallacy of current notions that the
environmental problems facing society can be solved by purely technological means. Mainstream
environmental economists often refer to dematerialization, or the decoupling of economic growth, from consumption of greater energy
and resources. Growth in energy efficiency is often taken as a concrete indication that the environmental problem is being solved. Yet savings in
materials and energy, in the context of a given process of production, as we have seen, are nothing new; they are part of the everyday history
of capitalist development.36 Each new steam engine, as Jevons emphasized, was more efficient than the one before. Raw materials-savings
processes, environmental sociologist Stephen Bunker noted, are older than the Industrial Revolution, and they have been dynamic
throughout the history of capitalism. Any notion that reduction in material throughput, per unit of national income, is a new phenomenon is
therefore profoundly ahistorical.37 What is neglected, then, in simplistic notions that increased energy efficiency normally leads to increased
energy savings overall, is the reality of the Jevons Paradox relationshipthrough which energy savings are used to promote new capital
formation and the proliferation of commodities, demanding ever greater resources. Rather than an anomaly, the rule that efficiency increases
energy and material use is integral to the regime of capital itself.38 As stated in The Weight of Nations, an important empirical study of
material outflows in recent decades in five industrial nations (Austria, Germany, the Netherlands, the United States, and Japan): Efficiency
gains brought by technology and new management practices have been offset by [increases in] the scale of economic growth.39 The result is
the production of mountains upon mountains of commodities, cheapening unit costs and leading to greater squandering of material resources.
Under monopoly capitalism, moreover, such commodities increasingly take the form of artificial use values, promoted by a vast marketing
system and designed to instill ever more demand for commodities and the exchange values they represent as a substitute for the fulfillment
of genuine human needs. Unnecessary,
wasteful goods are produced by useless toil to enhance purely
economic values at the expense of the environment. Any slowdown in this process of ecological destruction, under the
present system, spells economic disaster. In Jevonss eyes, the momentous choice raised by a continuation of business as usual was simply
between brief but true [national] greatness and longer continued mediocrity. He opted for the former the maximum energy flux. A century
and a half later, in our much bigger, more globalbut no less expansiveeconomy, it is no longer simply national supremacy
that is at stake, but the fate of the planet itself. To be sure, there are those who maintain that we should live high now and
let the future take care of itself. To choose this course, though, is to court planetary disaster. The only real answer for humanity
(including future generations) and the earth as a whole is to alter the social relations of production, to create a system in
which efficiency is no longer a cursea higher system in which equality, human development, community, and sustainability are
the explicit goals.
 AT Cap Good - Poverty
Capitalism causes poverty
Trainer 2Senior Lecturer of School of Social Work @ University of New South Wales (Ted, If You Want Affluence, Prepare for War, Democracy & Nature,
Vol. 8, No. 2, EBSCO, )

Rich countries are taking most of the worlds resource production. Their per capita resource consumption is about 20 times the average of
the poorest half of the worlds people. That they are consuming far more than their fair share is evident in many measures; for example, to provide a North

American lifestyle requires approximately 12 ha of productive land, but the per capital average amount of productive land on the planet is only 1.2 ha. The rich

squander resources on affluent living standards and frivolous luxuries while billions live in poverty. Many of these resources are
drawn from the Third World. Much of the productive capacity of the Third World has been allocated to the
production of commodities and manufactured goods for the benefit of the corporations and banks in the rich countries, who own the plantations and factories, and of the people
who shop in rich world supermarkets. Very little of the benefit goes to the poor majority in the Third World. Shirt makers in Bangladesh are paid 15 cents an hour.2 In other words, the
development that has taken place is almost totally inappropriate to the needs of most Third World people. It has been development in the interests of the rich. The crucial point about
development is to do with options foregone. It is easy to imagine forms of development that are far more likely to meet the needs of people, their society and their ecosystems but these are
prohibited by conventional/ capitalist development. Needs would be most effectively met if people were able to apply their available resources of land, forest, fisheries, labour, skill and capital

development prevents, because it ensures that the

to the production of basic items such as food and shelter. This is precisely what normal conventional /capitalist

available resources and the productive capacity are drawn into the most profitable ventures, which means mostly into
producing relatively luxurious items for export to richer people. Compare the capacity of a worker to feed his family on the 15 cents an hour wage earned in a shirt
factory, spent on food imported from a rich country, with the approximately four hours per week required by a home gardener to produce all the vegetables a
family requires.3 The global economy is therefore an imperial system, one in which there is a net flow of resources and wealth from the poor
to the rich and the resources the poor majority of people once had have been taken from them and now produce mostly for the benefit of the rich few. These
unjust distributions and the inappropriate development are primarily due to the market mechanism. Economic activity and
especially development are not determined by reference to the needs of humans, societies and ecosystems. In the present global economy

they are determined mostly by market forces. The inevitable result is that the rich get almost all of the valuable resources (because they can pay
most for them) and that almost all of the development that takes place is development of whatever rich people want (because that is most profitable, i.e. will return
most on invested capital). It is in other words a capitalist economic system and such a system ensures that the few who own most of the capital
(most is now owned by about 1% of the worlds people) will only invest it in ventures that are most likely to maximise profits, and
therefore in ventures which produce for those people with most effective demand, i.e. rich people. No other forms of development are

undertaken, hence much of the productive capacity of Tuvalu or Haiti lies idle because people with capital can make more money investing somewhere else.
More importantly, no other forms of development are conceivable. The dominant ideology has ensured that development cannot be thought of in any other way
than as investing capital in order to increase the capacity to produce for sale in the market.4 Thus the possibility that development might be seen predominantly as
improving the quality of life, security, the environment and social cohesion, or that these things might be achievable only if the goal of increasing the GDP is
rejected, almost never occurs in the development literature, let alone in development practice. Development can only be thought of in
terms of movement along the single dimension to greater levels of business turnover, sales, consumption, exporting, investing and GDP. Thus conventional
development is only the kind of development that results when what is developed is left to be determined by whatever will most enrich those few with capital
competing in a market situation. The inevitable result is development in the interests of the rich, i.e. those with the capital to invest and those with most purchasing
power. The global economy now works well for perhaps less than 10% of the worlds people, i.e. the upper 40% of the people in rich
counties, plus the tiny Third World elites. Conventional development is, in other words, a form of plunder. It takes most of the worlds wealth,

especially its productive capacity and allocates it to the rich few, and it takes much of this from billions of people who are so seriously deprived that
1200 million people are malnourished and tens of thousands die every day. Again the core point is that there are far better options; it is possible to imagine other
forms of development in which the resources and the productive capacity of Third World people are fully devoted to production by the people of the things they
most urgently need.

Trickle down is a jokeglobalization is changing the game

Trainer 2Senior Lecturer of School of Social Work @ University of New South Wales (Ted, If You Want Affluence, Prepare for War, Democracy & Nature,
Vol. 8, No. 2, EBSCO)

In any case conventionally defined development for the Third World is impossible. A glance at the limits to growth literature shows that there
are
nowhere near enough resources for all people ever to rise to rich world living standards.8 This point is almost totally
ignored in the development literature. On those rare occasions when attention turns towards the rationale for conventional development the trickle down
theory is revealed. The fact that the rich are further enriched immediately is justified on the grounds that in the long
run the increased wealth will begin to trickle down to lift the living standards of the poor majority. Conventional economists
point to the ever rising GDP of Third World countries and rest their case, ignoring the fact that economic growth is a
poor indicator of welfare or quality of life (which has been falling in the richest countries despite growth9) and the fact that in this era of
globalisation a rising average often results from a leap in the incomes of the rich along with a fall in those
of the poor. It is therefore not surprising that the 1996 Human Development Report concluded that the poorest one-third of the worlds people
are actually getting poorer.10 In addition conventional development, which virtually identifies development with growth, is ecologically suicidal.
Even the richest countries are blindly committed to development without end, i.e. to the continual and limitless increase in production for sale and in GDP. Their
supreme goal is in other words economic growth. However, over the past 40 years an overwhelmingly convincing limits-to-growth analysis has accumulated, making
it abundantly clear that rich countries are producing and consuming at rates that are grossly unsustainable. The result is rapid depletion and destruction of
resources, ecosystems and social bonds.11 Globalisation represents the acceleration and intensification of all of the above, enabled by the elimination of the
barriers that previously inhibited the access of corporations and banks to profitable business opportunities. The rules of trade, investment and service
provision are being radically altered to remove the capacity of government to preserve and protect the existing jobs, markets, forests, fisheries, water,
minerals and public services. It
is now becoming illegal for governments to protect their own people from the predatory intent of
the corporations. There have already been cases where governments that have tried to block undesirable corporate activity have been charged with interfering
with the freedom of trade and fined hundreds of millions of dollars. Globalisation
is a stunningly brazen and successful grab by the corporate
rich for even more of the worlds wealth. The impacts are most devastating on the Third World majority, whose
previously protected access to local resources and markets and state assistance is being eliminated as the business is being taken by
the corporations. It is no surprise that global inequality and polarisation are rapidly increasing. There is a vast
volume of evidence on the devastation globalisation is bringing to the poor majority of the worlds people.12

No uniqueness - Income inequality is the highest ever

DeSilver 13
Drew a Senior Writer at the Pew Research Center, U.S. income inequality, on rise for decades, is now highest since 1928,
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/12/05/u-s-income-inequality-on-rise-for-decades-is-now-highest-since-1928/, AB

President Obama took on a topic yesterday that most Americans dont like to talk about much: inequality.
There are a lot of ways to measure economic inequality (and well be discussing more on Fact Tank), but one basic approach is to look at
how much income flows to groups at different steps on the economic ladder. Emmanuel Saez,
an economics professor at UC-
Berkeley, has been doing just that for years. And according to his research, U.S. income inequality has been
increasing steadily since the 1970s, and now has reached levels not seen since 1928. (The GIF file at the top of
this post, created by Dorsey Shaw of Buzzfeed, compares growth in average income of the top 1% of Americans with everyone else.) Using tax-
return data from the IRS, Saez has built
extensive income-distribution datasets going back 100 years. He defines
income as pre-tax cash market income wages and salaries; dividends, interest, rent and other returns on invested capital;
business profits; and realized capital gains. He excludes Social Security payments, unemployment benefits and other government transfer
payments, which are more substantial today than before the Great Depression. In 1928, the top 1% of families received 23.9%
of all pretax income, while the bottom 90% received 50.7%. But the Depression and World War II dramatically reshaped the nations
income distribution: By 1944 the top 1%s share was down to 11.3%, while the bottom 90% were receiving 67.5%, levels that would remain
more or less constant for the next three decades. But starting in the mid- to late 1970s, the uppermost tiers income share began rising
dramatically, while that of the bottom 90% started to fall. The
top 1% took heavy hits from the dot-com crash and the
Great Recession but recovered fairly quickly: Saezs preliminary estimates for 2012 (which will be updated next month)
have that group receiving nearly 22.5% of all pretax income, while the bottom 90%s share is below 50%
for the first time ever (49.6%, to be precise). A century ago, Saez notes that the highest earners derived much of
their income from earnings on the accumulated wealth of past generations. By contrast, [t]he evidence suggests
that top incomes earners today areworking rich, highly paid employees or new entrepreneurs who have not yet
accumulated fortunes comparable to those accumulated during the Gilded Age.
 AT Cap Good - War
Neoliberalism creates the conditions for global warfare -- reject their evidence,
neoliberalism distorts mainstream media and academia to maintain its credibility
Staples 2000
Steven, policy analyst and president of Public Response, a digital agency that services non-profit organizations and trade unions in the fields of
online engagement and government relations, Journal for Social Justice, Vol. 27, No. 4, The Relationship Between Globalization and
Militarism, AB

Globalization and militarism should be seen as two sides of the same coin. On one side, globalization
promotes the conditions that lead to unrest, inequality, conflict, and, ultimately, war. On the other side,
globalization fuels the means to wage war by protecting and promoting the military industries needed to
produce sophisticated weaponry. This weaponry, in turn, is used, or its use is threatened, to protect the investments
of transnational corporations and their shareholders. 1. Globalization Promotes Inequality, Unrest, and Conflict Economic
inequality is growing; more conflict and civil wars are emerging. It is important to see a connection
between these two situations. Proponents of global economic integration argue that globalization
promotes peace and economic development of the Third World. They assert that "all boats rise with the tide" when investors and
corporations make higher profits. However, there is precious little evidence that this is true and substantial evidence

of the opposite. The United Nation's Human Development Report (U.N. Development Programme, 1999: 3) noted that globalization is
creating new threats to human security. Economic inequality between Northern and Southern nations
has worsened, not improved. There are more wars being fought today,mostly in the Third World , than there were
during the Cold War. Most are not wars between countries, but are civil wars where the majority of deaths are civilians, not soldiers. The mainstream
media frequently oversimplify the causes of these wars, with claims they are rooted in religious or ethnic
differences. A closer inspection reveals that the underlying source of such conflicts is economic in nature. Financial
instability, economic inequality, competition for resources, and environmental degradation, all root
causes of war, are exacerbated by globalization. The Asian financial meltdown of 1997 to 1999 involved a
terrible human cost. The economies of Thailand, South Korea, and Indonesia crumbled in the crisis. These
countries, previously held up by neoliberal economists as the darlings of globalization, were reduced to
riots and financial ruin. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) stepped in to rescue foreign investors and impose
austerity programs that opened the way for an invasion by foreign corporations that bought up assets
devalued by capital flight and threw millions of people out of work. Political upheaval and conflict ensued,
costing thousands of lives. Meanwhile, other countries watched as their neighbors suffered the consequences of greater global integration. In India,
citizens faced corporate recolonization, which spawned a nationalistic political movement. Part of the political program was the development of nuclear weapons
seen by many as the internationally accepted currency of power. Nuclear
tests have put an already conflict-ridden region on the
brink of nuclear war. The world economic system promotes military economies over civilian
economies, pushing national economic policies toward military spending. The World Trade Organization (WTO), one
of the main instruments of globalization, is largely based on the premise that the only legitimate role for a

government is to provide for a military to protect the interests of the country and a police force to
ensure order within. The WTO attacks governments' social and environmental policies that reduce
corporate profits, and it has succeeded in having national laws that protect the environment struck
down. Yet the WTO gives exemplary protection to government actions that develop, arm, and deploy armed
forces and supply a military establishment. Article XXI of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) allows
governments free reign for actions taken in the interest of national security. For example, in 1999 a WTO
trade panel ruled against a Canadian government program that provided subsidies to aerospace and defense corporations
for the production of civilian aircraft. Within weeks, the Canadian military announced a new $30 million subsidy program
for the same Canadian corporations, but this time the money was for production of new weapons (Canadian Press, 1999).
In this case, the government was forced down the path of a military economy . Contrast this WTO ruling with the billions of
dollars the Pentagon gives to American weapons corporations for developing and producing military aircraft. The $309-billion U.S. military budget dwarfs the
budgets of all its potential enemies combined, and with the collapse of the Soviet Union the U.S. faces no imminent military challengers. This
large budget
is, for all practical purposes, a corporate subsidy. Because the corporations involved happen to be building
weapons, the subsidy is protected under GATT's Article XXI. The use of military spending to develop a country's industrial and
economic base has not been lost on Third World countries. Though struggling to lift itself from apartheid-era poverty and accompanying

social problems, South Africa is spending billions of dollars on aircraft, warships, and even submarines in an effort to develop

its economy. South Africa stipulated that the arms it buys must be partially manufactured in South Africa. Finance Minister Trevor Manuel explained that the
increase in military spending would allow "the National Defence Force to upgrade equipment, while providing a substantial boost to South African industry, foreign
investment, and exports" (Engelbrecht, 1999). South
Africa's performance requirements would be wide open to WTO
challenges if they were for building schools, hospitals, transportation infrastructure, or virtually anything
except weapons. South Africa is about to make the same mistake Northern industrialized countries
made: it is creating new military projects that will become dependent on perpetual government funding,
drawing money away from essential social programs. When the current weapons orders have been filled and
government funding dries up, weapons corporations will have to find new customers to maintain current job levels,

driving the arms trade and potentially causing a whole new arms race in the region.

Even if they win their internal link, we outweigh

a) Probability and escalation
Mager 86 [Nathan, economist, The Kondratieif Waves, p 197-8]
The overall trend of the economy shapes perceptions as to its strength and direction. In a hull market, "experts" are almost uniformly optimistic; in a bear market
during the upward swings, soon after a trough and just before a peak, that wars
the owlish analysts almost universally suggest caution. It is

become more likely. It should be noted that peak wars are the result of a different kind of socioeconomic psychological
pressure and have quite different economic results than trough wars. Nations become socially and politically unsettled after a long
period of boom and expansion, perhaps because in their final stages, peoples' expectations begin to outrun actual growth in the general level of

prosperity. War then becomes the ultimate destination. Inasmuch as all nations are attempting to expand simultaneously, the intense

competition for resources and markets leads eventually to military confrontations, which become contagious. One explanation
suggested is that during trough wars the public is still largely concerned with private considerations and their own

wellbeing. They tend to be less interested in international disputes, world crusades, or campaigns involving large investment of cash, effort,

and the nervous energy needed to pursue projects to a conclusion. Trough wars tend to be short. They are more a matter of choice and sudden

decision by the stronger power. Inasmuch as peak wars are the result of frustration of expectations {usually with economic elements), peak wars tend to

be more desperate, more widespread, and more destructive.

b) Magnitude
Thompson 96pol sci prof, IndianaANDGeorge Modelski (Leading Sectors and World Powers: The Coevolution of Global Economics and Politics,
GoogleBooks, 20-22, )

Goldstein (1985. 1987. 1988. 1991a) has probably contributed more than anyone else to reviving the question of how wars and prosperity are linked. His 1988
analysis went some way in summarizing many of the arguments concerning economic long waves and war. His 1991 analysis is one of the more sophisticated
empirical studies to emerge after nearly a century of controversy (spatiotemporal boundaries: world system from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-twentieth
centuries).3 The basic perspective thai emerges from his analyses, outlined in figure 2.2. sees economic upswingsincreasing the probability of
severe wars. Severe wars usher in a phase of stagnation from which the world economy eventually recovers leading to another resurgence of robust
economic growth. Goldstein's analysis suggests that this process has gone on since at least 1495. Economic upswings create economic surpluses and full

war chests. The ability to wage war makes severe wars more likely. Severe wars, in turn, consume the surpluses and war chests
and put an end to the growth upswing. Decades are required to rebuild. While there may be some gains registered in terms of resource mobilization for combat
purposes, these gains are offset by the losses brought about by wartime distortions and destruction. Goldstein is careful to distinguish between production and
prices. Prices, in his view, are functions of war. Other things being equal, the severity of the war greatly effects the rate of war-induced inflationin other words,
the greater the severity, then the higher the rate of inflation. When prices rise, real wages decline. Yet he also notes that production (production waves are said to
precede war/price waves by some ten to fifteen years) is already stagnating toward the end of the upswing. This phenomenon is explained in terms of demand
increases outstripping supply. As a result, inflation occurs. Tile lack of clarity on this issue may be traceable to the lack of specification among innovation,
investment, and production. Cycles in innovation and investment are viewed as reinforcing the production long wave. Increases in innovation facilitate economic
growth but growth discourages further innovation. Investment increases on the upswing but, eventually, over investment results. Investors retrench and growth
slows down as a consequence. What is not exactly specified is whether innovation, investment, war, or some combination of the three processes is responsible for
ending the upswing. Goldstein also raises the question of how these economic/war cycles impact the distribution of capabilities among the major powers. War

severity increases capability concentration. Relative capabilities then begin a process of diffusion as they move toward equality among the
major powers. Another bout of severe war ensues and the cycle repeats itself. In addition to war, differential rates of innovation and
production influence relative capability standings. Presumably, all three factors share some responsibility for generating the fluctuations in capability concentration.
 AT Cap Good - Space
Doesnt solve the uniqueness issue -- space leads to more imperialist warfare
Loos 11
Maxwell, International Studies Department researcher at Macalester College, 5/3/11, Ground Zero: Tourism, Terrorism, and Global
Imagination, pg. 18-19, DA: 7/21/, http://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1013&context=intlstudies_honors

Going back to the image of the earth from space, Masahide Kato
In this way, global imagination does involve a global gaze.
argues that it manifested the totality of the globe eloquently to First World eyes, marking the triumph of an
absolute strategic gaze.22 Though Kato makes his statements about the globe as part of a larger argument about discourses of nuclear
politics, his
comments are relevant to the topic of global imagination. Kato argues that the image of the
globe from space, endowed with the authority of photography and mechanical reproduction, allows for the production of
the fiction of the globe as a unified whole,23 which allows for the entire globe to be gazed upon by
the First World in terms of economic and geopolitical strategy. This image and the fiction of the earth as a
totality, Kato argues, coupled with the logic of late capitalism, suppresses realities that cannot fit into this mode of
representation,24 limiting possibilities, and essentially allowing the global North to constitute the
world to its advantage.25 While Kato might be a bit of a pessimist, his argument is useful insofar as it demonstrates how the
process of imagining the globe as a cohesive whole with specific characteristics is inherently involved in
power/knowledge dynamics, at least partially rooted in political economy. Global imagination truly does take on
the form of a gaze, insofar as the process of seeing or imagining the globe is simultaneously a process of constituting it. This goes beyond
fantasy; the phantasm of the globe, imagined from a set of images, is the global reality for the subject.
Going back to Stegers global political ideologies, Imperial Globalism and Jihadist Globalism appear as the only ways to act, the appropriate
The process of global imagination thus undergirds
(even if contested) responses to the reality of the imagined globe.
practices with real, constitutive material impacts on the world, from tourism to imperialistic warfare.

