***Capitalism Kritik***

1NC – Generic

Federal infrastructure projects are situated within history as a tool to integrate both the nation and the world into the global capitalist order of the US – This create an imperial ideology that justifies the ruthless expansion of capital into foreign markets and causes short-termism causes environmental collapse

Smith ‘8 (Jason Scott, assistant professor of history at the University of New Mexico, "The New Deal Order," Enterprise and Society Vol. 9 Num 3 2008, Muse)

By using the lens of political economy to focus on the New Deal's public works spending, we can begin to see the outlines of a different interpretation. The huge amount of funds devoted to public construction, the far-reaching federal efforts invested in directing this money, and the long-run impact of the infrastructure itself form the components of the story of a public works revolution.9 This revolution helped justify the new role of the federal government in American life, legitimizing—intellectually and physically—what has come to be known as Keynesian management of the economy. By sponsoring this infrastructure, New Dealers remade the built environment that managed the movement of people, goods, electricity, water, and [End Page 524] waste. Among the New Deal's projects were some of the largest and most significant structures ever built in human history.10 These programs not only anticipated the national highways and the military-industrial complex; in the postwar period government-sponsored economic development also looked abroad. For example, Harry Truman's Point IV program was conceived of as an international PWA, building roads and airports in countries like Afghanistan and Vietnam. Similarly, Lyndon Johnson's vision of exporting Keynesian style economic development to Southeast Asia by replicating the Tennessee Valley Authority on the Mekong Delta reflected the powerful example set by the New Deal. After World War II, construction firms like Bechtel and Brown & Root (today a subsidiary of Halliburton) took their expertise overseas as well. The New Deal's public works programs employed millions of unemployed workers, both urban and rural, while building the infrastructure that helped integrate the disparate regions of the country into a national market. From the beginning, then, New Dealers built a state that was both far more powerful and substantially less liberal than historians have realized: more powerful, in the scale and scope of the federal government's commitment to economic development, and less liberal, in the sense that the New Deal state was focused on state-sponsored economic development, and not, in contrast, centrally occupied with tasks like implementing its social security program (which began making payments only in 1942), or with more radical goals, such as the direct redistribution of wealth through tax policy. By reinterpreting the New Deal in this way through a political economic lens, we gain a new history of just how the New Deal's public works programs contributed to American economic development. Public works also had important ramifications for state building and political party building at the federal, state, and local levels. Harry Hopkins, the head of the WPA, once claimed that the New Deal was a political project that could "tax and tax, spend and spend, and elect and elect." We now know this phrase's descendant, the derisive expression "tax and spend liberalism," but at the time Hopkins made his statement it was pure genius—he succinctly identified the qualities that made New Deal liberalism so powerful and controversial: The taxing and spending functions of government could—and [End Page 525] did—remake the physical landscape of the nation. Even more striking, though, was that through using the taxing and spending powers of the state, New Dealers were able to remake a society's politics.11 These accomplishments raise a central question: how do we evaluate New Deal liberalism when we attend to its political economy and place its public works programs at its core? The New Deal's public works programs reflect a number of achievements and shortcomings. These programs built the infrastructure that made a national market more efficient, spurred dramatic advances in economic productivity, created a network of roads and airports, planned for national highways, improved military bases, foreshadowed the rise of the Sunbelt, and gave the New Dealers a policy tool that could be used to shape overseas development, from the ColdWar through the Vietnam War. Faced with the Great Depression, the New Deal and its public works projects helped save capitalism, an achievement subsequently consolidated by enormous public spending during World War II and the ensuing postwar economic boom.12 Bound up with these triumphs, however, were many limitations. Most notable, of course, was the failure of the public works programs to bring an end to mass unemployment during the Great Depression. Those that the New Deal did manage to employ were white men, for the most part. This was hardly surprising, given their disproportionate presence in the building trades and construction industry, generally. Surely, the New Deal had a remarkable chance to address the crisis of unemployment among African-Americans and women. Yet, in basing so much of their public policy on the building of public works projects, New Dealers largely reinforced the gender and racial boundaries already evident in the labor market, bypassing the maternalist legacies of Progressive Era social policy.13 When we turn to the environment, the New Deal's shortcomings are likewise apparent. While architectural historians have generally [End Page 526] praised the New Deal for creating a more democratic landscape, environmental historians have strongly disagreed. From their perspective, the New Deal spent far too much money on roads and not enough on developing alternative mass transportation technologies. They charge that the New Deal's large hydroelectric projects promoted an imperialist view of resources, leaving nature to be exploited by a coercive, undemocratic power elite composed of technically minded engineers and narrow-minded bureaucrats. Developments such as the TVA displaced thousands of people, while the affordable electrical power generated by dams led only to increased pollution. The main achievement of the New Deal, in this view, is its role in creating an "asphalt nation." To be sure, the environmental damage caused by the New Deal's public works projects was real, if difficult to measure. But to blame New Dealers such as Harry Hopkins for not being mindful of the environment is to fail to recognize the historical impact of the New Deal's public works projects.14

The impact is extinction

Brown ‘5 (Charles, Professor of Economics and Research Scientist at the University of Michigan, 05/13/2005, http://archives.econ.utah.edu/archives/pen-l/2005w15/msg00062.htm)

The capitalist class owns the factories, the banks, and transportation-the means of production and distribution. Workers sell their ability to work in order to acquire the necessities of life. Capitalists buy the workers' labor, but only pay them back a portion of the wealth they create. Because the capitalists own the means of production, they are able to keep the surplus wealth created by workers above and beyond the cost of paying worker's wages and other costs of production. This surplus is called "profit" and consists of unpaid labor that the capitalists appropriate and use to achieve ever-greater profits. These profits are turned into capital which capitalists use to further exploit the producers of all wealth-the working class. Capitalists are compelled by competition to seek to maximize profits. The capitalist class as a whole can do that only by extracting a greater surplus from the unpaid labor of workers by increasing exploitation. Under capitalism, economic development happens only if it is profitable to the individual capitalists, not for any social need or good. The profit drive is inherent in capitalism, and underlies or exacerbates all major social ills of our times. With the rapid advance of technology and productivity, new forms of capitalist ownership have developed to maximize profit. The working people of our country confront serious, chronic problems because of capitalism. These chronic problems become part of the objective conditions that confront each new generation of working people. The threat of nuclear war, which can destroy all humanity, grows with the spread of nuclear weapons, space-based weaponry, and a military doctrine that justifies their use in preemptive wars and wars without end. Ever since the end of World War II, the U.S. has been constantly involved in aggressive military actions big and small. These wars have cost millions of lives and casualties, huge material losses, as well as trillions of U.S. taxpayer dollars. Threats to the environment continue to spiral, threatening all life on our planet. Millions of workers are unemployed or insecure in their jobs, even during economic upswings and periods of "recovery" from recessions. Most workers experience long years of stagnant real wages, while health and education costs soar. Many workers are forced to work second and third jobs to make ends meet. Most workers now average four different occupations during their lifetime, being involuntarily moved from job to job and career to career. Often, retirement-age workers are forced to continue working just to provide health care for themselves. With capitalist globalization, jobs move as capitalists export factories and even entire industries to other countries. Millions of people continuously live below the poverty level; many suffer homelessness and hunger. Public and private programs to alleviate poverty and hunger do not reach everyone, and are inadequate even for those they do reach. Racism remains the most potent weapon to divide working people. Institutionalized racism provides billions in extra profits for the capitalists every year due to the unequal pay racially oppressed workers receive for work of comparable value. All workers receive lower wages when racism succeeds in dividing and disorganizing them. In every aspect of economic and social life, African Americans, Latinos, Native Americans, Asian a nd Pacific Islanders, Arabs and Middle Eastern peoples, and other nationally and racially oppressed people experience conditions inferior to that of whites. Racist violence and the poison of racist ideas victimize all people of color no matter which economic class they belong to. The attempts to suppress and undercount the vote of the African American and other racially oppressed people are part of racism in the electoral process. Racism permeates the police, judicial and prison systems, perpetuating unequal sentencing, racial profiling, discriminatory enforcement, and police brutality. The democratic, civil and human rights of all working people are continually under attack. These attacks range from increasingly difficult procedures for union recognition and attempts to prevent full union participation in elections, to the absence of the right to strike for many public workers. They range from undercounting minority communities in the census to making it difficult for working people to run for office because of the domination of corporate campaign funding and the high cost of advertising. These attacks also include growing censorship and domination of the media by the ultra-right; growing restrictions and surveillance of activist social movements and the Left; open denial of basic rights to immigrants; and, violations of the Geneva Conventions up to and including torture for prisoners. These abuses all serve to maintain the grip of the capitalists on government power. They use this power to ensure the economic and political dominance of their class. Women still face a considerable differential in wages for work of equal or comparable value. They also confront barriers to promotion, physical and sexual abuse, continuing unequal workload in home and family life, and male supremacist ideology perpetuating unequal and often unsafe conditions. The constant attacks on social welfare programs severely impact single women, single mothers, nationally and racially oppressed women, and all working class women. The reproductive rights of all women are continually under attack ideologically and politically. Violence against women in the home and in society at large remains a shameful fact of life in the U.S.

Vote neg – the purpose of the debate should be envisioning a different relationship toward the knowledge capital produces – only by situating ourselves as intellectuals outside of state politics can solvency start – reformism is the link means the perm gets co-opted too

Meszaros 8 (Istvan, Chair of Philosophy at the University of Sussex, The Challenge and Burden of Historical Time, p323-328)

The unreality of postulation the sustainable solution of the grave problems of our social order within the formal and legal framework and corresponding constraints of parliamentary politics arises from the fundamental misconception of the structural determinations of capital’s rule, as represented in all varieties that assert the dualism of civil society and the political state. The difficulty, insurmountable within the parliamentary framework is this that since capital is actually in control of all vital aspects of the social metabolism, it can afford to define the separately constituted sphere of political legitimation as a strictly formal and legal matter, thereby necessarily excluding the possibility of being legitimately challenged in its substantive sphere of socioeconomic reproductive operation. Directly or indirectly, capital controls everything, including the parliamentary legislative process, even in the latter is supposed to be fully independent from capital in many theories that fictitiously hypostatize the “democratic equality” of all political forces participating in the legislative process. TO envisage a very different relationship to the powers of decision making in our societies, now completely dominated by the forces of capital in every domain, it is necessary to radically challenge capital itself as the overall controller of social metabolic reproduction. What makes this problem worse for all those who are looking for significant change on the margins of the established political system is that the later can claim for itself genuine constitutional legitimacy in its present mode of functioning, based on the historically constituted inversion of the actual state of the material reproductive affairs. For inasmuch as the capital is not only the “personification of capital” but simultaneously functions also “as the personification of the social character of labor, of the total workshop as such,” the system can claim to represent the vitally necessary productive power of society vis-à-vis the individuals as the basis of their continued existence, incorporating the interest of all. In this way capital asserts itself not only as the de facto but also the de jure power of society, in its capacity as the objectively given necessary condition of societal reproduction, and thereby as the constitutional foundation to its own political order. The fact that the constitutional legitimacy of capital is historically founded on the ruthless expropriation of the conditions of social metabolic reproduction- the means and material of labor-from the producers, and therefore capital’s claimed “constitutionality” (like the origin of all constitutions) is unconstitutional, is an unpalatable truth which fades away in the mist of a remote past. The “social productive powers of labor, or productive power or social labor, first develop historically with the specifically capitalist mode of production, hence appear as something immanent in the capital-relation and inseparable from it. This is how capital’s mode of social metabolic reproduction becomes eternalized and legitimated as a lawfully unchallengeable system. Legitimate contest is admissible only in relation to some minor aspects of the unalterable overall structure. The real state of affairs on thee plane of socioeconomic reproduction-i.e., the actually exercised productive power of labor and its absolute necessity for securing capital’s own reproduction- disappears from sight. Partly because of the ignorance of the very far from legitimate historical origin of capital’s “primitive accumulation” and the concomitant, frequently violent, expropriation of property as the precondition of the system’s present mode of functioning; and partly because of the mystifying nature of the established productive and distributive relations. As Marx notes: The objective conditions of labor do not appear as subsumed under the worker; rather, he appears as subsumed under them. Capital employs Labor. Even this relation is in its simplicity is a personification of things and a reification of persons. None of this can be challenged and remedied within the framework of parliamentary political reform. It would be quite absurd to expect the abolition of the “personification of things and the reification of persons” by political decree, and just as absurd to expect the proclamation of such an intended reform within the framework of capital’s political institutions. For the capital system cannot function without the perverse overturning of the relationship between persons and things: capital’s alienated and reified powers dominate the masses of the people. Similarly it would be a miracle if the workers who confront capital in the labor process as “isolated workers” could reacquire mastery over the social productive powers of their labor by some political decree, or even by a whole series of parliamentary reforms enacted under capital’s order of social metabolic control. For in these matters there can be no way of avoiding the irreconcilable conflict over the material stakes of “either/or” Capital can neither abdicate its-usurped-social productive powers in favor of labor, nor can I share them with labor, thanks to some wishful but utterly fictitious “political compromise.” For they constitute the overall controlling power of societal reproduction in the form of “the rule of wealth over society.” Thus it is impossible to escape, in the domain of the fundamental social metabolism, the severe logic of either/or. For either wealth, in the shape of capital, continues to rule over human society, taking it to the brink of self-destruction, or the society of associated producers learns to rule over alienated and reified wealth, with productive powers arising from the self-determinated social labor of its individual-but not longer isolated-members. Capital is the extra-parliamentary force par excellence. It cannot possibly be politically constrained by parliament in its power of social metabolic control. This is why the only mode of political representation compatible with capital’s mode of functioning is one that effectively denies the possibility of contesting its material power. And precisely because capital is the extra-parliamentary force par excellence, it has nothing to fear from the reforms that can be enacted within its parliamentary political framework. Since the vital issue on which everything else hinges is that “the objective conditions of labor do not appear as subsumed under the worker” buy, on the contrary, “he appears as subsumed under them,” no meaningful change is feasible without addressing the issue both in a form of politics capable of matching capital’s extra-parliamentary powers and modes of action, and in the domain of material reproduction. Thus the only challenge that could affect the power of capital, in a sustainable manner, is one which would simultaneously aim at assuming the system’s key productive functions, and at acquiring control over the corresponding political decision making processes in all spheres, instead of being hopelessly constrained by the circular confinement of institutionally legitimated political action to parliamentary legislation. There is a great deal of critique of formerly leftwing political figures and of their now fully accommodating parties in the political debates of the last decades. However, what is problematic about such debates is that by overemphasizing the role of personal ambition and failure, they often continue to envisage remedying the situation with in the same political institutional framework that, in fact, greatly favors the criticized “personal betrayals” and the painful “party derailments.” Unfortunately, though the advocated and hoped for personal and government changes tend to reproduce the same deplorable results. All this could not be very surprising. The reason why the now established political institutions successfully resist significant change for the better is because they are themselves part of the problem and not of the solution. For in their immanent nature they are the embodiment of the underlying structural determinations and contradictions through which the modern capitalist state- with its ubiquitous network of bureaucratic constituents- has been articulated and stabilized in the course of the last four hundred years. Naturally, the state was formed not as a one-sided mechanical result but through its necessary reciprocal interrelationship to the material ground of capital’s historical unfolding, as not only being shaped by the latter but also actively shaping it as much as historically feasible under the prevailing- and precisely through the interrelationship also changing- circumstances. Given the insuperably centrifugal determination of capital’s productive microcosms, even at the level of the giant quasi-monopolistic transnational corporations, only the modern state could assume and fulfill the required function of being the overall command structure of the capital system. Inevitably, that meant the complete alienation of the power of overall decision making from the producers. Even the “particular personifications of capital” were strictly mandated to act in accord with the structural imperatives of their system. Indeed the modern state, as constituted on the material ground of the capital system, is the paradigm of alienation as regards the power of comprehensive decision making. It would be therefore extremely naïve to imagine that the capitalist state could willingly hand over the alienated power of systemic decision making to any rival actor who operates within the legislative framework of parliament. Thus, in order to envisage a meaningful and historically sustainable societal change, it is necessary to submit to a radical critique both the material reproductive and the political inter-determinations of the entire system, and not simply some of the contingent and limited political practices. The combined totality of the material reproductive determinations and the all-embracing political command structure of the state together constitutes the overpowering reality of the capital system. In this sense, in view of the unavoidable question arising from the challenge of systemic determinations, with regard to both socioeconomic reproduction and the state, the need for a comprehensive political transformation-in close conjunction to the meaningful exercise of society’s vital productive functions without which far-reaching and lasting political change is inconceivable-becomes inseparable from the problem characterized as the wither away of the state. Accordingly, in the historic task of accomplishing “the withering away of the state,” self-management through full participation, and the permanently sustainable overcoming of parliamentarism by a positive form of substantive decision-making are inseparable. This is a vital concern and not “romantic faithfulness to Marx’s unrealizable dream,” as some people try to discredit and dismiss it. In truth, the “withering away of the state” refers to nothing mysterious or remote but to a perfectly tangible process that must be initiated right in our own historical time. It means, in plain language, the progressive reacquisition of the alienated power of political decision making by the individuals in their enterprise of moving toward a genuine socialist society. Without the reacquisition of this power- to which not only the capitalist state but also the paralyzing inertia of the structurally well-entrenched material reproductive practices are fundamentally opposed- neither the new mode of political control of society as a whole by its individuals is conceivable, nor indeed the nonadversarial and thereby cohesive and plannable everyday operation of the particular productive and distributive units by the self-managing freely associated producers. Radically superseding adversariality, and thereby securing the material and political ground of globally viable planning- an absolute must for the very survival of humanity, not to mention the potentially enriched self realization- of its individual members- its synonymous with the withering away of the state as an ongoing historical enterprise.

***Topic Links***

Generic Topic Links

Infrastructure projects are enablers of consumption that produce inequality – the role of the ballot should be envisioning new ways of relating to political ideology in order to shift to a more sustainable form of market development

Connolly 12 (William E, Krieger-Eisenhower Professor at Johns Hopkins University where he teaches political theory, "Steps toward an Ecology of Late Capitalism," Theory and Event Vol. 15 Issue 1, 2012, Muse)

 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, and social movements to reconstitute the state/market supported infrastructure of consumption. By the infrastructure of consumption I mean state support for market subsystems such as a national highway system, a system of airports, medical care through private insurance, etc., etc., that enable some modes of consumption in the zones of travel, education, diet, retirement, medical care, energy use, health, and education and render others more difficult or expensive to procure.21 To shift several of these in the correct direction would already reduce extant inequalities. To change the infrastructure is also to affect the types of work and investment available. Social movements that work upon the infrastructure and ethos in tandem can make a real difference directly, encourage more people to extend their critical perspectives, and thereby open more people to a militant politics if and as a new disruptive event emerges. Perhaps a cross-state citizen goal should be to construct a pluralist assemblage by moving back and forth between shifts in role performance, revisions in political ideology, and adjustments in political sensibility, doing so to generate enough collective energy to launch a general strike simultaneously in several countries in the near future. Its aim would be to reduce inequality and 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 aspects of nature as we speed up shifts in identity, role performance, cultural ethos, market regulation, and citizen activism.

Federal infrastructure projects are situated within history as a tool to integrate both the nation and the world into the global capitalist order of the US – This create an imperial ideology that justifies the ruthless expansion of capital into foreign markets and causes short-termism causes environmental collapse

Smith 8 (Jason Scott, assistant professor of history at the University of New Mexico, "The New Deal Order," Enterprise and Society Vol. 9 Num 3 2008, Muse)