Space exploration will cause environmental exploitation, space militarization,

sovereignty conflict and epidemics
Gagnon 1999 (Coordinator of the Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space, Bruce
K., Space Exploration and Exploitation, http://www.space4peace.org/articles/scandm.htm)

We are now poised to take the bad seed of greed, environmental exploitation and war into space. Having
shown such enormous disregard for our own planet Earth, the so-called "visionaries" and "explorers" are
now ready to rape and pillage the heavens. Countless launches of nuclear materials, using rockets that
regularly blow up on the launch pad, will seriously jeopardize life on Earth. Returning potentially
bacteria-laden space materials back to Earth, any real plans for containment and monitoring, could create
new epidemics for us. The possibility of an expanding nuclear-powered arms race in space will certainly have
serious ecological and political ramifications as well. The effort to deny years of consensus around
international space law will create new global conflicts and confrontations.
 AT Cap Good- Tech
Cap actively hampers innovation
Mike Palecek 9, Canadian National Union Representative, Capitalism Versus Science,
ireland.marxist.com/marxist-theory/165-ireland/7630-capitalism-versus-science-

We are constantly bombarded with the myth that capitalism drives innovation, technology, and
scientific advancement. We are told that competition, combined with the profit motive, pushes science to new
frontiers and gives big corporations incentive to invent new medicines, drugs, and treatments. The free market, we are told,
is the greatest motivator for human advance. But in fact, the precise opposite is true. Patents, profits, and private ownership

of the means of production are actually the greatest fetters science has known in recent history.
Capitalism is holding back every aspect of human development, and science and technology is no
exception. The most recent and blatant example of private ownership serving as a barrier to advancement can be found in the Ida fossil. Darwinius masillae
is a 47 million year old lemur that was recently discovered. Anyone and everyone interested in evolution cheered at the unveiling of a transitional species, linking
upper primates and lower mammals. Ida has forward-facing eyes, short limbs, and even opposable thumbs. What is even more remarkable is the stunning condition
she was preserved in. This fossil is 95% complete. The outline of her fur is clearly visible and scientists have even been able to examine the contents of her stomach,
determining that her last meal consisted of fruits, seeds, and leaves. Enthusiasts are flocking to New Yorks Museum of Natural History to get a glimpse of the
landmark fossil. So what does Ida have to do with capitalism? Well, she was actually unearthed in 1983 and has been held by a private collector ever since. The
collector didnt realize the significance of the fossil (not surprising since he is not a paleontologist) and so it just collected dust for 25 years. There is a large
international market for fossils. Capitalism has reduced these treasures, which rightly belong to all of humanity, to mere commodities. Privately held fossils are
regularly leased to museums so that they may be studied or displayed. Private fossil collections tour the world, where they can make money for their owners,
instead of undergoing serious study. And countless rare specimens sit in the warehouses of investment companies, or the living rooms of collectors serving as
nothing more than a conversation piece. It is impossible to know how many important fossils are sitting, waiting to be discovered in some millionaires office.
Medical Research The
pharmaceutical industry is well known for price gouging and refusing to distribute
medicines to those who cant afford it. The lack of drugs to combat the AIDS pandemic, particularly in
Africa, is enough to prove capitalisms inability to distribute medicine to those in need. But what role
does the profit motive play in developing new drugs? The big pharmaceuticals have an equally damning record in
the research and development side of their industry. AIDS patients can pay tens of thousands of dollars per year for the medication
they need to keep them alive. In 2003, when a new drug called Fuzeon was introduced, there was an outcry over the cost, which would hit patients with a bill of
over $20,000 per year. Roche's chairman and chief executive, Franz Humer tried to justify the price tag, We need to make a decent rate of return on our
innovations. This is a major breakthrough therapy I can't imagine a society that doesn't want that innovation to continue. But the innovation that Mr. Humer
speaks of is only half-hearted. Drug companies are not motivated by compassion; they are motivated by cash. To
a drug company, a person with
AIDS is not a patient, but a customer. The pharmaceutical industry has a financial incentive to make sure
that these people are repeat-customers, consequently there is very little research being done to find a
cure. Most research done by the private sector is centered on finding new anti-retroviral drugs - drugs that patients will have
to continue taking for a lifetime. There has been a push to fund research for an AIDS vaccine and, more recently,

an effective microbicide. However, the vast majority of this funding comes from government and non-profit

groups. The pharmaceutical industry simply isnt funding the research to tackle this pandemic. And why
would they? No company on earth would fund research that is specifically designed to put them out of
business. Similar problems arise in other areas of medical research. In the cancer field an extremely
promising drug was discovered in early 2007. Researchers at the University of Alberta discovered that a
simple molecule DCA can reactivate mitochondria in cancer cells, allowing them to die like normal cells.
DCA was found to be extremely effective against many forms of cancer in the laboratory and shows
promise for being an actual cure for cancer. DCA has been used for decades to treat people with mitochondria disorders. Its effects on the
human body are therefore well known, making the development process much simpler. But clinical trials of DCA have been slowed by

funding issues. DCA is not patented or patentable. Drug companies will not have the ability to make
massive profits off the production of this drug, so they are not interested. Researchers have been forced to raise money
themselves to fund their important work. Initial trials, on a small scale, are now under way and the preliminary results are very encouraging. But it has been two
years since this breakthrough was made and serious study is only just getting underway. The
U of As faculty of medicine has been forced
to beg for money from government and non-profit organizations. To date, they have not received a
single cent from a for-profit medical organization. The lack of research into potential non-patentable cures does not stop at DCA.
There is an entire industry built up around so-called alternative natural remedies. Many people, this author included, are skeptical about the claims made by those
that support alternative medicines. Richard Dawkins is quick to point out that If a healing technique is demonstrated to have curative properties in properly
controlled double-blind trials, it ceases to be alternative. It simply...becomes medicine. But this black and white view does not take into account the limitations
placed on science by capitalism. The refusal to fund the testing needed to verify non-patentable alternative medicines has two damaging effects. First, we are kept
in the dark about potentially effective medications. And second, the modern-day snake oil salesmen that peddle false cures are given credibility by the few
alternative treatments that do work. Technology and Industry The manufacturing industry in particular is supposed to be where capitalist innovation is in its
element. Weare told that competition between companies will lead to better products, lower prices, new
technology and new innovation. But again, upon closer inspection we see private interests serving as
more of a barrier than an enabler. Patents and trade secrets prevent new technologies from being
developed. The oil industry in particular has a long history of purchasing patents, simply to prevent the
products from ever coming to market. Competition can serve as a motivator for the development of new
products. But as we have already seen above, it can also serve as a motivator to prevent new products from ever
seeing the light of day. Companies will not only refuse to fund research for the development of a product
that might hurt their industry, but in some cases they will go to extraordinary lengths to prevent anyone
else from doing the same research. The 2006 documentary "Who Killed the Electric Car" goes into great
detail about the role of big oil companies, auto manufacturers, and the US Federal Government in
preventing an alternative vehicle from hitting the road. The filmmaker claims that auto companies would lose out
if an electric vehicle was ever produced because of the simplicity of their maintenance. The replacement parts side
of the auto industry would be decimated. Oil companies would see a dramatic reduction in the demand for their products as the world switched to electric vehicles.
It is claimed that hydrogen fuel cells, which have very little chance of being developed into a useful technology, are used as a distraction from real alternatives. The
film maker blasts the American government for directing research away from electric vehicles and towards hydrogen fuel cells. But the most damning accusations
are against major oil companies and auto manufacturers. The film suggests that auto
companies have sabotaged their own research
into electric cars. Whats worse, is that oil companies have purchased the patents for NiMH batteries to prevent
them from being used in electric vehicles. These are the same batteries that are used in laptop
computers and large batteries of this type would make the electric vehicle possible. But Chevron
maintains veto power over any licensing or use of NiMH battery technology. They continue to refuse to sell these
batteries for research purposes. Some hybrid vehicles are now using NiMH batteries, but hybrid vehicles, while improving mileage, still rely on fossil fuels. While
the purchasing of patents is an effective way of shelving new innovations, there are certainly other ways the capitalist system holds back research and development.
The very nature of a system based on competition makes collaborative research impossible. Whether it
be the pharmaceutical industry, the auto industry or any other, capitalism divides the best engineers
and scientists among competing corporations. Anyone involved in research or product development is
forced to sign a confidentiality agreement as a condition of employment. Not only are these people prevented from working together, they
are not even allowed to compare their notes! Peer review is supposed to be an important piece of the scientific method. Often, major advancements are made,
not by an individual group researchers, but by many groups of researchers. One team develops one piece of the puzzle, someone else discovers another and still
another team of scientists puts all of the pieces together. How can a system based on competition foster such collaborative efforts? Simply stated, it cant.
 AT Cap Inev
We must believe in the impossible capitalisms inevitability is a constructed mental
block meant to deny the freedom our political imaginary. Only by believing in the
impossible can it become possible.
Zizek 2K
[Slavoj Zizek, Senior Researcher, Institute for Social Studies, Ljubljana, 2K, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality, p. 324-6]

The first thing to note about this neoliberal clich is that the neutral reference to the necessities of the market economy, usually
invoked in order to categorize grand ideological projects as unrealistic utopias, is
itself to be inserted into the great modern utopian
projects. That is to say as Fredric Jameson has pointed out what characterizes utopia is not a belief in the essential goodness of human nature, or some
similar naive notion, but, rather, belief in some global mechanism which, applied to the whole of society, will automatically bring out the balanced state of progress
and happiness one is longing for and, in this precise sense, is not the market precisely the name for such a mechanism which, properly applied, will bring about the
optimal state of society? So, again, the first answer of the Left to those Leftists themselves who bemoan the loss of the utopian impetus in our societies should
be that this impetus is alive and well not only in the Rightist 'fundamentalist' populism which advocates the return to grass-roots democracy, but above all among
the advocates of the market economy themselves.12 The second answer should be a clear line of distinction between utopia and ideology: ideology is not only a
utopian project of social transformation with no realistic chance of actualization; no less ideological is the anti-utopian stance of those who `realistically' devalue
every global project of social transformation as `utopian,' that is, as unrealistic dreaming and/or harbouring 'totalitarian' potential today's

predominant form of ideological 'closure' takes the precise form of mental block which prevents us from
imagining a fundamental social change, in the interests of an allegedly realistic and mature attitude. In his
Seminar on the Ethics of Psychoanalysis,13 Lacan developed an opposition between 'knave' and 'fool' as the two intellectual attitudes: the right wing intellectual is a
knave, a conformist who considers the mere existence of the given order as an argument for it, and mocks thee Left for its 'utopian' plans, which necessarily lead to
catastrophe; while the left-wing intellectual is a fool, a court jester who publicly displays the lie of the existing order, but in a way which suspends the performative
efficiency of this speech. In the years immediately after the fall of Socialism, the knave was a neoconservative advocate of the free market who cruelly rejected all
forms of social solidarity as counterproductive sentimentalism; while the fool was a deconstructionist cultural critic who, by means of his ludic procedures destined
to 'subvert' the existing order, actually served as its supplement. Today, however, the relationship between the couple knavefool and the political opposition
Right/Left is more and more the inversion of the standard figures of Rightist knave and Leftist fool: are
not the Third Way theoreticians
ultimately today's knaves, figures who preach cynical resignation, that is, the necessary failure of every attempt
actually to change something in the basic functioning of global capitalism? And are not the conservative fools those
conservatives whose original modern model is Pascal and who as it were show the hidden cards of the ruling ideology, bringing-to light its underlying mechanisms
which, in order to remain operative, have to be repressed far more attractive? Today in the face of this Leftist knavery it is more
important than ever to hold this utopian place of the global alternative open, even if it remains empty,
living on borrowed time, awaiting the content to fill it in. I fully agree with Laclau that after the exhaustion of both the social
democratic welfare state imaginary and the 'really-existing-Socialist imaginary, the Left does need a new imaginary (a new mobilizing global
vision). Today, however, the outdatedness of the welfare state and socialist imaginaries is a clich the real dilemma is what to do with how the Left is to relate to
the predominant liberal democratic imaginary. It is my contention that Laclau's and Mouffe's 'radical democracy' comes all too close to merely 'radicalizing' this
liberal democratic imaginary, while remaining within its horizon. Laclau, of course, would probably claim that the point is to treat the democratic imaginary as an
'empty signifier', and to engage in the hegemonic battle with the proponents of the global capitalist New World Order over what its content will be. Here, however,
I think that Butler is right when she emphasizes that another way is also open: it is not 'necessary to occupy the dominant norm in order to produce an internal
subversion of its terms. Sometimes it is important to refuse it terms to let the term itself wither, to starve it of its strength' (JB, p. 177). This means that the Left
has a choice today: either it accepts the predominant liberal democratic horizon (democracy, human rights and freedoms . .
.), and engages in a hegemonic battle within it, or it risks the opposite gesture of refusing its very terms, of flatly rejecting today's
liberal blackmail that courting any prospect of radical change paves the way for totalitarianism. It is my firm conviction, my politico-existential premise that the old
'68 motto Soyons ralistes demandons l'impossible! still holds: it
is the advocates of changes and resignifications within the
liberal-democratic horizon who are the true utopians in their belief that their efforts will amount to
anything more than cosmetic surgery that will give us capitalism with a human face. In her second intervention,
Butler superbly deploys the reversal that characterizes the Hegelian dialectical process: the aggravated 'contradiction' in which the very differential structure of
meaning is collapsing, since every determination immediately turns into its opposite, this 'mad dance', is resolved by the sudden emergence of a new universal
determination. The best illustration is provided by the passage from the 'world of self-alienated Spirit' to the Terror of the French Revolution in The Phenomenology
of Spirit: the pre-Revolutionary 'madness of the musician "who heaped up and mixed together thirty arias, Italian, French, tragic, comic, of every sort; now with a
deep bass he descended into hell, then, contracting his throat, he rent the vaults of heaven with a falsetto tone, frantic and soothed, imperious and mocking, by
turns" (Diderot, Nephew of Rameau)' ,14 suddenly turns into its radical opposite: the revolutionary stance pursuing its goal with an inexorable firmness. And my
point, of course, is that today's 'mad dance', the dynamic proliferation of multiple shifting identities also awaits its resolution in a new form of Terror. The only
'realistic' prospect is to ground a new political univeralisty by opting for the impossible, fully assuming
the place of the exception with no taboos, no a priori norms ('human rights', `democracy'), respect for which would
prevent us also from 'resignifying' terror, the ruthless exercise of power, the spirit of sacrifice if this radical
choice is decried by some bleeding-heart liberals as Linksfaschismus, so be it!

Their inevitability claims are false - growing materialist dialectical knowledge

production is key to organize growing discontent.
Rosenberg and Villarejo 12
(Jordana Rosenberg, MA and PhD from Cornell University, and a BA from Wesleyan University. She is the recipient of an Ahmanson-Getty
Fellowship from the Center for Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Studies at UCLA (2009- 2010), as well as a Marion and Jasper Whiting
Foundation Award, the Catherine Macaulay Prize, and a William Andrews Clark Memorial Library Joint Fellowship Award. Professor Rosenberg's
fields of research and teaching include eighteenth-century transatlantic literature and poetry, moral philosophy, political theory, early modern
materialism, Marxism, and secularization; Amy Villarejo, Associate Professor in Film and Feminist, Gender, & Sexuality Studies Program. She
received her B.A. in English from Bryn Mawr College in 1985, an M.A. in English from the University of Pittsburgh in 1991, and a Ph.D. in Critical
and Cultural Studies (in the Film Studies Program) from the University of Pittsburgh in 1997, when she came to Cornell GLQ: A Journal of
Lesbian and Gay Studies, Volume 18, Number 1,2012, Published by Duke University Press, Introduction: Queerness, Norms, Utopia)

For even as neoliberal capitalism conscripts subjects to wage slavery, encloses commons, seizes
resources, and consigns populations to death and dispossession, movements for resistance and
liberation form and flourish in opposition to these depredations. And, informed by such activist interventions, there
has been in recent years a wealth of work documenting, defying, and exposing the specificities of
neoliberal capitalism and its various poisonous strategies. The dimensions of neoliberalism as an ideology, a politics,
and an economic tactic have been eloquently and passionately analyzed in articles and in book-length studies both inside and outside queer
studies. Lisa Duggan, David Eng, Jodi Melamed, Jasbir Puar, and Nikhil Pal Singh have shown how neoliberal
multiculturalism masks capitalisms structural reliance on racism and imperialism in its seemingly
endless quest to create and sustain profits.5 Heterodox economists, historians, and critical geographers such as Gopal
Balakrishnan, David Harvey, Anwar M. Shaikh and E. Ahmed Tonak, Gerard Dumenil and Dominique Levy, Chris Harman, and Giovanni Arrighi
have charted how financialization, the permanent arms economy, falling profits, stagnant real wages, and the debt economy have convulsed
the globe for decades. And, constellating the concerns of American studies, ethnic studies, and queer studies, critics like Roderick Ferguson,
Kevin Floyd, Miranda Joseph, and Jos Muoz have interrogated the historical lapses of political economy and Marxism in thinking gender, race,
and sexuality.6 Such work has initiated critical rapprochements between Marxism and queer studies, through readings of cultural texts marked
by neoliberalisms inception and rise. Thus burdened with the miseries of neoliberal capitalism and buoyed by the uprisings, liberation
movements, and thriving critical approaches that interrogate and resist neoliberalisms spoliations and havoc Queer Studies and the Crises
of Capitalism translates these contradictory castings into a robust engagement with the capitalism in neoliberal capitalism. We take to heart
Melameds acute rendering of the forces of neoliberal multiculturalism, which, in suturing liberal antiracism to U.S. nationalism, depoliticizes
capitalism by collapsing it with Americanism (6). This special issue works to resist such depoliticization by specifying, along with Melamed, that
neoliberalism is a qualifier for the more precise analytic and historical category of neoliberal capitalism. For, as Nikhil Pal Singh has argued,
liberalism insists on divorcing universal questions of individual rights from a historical context of unequal property relations and . . . primitive
capital accumulation (28). This is a divorce we must not repeat in our own work. Liberal ideology longs to veil the violence of
capitalism from view, leaving only fantasies about nationalism and the naturalized fiction of a free
market in its place. Our analytic response to such veilings must be to push capitalism always to the
foreground as not simply an object of analysis but as the ground and condition of such analysis as
well. To this end, Queer Studies and the Crises of Capitalism invokes quite specifically the Marxist, anticapitalist, and left lineages of
thinking neoliberalism. Neoliberalism, that is, is always neoliberal capitalism.
 AT-Growth Good-Dedev
Collapse now is key to prevent extinction
Barry 8 President and Founder of Ecological Internet, Ph.D. in Land Resources from U-Wisconsin-Madison (Glen, Economic Collapse And
Global Ecology, http://www.countercurrents.org/barry140108.htm)

Humanity and the Earth are faced with an enormous conundrum -- sufficient climate policies enjoy political support
only in times of rapid economic growth. Yet this growth is the primary factor driving greenhouse gas emissions and
other environmental ills. The growth machine has pushed the planet well beyond its ecological carrying
capacity, and unless constrained, can only lead to human extinction and an end to complex life. With
every economic downturn, like the one now looming in the United States, it becomes more difficult
and less likely that policy sufficient to ensure global ecological sustainability will be embraced. This essay
explores the possibility that from a biocentric viewpoint of needs for long-term global ecological, economic and social sustainability; it
would be better for the economic collapse to come now rather than later . Economic growth is a deadly
disease upon the Earth, with capitalism as its most virulent strain. Throw-away consumption and explosive population
growth are made possible by using up fossil fuels and destroying ecosystems . Holiday shopping numbers are
covered by media in the same breath as Arctic ice melt, ignoring their deep connection. Exponential economic growth destroys
ecosystems and pushes the biosphere closer to failure. Humanity has proven itself unwilling and
unable to address climate change and other environmental threats with necessary haste and ambition.
Action on coal, forests, population, renewable energy and emission reductions could be taken now at net benefit to the economy. Yet, the
losers -- primarily fossil fuel industries and their bought oligarchy -- successfully resist futures not dependent upon their deadly products.
Perpetual economic growth, and necessary climate and other ecological policies, are fundamentally
incompatible. Global ecological sustainability depends critically upon establishing a steady state
economy, whereby production is right-sized to not diminish natural capital. Whole industries like coal and natural forest logging will be
eliminated even as new opportunities emerge in solar energy and environmental restoration. This critical transition to both economic
and ecological sustainability is simply not happening on any scale. The challenge is how to carry out necessary
environmental policies even as economic growth ends and consumption plunges. The natural response is going to be liquidation of even more
life-giving ecosystems, and jettisoning of climate policies, to vainly try to maintain high growth and personal consumption. We know that
humanity must reduce greenhouse gas emissions by at least 80% over coming decades. How will this and other
necessary climate mitigation strategies be maintained during years of economic downturns, resource wars, reasonable
demands for equitable consumption, and frankly, the weather being more pleasant in some places? If efforts to reduce emissions and move to
a steady state economy fail; the collapse of ecological, economic and social systems is assured. Bright greens take the continued existence of a
habitable Earth with viable, sustainable populations of all species including humans as the ultimate truth and the meaning of life. Whether this
is possible in a time of economic collapse is crucially dependent upon whether enough ecosystems and resources remain post collapse to allow
It may be better for the Earth and humanity's future
humanity to recover and reconstitute sustainable, relocalized societies.
that economic collapse comes sooner rather than later, while more ecosystems and opportunities to
return to nature's fold exist. Economic collapse will be deeply wrenching -- part Great Depression, part African famine. There will be
starvation and civil strife, and a long period of suffering and turmoil. Many will be killed as balance returns to the Earth. Most people have
forgotten how to grow food and that their identity is more than what they own. Yet there is some justice, in that those who have lived most
lightly upon the land will have an easier time of it, even as those super-consumers living in massive cities finally learn where their food comes
from and that ecology is the meaning of life. Economic collapse now means humanity and the Earth ultimately
survive to prosper again. Human suffering -- already the norm for many, but hitting the currently materially affluent
-- is inevitable given the degree to which the planet's carrying capacity has been exceeded. We are a
couple decades at most away from societal strife of a much greater magnitude as the Earth's biosphere
fails. Humanity can take the bitter medicine now, and recover while emerging better for it; or our total collapse can be a final, fatal death
swoon. A successful revolutionary response to imminent global ecosystem collapse would focus upon
bringing down the Earth's industrial economy now. As society continues to fail miserably to implement necessary changes
to allow creation to continue, maybe the best strategy to achieve global ecological sustainability is economic
sabotage to hasten the day. It is more fragile than it looks.
AFF Answers
 2AC-Permutation-Generic