By using the lens of political economy to focus on the New Deal's public works spending, we can begin to see the outlines of a different interpretation. The huge amount of funds devoted to public construction, the far-reaching federal efforts invested in directing this money, and the long-run impact of the infrastructure itself form the components of the story of a public works revolution.9 This revolution helped justify the new role of the federal government in American life, legitimizing—intellectually and physically—what has come to be known as Keynesian management of the economy. By sponsoring this infrastructure, New Dealers remade the built environment that managed the movement of people, goods, electricity, water, and [End Page 524] waste. Among the New Deal's projects were some of the largest and most significant structures ever built in human history.10 These programs not only anticipated the national highways and the military-industrial complex; in the postwar period government-sponsored economic development also looked abroad. For example, Harry Truman's Point IV program was conceived of as an international PWA, building roads and airports in countries like Afghanistan and Vietnam. Similarly, Lyndon Johnson's vision of exporting Keynesian style economic development to Southeast Asia by replicating the Tennessee Valley Authority on the Mekong Delta reflected the powerful example set by the New Deal. After World War II, construction firms like Bechtel and Brown & Root (today a subsidiary of Halliburton) took their expertise overseas as well. The New Deal's public works programs employed millions of unemployed workers, both urban and rural, while building the infrastructure that helped integrate the disparate regions of the country into a national market. From the beginning, then, New Dealers built a state that was both far more powerful and substantially less liberal than historians have realized: more powerful, in the scale and scope of the federal government's commitment to economic development, and less liberal, in the sense that the New Deal state was focused on state-sponsored economic development, and not, in contrast, centrally occupied with tasks like implementing its social security program (which began making payments only in 1942), or with more radical goals, such as the direct redistribution of wealth through tax policy. By reinterpreting the New Deal in this way through a political economic lens, we gain a new history of just how the New Deal's public works programs contributed to American economic development. Public works also had important ramifications for state building and political party building at the federal, state, and local levels. Harry Hopkins, the head of the WPA, once claimed that the New Deal was a political project that could "tax and tax, spend and spend, and elect and elect." We now know this phrase's descendant, the derisive expression "tax and spend liberalism," but at the time Hopkins made his statement it was pure genius—he succinctly identified the qualities that made New Deal liberalism so powerful and controversial: The taxing and spending functions of government could—and [End Page 525] did—remake the physical landscape of the nation. Even more striking, though, was that through using the taxing and spending powers of the state, New Dealers were able to remake a society's politics.11 These accomplishments raise a central question: how do we evaluate New Deal liberalism when we attend to its political economy and place its public works programs at its core? The New Deal's public works programs reflect a number of achievements and shortcomings. These programs built the infrastructure that made a national market more efficient, spurred dramatic advances in economic productivity, created a network of roads and airports, planned for national highways, improved military bases, foreshadowed the rise of the Sunbelt, and gave the New Dealers a policy tool that could be used to shape overseas development, from the ColdWar through the Vietnam War. Faced with the Great Depression, the New Deal and its public works projects helped save capitalism, an achievement subsequently consolidated by enormous public spending during World War II and the ensuing postwar economic boom.12 Bound up with these triumphs, however, were many limitations. Most notable, of course, was the failure of the public works programs to bring an end to mass unemployment during the Great Depression. Those that the New Deal did manage to employ were white men, for the most part. This was hardly surprising, given their disproportionate presence in the building trades and construction industry, generally. Surely, the New Deal had a remarkable chance to address the crisis of unemployment among African-Americans and women. Yet, in basing so much of their public policy on the building of public works projects, New Dealers largely reinforced the gender and racial boundaries already evident in the labor market, bypassing the maternalist legacies of Progressive Era social policy.13 When we turn to the environment, the New Deal's shortcomings are likewise apparent. While architectural historians have generally [End Page 526] praised the New Deal for creating a more democratic landscape, environmental historians have strongly disagreed. From their perspective, the New Deal spent far too much money on roads and not enough on developing alternative mass transportation technologies. They charge that the New Deal's large hydroelectric projects promoted an imperialist view of resources, leaving nature to be exploited by a coercive, undemocratic power elite composed of technically minded engineers and narrow-minded bureaucrats. Developments such as the TVA displaced thousands of people, while the affordable electrical power generated by dams led only to increased pollution. The main achievement of the New Deal, in this view, is its role in creating an "asphalt nation." To be sure, the environmental damage caused by the New Deal's public works projects was real, if difficult to measure. But to blame New Dealers such as Harry Hopkins for not being mindful of the environment is to fail to recognize the historical impact of the New Deal's public works projects.14

Topic Links – Railroads

Railroad infrastructure hollows out the national economy for the domestic work force – this sets into motion a cannibalism of labor that turns case

Fraser 12 (Steve,writer and historian @ Columbia "More than Greed," Dissent Vol 59 Num 1 2012, Muse,

Why? Maybe that decision stems from Madrick’s aversion to thinking of the crisis as systemic and to a related faith in the Democratic Party as the repository of the New Deal version of capitalism, a version many progressives would like to restore. But the New Deal not only civilized a broken-down economic system, it also sought successfully to extend the reach of the capitalist marketplace and credit networks not abolish them. It created the political and institutional foundations of mass consumption capitalism. Those foundations eventually crumbled as domestic opportunities for profitable enough capital accumulation grew scarce, a process that in turn exerted a relentless downward pressure on labor costs and the social wage. That is to say, in an increasingly fierce struggle to compete with lower cost foreign producers, American business began to undermine the foundations of “effective demand” among ordinary working people that had kept the system upright for so long. It set in motion a perverse dynamic of disaccumulation or what might be called the auto-cannibalism of an economy eating itself alive. The most developed economy in the world began a process of underdevelopment. Its infrastructure—road, bridges, tunnels, railroads, waterworks, dams, airports, electrical grids—were allowed to decay. The industrial core of the economy was hollowed out by precisely those “financial engineers” Madrick writes [End Page 103] about. Deindustrialization signaled that the old system had broken down. This became a long, secular crisis. Gradually and then at an accelerated rate, it elicited one overriding response; namely, to leverage everything in sight. Everything in this case included capital assets that produced debt-based asset bubbles in stocks or housing or other securities and commodities that provided a kind of “privatized Keynesian” stimulus package for elite financial institutions. Meanwhile, below, a working population found itself drowning in a sea of usurious credit.

Topic Links – Highways

Highway infrastructure enables the economic integration of all aspects of the US – this ensured the atrophy of rural societies and shaped the economic ideologies of American capitalism

Hamilton 6 (Shane, assistant professor of history at the University of Georgia, "Trucking Country: Food Politics and the Transformation of Rural Life in Postwar America," Trucking Country: Food Politics and the Transformation of Rural Life in Postwar America, Muse)

By showing how trucking reconfigured the technological, political, and cultural relationships between rural producers and urban consumers from the 1930s to the 1970s, my dissertation reveals the rural roots of a radical transformation of American capitalism in the midtwentieth century. Highway transportation provided the infrastructure for a transition from the New Deal–era political economy—based on centralized political authority, a highly regulated economy, and collective social values—to a post–New Deal capitalist culture marked by widespread antistatism, minimal market regulation, and fierce individualism. From the 1930s to the late 1970s, consumer demand for low-priced food, coupled with farmers' demands for high commodity prices, prompted the federal government to encourage agribusinesses to use long-haul trucks, piloted by fiercely independent "truck drivin' men," to privatize the politics of food. Western meatpackers and other agribusinesses were determined to shred government regulations and labor unions in the name of "free enterprise," low wages, and irresistibly low consumer prices for goods such as well-marbled steaks, jugs of milk, and frozen orange juice. The post–World War II highway-based food economy began unraveling the social fabric of rural America for the sake of low [End Page 666] consumer prices—long before Wal-Mart became infamous for said strategy.1 Trucks, I contend, were political technologies, used to define the contours of public policy regarding foods and farmers; at the same time, trucks as technologies shaped the economic and social structures underlying those political debates. In doing so, long-haul trucking in the rural countryside set the pace for the low-price, low-wage, "free-market" economic ideologies of late twentieth-century American capitalism.

Topic Links – Airports

The airport is a symbol of global economic competition – it depoliticizes the state and erases material differences between consumers

Mead 96 (Walter Russell, “Trains, Planes, and Automobiles: The End of the Postmodern Moment,” World Policy Journal , Vol. 12, No. 4 (Winter, 1995/1996), pp. 13-31, JSTOR)

The airport is a kind of bubble of discontinuity in the social and geographical landscape of the modern city. Travelers from every corner of the earth stream in and out, travelers with cultural assumptions and purposes that bear no necessary relation to those of their fellow passengers. The Japanese businessman stands next to the Nigerian immigrant at the bar; the German tourist brushes past a bewildered family of what flight attendants call "Clampetts," first-time flyers from the boondocks attracted by low-cost fares. The airport, like the world we live in, is a confusing place. The tens of thousands of passengers and crew passing through its corridors seem to have nothing in common, but for airports to work, workers and passengers alike must understand and adhere to a complicated combination of regulations and etiquette. Cutthroat competition between airlines coexists with common adherence to traffic and safety regulations without which airport operations would not be possible. The international airport is both an agent and a symbol of the new global economy that is eclipsing the nation-state, but from passport and customs control to air traffic control and international aviation agreements, the airport is one of the places in our society where the nation-state's power is most keenly felt. The airport is also a symbol of man's triumph over the forces of nature, but as most travelers can attest, not even farmers are as painfully exposed to the vagaries of weather as those who seek to travel by air. The best one- word description of an air-port is a term used by French philosopher Michel Foucault: heterotopia. Utopia is a place where everything is good; dystopia is a place where everything is bad; heterotopia is where things are different - that is, a collection whose members have few or no intelligible connections with one another. This, increasingly, is what contemporary ob-servers perceive our world to have become; to feel this perception is to enter the post-modern world.

***Other Links

Links – Terrorism

Policy to prevent terrorism obscures the role global capital has in both carrying out imperial policies as well as mystifying the role the US plays in constructing danger

Slavoj Zizek, Professor of Sociology at the Institute for Sociology, Ljubljana University, 2002, Revolution at the Gates, p. 234-36

Along the same lines, Rightist commentators like George Will also immediately proclaimed the end of the American “holiday from history” —the impact of reality shattering the isolated tower of the liberal tolerant attitude and the Cultural Studies focus on textuality. Now, we are forced to strike back, to deal with real enemies in the real world. . . . Whom, however, do we strike at? Whatever the response, it will never hit the right target, bringing us full satisfaction. The ridicule of America attacking Afghanistan cannot fail to strike us: if the greatest power in the world destroys one of the world’s poorest countries, in which peasants barely survive on barren hills, will this not be the ultimate case of impotent acting out? In many ways Afghanistan is an ideal target: a country that is already reduced to rubble, with no infrastructure, repeatedly destroyed by war for the last two decades ... we cannot avoid the surmise that the choice of Afghanistan will also be determined by economic considerations: is it not best procedure to act out one’s anger at a country for which no one cares, and where there is nothing to destroy? Unfortunately, the choice of Afghanistan recalls the anecdote about the madman who searches for a lost key beneath a streetlamp; asked why there, when he lost the key in a dark corner somewhere, he answers: “But it’s easier to search under strong light!” Is it not the ultimate irony that the whole of Kabul already looks like downtown Manhattan? To succumb to the urge to act and retaliate means precisely to avoid confronting the true dimensions of what occurred on 11 September — it means an act whose true aim is to lull us into the secure conviction that nothing has really changed. The true long-term threats are further acts of mass terror in comparison with which the memory of the WTC collapse will pale — acts that are less spectacular, but much more horrifying. What about bacteriological warfare, what about the use of lethal gas, what about the prospect of DNA terrorism (developing poisons which will affect only people who share a determinate genome)? In this new warfare, the agents claim their acts less and less publicly: not only are “terrorists” themselves no longer eager to claim responsibility for their acts (even the notorious Al Qaida did not explicitly appropriate the 11 September attacks, not to mention the mystery about the origins of the anthrax letters); “antiterrorist” state measures themselves are draped in a shroud of secrecy; all this constitutes an ideal breeding ground for conspiracy theories and generalized social paranoia. And is not the obverse of this paranoiac omnipresence of the invisible war its desubstantialization? So, again, just as we drink beer without alcohol or coffee without caffeine, we are now getting war deprived of its substance — a virtual war fought behind computer screens, a war experienced by its participants as a video game, a war with no casualties (on our side, at least). With the spread of the anthrax panic in October 2001, the West got the first taste of this new “invisible” warfare in which — an aspect we should always bear in mind — we, ordinary citizens, are, with regard to information about what is going on, totally at the mercy of the authorities: we see and hear nothing; all we know comes from the official media. A superpower bombing a desolate desert country and, at the same time, hostage to invisible bacteria — this, not the WTC explosions, is the first image of twenty-first-century warfare. Instead of a quick acting-out, we should confront these difficult questions: what will “war” mean in the twenty-first century? Who will “they” be, if they are, clearly, neither states nor criminal gangs? Here I cannot resist the temptation to recall the Freudian opposition of the public Law and its obscene superego double: along the same lines, are not “international terrorist organizations” the obscene double of the big multinational corporations — the ultimate rhizomatic machine, omnipresent, yet with no clear territorial base? Are they not the form in which nationalist and/or religious “fundamentalism” accommodated itself to global capitalism? Do they not embody the ultimate contradiction, with their particular! exclusive content and their global dynamic functioning? For this reason, the fashionable notion of the “clash of civilizations” must be thoroughly rejected: what we are witnessing today, rather, are clashes within each civilization. A brief look at the comparative history of Islam and Christianity tells us that the “human rights record” of Islam (to use an anachronistic term) is much better than that of Christianity: in past centuries, Islam was significantly more tolerant towards other religions than Christianity. It is also time to remember that it was through the Arabs that, in the Middle Ages, we in Western Europe regained access to our Ancient Greek legacy. While I do not in any way excuse today’s horrific acts, these facts none the less clearly demonstrate that we are dealing not with a feature inscribed into Islam “as such”, but with the outcome of modern sociopolitical conditions. If we look more closely, what is this “clash of civilizations” really about? Are not all real-life “clashes” clearly related to global capitalism? The Muslim “fundamentalist” target is not only global capitalism’s corrosive impact on social life, but also the corrupt “traditionalist” regimes in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and so on. The most horrifying slaughters (those in Rwanda, Congo, and Sierra Leone) not only took place — and are taking place — within the same “civilization”, but are also clearly related to the interplay of global economic interests. Even in the few cases which would vaguely fit the definition of the “clash of civilisations” (Bosnia and Kosovo, southern Sudan, etc.), the shadow of other interests is easily discernible. A suitable dose of “economic reductionism” would therefore be appropriate here: instead of the endless analyses of how Islamic “fundamentalism” is intolerant towards our liberal societies, and other “clash-of-civilization” topics, we should refocus our attention on the economic background of the conflict — the clash of economic interests, and of the geopolitical interests of the United States itself (how to retain privileged links both with Israel and with conservative Arab regimes like those of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait).

Links – China

The China threat is a manifestation of a structural issue with capital – commodification leads to antagonistic excess that we cannot deal with – this produces a form of scholarship based upon fear politics which allows capital to subtly operate

Slavoj Zizek, researcher in sociology at the university of Ljubljana, The Ticklish Subject: The absent centre of political ontology, 1999, pg. 353-359

The big news of today’s post-political age of the ‘end of ideology’ is thus the radical depoliticization of the sphere of the economy: the way the economy functions (the need to cut social welfare, etc.) is accepted as a simple insight into the objective state of things. However, as long as this fundamental depoliticization of the economic sphere is accepted, all the talk about active citizenship, about public discussion leading to responsible collective decisions, and so on, will remain limited to the ‘cultural’ issues of religious, sexual, ethnic and other way-of-life differences, without actually encroaching upon the level at which long-term decisions that affect us all are made. In short, the only way effectively to bring about a society in which risky long-term decisions would ensue from public debate involving all concerned is some kind of radical limitation of Capital’s freedom, the subordination of the process of production to social control — the radical repoliticization of the economy. That is to say: if the problem with today’s post-politics (‘administration of social affairs’) is that it increasingly undermines the possibility of a proper political act, this undermining is directly due to the depoliticization of economics, to the common acceptance of Capital and market mechanisms as neutral tools/ procedures to be exploited. We can now see why today’s post-politics cannot attain the properly political dimension of universality: because it silently precludes the sphere of economy from politicization. The domain of global capitalist market relations is the Other Scene of the so-called repoliticization of civil society advocated by the partisans of ‘identity politics’ and other postmodern forms of politicization: all the talk about new forms of politics bursting out all over, focused on particular issues (gay rights, ecology, ethnic minorities...), all this incessant activity of fluid, shifting identities, of building multiple ad hoc coalitions, and so on, has something inauthentic about it, and ultimately resembles the obsessional neurotic who talks all the time and is otherwise frantically active precisely in order to ensure that something — what really matters — will not be disturbed, that it will remain immobilized.35 So, instead of celebrating the new freedoms and responsibilities brought about by the ‘second modernity’, it is much more crucial to focus on what remains the same in this global fluidity and reflexivity, on what serves as the very motor of this fluidity: the inexorable logic of Capital. The spectral presence of Capital is the figure of the big Other which not only remains operative when all the traditional embodiments of the symbolic big Other disintegrate, but even directly causes this disintegration: far from being confronted with the abyss of their freedom — that is, laden with the burden of responsibility that cannot be alleviated by the helping hand of Tradition or Nature — today’s subject is perhaps more than ever caught in an inexorable compulsion that effectively runs his life. The irony of history is that, in the Eastern European ex-Communist countries, the ‘reformed’ Communists were the first to learn this lesson. Why did many of them return to power via free elections in the mid 1990s? This very return offers the ultimate proof that these states have in fact entered capitalism. That is to say: what do ex-Communists stand for today? Due to their privileged links with the newly emerging capitalists (mostly members of the old nomenklatura ‘privatizing’ the companies they once ran), they are first and foremost the party of big Capital; furthermore, to erase the traces of their brief but none the less rather traumatic experience with politically active civil society, they as a rule ferociously advocate a quick deideologization, a retreat from active civil society engagement into passive, apolitical consumerism — the very two features which characterize contemporary capitalism. So dissidents are astonished to discover that they played the role of ‘vanishing mediators’ on the way from socialism to capitalism, in which the same class as before rules under a new guise. It is therefore wrong to claim that the ex-Communists’ return to power shows how people are disappointed by capitalism and long for the old socialist security — in a kind of Hegelian ‘negation of negation’, it is only with the ex-Communists’ return to power that socialism was effectively negated — that is to say, what the political analysts (mis)perceive as ‘disappointment with capitalism’ is in fact disappointment with the ethico-political enthusiasm for which there is no place in ‘normal’ capitalism.36 We should thus reassert the old Marxist critique of ‘reification’: today, emphasizing the depoliticized ‘objective’ economic logic against allegedly ‘outdated’ forms of ideological passions is the predominant ideological form, since ideology is always self-referential, that is, it always defines itself through a distance towards an Other dismissed and denounced as ‘ideological’.~~ For that precise reason — because the depoliticized economy is the disavowed fundamental fantasy’ of postmodern politics — a properly political act would necessarily entail the repoliticization of the economy: within a given situation, a gesture counts as an act only in so far as it disturbs (‘traverses’) its fundamental fantasy. In so far as today’s moderate Left, from Blair to Clinton, fully accepts this depoliticization, we are witnessing a strange reversal of roles: the only serious political force which continues to question the unrestrained rule of the market is the populist extreme Right (Buchanan in the USA; Le Pen in France). ‘When Wall Street reacted negatively to a fall in the unemployment rate, the only one to make the obvious point that what is good for Capital is obviously not what is good for the majority of the population was Buchanan. In contrast to the old wisdom according to which the extreme Right openly says what the moderate Right secretly thinks, but doesn’t dare say in public (the open assertion of racism, of the need for strong authority and the cultural hegemony of ‘Western values’, etc.), we are therefore approaching a situation in which the extreme Right openly says what the moderate Left secretly thinks, but doesn’t dare say in public (the necessity to curb the freedom of Capital). One should also not forget that today’s rightist survivalist militias often look like a caricaturized version of the extreme militant leftist splinter groups of the l960s: in both cases we are dealing with radical anti-institutional logic — that is, the ultimate enemy is the repressive State apparatus (the FBI, the Army, the judicial system) which threatens the group’s very survival, and the group is organized as a tight disciplined body in order to be able to withstand this pressure. The exact counterpoint to this is a Leftist like Pierre Bourdieu, who defends the idea of a unified Europe as a strong ‘social state’, guaranteeing the minimum of social rights and welfare against the onslaught of globalization: it is difficult to abstain from irony when one sees a radical Leftist raising barriers against the corrosive global power of Capital, so fervently celebrated by Marx. So, again, it is as if the roles are reversed today: Leftists support a strong State as the last guarantee of social and civil liberties against Capital; while Rightists demonize the State and its apparatuses as the ultimate terrorist machine. Of course, one should fully acknowledge the tremendous liberating impact of the postmodern politicization of domains which were hitherto considered apolitical (feminism, gay and lesbian politics, ecology, ethnic and other so-called minority issues): the fact that these issues not only became perceived as inherently political but also gave birth to new forms of political subjectivization thoroughly reshaped our entire political and cultural landscape. So the point is not to play down this tremendous advance in favour of the return to some new version of so-called economic essentialism; the point is, rather, that the depoliticization of the economy generates the populist New Right with its Moral Majority ideology, which today is the main obstacle to the realization of the very (feminist, ecological...) demands on which postmodern forms of political subjectivization focus. In short, I am pleading for a ‘return to the primacy of the economy’ not to the detriment of the issues raised by postmodern forms of politicization, but precisely in order to create the conditions for the more effective realization of feminist, ecological, and so on, demands. A further indicator of the necessity for some kind of politicization of the economy is the overtly ‘irrational’ prospect of concentrating quasi-monopolistic power in the hands of a single individual or corporation, like Rupert Murdoch or Bill Gates. If the next decade brings the unification of the multitude of communicative media in a single apparatus reuniting the features of interactive computer, TV, video- and audio-phone, video and CD player, and if Microsoft actually succeeds in becoming the quasi-monopolistic owner of this new universal medium, controlling not only the language used in it but also the conditions of its application, then we obviously approach the absurd situation in which a single agent, exempt from public control, will in effect dominate the basic communicational structure of our lives and will thus, in a way, be stronger than any government. This opens up the prospect of paranoiac scenarios: since the digital language we shall all use will none the less be man-made, constructed by programmers, is it not possible to imagine the corporation that owns it ins.talling in it some special secret program ingredient which will enable it to control us, or a virus which the corporation can trigger, and thus bring our communication to a halt? When biogenetic corporations assert their ownership of our genes through patenting them, they also give rise to a similar paradox of owning the innermost parts of our body, so that we are already owned by a corporation without even being aware of it. The prospect we are confronting is thus that both the communicational network we use and the genetic language we are made of will be owned and controlled by corporations (or even a corporation) out of public control. Again, does not the very absurdity of this prospect — the private control of the very public base of our communication and reproduction, the very network of our social being — impose a kind of socialization as the only solution? In other words, is not the impact of the so-called information revolution on capitalism the ultimate exemplification of the old Marxian thesis that ‘at a certain stage of their development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production, or — what is but a legal expression of the same thing — with the property relations within which they have been at work hitherto’?3~ Do not the two phenomena we have mentioned (the unpredictable global consequences of decisions made by private companies; the patent absurdity of owning’ a person’s genome or the media individuals use for communication), to which one should add at least the antagonism contained in the notion of owning (scientific) knowledge (since knowledge is by nature neutral to its propagation, that is, it is not worn out by its spread and universal use), explain why today’s capitalism has to resort to more and more absurd strategies to sustain the economy of scarcity in the sphere of information, and thus to contain within the frame of private property and market relations the demon it has unleashed (say, by inventing ever new modes of preventing the free copying of digitalized information)? In short, does not the prospect of the informational ‘global village’ signal the end of market relations (which are by definition, based on the logic of scarcity), at least in the sphere of digitalized information? 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 Marx’s 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 Marx’s 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, doesn’t 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