Perm-do boththe alt alone forecloses possibility to explore vulnerabilities within cap
and is a reductionist understanding on the way power manifestscollapses into
ressentiment
Connolly 13-Professor of Political Theory at Johns Hopkins University [William, The Fragility of Things, pp. 36-42]

A philosophy attending to the acceleration, expansion, irrationalities, interdependencies, and fragilities of late capitalism suggests that we
do not know
with confidence, in advance of experimental action, just how far or fast changes in the systemic character of neoliberal
capitalism can be made. The structures often seem solid and intractable, and indeed such a semblance may turn out to be true. Some
may seem solid, infinitely absorptive, and intractable when theyre in fact punctuated by hidden vulnerabilities, soft spots,

uncertainties, and potential lines of flight that become apparent when they are subjected to experimental

action, upheaval, testing, and strain. Indeed no ecology of late capitalism, given the variety of forces to which it is connected by a thousand pulleys, vibrations,
impingements, de- pendencies, shocks, and threads, can specify with supreme confidence the solidity or potential flexibility of the structures it seeks to change.
The strength of structural theory, at its best, was in identifying, institutional intersections that hold a system together; its conceit, at its worst, was
the claim to know in advance how resistant such intersections are to potential change. Without
adopting the opposite conceit, it seems important to pursue possible sites of strategic action that might
open up room for productive change. Today it seems important to attend to the relation be- tween the need for structural change and
identification of multiple sites of potential action. You do not know precisely what you are doing when you participate in such a venture.
You combine an experimental temper with the appreciation that living and acting into the future inevitably contain a shifting quotient of uncertainty. The following
tentative judgments and sites of action may be pertinent. 1) Neither neoliberal theory, nor socialist productivism, nor deep ecology, nor social democracy in its
classic form seems sufficient to the contemporary condition. This is so in part because the powers of market self-regulation are both real and limited in relation to a
larger multitude of heterogeneous force fields beyond the human estate with differential powers of self-regulation and metamorphosis. A first task is to challenge
neoliberal ideology through critique and by elaborating and publicizing positive alternatives that acknowledge the disparate relations between market processes,
other cultural systems, and nonhuman systems. Doing so to render the fragility of things more visible and palpable. Doing so, too, to set the stage for a series of
interceded shifts in citizen role performances, social movements, and state action. 2) Those who seek to reshape the ecology of late capitalism might set an interim
agenda of radical reform and then recoil back on the initiatives to see how they work. An
interim agenda is the best thing to focus on
because in a world of becoming the more distant future is too cloudy to engage. We must, for instance,
become involved in experimental micropolitics on a variety of fronts, as we participate in role experimentations,
social movements, artistic displaces, erotic-political shows, electoral campaigns, and creative interventions on the new media
to help recode the ethos that now occupies investment practices, consumption desires, family savings, state priorities, church assemblies, university curricula, and
media reporting. It is important to bear in mind how extant ideologies, established role performances, social movements, and commitments to state action
intersect. To shift some of our own role performances in the zones of travel, church participation, home energy use, investment, and
consumption, for instance, that now implicate us deeply in foreign oil dependence and the huge military expenditures that sec ure it, could make a minor

difference on its own and also lift some of the burdens of institutional implications from us to support
participation in more adventurous interpretations, political strategies, demands upon the state, and cross-state citizen actions. 3)
Today perhaps the initial target, should be on reconstituting established patterns of consumption by a combination of direct citizen actions in consumption choices,
publicity of such actions, the organization of local collectives to modify consumption practices, and social movements to reconstitute the current state- and market-
supported infrastructure of consumption. By the infrastructure of consumption I mean publicly supported and subsidized market subsystems such as a national
highway system, a system of airports, medical care through private insurance, agribusiness pouring high sugar, salt, and fat content into foods, corporate ownership
of the public media, the prominence of corporate 403 accounts over retirement pensions, and so forth that enable some modes of consumption in the zones of
travel, education, diet, retirement, medical care, energy use, health, and education and render others much more difficult or expensive to procure.22 To change the
infrastructure is also to shift the types of work and investment available. Social movements that work upon the infrastructure and ethos of consumption in tandem
can thus make a real difference directly, encourage more people to heighten their critical perspectives, and thereby open more people to a more militant politics if
and as the next disruptive event emerges. Perhaps a
cross-state citizen goal should construct a pluralist assemblage by
moving back and forth between experiments in role performances, the refinement of sensitive modes of perception,
revisions in political ideology, and adjustments in political sensibility; doing so to mobilize enough collective energy to
launch a general strike simultaneously in several countries in the near future. The aim of such an event would be to
reverse the deadly future created by established patterns of climate change by fomenting significant shifts in patterns of consumption, corporate policies, state law,
and the priorities of interstate organizations. Again, the dilemma of today is that the fragility of things demands shifting and slowing down intrusions into several
The existential forces of
aspects of nature as we speed up shifts in identity; role performance, cultural ethos, market regulation, and state policy. 4)

hubris (expressed above all in those confident drives to mastery conveyed by military elites, financial economists, financial elites, and CEOs) and of
ressentiment (expressed in some sectors of secularism and evangelicalism) now play roles of importance in the shape of
consumption practices, investment portfolios, worker routines, managerial demands, and the uneven
senses of entitlement that constitute neoliberalism. For that reason activism inside churches, schools, street life, and the media must
become increasingly skilled and sensitive. As we proceed, some of us may present the themes of a world of becoming to larger audiences, challenging thereby the
complementary notions of a providential world and secular mastery that now infuse too many role performances, market practices, and state priorities in capitalist
life. For
existential dispositions do infuse the role priorities of late capitalism. Today it is both difficult for
people to perform the same roles with the same old innocence and difficult to challenge those
performances amid our own implication in them. Drives by evangelists, the media, neoconservatives,
and the neoliberal right to draw a veil of innocence across the priorities of contemporary life make the
situation much worse. 5) The emergence of a neofascist or mafia-type capitalism slinks as a dangerous possibility on the horizon, partly because of the
expansion and intensification of capital, partly because of the real fragility of things, partly because the identity needs of many facing these pressures encourage
them to cling more intensely to a neoliberal imaginary as its bankruptcy becomes increasingly apparent, partly because so many in America insist upon retaining the
special world entitlements the country achieved after World War II in a world decreasingly favorable to them, partly because of the crisis tendencies inherent in
neoliberal capitalism, and partly because so many resist living evidence around and in them that challenges a couple of secular and theistic images of the cosmos
now folded into the institutional life of capitalism. Indeed the danger is that those constituencies now most disinclined to give close attention to public issues could
oscillate between attraction to the mythic promises of neoliberal automaticity and attraction to a neofascist movement when the next crisis unfolds. It has
happened before. I am not saying that neoliberalism is itself a form of fascism, but that the failures and meltdowns it periodically promotes could once again foment

fascist or neofascist responses, as happened in several countries after the onset of the Great Depression. 6) The democratic state , while it certainly
cannot alone tame capital or re- constitute the ethos and infrastructure of consumption, must play a significant role in reconstituting
our lived relations to climate, weather, resource use, ocean currents, bee survival, tectonic instability, glacier flows, species diversity, work, local life,

consumption, and investment, as it also responds favorably to the public pressures we must generate to forge a
new ethos. A new, new left will thus experimentally enact new intersections be- tween role performance and political activity,

outgrow its old disgust with the very idea of the state, and remain alert to the dangers states can
pose . It will do- so because, as already suggested, the fragile ecology of late ca. Most of those movemepital
requires state interventions of several sorts. A refusal to participate in the state today cedes too
much hegemony to neoliberal markets , either explicitly or by implication. Drives to fascism, remember , rose the last
time in capitalist states after market meltdownnts failed. But a couple became consolidated through a series of resonances (vibrations)
back and forth between industrialists, the state, and vigilante groups in neighborhoods, clubs, churches, the police, the media, and pubs. You do not fight

the danger of a new kind of neofascism by withdrawing from either micropolitics or state politics. You
do so through a multisited politics designed to infuse a new ethos into the fabric of everyday life.
Changes in ethos can in turn open doors to new possibilities of state and interstate action, so that an
advance in one domain seeds that in the other. And vice versa. A positive dynamic of mutual amplification
might be generated here. Could a series of significant shifts in the routines of state and global capitalism even press the fractured system to a point
where it hovers on the edge of capitalism itself? We dont know. That is one reason it is important to focus on interim goals.

Another is that in a world of becoming, replete with periodic and surprising shifts in the course of events,

you cannot project far beyond an interim period. Another yet is that activism needs to project concrete,
interim possibilities to gain support and propel itself forward. That being said, it does seem unlikely to me, at least, that a
positive interim future includes either socialist productivism or the world projected by proponents of deep ecology. 7) To advance such an agenda it is also
imperative to negotiate new connections between nontheistic constituencies who care about the future of the Earth and numerous devotees of diverse religious
traditions who fold positive spiritualities into their creedal practices. The
new, multifaceted movement needed today, if it emerges,
will take the shape of a vibrant pluralist assemblage acting at multiple sites within and across states,
rather than either a centered movement with a series of fellow travelers attached to it or a mere electoral constellation. Electoral victories
are important, but they work best when they touch priorities already embedded in churches, universities, film, music, consumption practices, media reporting,
investment priorities, and the like. A related thing to keep in mind is that the capitalist modes of acceleration, expansion, and intensification that heighten the fra-
gility of things today also generate pressures to minoritize the world along multiple dimensions at a more rapid pace than heretofore. A new pluralist constellation
will build upon the latter developments as it works to reduce the former effects. I am sure that the
forgoing comments will appear to
some as "optimistic" or "utopian." But optimism and pessimism are both primarily spectatorial views.
Neither seems sufficient to the contemporary condition. Indeed pessimism, if you dwell on it long, easily slides into cynicism,
and cynicism often plays into the hands of a right wing that applies exclusively to any set of state
activities not designed to protect or coddle the corporate estate. That is one reason that "dysfunctional politics"
redounds so readily to the advantage of cynics on the right who work to promote it. They want to promote
cynicism with respect to the state and innocence with respect to the market. Pure critique as already suggested, does not suffice either.

Pure critique too readily carries critics and their followers to the edge of cynicism. It is also true that the above
critique concentrates on neoliberal capital- ism, not capitalism writ large. That is because it seems to me that we need to specify the terms of critique as closely as
possible and think first of all about interim responses. If we lived under, say, Keynesian capitalism, a somewhat different set of issues would be defined and other
strategies identified.25 Capitalism writ largewhile it sets a general context that neoliberalism inflects in specific wayssets too large and
generic a target. It can assume multiple forms, as the differences between Swedish and American capitalism suggest; the times demand
a set of interim agendas targeting the hegemonic form of today, pursued with heightened militancy at several sites. The point today is not to wait

for a revolution that overthrows the whole system . The "system," as we shall see further, is replete
with too many loose ends, uneven edges, dicey intersections with nonhuman forces , and uncertain trajectories to
make such a wholesale project plausible. Besides, things are too urgent and too many people on the ground are
suffering too much now.
 2AC-Permutation-Lazzarato

Perm do both-their theorization of capitalism seeks relies on a grand, hegemonic understanding of

production that ignores machinic enslavementprefer our analysis of language and semiotics
LAZZARATO 14-semiotically qualified [Maurizio, Signs and Machines, Introduction, DKP]

In a seminar in 1984, Flix Guattari argued that the crisis affecting the West since the early 1970s as, more than an economic or
political crisis, a crisis of subjectivity. How are we to understand Guattaris claim? Germany and Japan came out of the
Second World War completely destroyed, under long-term occupation, both socially and (8) psychologically decimated, with no material
assets-no raw materials, no reserve capital. What explains the economic miracle? They rebuilt a
prodigious capital of subjectivity (capital in the form of knowledge, collective intelligence, the will to survive, etc.). Indeed, they invented a new
type of subjectivity out of the devastation itself. The Japanese, in particular, recovered aspects of their archaic subjectivity, converting them into the
most advanced forms of social and material production. [. . .] The latter represents a kind of industrial complex for the production of

subjectivity, one enabling a multiplicity of creative processes to emerge, certain of which are, however,
highly alienating.2 Capitalism launches (subjective) models the way the automobile industry launches a
new line of cars.3 Indeed, the central project of capitalist politics consists in the articulation of economic,
technological, and social flows with the production of subjectivity in such a way that political economy is
identical with subjective economy. Guattaris working hypothesis must be revived and applied to current
circumstances; and we must start by acknowledging that neoliberalism has failed to articulate the relation between these
two economies. Guattari further observes capitalisms capacity to foresee and resolve systemic crises through apparatuses and safeguards that it came to master following the
Great Depression. Today, the weakness of capitalism lies in the production of subjectivity. As a consequence, systemic crisis

and the crisis in the production of subjectivity are strictly interlinked. It is impossible to separate
economic, political, and social processes from the processes of subjectivation occurring within them. With
neoliberal deterritorialization, no new production of subjectivity takes place. On the other hand, neoliberalism has destroyed previous social

relations and their forms of subjectivation (9) (worker, communist, or social-democrat subjectivation or national subjectivity,
bourgeois subjectivity, etc.). Nor does neoliberalisms promotion of the entrepreneur-with which Foucault associates the subjective mobilization management requires in all forms
of economic activity-offer any kind of solution to the problem. Quite the contrary. Capital has always required a territory beyond the market and the corporation and a subjectivity that is not
that of the entrepreneur; for although the entrepreneur, the business, and the market make up the economy, they also break up society. Hence the long-standing recourse to pre-capitalist
territories and values, to long-established morals and religions, and to the formidable modern subjectivations of nationalism, racism, and fascism which aim to maintain the social ties

capitalism continually undermines. Today, the ubiquity of entrepreneurial subjectivation, manifest in the drive to transform every individual into a
business, has resulted in a number of paradoxes. The autonomy, initiative, and subjective commitment demanded of each of us constitute new norms of

employability and, therefore, strictly speaking, a heteronomy. At the same time, the injunction imposed on the individual to act, take the

initiative, and undertake risks has led to widespread depression, a maladie du sicle, the refusal to accept
homogenization, and, finally, the impoverishment of existence brought on by the individual success of the entrepreneurial model. For the
majority of the population, to become an economic subject (human capital, entrepreneur of the self) means no more than being compelled to manage declining wages and income,
precarity, unemployment, and poverty in the same way one would manage a corporate balance-sheet. As the crisis wrought by repeated financial debacles has worsened, capitalism has
abandoned its rhetoric of the knowledge or information society along with its (10) dazzling subjectivations (cognitive workers, manipulators of symbols, creative self-starters and luminaries).
The crisis has brought debt and its modes of subjection to the fore in the figure of the indebted man. Now that the promises of wealth for all through hard work, credit, and finance have
proved empty, the class struggle has turned to the protection of creditors and owners of securities. In the present crisis, in order for the power of private property to assert itself, the
articulation of production and the production of subjectivity relies on debt and the indebted man. Obviously, we are talking about a negative subjection, the most obvious indication that
flows of knowledge, action, and mobility, although continually solicited, lead only to repressive and regressive subjectivation. The indebted man, at once guilty and responsible for his lot, must
take on himself the economic, social, and political failures of the neoliberal power bloc, exactly those failures externalized by the State and business onto society. It is no longer a matter of
innovation, creativity, knowledge, or culture but of the flight of owners of capital whose exodus consists in their plundering the welfare state while refiising to pay taxes. In this way, the
univocity of the concept of production (both economic and subjective) allows us to see that the financial crisis is not only about economics, it is also a crisis of neoliberal governmentality
whose drive to turn every individual into an owner, a business, and a shareholder has miserably run aground with the collapse of the American real-estate market. Japan is emblematic of the
impossibility of resolving the crisis afflicting the country since the 199os without a new model of subjectivity. Like every other country in the world, Japan is now post-Fordist, yet more than
any other country it has had the greatest difficulty replacing the Fordist capital of subjectivity (full (11) employment, a job for life, the ethics of work, etc.) that made it rich. It is not enough
to inject astronomical sums into the economy; it is not enough to stabilize the banks, weaken and destabilize the job market, impoverish workers, and so on, in order to promote growth. To
new social, economic, and political conditions, subjectivity must be made to correspond, one cognizant of those conditions and able to persist within them. It is in this sense that the Japanese
financial and economic crisis is above all a crisis in the government of behavior. Economics and subjectivity go hand in hand. The unions and political parties on the left provide no solutions
to these problems because they too have no alternative subjectivities on offer. The people, the working class, labor, producers, and employment no longer have a hold on subjectivity, no

Todays critical theories similarly fail to account for the relationship between
longer function as vectors of subjectivation.

capitalism and processes of subjectivation. Cognitive capitalism, the information society, and cultural capitalism (Rifkin) capture the relationship but do so
 knowledge, information, and culture are far from suflicient to cover the multiplicity
all too reductively. On the one hand,

of economies that constitutes production. On the other hand, their subjective avatars (cognitive workers, manipulators of symbols,
etc.) fall short of the multiple modes of subjection and political subjectivation that contribute to the

production of subjectivity. Their claim to found a hegemonic paradigm for production and the
production of subjectivity is belied by the fact that the fate of the class struggle, as the crisis has shown, is not being
played out in the domains of knowledge, information, or culture. While these theories make short shrift of the relationship between
production and the production of subjectivity, Jacques Rancire and Alain Badiou neglect it completely. For them, one (12) simply has nothing to do with the

other. Instead, they assert the need to conceive a radical separation between economics and subjectivity, thereby developing an economistic
conception of the economy and an utterly political or idealist conception of subjectivity. Despite the rise of public and private apparatuses for the production, adaptation, and control of

subjectivity, apparatuses whose authoritarianism has only intensified during the crisis, we must insist with Guattari that subjectivity still has no
ground or means for subjectivation. This is a major crisis. A crisis of what? In my opinion, it is a major crisis because the problem thats at the tip of everyones
tongue is the following: Shit, weve got to at least have a religion, an idea! [. . .] we cant leave everything up in the air like this! But what does the concept of the production of subjectivity

In capitalism, the production of subjectivity works in two ways

entail? What is meant by subjectivation and, in particular, political subjectivation?