Links – Oil Wars

US oil investment ensures militarization of foreign countries with resources – this results in violent conflicts and forced occupations

Michael T. Klare, professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College, October 9, 2004, online: http://www.countercurrents.org/peakoil-klare091004.htm, accessed March 13, 2005

American leaders have responded to this systemic challenge to stability in oil-producing areas in a consistent fashion: by employing military means to guarantee the unhindered flow of petroleum. This approach was first adopted by the Truman and Eisenhower administrations after World War II, when Soviet adventurism in Iran and pan-Arab upheavals in the Middle East seemed to threaten the safety of Persian Gulf oil deliveries. It was given formal expression by President Carter in January 1980, when, in response to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and the Islamic revolution in Iran, he announced that the secure flow of Persian Gulf oil was in "the vital interests of the United States of America," and that in protecting this interest we would use "any means necessary, including military force." Carter's principle of using force to protect the flow of oil was later cited by President Bush the elder to justify American intervention in the Persian Gulf War of 1990-91, and it provided the underlying strategic rationale for our recent invasion of Iraq. Originally, this policy was largely confined to the world's most important oil-producing region, the Persian Gulf. But given America's ever-growing requirement for imported petroleum, U.S. officials have begun to extend it to other major producing zones, including the Caspian Sea basin, Africa, and Latin America. The initial step in this direction was taken by President Clinton, who sought to exploit the energy potential of the Caspian basin and, worrying about instability in the area, established military ties with future suppliers, including Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan, and with the pivotal transit state of Georgia. It was Clinton who first championed the construction of a pipeline from Baku to Ceyhan and who initially took steps to protect that conduit by boosting the military capabilities of the countries involved. President Bush junior has built on this effort, increasing military aid to these states and deploying American combat advisers in Georgia; Bush is also considering the establishment of permanent U.S. military bases in the Caspian region. Typically, such moves are justified as being crucial to the "war on terror." A close reading of Pentagon and State Department documents shows, however, that anti-terrorism and the protection of oil supplies are closely related in administration thinking. When requesting funds in 2004 to establish a "rapid-reaction brigade" in Kazakhstan, for example, the State Department told Congress that such a force is needed to "enhance Kazakhstan's capability to respond to major terrorist threats to oil platforms" in the Caspian Sea. As noted, a very similar trajectory is now under way in Colombia. The American military presence in oil-producing areas of Africa, though less conspicuous, is growing rapidly. The Department of Defense has stepped up its arms deliveries to military forces in Angola and Nigeria, and is helping to train their officers and enlisted personnel; meanwhile, Pentagon officials have begun to look for permanent U.S. bases in the area, focusing on Senegal, Ghana, Mali, Uganda, and Kenya. Although these officials tend to talk only about terrorism when explaining the need for such facilities, one officer told Greg Jaffe of the Wall Street Journal in June 2003 that "a key mission for U.S. forces [in Africa] would be to ensure that Nigeria's oil fields, which in the future could account for as much as 25 percent of all U.S. oil imports, are secure." An increasing share of our naval forces is also being committed to the protection of foreign oil shipments. The Navy's Fifth Fleet, based at the island state of Bahrain, now spends much of its time patrolling the vital tanker lanes of the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz -- the narrow waterway connecting the Gulf to the Arabian Sea and the larger oceans beyond. The Navy has also beefed up its ability to protect vital sea lanes in the South China Sea -- the site of promising oil fields claimed by China, Vietnam, the Philippines, and Malaysia -- and in the Strait of Malacca, the critical sea-link between the Persian Gulf and America's allies in East Asia. Even Africa has come in for increased attention from the Navy. In order to increase the U.S. naval presence in waters adjoining Nigeria and other key producers, carrier battle groups assigned to the European Command (which controls the South Atlantic) will shorten their future visits to the Mediterranean "and spend half the time going down the west coast of Africa," the command's top officer, General James Jones, announced in May 2003. This, then, is the future of U.S. military involvement abroad. While anti-terrorism and traditional national security rhetoric will be employed to explain risky deployments abroad, a growing number of American soldiers and sailors will be committed to the protection of overseas oil fields, pipeline, refineries, and tanker routes. And because these facilities are likely to come under increasing attack from guerrillas and terrorists, the risk to American lives will grow accordingly. Inevitably, we will pay a higher price in blood for every additional gallon of oil we obtain from abroad.

Links – Competitiveness/Innovation

Competitiveness makes environment and econ collapse inev

Bristow 9 (Gillian, School of City & Regional Planning, Cardiff University, "Resilient regions: re-‘place’ing regional competitiveness," Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society 2010, 3, 153–167

In recent years, regional development strategies have been subjugated to the hegemonic discourse of competitiveness, such that the ultimate objective for all regional development policy-makers and practitioners has become the creation of economic advantage through superior productivity performance, or the attraction of new firms and labour (Bristow, 2005). A major consequence is the developing ‘ubiquitification’ of regional development strategies (Bristow, 2005; Maskell and Malmberg, 1999). This reflects the status of competitiveness as a key discursive construct (Jessop, 2008) that has acquired hugely significant rhetorical power for certain interests intent on reinforcing capitalist relations (Bristow, 2005; Fougner, 2006). Indeed, the competitiveness hegemony is such that many policies previously considered only indirectly relevant to unfettered economic growth tend to be hijacked in support of competitiveness agendas (for example Raco, 2008; also Dannestam, 2008). This paper will argue, however, that a particularly narrow discourse of ‘competitiveness’ has been constructed that has a number of negative connotations for the ‘resilience’ of regions. Resilience is defined as the region’s ability to experience positive economic success that is socially inclusive, works within environmental limits and which can ride global economic punches (Ashby et al., 2009). As such, resilience clearly resonates with literatures on sustainability, localisation and diversification, and the developing understanding of regions as intrinsically diverse entities with evolutionary and context-specific development trajectories (Hayter, 2004). In contrast, the dominant discourse of competitiveness is ‘placeless’ and increasingly associated with globalised, growth-first and environmentally malign agendas (Hudson, 2005). However, this paper will argue that the relationships between competitiveness and resilience are more complex than might at first appear. Using insights from the Cultural Political Economy (CPE) approach, which focuses on understanding the construction, development and spread of hegemonic policy discourses, the paper will argue that the dominant discourse of competitiveness used in regional development policy is narrowly constructed and is thus insensitive to contingencies of place and the more nuanced role of competition within economies. This leads to problems of resilience that can be partly overcome with the development of a more contextualised approach to competitiveness. The paper is now structured as follows. It begins by examining the developing understanding of resilience in the theorising and policy discourse around regional development. It then describes the CPE approach and utilises its framework to explain both how a narrow conception of competitiveness has come to dominate regional development policy and how resilience inter-plays in subtle and complex ways with competitiveness and its emerging critique. The paper then proceeds to illustrate what resilience means for regional development firstly, with reference to the Transition Towns concept, and then by developing a typology of regional strategies to show the different characteristics of policy approaches based on competitiveness and resilience. Regional resilience Resilience is rapidly emerging as an idea whose time has come in policy discourses around localities and regions, where it is developing widespread appeal owing to the peculiarly powerful combination of transformative pressures from below, and various catalytic, crisis-induced imperatives for change from above. It features strongly in policy discourses around environmental management and sustainable development (see Hudson, 2008a), but has also more recently emerged in relation to emergency and disaster planning with, for example ‘Regional Resilience Teams’ established in the English regions to support and co-ordinate civil protection activities around various emergency situations such as the threat of a swine flu pandemic. The discourse of resilience is also taking hold in discussions around desirable local and regional development activities and strategies. The recent global ‘credit crunch’ and the accompanying increase in livelihood insecurity has highlighted the advantages of those local and regional economies that have greater ‘resilience’ by virtue of being less dependent upon globally footloose activities, having greater economic diversity, and/or having a determination to prioritise and effect more significant structural change (Ashby et al, 2009; Larkin and Cooper, 2009). Indeed, resilience features particular strongly in the ‘grey’ literature spawned by thinktanks, consultancies and environmental interest groups around the consequences of the global recession, catastrophic climate change and the arrival of the era of peak oil for localities and regions with all its implications for the longevity of carbon-fuelled economies, cheap, long-distance transport and global trade. This popularly labelled ‘triple crunch’ (New Economics Foundation, 2008) has powerfully illuminated the potentially disastrous material consequences of the voracious growth imperative at the heart of neoliberalism and competitiveness, both in the form of resource constraints (especially food security) and in the inability of the current system to manage global financial and ecological sustainability. In so doing, it appears to be galvinising previously disparate, fractured debates about the merits of the current system, and challenging public and political opinion to develop a new, global concern with frugality, egalitarianism and localism (see, for example Jackson, 2009; New Economics Foundation, 2008).

Links – State

The state both makes capital a coherent mode of social interaction as well as constitutes the framework for global incorporation of capitalism

Meszaros 95 (Istavan, Prof. Emeritus @ U of Sussex, Beyond Capital: Towards a Theory of Transition, p 65)

The modern state as the comprehensive political command structure of capital — is both the necessary prerequisite for the transformation of capital’s at first fragmented units into a viable system, and the overall framework for the full articulation and maintenance of the latter as a global system. In this fundamental sense the state on account of its constitutive and permanently sustaining role must be understood as an integral part of capital’s material ground itself. Or it contributes in a substantive way not only to the formation and consolidation of all of the major reproductive structures of society but also to their continued functioning. However, the close interrelationship holds also when viewed from the other side. For the modern state itself is quite inconceivable without capital as its social metabolic foundation. This makes the material reproductive structures of the capital system the necessary condition not only for the original constitution but also for the continued survival (and appropriate historical transformations) of the modern state in all its dimensions. These reproductive structures extend their Impact over everything, from the strictly material/repressive instruments cid juridical institutions of the state all the way to the most mediated ideological and political theorizations of its raison d’être and claimed legitimacy. It is on account of this reciprocal determination that we must speak of a close match between the social metabolic ground of the capital system on the one hand, and the modern state as the totalizing political command structure of the established productive and reproductive order on the other. For socialists this is a most uncomfortable and challenging reciprocity. It puts into relief the sobering fact that any intervention in the political domain — even when it envisages the radical overthrow of the capitalist state — can have only a very limited impact in the realization of the socialist project. And the other way round, the corollary of the same sobering fact is that, precisely because socialists have to confront the power of capital’s self-sustaining reciprocity under its fundamental dimensions, it should be never forgotten or ignored - although the tragedy of seventy years (if Soviet experience is that it had been willfully ignored — that there can be no chance of overcoming the power of capital without remaining faithful to the Marxian concern with the ‘withering away’ of the state.

Links – Environment

Economic contradiction force short-term thinking that results in environmental catastrophe – this causes extinction

Foster, 11 (John B, “Capitalism and Degrowth-An Impossibility Theorem”, Monthly Review Vol. 62, Iss. 8; pg. 26, 8 pgs , January 2011, proquest)

In the opening paragraph to his 2009 book, Storms of My Grandchildren, James Hansen, the world's foremost scientific authority on global warming, declared: "Planet Earth, creation, the world in which civilization developed, the world with climate patterns that we know and stable shorelines, is in imminent peril . . . .The startling conclusion is that continued exploitation of all fossil fuels on Earth threatens not only the other millions of species on the planet but also the survival of humanity itself - and the timetable is shorter than we thought."1 In making this declaration, however, Hansen was only speaking of a part of the global environmental crisis currently threatening the planet, namely, climate change. Recently, leading scientists (including Hansen) have proposed nine planetary boundaries, which mark the safe operating space for the planet. Three of these boundaries (climate change, biodiversity, and the nitrogen cycle) have already been crossed, while others, such as fresh water use and ocean accidification, are emerging planetary rifts. In ecological terms, the economy has now grown to a scale and intrusiveness that is both overshooting planetary boundaries and tearing apart the biogeochemical cycles of the planet.2 Hence, almost four decades after the Club of Rome raised the issue of "the limits to growth," the economic growth idol of modern society is once again facing a formidable challenge.3 What is known as "degrowth economics," associated with the work of Serge Latouche in particular, emerged as a major European intellectual movement in 2008 with the historic conference in Paris on "Economic De-Growth for Ecological Sustainability and Social Equity," and has since inspired a revival of radical Green thought, as epitomized by the 2010 "Degrowth Declaration" in Barcelona. Ironically, the meteoric rise of degrowth (décroissance in French) as a concept has coincided over the last three years with the reappearance of economic crisis and stagnation on a scale not seen since the 1930s. The degrowth concept therefore forces us to confront the questions: Is degrowth feasible in a capitalist grow-or-die society - and if not, what does this say about the transition to a new society? According to the Web site of the European degrowth project, "degrowth carries the idea of a voluntary reduction of the size of the economic system which implies a reduction of the GDP."4 "Voluntary" here points to the emphasis on voluntaristic solutions - though not as individualistic and unplanned in the European conception as the "voluntary simplicity" movement in the United States, where individuals (usually well-to-do) simply choose to opt out of the high-consumption market model. For Latouche, the concept of "degrowth" signifies a major social change: a radical shift from growth as the main objective of the modern economy, toward its opposite (contraction, downshifting). An underlying premise of this movement is that, in the face of a planetary ecological emergency, the promise of green technology has proven false. This can be attributed to the Jevons Paradox, according to which greater efficiency in the use of energy and resources leads not to conservation but to greater economic growth, and hence more pressure on the environment.5 The unavoidable conclusion - associated with a wide variety of political-economic and environmental thinkers, not just those connected directly to the European degrowth project - is that there needs to be a drastic alteration in the economic trends operative since the Industrial Revolution. As Marxist economist Paul Sweezy put it more than two decades ago: "Since there is no way to increase the capacity of the environment to bear the [economic and population] burdens placed on it, it follows that the adjustment must come entirely from the other side of the equation. And since the disequilibrium has already reached dangerous proportions, it also follows that what is essential for success is a reversal, not merely a slowing down, of the underlying trends of the last few centuries."6 Given that wealthy countries are already characterized by ecological overshoot, it is becoming more and more apparent that there is indeed no alternative, as Sweezy emphasized, but a reversal in the demands placed on the environment by the economy. This is consistent with the argument of ecological economist Herman Daly, who has long insisted on the need for a steady-state economy. Daly traces this perspective to John Stuart Mill's famous discussion of the "stationary state" in his Principles of Political Economy, which argued that if economic expansion was to level off (as the classical economists expected), the economic goal of society could then shift to the qualitative aspects of existence, rather than mere quantitative expansion. A century after Mill, Lewis Mumford insisted in his Condition of Man, first published in 1944, that not only was a stationary state in Mill's sense ecologically necessary, but that it should also be linked to a concept of "basic communism . . . [that] applies to the whole community the standards of the household," distributing "benefits according to need" (a view that drew upon Marx). Today this recognition of the need to bring economic growth in overdeveloped economies to a halt, and even to shrink these economies, is seen as rooted theoretically in Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen's The Entropy Law and the Economic Process, which established the basis of modern ecological economics.7 Degrowth as such is not viewed, even by its proponents, as a stable solution, but one aimed at reducing the size of the economy to a level of output that can be maintained perpetually at a steady-state. This might mean shrinking the rich economies by as much as a third from today's levels by a process that would amount to negative investment (since not only would new net investment cease but also only some, not all, worn-out capital stock would be replaced). A steady-state economy, in contrast, would carry out replacement investment but would stop short of new net investment. As Daly defines it, "a steady-state economy" is "an economy with constant stocks of people and artifacts, maintained at some desired, sufficient levels by low rates of maintenance 'throughput,' that is, by the lowest feasible flows of matter and energy."8 Needless to say, none of this would come easily, given today's capitalist economy. In particular, Latouche's work, which can be viewed as exemplary of the European degrowth project, is beset with contradictions, resulting not from the concept of degrowth perse, but from his attempt to skirt the question of capitalism. This can be seen in his 2006 article, "The Globe Downshifted," where he argues in convoluted form: For some on the far left, the stock answer is that capitalism is the problem, leaving us stuck in a rut and powerless to move towards a better society. Is economic contraction compatible with capitalism? This is a key question, but one that it is important to answer without resort to dogma, if the real obstacles are to be understood .... Eco-compatible capitalism is conceivable in theory, but unrealistic in practice. Capitalism would require a high level of regulation to bring about the reduction of our ecological footprint. The market system, dominated by huge multinational corporations, will never set off down the virtuous path of eco-capitalism of its own accord .... Mechanisms for countering power with power, as existed under the Keynes-Fordist regulations of the Social-Democratic era, are conceivable and desirable. But the class struggle seems to have broken down. The problem is: capital won .... A society based on economic contraction cannot exist under capitalism. But capitalism is a deceptively simple word for a long, complex history. Getting rid of the capitalists and banning wage labour, currency and private ownership of the means of production would plunge society into chaos. It would bring large-scale terrorism. . ..We need to find another way out of development, economism (a belief in the primacy of economic causes and factors) and growth: one that does not mean forsaking the social institutions that have been annexed by the economy (currency, markets, even wages) but reframes them according to different principles.9

Links – Free Trade

Free trade is premised upon a biased ideology that forcibly integrates the world into the global economy – this causes wage differentials and stratifies the world along a global rich and poor divide

De Angelis, lecturer in Political Economy at University of East London, July 2000 [Massimo, Trade, the global factory and the struggles for new commons, Paper presented at the CSE conference "Global Capital and Global Struggles: Strategies, Alliances, and Alternatives"]

Let us be clear from the outset. There is no such as thing as "faire" trade liberalisation. To the billion of people in the global economy, trade liberalisation is part of the project to impose upon them the discipline of the global factory. This discipline is the competing game itself. Whether is Pakistan’s textiles that replaces Italian’ textile workers or a British telecommunication firm that make Thailand's telecom workers redundant, it is the game itself that sucks. Whatever gains some group of workers obtain due to their competitive advantage, some other group of workers loses out, until they themselves are forced to take notice of a new competitive force which came to displace them. And if we patently follow the economists’ advice to wait for the long-term positive effect of trade, we are left to wonder: isn’t it now the long term of 200 hundreds yeas ago, of 100 years ago, of 50, 40 years ago, of twenty years ago? The people who died as result of the new enclosures accompanying trade liberalisation in all these years, the people who suffered war as result of the disintegration of the social fabric brought about by structural adjustment and associated export promotion, the people of any country of the North has to run in the competing rat race no less, but even more than in the past, just to acquire what is on average necessary to live with dignity, the average people struggling to overcome an imposed condition of scarcity when in fact we live in plenty, can we say these people have benefited of the long term advantage of trade? Nonsense, nobody can make these sorts of judgements. Without a proper assessment of human, social and environmental costs of modern trade, one cannot even to start talking about long term or short term advantages of trade. Without taking into consideration the voice of those without voice the rhetoric of trade benefits is a bias rhetoric. If there is no way anybody can argue whether trade has brought advantages or disadvantages, the only thing we can say with certainty is that because of current patterns of trade the context in which our lives and struggles of today are located is different than the context of our lives and struggles of yesterday and, if trade liberalisation continues, of tomorrow. However, the recomposing factors of various movement in Seattle last November, can be summarised by the slogan “no new round, WTO turnaround.” With this slogan the movement sets against the boundlessness of capital’s accumulation, but there is more. “No new round”, all movements agree. "WTO turnaround”, here is the problem, because people start to ask and debate “where to?” The problem for us is to identify, in the context of the large movement emerged in Seattle and that has set a temporary limit to trade liberalisation, whether it is possible to start to promote a debate towards an independent position of planetary civil society, one that does not bow to the easy traps of the free trade ideology. To do so, we must open a debate on the contradictory nature of trade in this phase of capitalist accumulation, its meaning and implications for a diverse organisation of human and natural resources of the planet. To gain an independent position of planetary civil society, we must start to think about proposals of transformation of current society within a conceptual grid that is independent from the main current dogmas that sustain capital's discourse: competition and, especially, the meaning of growth. Behind these unqualified concepts, there lies the project of today’s capital’s strategies.