through what Deleuze and Guattari call apparatuses [dispositfi] of social subjection and machinic enslavement. Social subjection

equips us with a subjectivity, assigning us an identity, a sex, a body, a profession, a nationality, and so on. In response to the
needs of the social division of labor, it in this way manufactures individuated subjects, their consciousness, representations, and behavior. But the production of the individuated subject is

coupled with a completely dilTerent process and a completely different hold on subjectivity that proceeds through desubjectivation. Machinic enslavement
dismantles the individuated subject, consciousness, and representations, acting on both the pre-
individual and supra-individual levels. (13) Among contemporary critical theories (those of Badiou, cognitive capitalism, Judith Butler, Slajov Zizek,
Ranciere, etc.), it is largely a question of subjectivity, the subject, subjectivation, and the distribution of the sensible. But what they neglect is how capitalism

specifically functions-that is, through machinic enslavements. These critical theories seem to have lost sight of what Marx had to say about the
essentially machinic nature of capitalism: machinery appears as the most adequate form of fixed capital ; and the latter, in so far

as capital can be considered as being related to itself, is the most adequate form of capital in general.5
Such is even more the case today given that, unlike in Marxs time, machinisms have invaded our daily lives; they now assist our ways of speaking, hearing, seeing, writing, and feeling by
constituting what one might call constant social capital. Nowhere in their analyses do we encounter these technical and social machines in which humans and non-humans function
together as component parts in corporate, welfare-state, and media assemblages. Ranciere and Badiou have radically elided them altogether. Thus machines and machinic assemblages can be
found everywhere except in contemporary critical theory. Now, capitalism reveals a twofold cynicism: the humanist cynicism of assigning us individuality and pre-established roles (worker,
consumer, unemployed, man/woman, artist, etc.) in which individuals are necessarily alienated; and the dehumanizing cynicism of including us in an assemblage that no longer distinguishes
between human and non-human, subject and object, or words and things. Throughout this book, we will examine the difiference and complementarity between apparatuses of social
subjection and those of machinic enslavement, for it is at their point of intersection that (14) the production of subjectivity occurs. We will trace a cartography of the modalities of
subjection and enslavement, those with which we will have to break in order to begin a process of subjectivation independent and autonomous of capitalisms hold on subjectivity, its
modalities of production and forms of life. It is therefore essential to understand that the subjectivity and subjectivations capitalism produces are meant for the machine. Not primarily for
the technical machine but for the social machine, for the megamachine, as Lewis Mumford calls it, which includes the technical machine as one of its products. What are the conditions
for a political and existential rupture at a time when the production of subjectivity constitutes the most fundamental of capitalist concerns? What are the instruments specific to the
production of subjectivity such that its industrial and serial production by the State and the corporation might be thwarted? What model and what modalities of organization must be
constructed for a subjectivation process that joins micro- and macropolitics? In the 1980s, Michel Foucault and Guattari each followed different paths to arrive at the conclusion that the
production of subjectivity and the constitution of the relation to the self were the sole contemporary political questions capable of pointing the way out of the impasse in which we still
continue to founder. Each in their own way they revealed a new dimension irreducible to power and knowledge relations. As the power of self-positioning and existential affirmation
(Guattari), the relation to the self (Foucault) derives-in its double sense of originating in and drawing off from these relations. The subjective is not, however, dependent on them. For
Foucault, taking the care of the self as ones starting point does not mean pursuing the ideal splendor of a beautiful life but rather inquiring into the overlap of an aesthetics (15) of
existence and a politics that corresponds to it. The problems of an other world and an other life arise together in a politically engaged life whose precondition is a break with established
conventions, habits, and values. Nor does Guattaris aesthetic paradigm call for an aestheticization of the social and political but rather for making the production of subjectivity the central
practice and concern of a new way of political action and organizing. Subjectivation processes and their forms of organization have always given rise to crucial debates within the labor
movement and have occasioned political ruptures and divisions between reformists and revolutionaries. The history of the labor movement remains incomprehensible if we refuse to see
the wars of subjectivity (Guattari) in which the movement has engaged. A certain type of worker during the Paris Commune became such a mutant that the bourgeoisie had no choice but
to exterminate him. They liquidated the Paris Commune just as they did, in a different time, the Protestants on Saint-Bartholomews.6 The Bolsheviks did not explicitly think of inventing a
new kind of militant subjectivity which would, among other things, respond to the Communes defeat.7 Examining processes of political subjectivation by foregrounding the micro-political
(Guattari) and the micro-physical (Foucault) dimensions of power does not dispense with the need to address and reconfigure the macro-political sphere. Its an either/or: either someone,
whoever it is, comes up with new methods for the production of subjectivity, whether Bolshevik, Maoist, or whatever; or the crisis will just keep on getting worse.8 (16) In his way, Guattari not
only remained faithful to Marx but to Lenin as well. Of course, the methods for the production of subjectivity that came out of Leninism (the party, the conception of the working class as
vanguard, the professional revolutionary, etc.) are no longer relevant to current class compositions. What Guattari retains from the Leninist experiment is the methodology: the need to

Just as the production of

break with social-democracy, to construct tools for political innovation extending to the organizational modalities of subjectivity.

subjectivity cannot be separated from economics, it cannot be separated from politics. How must we conceive
of political subjectivation? All political subjectivation entails a mutation and a reconversion of subjectivity that

affects existence. It cannot only be political in the sense that both Ranciere and Badiou give the term. Subjective mutation is not primarily discursive; it does not primarily have to
do with knowledge, information, or culture since it affects the nucleus of non-discursivity, non-knowledge, and non-acculturation lying at the heart of subjectivity. Subjective

mutation is fundamentally an existential affirmation and apprehension of the self, others, and the
world. And it is on the basis of this non-discursive, existential, and affective crystallization that new
languages, new discourses, new knowledge, and a new politics can proliferate. We will first examine this question from a
specific perspective: the paradoxical relationship that the discursive-that is, what is actualized in language but

also within the spatiotemporal coordinates of knowledge, culture, institutions, and the economy-
maintains with the non-discursive, as the focal point of self-production, self-positioning, and existential
affirmation. The same critical theories that neglect the machinic specificity of capitalism also fail to
problematize the relationship between the (17) discursive and the existential. Indeed, they assign a central role to the former,
that is, to language in the realm of politics (Rancire), production (cognitive capitalism, Paolo Virno), and the constitution of the subject (Zizek and Butler). Structuralism may

be dead, but language, which founds the structuralist paradigm, is still alive and well in these theories. To grasp the limits of the new logocentrism, we
will have to take a step backwards, returning to the critiques of structuralism and linguistics advanced in the 1960s and 70s by Guattari, Deleuze, and Foucault. In different ways, their

critiques demoted language from the central role it was made to play in politics and subjectivation
processes following the linguistic turn in analytic philosophy and Lacanian psychoanalysis. They set forth a new semiotic theory and a new theory of
enunciation better able to register how signs function in these processes and in the economy. In particular, we will return to Guattaris semiotic theory. While affirming that

each subjectivation process implies the operations of mixed, signifying, symbolic, and asignifying
semiotics, Guattari considers the latter, as they operate in the economy, science, art, and machines, the
specificity of capitalism.
 2AC-Alt Fails
The alt is manifests like an elitist revolutionary vanguard that perpetuates state power
and leads to a fetishization of violence and terror
Newman 11-Reader in Political Theory at Goldsmiths College, University of London, PhD in Political Science @ the University of New South
Wales [Saul, Postanarchism and Radical Politics Today, Post-Anarchism: A Reader,
http://www.lboro.com/media/wwwlboroacuk/content/phir/documentsandpdfs/arg/LoughboroughPaper%20-
%20Postanarchism%20and%20Radical%20Politics%20Today%20-%20Saul%20Newman.pdf DKP]

There is an urgent need today for a new conceptualisation of radical politics, for the invention of a new kind of radical political
horizonespecially as the existing political terrain is rapidly becoming consumed with various reactionary forces such as religious fundamentalism,
neoconservatism/neoliberalism and ethnic communitarianism. But what kind of politics can be imagined here in response to these challenges, defined by what
goals and by what forms of subjectivity? The
category of the worker, defined in the strict Marxian economic sense,
and politically constituted through the revolutionary vanguard whose goal was the dictatorship of the proletariat, no
longer seems viable. The collapse of the state socialist systems, the numerical decline of the industrial
working class (in the West at least) and the emergence, over the past four or so decades, of social movements and struggles
around demands that are no longer strictly economic (although they have often have economic implications), have all led to
a crisis in the Marxist and Marxist-Leninist imaginary. This does not mean, of course, that economic issues are no longer central to radical
politics, that the desire for economic and social equality no longer conditions radical political struggles and movements. On the contrary, as we have seen in recent
years with the anti-globalisation movement, capitalism is again on the radical political agenda. However, the
relationship between the political
and the economic is now conceived in a different way: global capitalism now operates as the signifier
through which diverse issuesautonomy, working conditions, indigenous identity, human rights, the environment, etcare given a
certain meaning.3The point is, though, that the Marxist and Marxist-Leninist revolutionary modelin which economic determinism
met with a highly elitist political voluntarismhas been largely historically discredited. This sort of authoritarian

revolutionary vanguard politics has led not to the withering away of state power, but rather to its
perpetuation. ieks attempt to resurrect this form of politics does not resolve this problem, and leads
to a kind of fetishization of revolutionary violence and terror.4 Indeed, one could say that there is a growing wariness about
authoritarian and statist politics forms, particularly as state power today takes an increasingly and overtly repressive form. The expansion of the modern neoliberal
state under its present guise of securitisation represents a crisis of legitimacy for liberal democracy: in all 5 even the formal ideological and institutional
trappings of liberal checks and balances and democratic accountability have started to fall away to reveal a form of sovereignty which is articulated more and more
through the state of exception. This is why radical political movements are increasingly suspicious of state power and often resistant to formal channels of political
representationthe state appears to activists as a hostile and unassailable force through which there can be no serious hope of emancipation.

They essentialize capitalism as a singular ideology which crushes solvency a creates a

self-fulfilling prophecy that denies the materialism they claimed to be concerned
about
Cleaver 2k-Professor of Economics @ The University of Texas, PhD in Economics @ Stanford [Harry, Reading Capital Politically
[http://www.eco.utexas.edu/~hmcleave/rcp1.html]

What we have here is a reading of Capital that is not only limited to being a passive interpretation, but which also, by restricting itself to the
"economic" sphere or "base" effectively, makes of political economy the theory of the capitalist factory and its
waged workers alone. (49) This has the effect of excluding the rest of society from the analysis -- not only the
state and party politics but also the unemployed, the family, the school, health care, the media, art, and
so on. As a result political economists who would try to take these things into account find themselves rummaging through Marx's writings looking for suggestive
tidbits of "other" theories. (50) Yet it is precisely in these "other" social spheres that many of the major social
conflicts of today are occurring. At the turn of the century, when working-class struggle was located primarily (but not uniquely by any means) in
the factory, there was perhaps some excuse for reading Capital as a theoretical model of the capitalist factory. But as a result of the extensive
social engineering of the 1920s and 1930s through which capitalist social planners sought to restructure virtually all of society, and as a result of
the nature of recent social struggles against such planning, such interpretations today are grossly inadequate. The New Left correctly
sensed this and avoided orthodox interpretations. The inadequacy of both orthodox and neo-Marxist theories became abundantly clear in
the late 1960s. Both were unequipped to explain the revolts of the unwaged and were forced to appeal to ad hoc
solutions. Orthodoxy revived historical materialism and tried to shove peasant revolts into the box of pre-
capitalist modes of production. Student revolts were classified as either petty bourgeois or lumpen.
Women's revolts were within the framework of some "domestic" mode of production. All were thus set
aside as unimportant secondary phenomena because they were not truly working class. This of course
set up the Party once again as the mediating interpreter of the real working-class interests and justified
the attempt to repress or co-opt these struggles. Although the neo-Marxism of the New Left made these struggles central to its notion
of revolution, it fared little better theoretically. Because it accepted orthodoxy's exclusion of these groups from the working class, all it could
offer were vague evocations of "the people's" interests. In as much as either they fell outside the "economic"
sphere or their place within it was obscure, these revolts had to be seen as byproducts of the general
irrationality of the system. We can thus see that one great weakness of reading Marx as political economy has been to isolate and reduce his analysis
to that of the factory. But if this is a weakness which has made both orthodox and neo-Marxism utterly incapable of accounting for the present crisis, it is not the
only problem. Even more important is the one-sidedness of all these analyses, from those of the Second International
right up through the contemporary debates on crisis theory. This one-sidedness lies in the limited way in
which the working class, however defined, makes an appearance in these models. When it appears on
the scene at all, it comes in from the outside and usually as a victim fighting defensive battles. This is why I
would label the Marxist or neo-Marxist categories employed in these models "reified." They are "reified" in that instead of being
understood as designating social relations between the classes they have been turned into designations
of things, things within capital separate from the social relation. In fact the concept of capital itself in these models
usually designates not the class relation (that is sometimes thrown in as an afterthought) but rather the means of
production, money capital, commodity capital, and labor power, all circulating as mindless entities
through the ups and downs of their circuits. Where does the impulse to movement, technological
change, or expansion come from in these models? Why, it comes from within capital, of course, usually the blind result of
competition among capitalists. When competition breaks down in monopoly capital, Marxists like Baran, Sweezy, and Josef Steindl deduce a
necessary tendency to stagnation. In either case the working class is only a spectator to the global waltz of capital's
autonomous self-activating development. This was not Marx's view of the world. Not only did he repeatedly insist that capital
was a social relation of classes, but he also explicitly stated that at the level of the class the so-called economic relations were in fact political relations: Every
movement in which the working class comes out as a class against the ruling classes and attempts to force them by pressure from without is a political movement.
For instance, the attempt in a particular factory or even a particular industry to force a shorter working day out of the capitalists by strikes, etc., is a purely economic
movement. On the other hand the movement to force an eight hour day, etc., law is a political movement. And in this way, out of the separate economic
movements of the workers there grows up everywhere a political movement, that is to say a movement of the class, with the object of achieving its interests in a
general form, in a form possessing a general social force of compulsion. (51) The point here is that as
the struggle for the eight-hour day
develops, as it becomes generalized, it moves beyond the particular demands of a narrowly defined group
of workers and becomes a demand of the whole class and thus political. This corresponds to a historical movement which
begins with the demands of a quantitatively small number of workers but which circulates to become a new qualitative focal point of the class struggle. Such
demands spread if they correspond to the underlying social conditions of the class generally. Marx sought out and analyzed several of these struggles -- over the
length of the working day, the intensity of work, productivity, mechanization, the social wage, and so on. In Capital he lays out both the specific history of their
development in England and their general place within capital, that is, within the overall class struggle. From the time when these areas of contention become
generalized, they are branded as class and hence political relations. At any given moment particular groups of workers may or may not be actively struggling for one
or another demand, but if they do, the individual struggle at each factory or industry can no longer be considered an isolated "purely economic" struggle but must
be grasped as a part of the whole, as a political struggle for power. Today we can see this even more clearly than in Marx's time because of the transformed role of
the state. The rise of the Keynesian state has meant the virtual merging of not only the state and the "economy" but of the state and "society" itself. This is a
second fundamental danger of reading Marx as political economy and as ideology. We are presented
with elaborately detailed critical interpretations of this self-activating monster in a way that completely
ignores the way actual working-class power forces and checks capitalist development. Marx saw how
the successful struggle for a shorter working day caused a crisis for capital. These political economists do
not: they see absolute surplus value as a reified abstract concept. Marx saw how that struggle forced the
development of productivity-raising innovations which raised the organic composition of capital. He thus saw
relative surplus value as a strategic capitalist response. These political economists do not: they see only competition between
capitalists. Marx saw how workers' wage struggles could help precipitate capitalist crises. These political
economists see only abstract "laws of motion." (52) These kinds of interpretations glorify the dynamic of
capital, however evil, and portray the working class as a hapless victim. Because of this, even if one
wishes to see ideological critique as a weapon in the class struggle, one must conclude that such theories which
accord all power to capital can only be in its interest. Such critiques are particularly well suited to the needs of
Leninist parties or any other elitist groups which would present themselves as the only solution for the
class. If the class is powerless in the "economic" struggle, as the theories say, then its only solution is obviously
"to join the Party and smash the state." How this mass of hapless victims is to achieve such a feat would
seem to be a mystery understood only by the Party hierarchy, who will provide the necessary leadership
and wisdom. But the truth is that the class is not powerless at all and that the Party leaders seek to
mobilize its power as a prelude to taking control themselves and becoming the managers of a
rationalized, planned "socialist" economy in which the workers, they hope, will work even harder than
before. CARD CONTINUES The flaw that lies at the very heart of Critical Theory's concept of bourgeois
cultural hegemony (just as it lurks within political economy's theory of capitalist technological domination in the factory) is its total one-
sidedness. The positing of cultural hegemony, like that of an all-powerful technological rationality, reflects
the inability to recognize or theorize the growth of any working-class power capable of threatening the
system. Although the theory may have accurately reflected the new issues that accompanied the rise of Hitler, Stalin, and Roosevelt, its exaggerated pessimism
became manifested in the 1960s. The logic of the theory of absolute consumerist integration forced Marcuse, Baran, and Sweezy to interpret
the upheavals of the time as falling "outside" the class struggle and they built their hopes on what they saw as revolts against racial and
sexual repression and against the general irrationality of the system. This exteriorization of contradiction blinded [made them unaware of] them all
to the effectiveness of the actual struggles of wage workers as well as their interaction with the
complementary struggles of the unwaged. As a result Marcuse could see only defeat in the dissolution of the "movement" in the early
1970s and the rising danger of a new fascism. Unable to grasp how the cycle of struggles of the 1960s had thrown capital into crisis, was forced back to the political
economy of Baran and Sweezy for an explanation of the international economic crisis of the 1970s. (82) It is ironic that, while
he has spoken of a
capitalist "counterrevolution" that could lead to 1984, he cannot see the "revolution" to which it is a
counter and can only proclaim it a "preventive" action by capital. (83) He does see the revolt against work but interprets its
rampant absenteeism, falling productivity, industrial sabotage, wildcat strikes, and school dropouts as
simply "prepolitical" signs of discontent and of the possible crumbling of bourgeois cultural hegemony via managed consumerism. (84) As a
result he has begun, in Counterrevolution and Revolt (1972), to remodel his critical theory into one of how the consumerist logic of contemporary capitalism may be
undermining itself by the production of nonintegrable, transcendent needs. He postulates a growing divergence between the consumerist promises of capitalist
ideology propagated by the mass media and the willingness to deliver in a period of economic crisis: "a contradiction between that which is and that which is
possible and ought to be." (85) The political conclusions Marcuse draws from this analysis formulate the current political situation in terms of the ideological
question of whether growing popular dissatisfaction can be crafted by a revitalized New Left educational and organizational effort into a real threat to the system.
Despite his affirmation that consumerism has enlarged the base of exploitation and political revolt, and his calls for a New Left revival, it must be said that he
repeatedly points to what sometimes seems to be insurmountable difficulties in carrying out this program. Given his insistence on the isolation of radicals, his
repeated affirmation of the "political weakness and the non-revolutionary attitude of the majority of the working class," and his endorsement of the necessity of a
"long march through the institutions" (working within the system), one is not surprised to find in his final declaration the traditional Old Left evocation of the "long
road": "the next revolution will be the concern of generations and the 'final crisis of capitalism' may take all but a century." (86) Gone is his sense of optimism that
rode the wave of struggles of the 1960s. Marcuse seems to have rediscovered the inherent pessimism of the Frankfurt School's concept of hegemony as well as its
limited political program for a long process of "building consciousness" through the ideological critique of society. Blind
to the real power
developed and held by workers today, Marcuse cannot see either the extent and difficulties of current
capitalist attempts at restructuring or how the continuing struggles of workers are thwarting those
efforts. Of this drama he can capture only the repressive side of the capitalist offensive and falls back
into a more or less traditional leftist program of defense against authoritarian state capitalism via the
ideological struggles of Critical Theory. To summarize: despite the originality and usefulness of their research into the mechanisms of capitalist
domination in both the economic and cultural spheres, and indeed precisely in the formulation of those mechanisms as one-sidedly
hegemonic, Critical Theorists have remained blind to the ability of working-class struggles to transform
and threaten the very existence of capital. Their concept of domination is so complete that the
"dominated" virtually disappears as an active historical subject. In consequence, these philosophers
have failed to escape the framework of mere ideological critique of capitalist society. To return to the military
analogy used earlier in this introduction, we can pose the difficulty this way:
if one's attention is focused uniquely on the enemy's
activities on the battlefield, the battle will assuredly be lost. In the class war, as in conventional military encounters,
one must begin with the closest study of one's own forces, that is, the structure of working-class power. Without an
understanding of one's own power, the ebb and flow of the battle lines can appear as an endless
process driven only by the enemy's unilateral self-activity. When the enemy regroups or restructures, as
capital is doing in the present crisis, its actions must be grasped in terms of the defeat of prior tactics or strategies
by our forces -- not simply as another clever move. That an analysis of enemy strategy is necessary is obvious.
The essential point is that an adequate understanding of that strategy can be obtained only by grasping it in
relation to our own strengths and weaknesses. In the movie Patton there is a highly instructive scene in which
Patton sees that he will defeat Rommel's armor in North Africa and cries, "Rommel, you magnificent bastard, I read your book!" He is referring to a translation of
Rommel's book on tank warfare. If Patton had read that book of his declared opponent the way Critical Theorists
read bourgeois authors, he would still have been sitting in his quarters writing "critiques" of this point or that
when Rommel rolled over him with his army. Instead, he read the book as an enemy weapon, which it was, in
order to develop better strategies to defeat him. It would also have done him little good if, when he finally faced Rommel's army, he had
had no understanding of the strengths of his own firepower. (87) It serves little purpose to study the structures of capitalist
domination unless they are recognized as strategies that capital must struggle to impose. Revolutionary
strategy cannot be created from an ideological critique; it develops within the actual ongoing growth of
working-class struggle. Blindness to this inevitably forces one back into the realm of "consciousness
raising" as the only way to bridge the perceived gap between working-class powerlessness (capitalist hegemony) and working-class victory (revolutionary defeat
of capital).
The alt is overly simplisticeven if material forces shape some social relations, they
ignore the complex interaction of different identities with materiality
Scatamburlo-DAnnibale and McLaren 3 (Valerie, Associate professor in the Department of Communication, Media
and Film at the University of Windsor, Peter, Distinguished Professor in Critical Studies, College of Educational Studies, Chapman University,
where he is Co-Director of the Paulo Freire Democratic Project, The Strategic Centrality of Class in the Politics of Race and Difference ,
2003, http://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/mclaren/mclaren%20and%20valerie.pdf)

To suggest that culture is generally conditioned/shaped by material forces and social relations linked to
production does not reinscribe the sim- plistic and presumably deterministic base/superstructure
metaphor, which has plagued some strands of Marxist theory. Rather, such a formulation draws on Marx's own writings from both
the Grundrisse (Marx, 1858/1973) and Cap- ital (Marx, 1867/1967) in which he contended that there is a consolidating logic in the relations

of production that permeates society in the complex vari- ety of its "empirical" reality.4 This emphasizes Marx's
understanding of capital- ism and capital as a "social" relationone that stresses the interpenetration of these categories and one that offers a unified and
dialectical analysis of history, ideology, culture, politics, economics, and society (see Marx, 1863/1972, 1867/1976a, 1866/1976b, 1865/ 1977a, 1844/1977b).
Moreover, fore-
grounding the limitations of "difference" and "representational" politics does not suggest a
disavowal of the importance of cultural and/or discursive arena(s) as sites of contestation. We readily
acknowledge the significance of theorizations that have sought to valorize precisely those forms of
difference that have historically been denigrated. They have helped to uncover the geneal- ogy of terror
hidden within the drama of Western democratic life. This has been an important development that has
enabled subordinated groups to reconstruct their own histories and give voice to their individual and
collective identities (Bannerji, 1995; Scatamburlo-D'Annibale & Langman, 2002). Contemporary theorists have also contributed
to our understanding of issues Contemporary theorists have also contributed to our understanding of
issues of "otherness" and "race" as hegemonic articulations (Hall, 1980, 1987, 1988), the cultural politics of race and racism and
the implications of raciology (Gilroy, 1990, 2000), as well as the epistemological violence perpetrated by Western theories of knowledge (Goldberg, 1990, 1993).
Miron and Indas (2000) work, drawing on Judith Butlers theory of performativity, has been insightful in showing how race works to constitute the racial subject
through a reiterative discursive practice that achieves its effect through the act of naming and the practice of shaming.

The alt alone is coopted you need a multitude of standpoints means the perm solves

Carroll 10 founding director of the Social Justice Studies Program at the University of Victoria (William, Crisis, movements, counter-
hegemony: in search of the new, Interface 2:2, 168-198)

Just as hegemony has been increasingly organized on a transnational basis through the globalization of Americanism,
the construction of global governance institutions, the emergence of a transnational capitalist class and so on (Soederberg 2006; Carroll 2010) counter-

hegemony has also taken on transnational features that go beyond the classic organization of left parties into
internationals. What Sousa Santos (2006) terms the rise of a global left is evident in specific movement based campaigns,
such as the successful international effort in 1998 to defeat the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI); in initiatives such as the World Social Forum, to
contest the terrain of global civil society; and in the growth of transnational movement organizations and of a democratic globalization network, counterpoised to
neoliberalisms transnational historical bloc, that address issues of North-South solidarity and coordination (Smith 2008:24). As I have suggested elsewhere (Carroll
2007), an incipient war of position is at work here a bloc of oppositional forces to neoliberal globalization
encompassing a wide range of movements and identities and that is global in nature, transcending traditional national
boundaries (Butko 2006: 101). These moments of resistance and transborder activism do not yet combine to form a coherent historical bloc around a
counter-hegemonic project. Rather, as Marie-Jose Massicotte suggests, we are witnessing the emergence and re-making of
political imaginaries, which often lead to valuable localized actions as well as greater transborder solidarity (2009: 424). Indeed,
Gramscis adage that while the line of development is international, the origin point is national, still has currency. Much of the energy of anti-

capitalist politics is centred within what Raymond Williams (1989) called militant particularisms localized struggles that, left
to themselves are easily dominated by the power of capital to coordinate accumulation across universal but fragmented space (Harvey 1996:
32). Catharsis, in this context, takes on a spatial character. The scaling up of militant particularisms requires alliances across

interrelated scales to unite a diverse range of social groupings and thereby spatialize a Gramscian war of position to the global
scale (Karriem 2009: 324). Such alliances, however, must be grounded in local conditions and aspirations. Eli Friedmans (2009) case study of two affiliated
movement organizations in Hong Kong and mainland China, respectively, illustrates the limits of transnational activism that radiates from advanced capitalism to
exert external pressure on behalf of subalterns in the global South. Friedman recounts how a campaign by the Hong Kong-based group of Students and Scholars
Against Corporate Misbehavior to empower Chinese mainland workers producing goods for Hong Kong Disneyland failed due to the lack of local mobilization by
workers themselves. Yet the same group, through its support for its ally, the mainland-based migrant workers association, has helped facilitate self-organization on
the shop floor. In the former case, well-intentioned practices of solidarity reproduced a paternalism that failed to inspire local collective action; in the latter,
workers taking direct action on their own behalf, with external support, led to psychological empowerment and movement mobilization (Friedman 2009: 212). As
a rule, the
more such solidarity work involves grassroots initiatives and participation, the greater is the likelihood
that workers from different countries will learn from each other, enabling transnational counter-
hegemony to gain a foothold (Rahmon and Langford 2010: 63).
 2AC-Accumulation DA
The revolution itself is bourgeoiscapitalism will reform itself around further regimes
of accumulation
Wendling, 2k6. (Amy Wendling, Assistant Professor of Philosophy @ Creighton College. Reading Bataille
Now. Ed. Winnubst. P 64-51)

- Sovereignty and the Revolutionary Subject Bataille's discussion of "sovereignty" occupies the entire third volume of The Accursed Share. This
volume explains the final two chapters of volume 1, in which Bataille sketches the forms of consumption characteristic of Soviet
industrialization as a modality of the forms of consumption characteristic of the bourgeois world, as a cruel accumulation.
In sovereign
consumption, consumption is not subjected to an end outside of itself. In the terms of classical Marxism, to act
sovereignly is to privilege use over exchange value, or individual over productive consumption. In a temporal schema, to act
sovereignly is to privilege the present over the past or future. We might recognize sovereign
consumption as noncoercive pleasure or play, consumption that exceeds a productive, work-driven
economy. A sovereign world would have the vision-and the language-to accommodate such a recognition and to accommodate it in a mode
other than dubbing it irresponsible, irrational, childlike, or mad. Let me offer an example of sovereign consumption from the realm of sexuality,
a realm that Bataille also highlights in both his fiction and his philosophy. The compulsory productive heterosexuality characteristic of bourgeois
cultures is also part of the coercion to production. Bataille's por [p. 47] nography, all of which describes nonreproductive if mostly heterosexual
sex, fits into his project for this reason. Nonreproducrive sex-sex for sex's sake, queer sex, or sex for pleasure-are all modes of nonproductive,
or sovereign consumption: consumption that does no work, produces no new workers, and uses energy without recompense. All bourgeois
cultural taboos about sexuality are rooted in the coercion to production. For Bataille, the sovereign individual, a version of the Nietzschean
noble or Hegelian master (1991b, 219; 1973, 267), "consumes and doesn't labor" (199lb, 198; 1973, 248). Like Nietzsche, Bataille argues that
bourgeois societies-we readily recognize them as our own-have made this sort of consumption impossible for us by inverting the values
attached to it. Accumulation
eclipses the character of the sovereign: we stockpile, hoard, and hold in
reserve rather than use or enjoy. Our deepest pleasures derive from the hoarding itself: from the
security of knowing it is there, should we want it. Because of this out pleasures remain vicarious,
theoretical, indefinitely deferred and abstract. In an inversion of economic values, the pressure to accumulate eclipses
Bataille's sovereign consumption. Similarly, in Nietzsche, the priest's inversion of moral values eclipses the goodness of nobility. For Bataille, the
bourgeois class is the first-and ultimately only- r revolutionary class: an ascetic class that revolts specifically against the sovereign nobility in
favor of accumulation. The bourgeois revolution over against sovereignty conditions and inescapably schematizes all subsequent revolution and
appeals to revolution. Thevery idea and practice of revolution is itself bourgeois. Revolution is a bourgeois
concept, and the world in which Bataille finds himself continues to be the world of a feudal order that
is breaking down. Bataille writes: 1 cannot help but insist on these aspects: I wish to stress, against both classical and
present-day Marxism, the connection of all the great modern revolutions, from the English and the French onward, with a feudal order
that is breaking down. There have never been any great revolutions that have struck down an established
bourgeois domination. All those that overthrew a regime started with a revolt motivated by the
sovereignty that is implied in feudal society, (1991b, 279; 1973, 321) Conceptually, revolution demarcates
the transition from sovereignty to accumulation. Revolution will always be connected with the dissolution of a feudal order
and the privileges emblematized by such an order: access to nonproductive consumption, enjoyment, or use-value itself, by right of birth. [p.
48] But why not, rather, a conception of plenitude and entitlement for all, also by right of birth, instead of competition and struggle for
survival? Such
a view is impossible when Nietzschean ressentiment is the impetus for liberation, because
postrevolutionary subjects have learned to demonize the very things that they most desire. This point
goes some distance toward explaining why revolutionary class hatred is insufficiently analytic and
confuses the aristocracy with the bourgeoisie. It also explains why the revolution attempted in 1848 was a disaster. Bataille
writes: The days ofJuue, the Commune, and Spartakus are the only violent convulsions of the working masses struggling against the
bourgeoisie, but these movements occurred with the help of a misunderstanding. The workers were misled by the lack of obstacles
encountered a little earlier when the bourgeoisie, in concert with them, rose up against men born of that feudality which irritated everybody.
(1991b, 289) Under this historical error, born of the precipitous mixing of classes, the particularity of the
bourgeoisie is misunderstood. The bourgeois is no lord or lady waited upon, but a money-grubbing, guilt-ridden, obsessive worker,
too cheap to hire help, self-righteously confirmed in his or her work ethic and ascetic way of life. I am not suggesting that the bourgeois does
not have privileges. He or she does, but not in the same way as the feudal lord or lady. The bourgeois goal is always further
accumulation, never consumption, and therefore never sovereignty. Bataille writes, "The masses have never united
except in a radical hostility to the principle of sovereignty" (l99lb, 288; 1973, 329). The masses do not unite against
accumulation, except when that accumulation is expressed as sovereignty, and therefore not as
accumulation at all, but as consumption. The proletarian worker perceives an excessive consumption
as the necessary result of the bourgeois accumulation of property. But this is a misperception, for the
bourgeois does not enjoy but accumulates. When the proletarian worker comes to power, a bourgeois
revolution recurs because this mass worker, the slave ascendant, forever operates in an economy of
scarcity: hoarding resources from the memory of being deprived. The problem of accumulation begins
again. The structure is of actual scarcity, followed by perceived scarcity and hoarding that holds on as
a historical remainder. Never fully overcome, this remainder becomes part of the historically
sedimented fear through which bourgeois cultures function. The problem is that a resentful
revolutionary subject is unfit and unable to enjoy wealth and, by extension, political sovereignty. In The
German Ideal [p. 49] ogy, Marx answers this criticism by claiming that through the process of revolutionary action, the proletariat is able to
overcome accumulated habit and conditioning, learn to consume well, and thus become fit for rule (1978, 193). Only an upsurge of violent
revolutionary action will be a sufficient lesson in consumption, a trial by violence that returns the bondsman back to the scene of the struggle
to the death. For Marx, the emergent subject, baptized by fire, is transformed into a being capable of sovereignty-or dead-at the end of the
process.
But we have seen that the process of revolutionary action instills not liberation but a fearful
repetition of servitude, now internal. In short, transformation is never so neat as Marx would have it.
The problem of how subjects who have lived through oppression wield power has been notoriously
sticky, reappearing in all thoughtful considerations of postrevolutionary subjects. In volume 3 of The Accursed
Share, the problem appears in Bataille's characterization of Stalin as a serfs son come to power, who deliberately carries out a revolutionary program that he knows
will not extend beyond the reformations of the bourgeois democracies to the West. In his own list of the tasks of the Provisional Revolutionary Government, Stalin
wrote that "none of them would go beyond the limits of bourgeois democracy" (Bataille 1991b, 266-67). The problem appears in Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of
the Earth (1968) when he considers the Algerian Revolution and the subsequent fitness to rule of those whose political and psychological sensibilities have been
shaped by oppression. The problem also appears in the strains of contemporary feminism that deal with transgendered persons, persons who live out a socially
deterknined gender identity other than the one into which they were born. In Judith Halberstam's Female Masculinity, she describes the female to male
transgendered person who has seized a prized and structurally privileged position. Halberstam writes, "Gender transition from female to male allows biological
women access to male privilege within their reassigned genders" (1998, 143).b0 Such "postrevolutionary" subjects struggle against inhabiting a masculinity that
reinscribes the dominant model by which they themselves were oppressed. They must also struggle against being perceived as "class traitors" to women and
feminism (Califia 2000; Halberstam 1998, 144). Having gone through this transition, Patrick Califia considers what he calls "the transformation of manhood and
masculinity" (2002, 394). Fully aware of the ambivalence of his postrevolutionary subjectivity, he writes: My gender dysphoria [came from the) feeling that there is
something wrong when other people perceived or treated me as if I were a girl. Not wanting to he female, but not having much enthusiasm for the only other
option our [p. 50] society offers .... Still, I keep thinking there must be something unique about being a man, something fit to be celebrated in ritual and mythology,
the stuff of a spiritual mystery teaching. Or is this desire the toot of the oppression of women-the need to cordon off certain activities or experiences and say, only
we can do this and women may not, because we mast have a source of pride and uniqueness in order to have meaningful lives? ... I wonder if I can talk about what I
like about being a man and disliked about being a woman without being attacked for being sexist? ... Being a fag or thirdgender person is a way
for me to salvage the good that I saw in my father, the virtues that I see in ordinary men, without being damaged by the ugliness, the unbridled
rage, the hatred of homosexuals, the racism, the arrogance that made me wary of my dad. (2002, 394-400) Conclusion T remain hopeful about
postrevolurionary subjects and the abilities of such subjects to occupy positions of power in critical and self-aware ways. I
also remain
hopeful about a notion of sovereignty partially liberated from the context of oppression in which it
was forged and about consumption as enjoyment that somehow exceeds a context of production, or
work. In seeking to keep sovereignty alive, Baraille too does not envision a return to the oppreslive sovereignty characteristic of a feudal
system. Sovereignty operates for Bataille more as a conceptual, methodological, and practical postulate
rather than as a historical nostalgia. But it is precisely because of this that sovereignty can stage its insurgency anywhere. Baraille
suggests that enjoyaunt itself is the upsurge of sovereignty: "The enjoyment of production is in opposition to accumulation (that is, [in
opposition) to the production of the means of production) . . . [Sovereignty is] neither anachronistic nor insignificant [because it is the general)
condition of each human being" (1991b, 281; 1973, 322, my emphasis). Sovereignty
is the overcoming of the urge to
hoard; the overcoming of bourgeois subjectivity; the refusal of the historical sedimentation of cruelty,
accumulation, and the bad conscience, Acting sovereignly, I leave behind fear, and I stop living in
expectation of death. I fear the loss of enjoyment more than death. Bataille's sovereignty anticipates the
existentialist refrain of freedom at any cost. But unlike in existentialism, Bataille's sovereignty preserves corporeality: I live sovereignly,
not despite my feats of death, but because of my enjoyment of life. For according to Baraille, "if we live
sovereignly, the representation of death is impossible, for the present is not subject to the demands
of the future. That is why, in a fundamental sense, living sovereignly is to escape, if not death, at least the anguish of [p. 51] death. Not
that dying is hateful-but living servilely is hateful" (1991b, 219). Nor has Bataille given up on communism: "Sovereignty is no longer alive except
in the perspectives of communism" (1991b, 261; 1973, 305). For communism is the only kind of thinking and practice that tries to restore
individual consumption, to restore use-value and with it enjoyment as the general condition of life. Bataille knows that the jury is out on
communism: its historical moment is too near to rake a clear view of its implications as a whole. Because of its historical proximity, communism
has fallen between the cracks of dogmatic and politicized positions. Bataille writes that "the lack of interest in understanding communism
evinced by practically all noncommunists and the involvement of militants in a cohort acting almost without debate-according to directives in
which the whole game is not known-have made communism a reality that is foreign, as it were, to the world of reflection" (1991b, 264).
Bataille's comments on communism in volume 3 of The AccnrsedShare seek to redress this gap, forcing the owl of Minerva to rake her
customary flight earlier than usual. Cleansed of teleology, communist revolution becomes the theoretical and practical pursuit of such
enjoyment, of a different kind of liberation. And in contemporary thinkers as diverse as Jacques Derrida, Donna Haraway, and Antonio Negri,
we find sketches of non-teleological liberations, which are no longer revolutions that reinstate
repressive subjectivities. Derrida speaks of ongoing, underground practices of resistance (1994, 99).
Haraway insists on the non-innocence and impurity of all positions of resistance that appear alongside
hegemonic cultural ideals (1991, 1997). Addressing the temporal deferral of communism itself, Negri writes, "Communism does not
come in a 'subsequent period,' it springs up contemporaneously as a process constituting an enormous power of antagonism and of real
supersession" (1991, 181). Anticipating these thinkers, Bataille situates the real interest of communism in its vision of a human being whose
general condition is to play without labor in an economy of plenty. No price must be exacted for enjoyment, and there is no question of
entitlement. The
eclipse of this assertion, in favor of the accumulating and stockpiling of the means of
production for future use, is communism missing its own best point.
 2AC-Cede the Political

Capitalism is utterly inevitabletrades off with practical reforms like the AFF
Wilson, 2000 Author of many books including The Myth of Political Correctness 2000 (John K. Wilson, How the Left can Win
Arguments and Influence People p. 7- 10)

Socialism is dead. Kaput. Stick a fork in Lenin's corpse. Take the Fidel posters off the wall. Welcome to the twenty-first century. Wake
up and smell the capitalism. I have no particular hostility to socialism. But nothing can kill a good idea in America so quickly as sticking
the "socialist" label on it. The reality in America is that socialism is about as successful as Marxist footwear (and have you ever seen a sickle and
hammer on anybody's shoes?). Allow your position to be defined as socialist even if it isn't (remember Clinton's capitalist
health care plan?), and the idea is doomed. Instead of fighting to repair the tattered remnants of socialism as a marketing slogan, the
left needs to address the core issues of social justice. You can form the word socialist from the letters in social justice, but it sounds better if you
don't. At least 90 percent of America opposes socialism, and 90 percent of America thinks "social justice" might be a good idea. Why alienate so
many people with a word? Even the true believers hawking copies of the Revolutionary Socialist Worker must realize by now that the word
socialist doesn't have a lot of drawing power. In the movie Bulworth, Warren Beatty declares: "Let me hear that dirty word: socialism!"
Socialism isn't really a dirty word, however; if it were, socialism might have a little underground appeal as a forbidden topic. Instead, socialism
is a forgotten word, part of an archaic vocabulary and a dead language that is no longer spoken in America. Even Michael Harrington, the
founder of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), didn't use the word socialism in his influential book on poverty, The Other America. The
best reason for the left to abandon socialism is not PR but honesty. Most of the self-described
"socialists" remaining in America don't qualify as real socialists in any technical sense. If you look at the DSA
(whose prominent members include Harvard professor Cornel West and former Time columnist Barbara Ehrenreich), most of the
policies they urge-a living wage, universal health care, environmental protection, reduced spending on
the Pentagon, and an end to corporate welfare-have nothing to do with socialism in the specific sense of
government ownership of the means of production. Rather, the DSA program is really nothing more
than what a liberal political party ought to push for, if we had one in America. Europeans, to whom the hysteria
over socialism must seem rather strange, would never consider abandoning socialism as a legitimate political ideology. But in America,
socialism simply isn't taken seriously by the mainstream. Therefore, if socialists want to be taken
seriously, they need to pursue socialist goals using nonsocialist rhetoric. Whenever someone tries to attack an idea
as "socialist" (or, better yet, "communist"), there's an easy answer: Some people think everything done by a government, from Social Security
to Medicare to public schools to public libraries, is socialism. The rest of us just think it's a good idea. (Whenever possible, throw public libraries
into an argument, whether it's about good government programs or NEA funding. Nobody with any sense is opposed to public libraries. They
are by far the most popular government institutions.) If an argument turns into a debate over socialism, simply define socialism as the total
government ownership of all factories and natural resources--which, since we don't have it and no one is really arguing for this to happen,
makes socialism a rather pointless debate. Of course, socialists will always argue among themselves about socialism and continue their internal
debates. But when it comes to influencing public policy, abstract
discussions about socialism are worse than useless, for
they alienate the progressive potential of the American people. It's only by pursuing specific progressive
policies on nonsocialist terms that socialists have any hope in the long term of convincing the public that
socialism isn't (or shouldn't be) a long-dead ideology.