Links – Hegemony

US hegemony is sustained by imperial domination of the globe – this situates the US as the global economic superpower – the impact is nuclear omnicide and ecological collapse

Foster 5 (John, Professor of Sociology, University of Oregon; Editor, Monthly Review, http://www.monthlyreview.org/0905jbf.htm)

The unprecedented dangers of this new global disorder are revealed in the twin cataclysms to which the world is heading at present: nuclear proliferation and hence increased chances of the outbreak of nuclear war, and planetary ecological destruction. These are symbolized by the Bush administration’s refusal to sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty to limit nuclear weapons development and by its failure to sign the Kyoto Protocol as a first step in controlling global warming. As former U.S. Secretary of Defense (in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations) Robert McNamara stated in an article entitled “Apocalypse Soon” in the May–June 2005 issue of Foreign Policy: “The United States has never endorsed the policy of ‘no first use,’ not during my seven years as secretary or since. We have been and remain prepared to initiate the use of nuclear weapons—by the decision of one person, the president—against either a nuclear or nonnuclear enemy whenever we believe it is in our interest to do so.” The nation with the greatest conventional military force and the willingness to use it unilaterally to enlarge its global power is also the nation with the greatest nuclear force and the readiness to use it whenever it sees fit—setting the whole world on edge. The nation that contributes more to carbon dioxide emissions leading to global warming than any other (representing approximately a quarter of the world’s total) has become the greatest obstacle to addressing global warming and the world’s growing environmental problems—raising the possibility of the collapse of civilization itself if present trends continue. The United States is seeking to exercise sovereign authority over the planet during a time of widening global crisis: economic stagnation, increasing polarization between the global rich and the global poor, weakening U.S. economic hegemony, growing nuclear threats, and deepening ecological decline. The result is a heightening of international instability. Other potential forces are emerging in the world, such as the European Community and China, that could eventually challenge U.S. power, regionally and even globally. Third world revolutions, far from ceasing, are beginning to gain momentum again, symbolized by Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution under Hugo Chávez. U.S. attempts to tighten its imperial grip on the Middle East and its oil have had to cope with a fierce, seemingly unstoppable, Iraqi resistance, generating conditions of imperial overstretch. With the United States brandishing its nuclear arsenal and refusing to support international agreements on the control of such weapons, nuclear proliferation is continuing. New nations, such as North Korea, are entering or can be expected soon to enter the “nuclear club.” Terrorist blowback from imperialist wars in the third world is now a well-recognized reality, generating rising fear of further terrorist attacks in New York, London, and elsewhere. Such vast and overlapping historical contradictions, rooted in the combined and uneven development of the global capitalist economy along with the U.S. drive for planetary domination, foreshadow what is potentially the most dangerous period in the history of imperialism. The course on which U.S and world capitalism is now headed points to global barbarism—or worse. Yet it is important to remember that nothing in the development of human history is inevitable. There still remains an alternative path—the global struggle for a humane, egalitarian, democratic, and sustainable society.

Links – Prolif

Proliferation is the result of global inequities that force arms races as an expansion of capital accumulation

Callinicos, Director of the Centre for European Studies at King’s College, in ’04 [Alex, The Revolutionary Ideas of Karl Marx, 2004 pg. 196-197]

Capitalism has not changed its spots. It is still based on the exploitation of the working class, and liable to constant crises. The conclusion that Marx drew from this analysis, that the working class must overthrow the system and replace it with a classless society, is even more urgent now than in his day. For the military rivalries which are the form increasingly assumed by competition between capitals now threaten the very survival of the planet. As Marx’s centenary approached, the fires of war flickered across the globe—in Lebanon, Iran and Iraq, Kampuchea, southern Africa, the Horn of Africa, Afghanistan and the South Atlantic. The accumulation of vast armouries of nuclear destruction by the superpowers, missilerattling in the Kremlin, talk of ‘limited’ and ‘protracted’ nuclear war in Washington—these cast a shadow over the whole of humanity. Socialist revolution is an imperative if we are to change a world in the grip of economic depression and war fever, a world where 30 million rot on Western dole queues and 800 million go hungry in the Third World. To that extent, Marx’s ideas are more relevant today than they were 100 years ago. Capitalism has tightened its grip of iron on every portion of the planet since 1883, and is rotten-ripe for destruction, whether at its own hands through nuclear war, or at the hands of the working class. The choice is between workers’ power or the ‘common ruination of the contending classes’—between socialism or barbarism. Many people who genuinely wish to do something to remedy the present state of the world believe that this stress on the working class is much too narrow. The existence of nuclear weapons threatens everyone, whether workers or capitalists or whatever. Should not all classes be involved in remedying a problem which affects them all? What this ignores is that what Edward Thompson has called ‘exterminism’— the vast and competing military apparatuses which control the arms race—is an essential part of the working of capitalism today. No sane capitalist desires a nuclear war (although some insane ones who believe that such a war would be the prelude to the Second Coming now hold positions of influence in Washington). But sane or insane, every capitalist is part of an economic system which is bound up with military competition between nation-states. Only a class with the interest and power to do away with capitalism can halt the march to Armageddon. Marx always conceived of the working class as the class whose own selfemancipation would also be the liberation of the rest of humanity. The socialist revolution to whose cause he devoted his life can only be, at one and the same time, the emancipation of the working class and the liberation of all the oppressed and exploited sections of society.

Links – Democracy

Capitalism forces democratic priorities to concede to the interests of corporations that trades-off with genuine representation

Reich 7 (Robert, University of California Berkeley public policy professor and former U.S. secretary of Labor, “How capitalism is killing democracy”, September/October 2007, http://www.robertreich.org/reich/20070901.)

But citizens living in democratic nations aren’t similarly constrained. They have the ability to alter the rules of the game so that the cost to society need not be so great. And yet, we’ve increasingly left those responsibilities to the private sector—to the companies themselves and their squadrons of lobbyists and public-relations experts—pretending as if some inherent morality or corporate good citizenship will compel them to look out for the greater good. But they have no responsibility to address inequality or protect the environment on their own. We forget that they are simply duty bound to protect the bottom line. Why has capitalism succeeded while democracy has steadily weakened? Democracy has become enfeebled largely because companies, in intensifying competition for global consumers and investors, have invested ever greater sums in lobbying, public relations, and even bribes and kickbacks, seeking laws that give them a competitive advantage over their rivals. The result is an arms race for political influence that is drowning out the voices of average citizens. In the United States, for example, the fights that preoccupy Congress, those that consume weeks or months of congressional staff time, are typically contests between competing companies or industries. While corporations are increasingly writing their own rules, they are also being entrusted with a kind of social responsibility or morality. Politicians praise companies for acting “responsibly” or condemn them for not doing so. Yet the purpose of capitalism is to get great deals for consumers and investors. Corporate executives are not authorized by anyone—least of all by their investors—to balance profits against the public good. Nor do they have any expertise in making such moral calculations. Democracy is supposed to represent the public in drawing such lines. And the message that companies are moral beings with social responsibilities diverts public attention from the task of establishing such laws and rules in the first place. It is much the same with what passes for corporate charity. Under today’s intensely competitive form of global capitalism, companies donate money to good causes only to the extent the donation has public-relations value, thereby boosting the bottom line. But shareholders do not invest in firms expecting the money to be used for charitable purposes. They invest to earn high returns. Shareholders who wish to be charitable would, presumably, make donations to charities of their own choosing in amounts they decide for themselves. The larger danger is that these conspicuous displays of corporate beneficence hoodwink the public into believing corporations have charitable impulses that can be relied on in a pinch. By pretending that the economic success corporations enjoy saddles them with particular social duties only serves to distract the public from democracy’s responsibility to set the rules of the game and thereby protect the common good. The only way for the citizens in us to trump the consumers in us is through laws and rules that make our purchases and investments social choices as well as personal ones. A change in labor laws making it easier for employees to organize and negotiate better terms, for example, might increase the price of products and services. My inner consumer won’t like that very much, but the citizen in me might think it a fair price to pay. A small transfer tax on sales of stock, to slow the movement of capital ever so slightly, might give communities a bit more time to adapt to changing circumstances. The return on my retirement fund might go down by a small fraction, but the citizen in me thinks it worth the price. Extended unemployment insurance combined with wage insurance and job training could ease the pain for workers caught in the downdrafts of globalization. Let us be clear: The purpose of democracy is to accomplish ends we cannot achieve as individuals. But democracy cannot fulfill this role when companies use politics to advance or maintain their competitive standing, or when they appear to take on social responsibilities that they have no real capacity or authority to fulfill. That leaves societies unable to address the tradeoffs between economic growth and social problems such as job insecurity, widening inequality, and climate change. As a result, consumer and investor interests almost invariably trump common concerns. The vast majority of us are global consumers and, at least indirectly, global investors. In these roles we should strive for the best deals possible. That is how we participate in the global market economy. But those private benefits usually have social costs. And for those of us living in democracies, it is imperative to remember that we are also citizens who have it in our power to reduce these social costs, making the true price of the goods and services we purchase as low as possible. We can accomplish this larger feat only if we take our roles as citizens seriously. The first step, which is often the hardest, is to get our thinking straight.

Links – Race

Race and class are reproduced within capitalist relations – capitalism racializes subjects to force competition and divides social groups by obfuscating labor consciousness – this is a way to mask contradiction and maintain capital accumulation

San Juan 3 (E, Fullbright lecturer @ U of Leuven, Belgium, “Marxism and the Race/Class Problematic: A Re-Articulation”, http://clogic.eserver.org/2003/sanjuan.html)