Apocalyptic predictions about the ills of capitalism will not motivate activism
practical reforms are the only hope for the left.
Wilson, 2000 Editor and Publisher of Illinois Academe 2000 (John K. Wilson, How the Left can Win Arguments and Influence People p.
14- 15)
Leftists also need to abandon their tendency to make apocalyptic predictions. It's always tempting to
predict that environmental destruction is imminent or the stock market is ready to crash in the coming
second Great Depression. Arguments that the U.S. economy is in terrible shape fly in the face of reality.
It's hard to claim that a middle-class American family with two cars, a big-screen TV, and a computer is oppressed. While the poor in America
fell behind during the Reagan/Gingrich/Clinton era and the middle class did not receive its share of the wealth produced during this time, the
economy itself is in excellent shape. Instead,
the problem is the redistribution of wealth to the very rich under the
resurgence of "free market" capitalism. Instead of warning that the economy will collapse without
progressive policies, the left should emphasize that the progressive aspects of American capitalism have
created the current success of the American economy after decades of heavy government investment in
human capital. But the cutbacks in investment for education and the growing disparity between the
haves and the have-notes are threatening the economys future success.
 2AC-Deconstruction Good

Turn deconstruction is key to the material

Cheah Professor of Rhetoric UC-Berkeley 2008 Pheng diacritics 38.1-2 project muse

Although the impossible is not of the order of presence, it is not without relation to concrete actuality since it constitutes it. Indeed, the
impossible is curiously more material and real than concrete actuality. In his later writings, Derrida repeatedly insists
on the fundamental reality of this impossible relation to or coming of the other. The deconstruction of logoeentrism, of linguisticism,
of economism (of the proper, of the at-home [chez-soi], oikos, of the same), etc., as well as the affirmation of the impossible are always
put forward in the name of the real, of the irreducible reality of the real not of the real as the attribute of the objective,
present, perceptible or intelligible thinjj (res), but of the real as the coming or event of the other, where the other resists all
appropriation, be it ana-onto-phenomenological appropriation. The real is this non-negative impossible, this impossible coming or
invention of the event the thinking of which is not an onto- phenomenologv. It is a thinking of the event (singularity of the other, in its
unanticipatiblc coming, hie et nunc) that resists rcappropriation by an ontology or phenomenology of presence as such. . . . Nothing is
more "realist," in this sense, than a deconstruction. It is (what-/ who- )cvcr happens [ (ce) qui arrive].11 This impossible
coming of the other is not Utopian. It is a force of precipitation that is experienced as an eruption within the order of presence and that in turn
forces the experiencing subject to act. The impossible, Derrida writes, "gives their very movement to desire, action, and decision: it is the very
figure of the real. It has its hardness, closeness, and urgency."12 For present purposes, the desubstantialization of matter that occurs
as a result of the deconstructive inscription of materiality as the impossible relation to the other has at least three practical
implications. First, it prob- lematizes the concepts of actuality (Wirkliehkeit) and actualization (Ver- wirkliehmig) at
the heart of Marxist materialism. Where Marx opposes ghosts and specters such as those of ideology, the commodity,
and the money form to the concrete actuality that is actualized by the material corporeal activity' of labor, Derrida argues that as instances
of presence and objcctivc cxistcncc, concrctc actuality and the work that cffccts it or brings it about are only possible because of a
certain spectrality. The very form of actuality and the form that material activity seeks to actualize are premised on
their iterability and temporalization. But because this iterability can only come from the absolutely other, it breaks apart from
within any actuality that is established as a fundamental ground or archc. Iterability inscribes "the possibility of the
reference to the other, and thus of radical alteritv and heterogeneity, of difference, of technicitv, and of ideality
in the very event of presence, in the presence of the present that it dis-joins a priori in order to make it possible [thus impossible in
its identity or its contemporaneity with itself] "13 Second, this movement of dcsubstantialization the survival or living-on of the form
of a thing is a paradoxical form of causality that yokes together what have been viewed as diametrical opposites in the history of
Western philosophy: automatism and autonomy. We conventionally distinguish the automatism of the machine from free human
action on the grounds that the former is a form of mindless mechanical causality and the latter is spontaneous and universal rational-purposive
activity. Now, the constitutive dislocation of the living present by iterability is precisely a freeing or independence from presence. But this
freedom is inhuman because it is prior to and exceeds the spontaneity of human practical reason. What
is broached here, Derrida notes,
is "a certain materiality, which is not necessarily a corporeality, a certain technicity, programming, repetition or iterability, a
cutting off from or independence from any living subject the psychological, sociological, transcendental or even human subject."14 This
materiality is a movement of freeing from the spontaneous rational subject. It
is thus paradoxically a freedom prior to human
freedom. "It is," Derrida writes, "the contradiction of automatic autonomy, mechanical freedom, technical life."15 Indeed, this materiality is
even inorganic insofar as it is a scarring that threatens the teleological self-return of the organism as a self-organizing proper body or organic
totality. Dcrrida goes as far as to describe it as a "machinistic materiality without materialism and even perhaps without matter."16 Materiality
in this sense has four characteristics. First, as "a very useful generic name for all that resists appropriation, . . . materiality is not... the body
proper as an organic totality" (154). Second, it is marked by suspended reference, repetition, and the threat of mutilation (156). Third,
it
exhibits "a mechanical, machinelike, automatic independence in relation to any subject, any subject of
desire and its unconscious" (157). Fourth, it implies the values of the arbitrary, the gratuitous, the
contingent, the random, and the fortuitous (158).

Turn: use value is always already haunted by exchangeability which is the very
condition of capital spectorial analysis is key to understand capitalism
Derrida 6-[Jacques, originally published 1993, Specters of Marx Translated by Peggy Kamuf pg. 201-203]

Without disappearing, use-value becomes, then, a sort of limit, the correlative of a limit-concept, of a pure beginning to which no object can or
should correspond, and which therefore must be complicated in a general (in any case more general) theory of capital. We will draw from this only
one consequence here, among all the many other possible ones: if it itself retains some use value (namely, of permitting one to orient an analysis of the
"phantasmagoric" process beginning at an origin that is itself fictivc or ideal, thus already purified by a certain fantastics), this limit-conccpt of use-value
is in
advance contaminated, that is, pre-occupied, inhabited, haunted by its other, namely, what will be born from the wooden head of the table,
the commodity-form, and its ghost dance. The commodity-form, to be sure, is not use-value, we must grant this to Marx and take account
of the analytic power this distinction gives us. But if the commodity-form is not, presently, use-value, and even if it is not actually present,

it affects in advance the use-value of the wooden table. It affects and bereaves it in advance, like the ghost it will
become, but this is precisely where haunting begins. And its time, and the untimeliness of its present, of its being "out of Get this book
in print Y joint." To haunt does not mean to be present, and it is necessary to introduce haunting into the very construction of a concept. time. That is what we
would be calling here a hauntology. Ontology opposes it only in a movement of exorcism. Ontology is a conjuration. The "mystical charactcr" of the commodity is
inscribed before being inscribed, traced before being written out letter for letter on the forehead or the screen of the commodity. Everything
begins
before it begins. Marx wants to know and make known where, ut vvhut prccisc moment, at what instant the ghost comes on
stage, and this is a manner of exorcism, a way of keeping it at bay: before this limit, it was not there, it was powerless. We are suggesting on the
contrary that, before the coup de theatre of this instant, before the "as soon as it comes on stage as commodity, it changes into a sensuous
supersensible thing," the ghost had made its apparition, without appearing in person, of course and by definition, but
having already hollowed out in use value, in the hardheaded wood of the headstrong table, the repetition (therefore substitution, exchangeability, iterability, the
loss of singularity as the experience of singularity itself, the possibility of capital) without which a use could never even be determined. This haunting is not an
empirical hypothesis. Without it, one could not even form the concept either of use-value, or of value in general, or inform any
matter whatsoever, or determine any table, whether a wooden tableuseful or saleableor a table of categories. Or any Tablet of commandments. One

could not even complicate, divide, or fracture sufficiently the concept of use-value by pointing out, as Marx
does for example, this obvious fact: for its first presumed owner, the man who takes it to market as use-value meant for others, the first use

value is an exchange-value. "Hence commodities must be realized as values before they can be realized as use-values" (p. 1 79). And vice versa,
which makes the diachrony circular and transforms the distinction into a co-implication. "On the other hand, [commodities] must stand the test as use-values
before they can be realized as values." Even
if the transformation of one commodity into use-value and some other into money
marks an independent stopping point, a stasis in circulation, the latter remains an infinite process. If the total
circulation C M C is a "series without beginning or end," as the Critique of Political Economy constantly insists, it is because
the metamorphosis is possible in all directions between the use value, the commodity, and money. Not to
mention that the use-value of the money-commodity (Ccldvvare) is also itself "dual": natural teeth can be replaced by gold prostheses, but this use-value is different
from the one Marx calls "formal use-value" which arises out of the specific social function of money.30
 2AC-Gibson-Graham

Alt fails-representing capitalism as a bounded, monistic entity precludes alternatives and fractures
coalitions

Gibson-Graham 6 J.K., pen name shared by feminist economic geographers Julie Graham and Katherine Gibson
(The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy, pg 43-45)

The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It) problematizes "capitalism" as an economic and social descriptor.4 Scrutinizing what
might be seen as throwaway uses of the term - passing references, for example, to the capitalist system or to global capitalism - as well as systematic and deliberate
attempts to represent capitalism as a central and organizing feature of modern social experience, the book selectively traces the discursive origins of a

widespread understanding: that capitalism is the hegemonic, or even the only, present form of economy
and that it will continue to be so in the proximate future. It follows from this prevalent though not ubiquitous view
that noncapitalist economic sites, if they exist at all, must inhabit the social margins; and, as a corollary, that
deliberate attempts to develop noncapitalist economic practices and institutions must take place in the
social interstices, in the realm of experiment, or in a visionary space of revolutionary social replacement. Representations of capitalism
are a potent constituent of the anticapitalist imagination, providing images of what is to be resisted and
changed as well as intimations of the strategies, techniques, and possibilities of changing it. For this reason, depictions of "capitalist
hegemony" deserve a particularly skeptical reading. For in the vicinity of these representations, the very
idea of a noncapitalist economy takes the shape of an unlikelihood or even an impossibility. It becomes difficult
to entertain a vision of the prevalence and vitality of noncapitalist economic forms, or of daily or partial
replacements of capitalism by noncapitalist economic practices, or of capitalist retreats and reversals. In
this sense, "capitalist hegemony" operates not only as a constituent of, but also as a brake upon, the

anticapitalist imagination.5 What difference might it make to release that brake and allow an anticapitalist economic imaginary to develop
unrestricted?6 If we were to dissolve the image that looms in the economic foreground, what shadowy

economic forms might come forward? In these questions we can identify the broad outlines of our project: to discover or create a world of
economic difference, and to populate that world with exotic creatures that become, upon inspection, quite local and familiar (not to mention familiar beings that
are not what they seem). The discursive artifact we call "capitalist hegemony" is a complex effect of a wide
variety of discursive and nondiscursive conditions.7 In this book we focus on the practices and preoccupations of discourse, tracing
some of the different, even incompatible, representations of capitalism that can be collated within this fictive summary representati n. These depictions have
their origins in the diverse traditions of Marxism, classical and contemporary political economy, academic social science, modern historiography, popular economic
and social thought, western philosophy and metaphysics, indeed, in an endless array of texts, traditions and infrastructures of meaning. In the chapters that follow,
only a few of these are examined for the ways in which they have
sustained a vision of capitalism as the dominant form of
economy, or have contributed to the possibility or durability of such a vision. But the point should emerge none the less clearly:
the virtually unquestioned dominance of capitalism can be seen as a complex product of a variety of discursive
commitments, including but not limited to organicist social conceptions, heroic historical narratives, evolutionary scenarios of social development, and
essentialist, phallocentric, or binary patterns of thinking. It is through these discursive figurings and alignments that capitalism is constituted as large, powerful,
persistent, active, expansive, progressive, dynamic, transformative; embracing, penetrating, disciplining, colonizing, constraining; systemic, self-reproducing,
rational, lawful, self-rectifying; organized and organizing, centered and centering; originating, creative, protean; victorious and ascendant; selfidentical, self-
expressive, full, definite, real, positive, and capable of conferring identity and meaning.8 The argument revisited :
it is the way capitalism has
been "thought" that has made it so difficult for people to imagine its supersession.9 It is therefore the ways in which
capitalism is known that we wish to delegitimize and displace. The process is one of unearthing, of bringing to light images and habits of understanding that
constitute "hegemonic capitalism" at the intersection of a set of representations. This we see as a first step toward theorizing capitalism without representing
dominance as a natural and inevitable feature of its being. At the same time, we hope to foster conditions under which the economy might become less subject to
definitional closure. If
it were possible to inhabit a heterogeneous and open-ended economic space whose
identity was not fixed or singular (the space potentially to be vacated by a capitalism that is necessarily and naturally hegemonic) then a
vision of noncapitalist economic practices as existing and widespread might be able to be born; and in
the context of such a vision, a new anticapitalist politics might emerge, a noncapitalist politics of class (whatever that may
mean) might take root and flourish. A long shot perhaps but one worth pursuing.

Internal link turns their scholarship and reproduces capitalist subjectization

Gibson-Graham 06 J.K., pen name shared by feminist economic geographers Julie Graham and Katherine Gibson
(The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy, pg 43-45)

What interests me most here is the question of why the economism of which capitalism is the bearer is so difficult to moderate or
excise. And what may account for the economic monism or hegemonism that accompanies most
representations of capitalist society and development? Here a partial answer may be found in the
metaphysics of identity that Althusser sought to undermine. Operating under an "imperative of unity" (Hazel
1994: 4) western conceptions of identity entail both the unity of an object with itself (its self-
resemblance) and its one-to one relation with the sign by which it is known: one word with one meaning,
corresponding to one thing. To such an essentialist reading of identity "capitalism" designates an
underlying commonality in the objects to which it refers. Thus we are not surprised to encounter
a capitalism that is essentially the same in different times and places (despite the fact that sameness as the
precondition of meaning is exactly what various structuralist and poststructuralist traditions have sought to undermine.) By
virtue of their identification as capitalist settings, different societies become the sites of a
resemblance or a replication. Complex processes of social development - commodification,
industrialization, proletarianization, internationalization - become legible as the signatures of capitalism rather
than as unique and decentered determinations. When capitalism exists as a sameness,
noncapitalism can only be subordinated or rendered invisible (like traditional or domestic economic
forms). Noncapitalism is to capitalism as woman to man: an insufficiency until and unless it is
released from the binary metaphysics of identity (where A is a unified self-identical being that excludes what it is
not).34 If capitalism/man can be understood as multiple and specific; if it is not a unity but a heterogeneity,
not a sameness but a difference; if it is always becoming what it is not; if it incorporates difference within its decentered being;
then noncapitalism/woman is released from its singular and subordinate status. There is no
singularity of Form to constitute noncapitalism/woman as a simple negation or as the recessive ground against which the positive
figure of capitalism/man is defined. To
conceptualize capitalism/man as multiple and different is thus a
condition of theorizing noncapitalism/woman as a set of specific, definite forms of being. It is easy
to appreciate the strategic effectiveness of reading the texts of capitalism deconstructively, discovering the surplus and contradictory
meanings of the term, the places where capitalism is inhabited and constituted by noncapitalism, where it escapes the logic of sameness
and is unable to maintain its ostensible self-identity (see chapter 10). But overdetermination can be used as an additional anti-essentialist theoretical
strategy to complement and supplement the strategy of deconstruction. Taken together these strategies have the potential to undermine capitalism's
discursive "hegemony" and to reconceptualize its role in social determination. Representations of society and economy cannot themselves be centered
on a decentered and formless entity that is itself always different from itself, and that obtains its shifting and contradictory identity from the always
changing exteriors that overdetermine it. Just as postmodernism obtains its power from modernism (its power to undermine and destabilize, to oppose
and contradict),35 so can an overdeterminist approach realize its power and strategic capacity by virtue of its oppositional relation to the preeminent
modes of understanding both language categories and identity/being. To the extent that we conceptualize entities as autonomous, bounded, and
discrete (constituted by the exclusion of their outsides), and as the unique referents that give each sign a stable and singular meaning, to that extent
does the strategy of thinking overdetermination have the power to destabilize theoretical discourse and reposition the concepts within it.36 Through
the lens of overdetermination, identities (like capitalism) can become visible as entirely constituted by their "external" conditions. With an
overdeterminist strategy we may empty capitalism of its universal attributes and evacuate the essential and invariant logics that allow it to hegemonize
the economic and social terrain. Overdetermination enables us to read the causality that is capitalism as coexisting with an infinity
of other determinants, none of which can definitively be said to be less or more significant, while repositioning capitalism itself as an
effect. That the capitalist economy often escapes reconceptualization and so continues to function
as an organizing moment, and an origin of meaning and causation in social theory, cannot be understood as a simple
theoretical omission. It is also a reassertion of the hegemonic conceptions of language and
determination that overdetermination is uniquely positioned to contradict. It is a testimony to the power of overdetermination
that it has allowed certain post-Althusserian theorists to envision an "economy" that is not singular, centered, ordered or
selfconstituting, and that therefore is not capitalism's exclusive domain.37 But it
testifies to the resilience of the
dominant conceptual context (it should perhaps be called a mode of thought) in which the objects of thought
exist independently of thought and of each other that an autonomous economy still exists and operates in social representation. One
can say that representations of the capitalist economy as an independent entity informed by
logics and exclusive of its exteriors have allowed capitalism to hegemonize both the economic and
the social field. One can also say, however, that overdetermination is a discursive strategy that can potentially empty, fragment,
decenter and open the economy, liberating discourses of economy and society from capitalism's embrace. But that process, far from
being over or even well on its way, has hardly begun.
 2AC-No Root Cause

Cap not root cause

Aberdeen 3 activist and founder, Aberdeen Foundation (Richard, The Way, http://richardaberdeen.com/uncommonsense/theway.html)

A view shared by many modern activists is that capitalism, free enterprise, multi-national corporations and globalization are the primary
cause of the current global Human Rights problem and that by striving to change or eliminate these, the root
problem of what ills the modern world is being addressed. This is a rather unfortunate and historically
myopic view, reminiscent of early class struggle Marxists who soon resorted to violence as a means to
achieve rather questionable ends. And like these often brutal early Marxists, modern anarchists who
resort to violence to solve the problem are walking upside down and backwards, adding to rather than correcting, both the
immediate and long-term Human Rights problem. Violent revolution, including our own American revolution, becomes a

breeding ground for poverty, disease, starvation and often mass oppression leading to future violence.
Large, publicly traded corporations are created by individuals or groups of individuals, operated by individuals and made up of individual and/or group investors. These business
enterprises are deliberately structured to be empowered by individual (or group) investor greed. For example, a theorized need for offering salaries much higher than is necessary to secure
competent leadership (often resulting in corrupt and entirely incompetent leadership), lowering wages more than is fair and equitable and scaling back of often hard fought for benefits, is sold
to stockholders as being in the best interest of the bottom-line market value and thus, in the best economic interests of individual investors. Likewise, major political and corporate exploitation
of third-world nations is rooted in the individual and joint greed of corporate investors and others who stand to profit from such exploitation. More than just investor greed, corporations are

If one examines the course of human

driven by the greed of all those involved, including individuals outside the enterprise itself who profit indirectly from it.

events closely, it can correctly be surmised that the root cause of humanitys problems comes from
individual human greed and similar negative individual motivation. The Marx/Engles view of history being a class
struggle does not address the root problem and is thus fundamentally flawed from a true historical
perspective (see Gallo Brothers for more details). So-called classes of people, unions, corporations and political groups are made up of individuals who support the particular group
or organizational position based on their own individual needs, greed and desires and thus, an apparent class struggle in reality, is an extension of individual motivation. Likewise,

nations engage in wars of aggression, not because capitalism or classes of society are at root cause, but
because individual members of a society are individually convinced that it is in their own economic
survival best interest. War, poverty, starvation and lack of Human and Civil Rights have existed on our
planet since long before the rise of modern capitalism, free enterprise and multi-national corporation
avarice, thus the root problem obviously goes deeper than this.
 2AC-Racism First

Modern capitalism is founded on racism and slaverytheir singular focus is bad history
Mills 97-Professor of Moral and Intellectual Philosophy @ Northwestern University [Charles, The Racial Contract, pp. 31-40, 1997]

The classic social contract, as I have detailed, is primarily moral/political in nature. But it is also economic in the background
sense that the point of leaving the state of nature is in part to secure a stable environment for the
industrious appropriation of the world. (After all, one famous definition of politics is that it is about who gets what and why.) Thus even in
Locke's moralized state of nature, where people generally do obey natural law, he is concerned about the safety of private property, indeed proclaiming that "the
great and chief end therefore, of Mens uniting into Commonwealths, and putting themselves under Government, is the Preservation of their Property."42 And in
Hobbes's famously amoral and unsafe state of nature, we are told that "there is no place for Industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain; and consequently no
Culture of the Earth."43 So
part of the point of bringing society into existence, with its laws and enforcers of the
law, is to protect what you have accumulated. / What, then, is the nature of the economic system of the new society? The general
contract does not itself prescribe a particular model or particular schedule of property rights, requiring only that the "equality" in the prepolitical state be somehow
preserved. This provision may be variously interpreted as a self-interested surrender to an absolutist Hobbesian government that itself determines property rights,
or a Lockean insistence that private property accumulated in the moralized state of nature be respected by the constitutionalist government. Or more radical
political theorists, such as socialists and feminists, might argue that state-of-nature equality actually mandates class or gender economic egalitarianism in society.
So, different political interpretations of the initial moral egalitarianism can be advanced, but the general
background idea is that the equality of human beings in the state of nature is somehow (whether as equality of
opportunity or as equality of outcome) supposed to carry over into the economy of the created sociopolitical order,

leading to a system of voluntary human intercourse and exchange in which exploitation is precluded. / By
contrast, the economic dimension of the Racial Contract is the most salient, foreground rather than
background, since the Racial Contract is calculatedly aimed at economic exploitation. The whole point of
establishing a moral hierarchy and juridically partitioning the polity according to race is to secure and
legitimate the privileging of those individuals designated as white/persons and the exploitation of those
individuals designated as nonwhite/subpersons. There are other benefits accruing from the Racial Contractfar greater political
influence, cultural hegemony, the psychic payoff that comes from knowing one is a member of the Herrenvolk (what W. E. B. Du Bois once called "the wages of
whiteness")44but the bottom line is material advantage. Globally,
the Racial Contract creates Europe as the continent that
dominates the world; locally, within Europe and the other continents, it designates Europeans as the
privileged race. / The challenge of explaining what has been called "the European miracle"the rise of Europe to global
dominationhas long exercised both academic and lay opinion.45 How is it that a formerly peripheral
region on the outskirts of the Asian land mass, at the far edge of the trade routes, remote from the
great civilizations of Islam and the East, was able in a century or two to achieve global political and
economic dominance? The explanations historically given by Europeans themselves have varied tremendously,
from the straightforwardly racist and geographically determinist to the more subtly environmentalist
and culturalist. But what they have all had in common, even those influenced by Marxism, is their
tendency to depict this development as essentially autochthonous, their tendency to privilege some set
of internal variables and correspondingly-downplay or ignore altogether the role of colonial conquest
and African slavery. Europe made it on its own, it is said, because of the peculiar characteristics of Europe and Europeans. / Thus whereas no reputable
historian today would espouse the frankly biologistic theories of the past, which made Europeans (in both pre- and post-Darwinian accounts) inherently the most
advanced race, as contrasted with the backward/less-evolved races elsewhere, the thesis of European specialness and exceptionalism is still presupposed. It is still
assumed that rationalism and science, innovativeness and inventiveness found their special home here, as against the intellectual stagnation and traditionalism of
the rest of the world, so that Europe was therefore destined in advance to occupy the special position in global history it has. James Blaut calls this the theory, or
"super-theory" (an umbrella covering many different versions: theological, cultural, biologistic, geographical, technological, etc.), of "Eurocentric diffusionism,"
according to which European progress is seen as "natural" and asymmetrically determinant of the fate of non-Europe." Similarly, Sandra Harding, in her anthology
on the "racial" economy of science, cites "the assumption that Europe functions autonomously from other parts of the world; that Europe is its own origin, final end,
and agent; and that Europe and people of European descent in the Americas and elsewhere owe nothing to the rest of the world."47 / Unsurprisingly, black and
Third World theorists have traditionally dissented from this notion of happy divine or natural European
dispensation. They have claimed, quite to the contrary, that there is a crucial causal connection between
European advance and the unhappy fate of the rest of the world. One classic example of such scholarship from a
half century ago was the Caribbean historian Eric Williams's Capitalism and Slavery, which argued that the

profits from African slavery helped to make the industrial revolution possible, so that internalist
accounts were fundamentally mistaken.48 And in recent years, with decolonization, the rise of the New Left in the United States, and the
entry of more alternative voices into the academy, this challenge has deepened and broadened. There are variations in the authors' positionsfor example, Walter
Rodney, Samir Amin, Andre Guilder Frank, Immanuel Wallerstein9but the basic theme is that the
exploitation of the empire (the bullion
from the great gold and silver mines in Mexico and Peru, the profits from plantation slavery, the
fortunes made by the colonial companies, the general social and economic stimulus provided by the
opening up of the "New World") was to a greater or lesser extent crucial in enabling and then consolidating the
takeoff of what had previously been an economic backwater. It was far from the case that Europe was
specially destined to assume economic hegemony; there were a number of centers in Asia and Africa of
a comparable level of development which could potentially have evolved in the same way. But the
European ascent closed off this development path for others because it forcibly inserted them into a
colonial network whose exploitative relations and extractive mechanisms prevented autonomous
growth. / Overall, then, colonialism "lies at the heart" of the rise of Europe.50 The economic unit of analysis needs to be
Europe as a whole, since it is not always the case that the colonizing nations directly involved always benefited in the long term. Imperial Spain, for example, still
feudal in character, suffered massive inflation from its bullion imports. But through trade and financial exchange, others launched on the capitalist path, such as
Holland, profited. Internal national rivalries continued, of course, but this common identity based on the transcontinental exploitation of the non-European world
would in many cases be politically crucial, generating a sense of Europe as a cosmopolitan entity engaged in a common enterprise, underwritten by race. As Victor
Kiernan puts it, "All countries within the European orbit benefited however, as Adam Smith pointed out, from colonial contributions to a common stock of wealth,
bitterly as they might wrangle over ownership of one territory or another... [T]here was a sense in which all Europeans shared in a heightened sense of power
engendered by the successes of any of them, as well as in the pool of material wealth... that the colonies produced."51 / Today, correspondingly, though formal
decolonization has taken place and in Africa and Asia black, brown, and yellow natives are in office, ruling independent nations, the global economy is essentially
dominated by the former colonial powers, their offshoots (Euro-United States, Euro-Canada), and their international financial institutions, lending agencies, and
corporations. (As previously observed, the notable exception, whose history confirms rather than challenges the rule, is Japan, which escaped colonization and,
after the Meiji Restoration, successfully embarked on its own industrialization.) Thus one could say that the world is essentially
dominated by white capital. Global figures on income and property ownership are, of course, broken down nationally rather than racially, but if a
transnational racial disaggregation were to be done, it would reveal that whites control a percentage of
the world's wealth grossly disproportionate to their numbers. Since there is no reason to think that the
chasm between First and Third Worlds (which largely coincides with this racial division) is going to be
bridgedvide the abject failure of various United Nations plans from the "development decade" of the 1960s onwardit seems undeniable that
for years to come, the planet will be white dominated. With the collapse of communism and the defeat
of Third World attempts to seek alternative paths, the West reigns supreme, as celebrated in a London Financial Times
headline: "The fall of the Soviet bloc has left the IMF and G7 to rule the world and create a new imperial age."52 Economic structures have been

set in place, causal processes established, whose outcome is to pump wealth from one side of the globe
to another, and which will continue to work largely independently of the ill will/good will,
racist/antiracist feelings of particular individuals. This globally color-coded distribution of wealth and
poverty has been produced by the Racial Contract and in turn reinforces adherence to it in its signatories
and beneficiaries. / Moreover, it is not merely that Europe and the former white settler states are globally
dominant but that within them, where there is a significant nonwhite presence (indigenous peoples, descendants of
imported slaves, voluntary nonwhite immigration), whites continue to be privileged vis-a-vis non-whites. The old structures of formal,
de jure exclusion have largely been dismantled, the old explicitly biologistic ideologies largely abandoned53the Racial Contract, as will be discussed later, is
continually being rewrittenbut opportunities for nonwhites, though they have expanded, remain below those for
whites. The claim is not, of course, that all whites are better off than all nonwhites, but that, as a statistical
generalization, the objective life chances of whites are significantly better. / As an example, consider the United States. A
series of books has recently documented the decline of the integrationist hopes raised by the 1960s and the growing intransigence and hostility of whites who

think they have "done enough," despite the fact that the country continues to be massively segregated,
median black family incomes have begun falling by comparison to white family incomes after some earlier closing
of the gap, the so-called "black underclass" has basically been written off, and reparations for slavery and post-

Emancipation discrimination have never been paid, or, indeed, even seriously considered.54 Recent work on racial
inequality by Melvin Oliver and Thomas Shapiro suggests that wealth is more important than income in determining the

likelihood of future racial equalization, since it has a cumulative effect that is passed down through
intergenerational transfer, affecting life chances and opportunities for one's children. Whereas in 1988 black
households earned sixty two cents for every dollar earned by white households, the comparative differential with regard to wealth is much greater and, arguably,
provides a more realistically negative picture of the prospects for closing the racial gap: "Whites possess nearly twelve times as much
median net worth as blacks, or $43,800 versus $3,700. In an even starker contrast, perhaps, the average white household controls $6,999 in net
financial assets while the average black household retains no NFA nest egg whatsoever." Moreover, the analytic focus on wealth rather than

income exposes how illusory the much-trumpeted rise of a "black middle class" is: "Middle class blacks,
for example, earn seventy cents for every dollar earned by middle-class whites but they possess only
fifteen cents for every dollar of wealth held by middle-class whites." This huge disparity in white and
black wealth is not remotely contingent, accidental, fortuitous; it is the direct outcome of American
state policy and the collusion with it of the white citizenry. In effect, "materially, whites and blacks
constitute two nations,"55 the white nation being constituted by the American Racial Contract in a
relationship of structured racial exploitation with the black (and, of course, historically also the red)
nation. / A collection of papers from panels organized in the 1980s by the National Economic Association, the professional organization of black economists,
provides some insight into the mechanics and the magnitude of such exploitative transfers and denials of opportunity to accumulate material and human capital. It
takes as its title The Wealth of Racesan ironic tribute to Adam Smith's famous book The Wealth of Nationsand analyzes the different varieties of discrimination
to which blacks have been subjected: slavery, employment discrimination, wage discrimination, promotion discrimination, white monopoly power discrimination
against black capital, racial price discrimination in consumer goods, housing, services, insurance, etc.56 Many of these, by their very nature, are difficult to quantify;
moreover, there are costs in anguish and suffering that can never really be compensated. Nonetheless, those that do lend themselves to calculation offer some
remarkable figures. (The figures are unfortunately dated; readers should multiply by a factor that takes fifteen years of inflation into account.) If one were to do a
calculation of the cumulative benefits (through compound interest) from labor market discrimination over the forty-year period from 1929 to 1969 and adjust for
inflation, then in 1983 dollars, the figure would be over $1.6 trillion.57 An estimate for the total of "diverted income" from slavery, 1790 to 1860, compounded and
translated into 1983 dollars, would yield the sum of $2.1 trillion to $4.7 trillion.58 And if
one were to try to work out the cumulative
value, with compound interest, of unpaid slave labor before 1863, underpayment since 1863, and denial
of opportunity to acquire land and natural resources available to white settlers, then the total amount
required to compensate blacks "could take more than the entire wealth of the United States"59 / So this gives
an idea of the centrality of racial exploitation to the U.S. economy and the dimensions of the payoff for its
white beneficiaries from one nation's Racial Contract. But this very centrality, these very dimensions render the topic
taboo, virtually undiscussed in the debates on justice of most white political theory. If there is such a backlash
against affirmative action, what would the response be to the demand for the interest on the unpaid forty acres and a mule? These issues cannot be

raised because they go to the heart of the real nature of the polity and its structuring by the Racial
Contract. White moral theory's debates on justice in the state must therefore inevitably have a
somewhat farcical air, since they ignore the central injustice on which the state rests. (No wonder a hypothetical
contractarianism that evades the actual circumstances of the polity's founding is preferred!) / Both globally and within particular nations, then, white people,
Europeans and their descendants, continue to benefit from the Racial Contract, which creates a world in their cultural image, political states differentially favoring
their interests, an economy structured around the racial exploitation of others, and a moral psychology (not just in whites but sometimes in nonwhites also) skewed
consciously or unconsciously toward privileging them, taking the status quo of differential racial entitlement as normatively legitimate, and not to be investigated
further.
 Cap good 2ac environment

A) Rejecting capitalism causes massive ecological disasters

Butters 07 (Roger B., Ph.D., President Nebraska Council on Economic Education, Assistant Professor of
Economics University of Nebraska at Lincoln, Teaching the Benefits of Capitalism,
http://www.hillsdale.edu/images/userImages/afolsom/Page_6281/Butters.pdf)

Property rights create the incentive needed to conserve scarce resources. Why is the air outside polluted
and the air in your car clean? The answer is property rights. You dont own the air outside your car so you gladly pollute it whereas the
air inside your car, over which you have a property right, is jealously maintained with air conditioning, filters and air fresheners. How
can we solve the pollution problem? Simple, establish a property right and require that all exhaust fumes be
vented inside the vehicle that creates them. Suddenly the incentive to use better fuels, drive a more efficient vehicle and reduce
emissions would result in booming innovation in pollution abatement; all in response to a property right. Clearly this example pushes
into the absurd, but it illustrate the point none the less. For a more practical comparison consider why private bathrooms are clean,
and public ones are not. Better yet, why are Maine Lobsters plentiful and orange roughy arent? Property rights. Why are cows
thriving and tigers vanishing? Property rights. For cows people have a direct incentive to preserve,
protect and improve. For tigers the only incentive is to use the resource before someone else does. Why are elephants and
other endangered species on the rebound in some African countries? Property rights. By letting villages
own the animals they have an incentive to preserve, protect and improve, and as a result the animals are
thriving. Rather than calling poachers when a rhinoceros decimates your corn field, you care for the animal, make sure it has several
young and then auction the right to shoot it to a wealthy game hunter. The animals are preserved, the population is maintained, the
village receives increased wealth and a private individual has a unique experience. By
defining the property right we
have gone from extinction and poverty to trade and wealth and at the end of the day there are more,
not fewer rhinoceroses. The tragedy of the commons is one of the most valuable and pervasive
examples of what happens when property rights are poorly defined and unenforced. What is the
benefit of capitalism? It provides us with property rights that create the incentives to preserve,
protect and improve. It is not surprising that the greatest ecological disasters have all occurred in societies
without strong social institutions that protect property.

B) Extinction
Kline 98 (Gary, Associate Professor of Political Science, Georgia Southwestern State University, Journal
of Third World Studies, 15(1), Spring)

Additionally, natural
ecosystems provide certain less obvious services that are crucial to life as we know it.6 The
atmosphere of our planet is the product largely of ecosystem operations. About twenty-one percent of our
atmosphere is made up of oxygen, the result of plant photosynthesis which releases the gas. Approximately seventy-eight percent of
the remaining air we breathe is nitrogen, which is regulated by the nitrogen cycle of plant production. Ecosystems then influence
weather and climate patterns by affecting the circulation of air in this atmosphere. Plants, and especially forests, are
instrumental in retaining and conserving our soil and water. Destruction of forest areas results in soil erosion
(deleterious to agriculture and plant life in general), floods, and droughts. The rapid decertification of large tracts of land in places like
north Africa are a direct consequence of loss of such ecosystems. Each year an area equivalent in size to Belgium falls victim to
decertification. Plant and animal life, much of it not visible to the naked eye, helps create and maintain soil by breaking down rocks
into finer and finer pieces and by adding organic material to it, enriching it for agriculture. Except for some of the most troublesome
products of Humankind, like DDT and plastics, these same plants and animals work to dispose of wastes. Decomposed wastes are then
recycled as nutrients into the food chain for the sustenance of new life. Natural ecosystems also produce mechanisms in plants for the
resistance of pests and diseases and for the pollination of flowering plants, essential to their reproduction, including many of our food
crops. It should be apparent that biodiversity and life are synonymous. The organisms in an ecosystem are part of a "trophic pyramid,"
as labelled by scientists. That is, a large mass of plants supports a smaller number of herbivores; these support a smaller number of
primary carnivores and an even smaller number of second order carnivores. Due to their more rapid rates of reproduction, the lower
order life forms are generally better able to adapt to changes in their environment than the higher forms. The latter are also
disadvantaged by bioconcentration of harmful substances which make their way into the food chain. Every organism has some niche
and work to perform in the pyramid. Homo sapiens occupy a position at the top and are therefore vulnerable to instability at the base.
Human activity which threatens the pyramid is akin to playing Russian roulette. Of this, Humankind is
now more aware. As Garrison Wilkes of the University of Massachusetts put it, "We have been building our roof with stones from the
foundation."7 This problem is now manifesting itself especially in an area of human endeavor which is essential to our existence:
agriculture.
 Cap good 2ac poverty

Cap solving povertywe control uniqueness

Johan Norberg 3 is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, In Defense of Global Capitalism p. 25

Between 1965 and 1998, the average world citizens income practically doubled, from $2,497 to $4,839,
adjusted for purchasing power and inflation. That increase has not come about through the industrialized nations multiplying their
incomes. During this period the richest fifth of the worlds population increased their average income from
$8,315 to $14,623, or by roughly 75 percent. For the poorest fifth of the worlds population, the increase has been faster
still, with average income more than doubling during the same period from $551 to $1,137.5 World consumption today is more
than twice what it was in 1960. Thanks to material developments in the past half century, the world has over three billion more people
living above the poverty line. This is historically unique. The United Nations Development Program (UNDP) has observed that, all in all,
world poverty has fallen more during the past 50 years than during the
preceding 500. In its Human Development Report 1997, the UNDP writes that humanity is in the midst of the second great
ascent. The first began in the 19th century, with the industrialization of the United States and Europe and the rapid spread of
prosperity. The second began during the post-war era and is now in full swing, with first Asia and then the other developing countries
scoring ever-greater victories in the war against poverty, hunger, disease, and illiteracy. The great success in reducing poverty in the
20th century shows that eradicating
severe poverty in the first decades of the 21st
century is feasible.6 Poverty is still rapidly diminishing. Absolute poverty is usually defined as the condition of having an
income less than one dollar a day. In 1820 something like 85 percent of the worlds population were living on the equivalent of less
than a dollar a day. By 1950 that figure had fallen to about 50 percent and by 1980 to 31 percent. According to World Bank figures,
absolute poverty has fallen since 1980 from 31 to 20 percent (a figure of 24 percent is often mentioned, meaning 24 percent of the
population of the developing countries). The radical
reduction of the past 20 years is unique in that not only
the proportion but also the total number of people living in absolute poverty has declinedfor
the first time in world history. During these two decades the worlds population has grown by a billion and a half, and yet
the number of absolute poor has fallen by about 200 million. That decrease is connected with economic growth. In places where
prosperity has grown fastest, poverty has been most effectively combated. In East Asia (China excluded), absolute poverty has fallen
from 15 to just over 9 percent, in China from 32 to 17 percent. Six Asians in 10 were absolutely poor in 1975. Todays figure, according
to the World Bank, is fewer than 2 out of 10. Even those encouraging findings, however, almost certainly overestimate world poverty
significantly because the World Bank uses notoriously unreliable survey data as the basis for its own assessments. Former World Bank
economist Surjit S. Bhalla recently published his own calculations, supplementing survey results with national accounts data. This
method, he argues convincingly, is far more likely to provide an accurate measurement. Bhalla found that poverty had fallen
precipitously, from a level of 44 percent in 1980 to 13 percent at the end of 2002. If those figures are
correct, then the last 20 years have seen an extraordinary, unprecedented reduction
of povertytwice that achieved in any other 20-year period on record. The UNs goal of lowering world poverty to below 15
percent by 2015 has already been achieved and surpassed.7

Poverty outweighs nuke war

Abu-Jamal 1998 (Mumia, Peace Activist, A Quiet and Deadly Violence, FLASHPOINTS, September 19,
1998, available online at http://www.flashpoints.net/mQuietDeadlyViolence.html, accessed 6/30/07)
This form of violence, not covered by any of the majoritarian, corporate, ruling-class protected media, is invisible to us and because of
its invisibility, all the more insidious. How dangerous is it--really? Gilligan notes: [E]very
fifteen years, on the average, as
many people die because of relative poverty as would be killed in a nuclear war that caused 232 million
deaths; and every single year, two to three times as many people die from poverty throughout the world as
were killed by the Nazi genocide of the Jews over a six-year period. This is, in effect, the equivalent of an
ongoing, unending, in fact accelerating, thermonuclear war, or genocide on the weak and poor every year
of every decade, throughout the world. [Gilligan, p. 196] Worse still, in a thoroughly capitalist society, much of that violence became
internalized, turned back on the Self, because, in a society based on the priority of wealth, those who own nothing are taught to loathe
themselves, as if something is inherently wrong with themselves, instead of the social order that promotes this self-loathing.. This
vicious, circular, and invisible violence, unacknowledged by the corporate media, uncriticized in substandard educational systems, and
un-understood by the very folks who suffer in its grips, feeds on the spectacular and more common forms of violence that the system
makes damn sure -that we can recognize and must react to it. This fatal and systematic violence may be called The War on the Poor.
 Cap Good-2ac War
Capitalism empirically deters war
Griswold 5 (Daniel, director of Center for Trade Policy Studies@CATO, December 28,
http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=5344, accessed: 29 June 2011, JT)
As one little-noticed headline on an Associated Press story recently reported, "War declining worldwide, studies say." According to the
Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, the number of armed conflicts around the world has been in
decline for the past half-century. In just the past 15 years, ongoing conflicts have dropped from 33 to 18, with all of them
now civil conflicts within countries. As 2005 draws to an end, no two nations in the world are at war with each other. The death
toll from war has also been falling. According to the AP story, "The number killed in battle has fallen to its
lowest point in the post-World War II period, dipping below 20,000 a year by one measure. Peacemaking missions,
meanwhile, are growing in number." Those estimates are down sharply from annual tolls ranging from 40,000 to 100,000 in the 1990s,
and from a peak of 700,000 in 1951 during the Korean War. Many causes lie behind the good news -- the end of the Cold War and the
spread of democracy, among them -- but expanding trade and globalization appear to be playing a major
role. Far from stoking a "World on Fire," as one misguided American author has argued, growing commercial ties
between nations have had a dampening effect on armed conflict and war, for three main reasons. First,
trade and globalization have reinforced the trend toward democracy, and democracies don't pick
fights with each other. Freedom to trade nurtures democracy by expanding the middle class in globalizing countries and
equipping people with tools of communication such as cell phones, satellite TV, and the Internet. With trade comes more
travel, more contact with people in other countries, and more exposure to new ideas. Thanks in part to
globalization, almost two thirds of the world's countries today are democracies -- a record high. Second, as national
economies become more integrated with each other, those nations have more to lose should war
break out. War in a globalized world not only means human casualties and bigger government, but also ruptured
trade and investment ties that impose lasting damage on the economy. In short, globalization has
dramatically raised the economic cost of war. Third, globalization allows nations to acquire wealth
through production and trade rather than conquest of territory and resources. Increasingly, wealth is
measured in terms of intellectual property, financial assets, and human capital. Those are assets that cannot be seized by armies. If
people need resources outside their national borders, say oil or timber or farm products, they can acquire them peacefully by trading
away what they can produce best at home.

Alternatives to capitalism make war inevitable

Nyquist 6 (JR. Financial Sense, Anatomy of a Delusion, September 8,
http://www.financialsense.com/stormwatch/geo/pastanalysis/2006/0908.html, Accessed 7-11-09, PAK)
The free market teaches men to love peace, while the miserable circumstances of socialist decline
teach men the necessity of predatory warfare. According to Mises, the markets love of peace
does not spring from philanthropic considerations but depends on a proper appreciation of economic self-
interest. Those who believe in profit and the free market reject war because war signifies the
destruction of property. Wars are not initiated by corporate greed. Wars are initiated by backward cults who seek a return to
medieval conditions. World revolution is the cry of the militant socialists, the Marxist-Leninists of the Peoples
Republic of China, North Korea, Vietnam, Cuba and the KGB clique that presently governs the former Soviet Union. To understand
world events properly we must understand the distinction between socialist and free market economies. Dictatorship and war
belong to the sphere of socialism and economic controls (or restrictions). Freedom means the freedom to buy and
sell, to build and create. Once you allow a mob of political activists to legislate against the free market
in accordance with moral or environmental pleas your economic decline is foreordained. Instead of a society guided
by environmental angels, you will have a society guided by distorted madmen who (in the words of Mises) do not approach the study
of economic matters with scientific disinterestedness. Most of them are driven by an envious resentment against those whose
incomes are larger than their own. This bias makes it impossible for them to see things as they really are. For them the main thing is
 not to improve the conditions of the masses, but to harm the entrepreneurs and capitalists even if this policy victimizes the immense
majority of the people.

Capitalism promotes democratic peace.

Fukuyama 95 Senior Social Scientist, Rand Corporation 1995 (Francis, TRUST, p. 360-1)

The role that a capitalist economy plays in channeling recognition struggles in a peaceful direction, and
its consequent importance to democratic stability, is evident in post-communist Eastern Europe. The
totalitarian project envisioned the destruction of an independent civil society and the creation of a new
socialist community centered exclusively around the state. When the latter, highly artificial community,
there were virtually no alternative forms of community beyond those of family and ethnic group, or else
in the delinquent communities constituted by criminal gangs. In the absence of a layer of voluntary
associations, individuals clung to their ascriptive identities all the more fiercely. Ethnicity provided an
easy form of community by which they could avoid feeling atomized, weak, and victimized by the larger
historical forces swirling around them. In developed capitalist societies with strong civil societies, by
contrast, the economy itself is the locus of a substantial part of social life. When one works for
Motorola, Siemens, Toyota, or even a small family dry-cleaning business, one is part of a moral network
that absorbs a large part of ones energies and ambitions. The Eastern European countries that appear
to have the greatest chances for success as democracies are Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic,
which retained nascent civil societies throughout the communist period and were able to generate
capitalist private sectors in relatively short order. There is no lack of divisive ethnic conflicts in these
places, whether over competing Polish and Lithuanian claims to Vilnius or Hungarian irredenta vis--vis
neighbors. But they have not flared up into violent conflicts yet because the economy has been
sufficiently vigorous to provide an alternative source of social identity and belonging. The mutual dependence of economy and polity
is not limited to democratizing states in the former communist world. In a way, the loss of social capital in the United States has more immediate consequences for American democracy than
for the American economy. Democratic political institutions no less than businesses depend on trust for effective operation, and the reduction of trust in a society will require a more intrusive,
rule-making government to regulate social relations.
 Cap good 2ac space

Capitalism key to space

Charles Q. Choi 10 11-16 Space.com U.S. and Russia in race for private space stations
http://sys09.msnbc.msn.com/id/40225091/ns/technology_and_science-space/40538455

A new space race is beginning, but this time between private companies, not nations.
Businesses in the United States and Russia are vying to be the first to launch a private space
station. One project, an inflatable space habitat, already has six clients waiting for it, according to the company,
Bigelow Aerospace of Las Vegas. "We're just beginning to see the tip of the iceberg with
commercial opportunities and pent-up demand," Mike Gold, Bigelow Aerospace's director of
Washington, D.C. operations and business growth, told SPACE.com. The other venture, led by two companies in Russia, is called
the Commercial Space Station and aims to be a combination laboratory and hotel. Both the CSS and the Bigelow station are looking to
launch in the next five years or so. [Poll: Who Will Win the Private Space Station Race?] The Russian project has received support from
the official Russian space program. "We consider the Commercial Space Station a very interesting project, encouraging private
participation," said Vitaly Davydov, deputy head of Russia's Federal Space Agency. "It will attract private investment for
the Russian space industry." To date, space stations have been a national or international affair. Russia achieved early success with its
Salyut and Mir stations, and NASA brought the United States into the game first with Skylab in 1973. The U.S. and Russia have since
teamed up with 13 other countries to build the $100 billion International Space Station, which celebrated a decade of continuous
manned operations this month. But private space stations like those promised by Bigelow Aerospace and the Moscow-based
Orbital Technologies, which is backing the Commercial Space Station, hold the promise of catering to a
wider clientele a customer base that includes scientists and governments, as well as
materials manufactures and thrill-seeking space tourists. An expandable station The inflatable design developed
by Bigelow Aerospace is based on discontinued research by NASA under the Transhab project on modules made with Kevlar-like
composites that expand in space. These offer far more room than comparable modules on the International Space Station, while
providing as much or more protection against radiation and impacts from debris, Bigelow officials said. "When traditional metallic
structures in space are struck by solar flares, they get a secondary radiation effect called scattering that can be deadly," Gold
explained. "Our structures are nonmetallic, substantially reducing that problem and offering enhanced protection against radiation."
When it comes to impacts from micrometeoroids and the like, the Bigelow modules' skins can not only absorb and disperse the energy
from strikes, but can retain their shape as well. "Expandable structures hold their integrity longer than physical structures, which can
collapse," Gold said. "The additional volume our structures have buys additional time to fix them as well." The first Bigelow station will
consist of four components in low-Earth orbit. First is the Sundancer module, which has 6,356 cubic feet (180 cubic meters) of usable
space and can support a crew of three. Next is a node-bus combination that adds docking capability, and then a second Sundancer.
Last comes a BA330 module, which provides 11,653 cubic feet (330 cubic meters) of space and can hold up to six crewmembers.
"That's a crew capacity of 12, double that of the International Space Station," Gold said. The BA330 boasts four large windows coated
with a film that protects against ultraviolet rays, and contains an environment control and life-support system, including lavatory and
hygiene facilities. The station will be powered by solar arrays and batteries, similar to the International Space Station. The Bigelow
station will be geared toward astronautics and commercial and scientific microgravity research, Gold said, not tourism. "First and
foremost, we are not a space hotel," he stressed in an interview. Bigelow Aerospace already has six customers lined up, in the form of
memoranda of understanding with space agencies and government departments in Australia, the Netherlands, Japan, Singapore,
Sweden and the United Kingdom. The cost for customers to use the station remains uncertain, "as that's largely driven by the issue of
transportation there and back," Gold said. "Once we know what transportation vehicle we'll use and where we'll launch from, we'll
have a better idea on costs." Their station could launch by 2015 or so, Gold said, using United Launch Alliance's
Atlas 5 rocket or SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket. They are partnered with Boeing to produce a crew capsule as part of NASA's Commercial
Crew Development(CCDev) initiative. "Customers and companies
that have access to space will be the
economic giants of the future. We hope it happens here, and hope that all of humanity can enjoy its benefits,"
Gold said. Russian competition Two Russian companies have also recently announced their intentions to build, launch and operate a
private space habitat named the Commercial Space Station, or CSS. [Illustration: Russia's Commercial Space Station] "The most exciting
possibilities include flights from the station to the moon or Mars," Sergey Kostenko, chief executive officer of Moscow-based Orbital
Technologies, told SPACE.com. Orbital Technologies said the station will have a crew of up to seven and will be serviced by Russian
Soyuz and Progress spacecraft and potentially other commercially available vehicles. The station would consist of one module about 10
feet (3 meters) in diameter powered by solar arrays, with a usable volume of about 700 cubic feet (20 cubic meters), Kostenko said.
The plan is to launch it in 2015 or 2016. The company added that it already had several customers under contract from the commercial
 space industry and the scientific community interested in areas such as medical research, protein crystallization, and materials
processing, as well as from the geographic imaging and remote-sensing industry. Media projects have also been proposed. "The
biggest goal may be tourism," Kostenko said. The Commercial Space Station could also serve as an emergency refuge for the
International Space Station's crew. "If a required maintenance procedure or a real emergency were to occur, without the return of the
ISS crew to Earth, habitants could use the CSS as a safe haven," said Alexey Krasnov, head of manned spaceflight at Russia's Federal
Space Agency.

Space solves extinction

Alan Wasser and Douglas Jobes, Winter 08. 73 J. Air L. & Com. 37, SPACE SETTLEMENTS, PROPERTY
RIGHTS, AND INTERNATIONAL LAW: COULD A LUNAR SETTLEMENT CLAIM THE LUNAR REAL ESTATE IT
NEEDS TO SURVIVE? Wasser is the Chairman of The Space Settlement Institute and a formerCEO of the
National Space Society. He is a former member of the AIAA SpaceColonization Technical Committee.
Jobes is the President of The Space Settlement Institute. Southern Methodist University Dedman School
of Law Page Lexis.

HUMANITY'S SURVIVAL depends on moving out into the cosmos while the window of opportunity for
doing so still exists. Besides helping to ensure the survival of humankind, the settling of space - including the establishment of
permanent human settlements on the Moon and Mars - will bring incalculable economic and social benefits to all
nations. The settlement of space would benefit all of humanity. It would open a new frontier, provide resources and
room for growth of the human race without despoiling the Earth, energize our society, and as Dr. Stephen
Hawking has pointed out, create a lifeboat for humanity that could survive even a planet-wide
catastrophe. n1 But, as Dr. Lawrence Risley pointed out, "Exploration is not suicidal and it is usually not altruistic, rather it is
a means to obtain wealth. There must be rewards for the risks being taken."
 Cap good Tech/Innovation 2AC
Cap is key to tech innovations preventing extinction Sustainability on the brink
Atkisson 2k (Alan, President and CEO of an international sustainability consultancy to business and government, Sustainability is Dead Long Live Sustainability)

Transformation of many kinds is already happening all around us, mostly in the name of globalization. Globalization has become the signifier for a family of
transformations in communications, finance, trade, travel, ecological and cultural interaction that are
drawing the worlds people and natural systems into ever closer relationship with each other, regardless
of national boundaries.Many of these transformations contribute more to the likelihood of global collapse
than to global sustainability, because they are fueled by destructive technologies, they result in ever greater levels of environmental
damage, they undermine national democracies, and they have so far widened dramatically the gap between rich and poor. Yet there is nothing inherently unsustainable

about globalizationper se, if we understand that word to mean the growing integration of global human
society.Indeed,globalization of many kindsfrom the spread of better technologies to the universal
adoption of human rightsis essential to attaining global sustainability.But the engines of globalization need to be harnessed to a more noble
set of goals and aspirations. At the heart of most descriptions of globalization is the market economy. It has often been

fashionable to blame the market for the environmental crisis, and in particular to blame the markets tendency to concentrate power within the large,
independent capital structures we call corporations. But we need corporations, and the market, to accomplish the change we seek.

To develop and spread innovations for sustainability at transformation speed, we need corporate-scale
concentrations of research, production, and distribution capacity. We need the market's speed,
freedom, and incentive structures.Clearly, we also need governors on the spread of destructive development, and the enormous fleet of old and dangerous innovationsfrom the internal
combustion engine to the idea that cynical nihilism is coolthat are increasing our distance from the dream of sustainability at an accelerating rate. But if we can alter globalization so

that it turns the enormous power of the market and the corporation in a truly sustainable direction, we
will watch in awe as our world changes for the better with unimaginable speed. Envisioning the transformation of globalization will
strike many as the ultimate in wishful thinking. Yet transformation begins precisely in wish and thought; and there are currently two powerful wishes adding considerable weight to global efforts to bring down the Berlin Wall
between today's damaging capitalism-at-all-costs and tomorrows practice of a more mindful capitalism conscious of all costs. One wish is the United Nations new Global Compact with the corporate sector. It calls on
corporations to adopt greater levels of social and environmental responsibilitya call that many are pledging to heed. The other wish is the non-governmental Global Reporting Initiative, which sets new criteria for measuring
sustainable corporate performance and is fast becoming adopted as the international standard, by corporations and activists alike. These promising developments, still in their relative infancy, did not appear suddenly out of
nowhere. There are but the latest and most successful demonstration of the power of wishful thinking, indulged in by hundreds of thousands of people, from the Seattle protesters of 1999 to the world government theorists of
the 1930s. And these agreements are, themselves, wishful thinking of a kind, comprised as they are of agreements on principle and criteria for measurements. But if this is what wishful thinking can do, consider what inspired
action, multiplied throughout the global system, will accomplish when seriously embraced at the same scale. Indeed, the transformation of globalization will, in many ways, signal the onset of transformation in general.

When we witness the redirection of investment flows, the adoption of new rules and ethics governing
the production process, the true raising of global standards of environmental, social, and economic
performance, sustainability will then be written directly into the cultural genes, also known as memes, steering
global development.These new sustainability memes will then be replicated in every walk of industrial life. The dream of sustainability will become business as usual.
 Cap Inevitable

Capitalism is inevitable-no alternative system

Stromberg 4, Resident Historian at the Von Mises Institute
(Joseph, Why Capitalism is Inevitable, Mises Daily, July 9, http://mises.org/article.aspx?Id=1562, AD: 6-21-9, PAK)
His conclusion must have sounded impossibly nave in 1973 but today we can see that he saw further than any other "futurists" of his
time: "the advent of industrialism and the Industrial Revolution has irreversibly changed the prognosis for freedom and statism. In the
pre-industrial era, statism and despotism could peg along indefinitely, content to keep the peasantry at subsistence levels and to live
off their surplus. But industrialism has broken the old tables; for it
has become evident that socialism cannot run an
industrial system, and it is gradually becoming evident that neomercantilism, interventionism, in the long run cannot run an
industrial system either. Free-market capitalism, the victory of social power and the economic means, is not only the only
moral and by far the most productive system; it has become the only viable system for mankind in the industrial era. Its
eventual triumph is therefore virtually inevitable." Rothbard's optimism about the prospects for liberty is legendary but
less well understood is the basis for it: markets work and government do not. Left and right can define terms however much they
what must achieve victory
want, and they can rant and rave from the point of view of their own ideological convictions, but
in the end is the remarkable influence of millions and billions of mutually beneficial exchanges
putting relentless pressure on the designs of central planners to thwart their will. To be optimistic
about the prospects for capitalism requires only that we understand Mises's argument concerning the
inability of socialist means to produce rational outcomes, and to be hopeful about the triumph of
choice over coercion.

Greed and capitalism are inevitable the concepts of property rights and free trade
are engrained in our psyche

Wilkinson 5 (Will, policy analyst@CATO, CATO Policy Report, XXVII(1), January/February,

http://www.cato.org/research/articles/wilkinson-050201.html, accessed: 29 June 2011, JT)

Perhaps the most

depressing lesson of evolutionary psychology for politics is found in its account of the deep-
seated human capacity for envy and, related, of our difficulty in understanding the idea of gains from trade and increases
in productivitythe idea of an ever-expanding "pie" of wealth. There is evidence that greater skill and initiative could lead to higher
status and bigger shares of resources for an individual in the EEA. But because of the social nature of hunting and gathering, the fact
that food spoiled quickly, and the utter absence of privacy, the benefits of individual success in hunting or foraging could not be easily
internalized by the individual, and were expected to be shared. The EEA was for the most part a zero-sum world, where increases in
total wealth through invention, investment, and extended economic exchange were totally unknown. More for you was less
for me. Therefore, if anyone managed to acquire a great deal more than anyone else, that was pretty good evidence that theirs was
a stash of ill-gotten gains, acquired by cheating, stealing, raw force, or, at best, sheer luck. Envy of the disproportionately wealthy may
have helped to reinforce generally adaptive norms of sharing and to help those of lower status on the dominance hierarchy guard
against further predation by those able to amass power. Our zero-sum mentality makes it hard for us to understand how trade and
investment can increase the amount of total wealth. We are thus ill-equipped to easily understand our own economic system. These
features of human naturethat we are coalitional, hierarchical, and envious zero-sum thinkerswould seem to make liberal
capitalism extremely unlikely. And it is. However, the
benefits of a liberal market order can be seen in a few further
features of the human mind and social organization in the EEA. Property Rights are Natural The problem
of distributing scarce resources can be handled in part by implicitly coercive allocative hierarchies. An alternative solution to the
problem of distribution is the recognition and enforcement of property rights. Property
rights are prefigured in nature
by the way animals mark out territories for their exclusive use in foraging, hunting, and mating. Recognition of such
rudimentary claims to control and exclude minimizes costly conflict, which by itself provides a strong evolutionary reason to look for
innate tendencies to recognize and respect norms of property. New scientific research provides even stronger evidence for the
existence of such property "instincts." For example, recent experimental work by Oliver Goodenough, a legal theorist, and Christine
Prehn, a neuroscientist, suggests that the
human mind evolved specialized modules for making judgments
about moral transgressions, and transgressions against property in particular. Evolutionary psychology
can help us to understand that property rights are not created simply by strokes of the legislator's pen.
Mutually Beneficial Exchange is Natural Trade and mutually beneficial exchange are human universals, as is the division
of labor. In their groundbreaking paper, "Cognitive Adaptations for Social Exchange," Cosmides and Tooby point out that, contrary to
widespread belief, hunter-gatherer
life is not "a kind of retro-utopia" of "indiscriminate, egalitarian
cooperation and sharing." The archeological and ethnographic evidence shows that hunter-gatherers were
involved in numerous forms of trade and exchange. Some forms of hunter-gatherer trading can involve quite
complex specialization and the interaction of supply and demand. Most impressive, Cosmides and Tooby have shown through a series
of experiments that human
beings are able easily to solve complex logical puzzles involving reciprocity,
the accounting of costs and benefits, and the detection of people who have cheated on agreements. However, we are
unable to solve formally identical puzzles that do not deal with questions of social exchange. That,
they argue, points to the existence of "functionally specialized, content-dependent cognitive adaptations for social exchange."
 Cap good 2ac transition wars

Rejection of capitalism causes massive transition wars

Harris 03 (Lee, Analyst Hoover Institution and Author of The Suicide of Reason, The Intellectual
Origins of America-Bashing, Policy Review, January,
http://www.hoover.org/publications/policyreview/3458371.html)
This is the immiserization thesis of Marx. And it is central to revolutionary Marxism, since if capitalism produces no widespread misery,
then it also produces no fatal internal contradiction: If everyone is getting better off through capitalism, who will dream of struggling
to overthrow it? Only genuine misery on the part of the workers would be sufficient to overturn the whole apparatus of the capitalist
state, simply because, as Marx insisted, the
capitalist class could not be realistically expected to relinquish
control of the state apparatus and, with it, the monopoly of force. In this, Marx was absolutely correct. No
capitalist society has ever willingly liquidated itself, and it is utopian to think that any ever will.
Therefore, in order to achieve the goal of socialism, nothing short of a complete revolution would do; and
this means, in point of fact, a full-fledged civil war not just within one society, but across the globe. Without
this catastrophic upheaval, capitalism would remain completely in control of the social order and all socialist
schemes would be reduced to pipe dreams.

Extinction
Kothari 82 (Rajni, Professor of Political Science University of Delhi, Toward a Just Social Order, p. 571)

Attempts at global economic reform could also lead to a world racked by increasing turbulence, a
greater sense of insecurity among the major centres of power -- and hence to a further tightening of the
structures of domination and domestic repression producing in their wake an intensification of the old arms race
and militarization of regimes, encouraging regional conflagrations and setting the stage for
eventual global holocaust.

Turns their impact the transition magnifies every flaw of capitalism

Gurbud 97 (Mark Avrum, Graduate Research Assistant Center for Superconductivity Research at the
University of Maryland, Nanotechnology and International Security,
http://www.foresight.org/Conferences/MNT05/Papers/Gubrud/)
With molecular manufacturing, international trade in both raw materials and finished goods can be replaced by decentralized
production for local consumption, using locally available materials. The decline of international trade will undermine a powerful source
of common interest. Further, artificial intelligence will displace skilled as well as unskilled labor. A world system based on wage labor,
transnational capitalism and global markets will necessarily give way. We imagine that a golden age is possible, but we dont know
how to organize one. As global capitalism retreats, it will leave behind a world dominated by politics,
and possibly feudal concentrations of wealth and power. Economic insecurity, and fears for the material and
moral future of humankind may lead to the rise of demagogic and intemperate national leaders. With almost two
hundred sovereign nations, each struggling to create a new economic and social order, perhaps the most predictable
outcome is chaos: shifting alignments, displaced populations, power struggles, ethnic conflicts
inflamed by demagogues, class conflicts, land disputes, etc. Small and underdeveloped nations will be more
than ever dependent on the major powers for access to technology, and more than ever
vulnerable to sophisticated forms of control or subversion, or to outright domination. Competition among
the leading technological powers for the political loyalty of clients might imply reversion to some form of nationalistic imperialism.