It seems obvious that racism cannot be dissolved by instances of status mobility when sociohistorical circumstances change gradually or are transformed by unforeseen interventions. The black bourgeoisie continues to be harassed and stigmatized by liberal or multiculturalist practices of racism, not because they drive Porsches or conspicuously flaunt all the indices of wealth. Class exploitation cannot replace or stand for racism because it is the condition of possibility for it. It is what enables the racializing of selected markers, whether physiological or cultural, to maintain, deepen and reinforce alienation, mystifying reality by modes of commodification, fetishism, and reification characterizing the routine of quotidian life. Race and class are dialectically conjoined in the reproduction of capitalist relations of exploitation and domination. 30. We might take a passage from Marx as a source of guidelines for developing a historical-materialist theory of racism which is not empiricist but dialectical in aiming for theorizing conceptual concreteness as a multiplicity of historically informed and configured determinations. This passage comes from a letter dated 9 April 1870 to Meyer and Vogt in which Marx explains why the Irish struggle for autonomy was of crucial significance for the British proletariat: . . . Every industrial and commercial center 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 towards him 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 class maintains its power. And that class is fully aware of it (quoted in Callinicos 1993). Here Marx sketches three parameters for the sustained viability of racism in modern capitalist society. First, the economic competition among workers is dictated by the distribution of labor power in the labor-market via differential wage rates. The distinction between skilled and unskilled labor is contextualized in differing national origins, languages and traditions of workers, which can be manipulated into racial antagonisms. Second, the appeal of racist ideology to white workers, with their identification as members of the "ruling nation" affording--in W.E.B. DuBois's words--"public and psychological wage" or compensation. Like religion, white-supremacist nationalism provides the illusory resolution to the real contradictions of life for the working majority of citizens. Third, the ruling class reinforces and maintains these racial divisions for the sake of capital accumulation within the framework of its ideological/political hegemony in the metropolis and worldwide. 31. Racism and nationalism are thus modalities in which class struggles articulate themselves at strategic points in history. No doubt social conflicts in recent times have involved not only classes but also national, ethnic, and religious groups, as well as feminist, ecological, antinuclear social movements (Bottomore 1983). The concept of "internal colonialism" (popular in the seventies) that subjugates national minorities, as well as the principle of self-determination for oppressed or "submerged" nations espoused by Lenin, exemplify dialectical attempts to historicize the collective agency for socialist transformation. Within the framework of the global division of labor between metropolitan center and colonized periphery, a Marxist program of national liberation is meant to take into account the extraction of surplus value from colonized peoples through unequal exchange as well as through direct colonial exploitation in "Free Trade Zones," illegal traffic in prostitution, mail-order brides, and contractual domestics (at present, the Philippines provides the bulk of the latter, about ten million persons and growing). National oppression has a concrete reality not entirely reducible to class exploitation but incomprehensible apart from it; that is, it cannot be adequately understood without the domination of the racialized peoples in the dependent formations by the colonizing/imperialist power, with the imperial nation-state acting as the exploiting class, as it were (see San Juan 1998; 2002). 32. Racism arose with the creation and expansion of the capitalist world economy (Wolf 1982; Balibar and Wallerstein, 1991). Solidarities conceived as racial or ethnic groups acquire meaning and value in terms of their place within the social organization of production and reproduction of the ideological-political order; ideologies of racism as collective social evaluation of solidarities arise to reinforce structural constraints which preserve the exploited and oppressed position of these "racial" solidarities. Such patterns of economic and political segmentation mutate in response to the impact of changing economic and political relationships (Geshwender and Levine 1994). Overall, there is no denying the fact that national-liberation movements and indigenous groups fighting for sovereignty, together with heterogeneous alliances and coalitions, cannot be fully understood without a critical analysis of the production of surplus value and its expropriation by the propertied class--that is, capital accumulation. As John Rex noted, different ethnic groups are placed in relations of cooperation, symbiosis or conflict by the fact that as groups they have different economic and political functions.Within this changing class order of [colonial societies], the language of racial difference frequently becomes the means whereby men allocate each other to different social and economic positions. What the type of analysis used here suggests is that the exploitation of clearly marked groups in a variety of different ways is integral to capitalism and that ethnic groups unite and act together because they have been subjected to distinct and differentiated types of exploitation. Race relations and racial conflict are necessarily structured by political and economic factors of a more generalized sort (1983, 403-05, 407). Hence race relations and race conflict are necessarily structured by the larger totality of the political economy of a given society, as well as by modifications in the structure of the world economy. Corporate profit-making via class exploitation on an international/globalized scale, at bottom, still remains the logic of the world system of finance capitalism based on historically changing structures and retooled practices of domination and subordination.

Links – Gender

The oppression of women is not the ahistorical products an abstract system of patriarchy – it’s the historical product of the emergence of a classed society founded on the logic of surplus accumulation – The shift from necessity to surplus transformed division of labor into a tool to concentrate wealth and power over women

Cloud 3 (Dana, Prof. Comm at UT, “Marxism and Oppression”, Talk for Regional Socialist Conference)

In order to challenge oppression, it is important to know where it comes from. Historians, archaeologists, and anthropologists tell us that in pre-class societies such as hunter-gatherer societies, racism and sexism were unheard of. Because homosexuality was not an identifiable category of such societies, discrimination on that basis did not occur either. In fact, it is clear that racism, sexism, and homophobia have arisen in particular kinds of societies, namely class societies. Women’s oppression originated in the first class societies, while racism came into prominence in the early periods of capitalism when colonialism and slavery drove the economic system. The prohibition against gays and lesbians is a relatively modern phenomenon. But what all forms of oppression have in common is that they did not always exist and are not endemic to human nature. They were created in the interest of ruling classes in society and continue to benefit the people at the top of society, while dividing and conquering the rest of us so as to weaken the common fight against the oppressors. The work of Marx’s collaborator Friederich Engels on The Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State in some respects reflects the Victorian times in which in was written. Engels moralizes about women’s sexuality and doesn’t even include gay and lesbian liberation in his discussion of the oppressive family. However, anthropologists like the feminist Rayna Reiter have confirmed his most important and central argument that it was in the first settled agricultural societies that women became an oppressed class. In societies where for the first time people could accumulate a surplus of food and other resources, it was possible for some people to hoard wealth and control its distribution. The first governments or state structures formed to legitimate an emerging ruling class. As settled communities grew in size and became more complex social organizations, and, most importantly, as the surplus grew, the distribution of wealth became unequal—and a small number of men rose above the rest of the population in wealth and power. In the previous hunter-gatherer societies, there had been a sexual division of labor, but one without a hierarchy of value. There was no strict demarcation between the reproductive and productive spheres. All of that changed with the development of private property in more settled communities. The earlier division of labor in which men did the heavier work, hunting, and animal agriculture, became a system of differential control over resource distribution. The new system required more field workers and sought to maximize women’s reproductive potential. Production shifted away from the household over time and women became associated with the reproductive role, losing control over the production and distribution of the necessities of life. It was not a matter of male sexism, but of economic priorities of a developing class system. This is why Engels identifies women’s oppression as the first form of systematic class oppression in the world. Marxists since Engels have not dismissed the oppression of women as secondary to other kinds of oppression and exploitation. To the contrary, women’s oppression has a primary place in Marxist analysis and is a key issue that socialists organize around today. From this history we know that sexism did not always exist, and that men do not have an inherent interest in oppressing women as domestic servants or sexual slaves. Instead, women’s oppression always has served a class hierarchy in society. In our society divided by sexism, ideas about women’s nature as domestic caretakers or irrational sexual beings justify paying women lower wages compared to men, so that employers can pit workers against one another in competition for the same work. Most women have always had to work outside the home to support their families. Today, women around the world are exploited in sweatshops where their status as women allows bosses to pay them very little, driving down the wages of both men and women. At the same time, capitalist society relies on ideas about women to justify not providing very much in the way of social services that would help provide health care, family leave, unemployment insurance, access to primary and higher education, and so forth—all because these things are supposed to happen in the private family, where women are responsible. This lack of social support results in a lower quality of life for many men as well as women. Finally, contemporary ideologies that pit men against women encourage us to fight each other rather than organizing together.

Links – Generic Link

The focus on _____________ becomes an alibi for acquiescence of class struggles – they obscure the logic of capital and ensure repetition of oppression

Zavarzadeh 94 (Mas'Ud, The Stupidity That Consumption Is Just as Productive as Production": In the Shopping Mall of the Post-al Left," College Literature, Vol. 21, No. 3, The Politics of Teaching Literature 2 (Oct., 1994),pp. 92-114)

Post-al logic is marked above all by its erasure of "production" as the determining force in organizing human societies and their institutions, and its insistence on "consumption" and "distribution" as the driving force of the social.5 The argument of the post-al left (briefly) is that "labor," in advanced industrial "democracies," is superseded by "information," and consequently "knowledge" (not class struggle over the rate of surplus labor) has become the driving force of history. The task of the post-al left is to deconstruct the "metaphysics of labor" and consequently to announce the end of socialism and with it the "outdatedness" of the praxis of abolishing private property (that is, congealed alienated labor) in the post-al moment. Instead of abolishing private property, an enlightened radical democracy which is to supplant socialism (as Laclau, Mouffe, Aronowitz, Butler, and others have advised) should make property holders of each citizen. The post-al left rejects the global objective conditions of production for the local subjective circumstances of consumption, and its master trope is what R-4 [France] so clearly foregrounds: the (shopping) "mall"?the ultimate site of consumption "with all latest high-tech textwares" deployed to pleasure the "body." In fact, the post-al left has "invented" a whole new interdiscipline called "cultural studies" that provides the new alibi for the regime of profit by shifting social analytics from "production" to "consumption." (On the political economy of "invention" in ludic theory, see Transformation 2 on "The Invention of the Queer.") To prove its "progressiveness," the post-al left devotes most of its energies (see the writings of John Fiske, Constance Penley, Michael Berube, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Andrew Ross, Susan Willis, Stuart Hall, Fredric Jameson), to demonstrate how "consumption" is in fact an act of production and resistance to capitalism and a practice in which a Utopian vision for a society of equality is performed! The shift from "production" to "consumption" manifests itself in post-al left theories through the focus on "superstructural" cultural analysis and the preoccupation not with the "political economy" ("base") but with "representation"? for instance, of race, sexuality, environment, ethnicity, nationality, and identity. This is, for example, one reason for [Hill's] ridiculing the "base" and "superstructure" analytical model of classical Marxism (Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy) with an anecdote (the privileged mode of "argument" for the post-al left) that the base is really not all that "basic." To adhere to the base/superstructure model for [him] is to be thrown into an "epistemological gulag." For the post-al left a good society is, therefore, one in which, as [France] puts it, class antagonism is bracketed and the "surplus value" is distributed more evenly among men and women, whites and persons of color, the lesbian and the straight. It is not a society in which "surplus value"?the exploitative appropriation of the other's labor-is itself eliminated by revolutionary praxis. The post-al left's good society is not one in which private ownership is obsolete and the social division of labor (class) is abolished. Rather it is a society in which the fruit of exploitation of the proletariat (surplus labor) is more evenly distributed and a near-equality of consumption is established. This distributionist/consumptionist theory that underwrites the economic interests of the (upper)middle classes is the foundation for all the texts in this exchange and their pedagogies. A good pedagogy in these texts therefore is one in which power is distributed evenly in the classroom: a pedagogy that constructs a classroom of consensus not antagonism (thus opposition to "politicizing the classroom" in OR-1 [Hogan]) and in which knowledge (concept) is turned through the process that OR-3 [McCormick] calls "translation"?into "consumable" EXPERIENCES. The more "intense" the experience, as the anecdotes of [McCormick] show, the more successful the pedagogy. In short, it is a pedagogy that removes the student from his/her position in the social relations of production and places her/him in the personal relation of consumption: specifically, EXPERIENCE of/as the consumption of pleasure. The post-al logic obscures the laws of motion of capital by very specific assumptions and moves-many of which are rehearsed in the texts here. I will discuss some of these, mention others in passing, and hint at several more. (I have provided a full account of all these moves in my "Post-ality" in Transformation 1.) I begin by outlining the post-al assumptions that "democracy" is a never-ending, open "dialogue" and "conversation" among multicultural citizens; that the source of social inequities is "power"; that a post-class hegemonic "coalition," as OR-5 [Williams] calls it-and not class struggle-is the dynamics of social change; that truth (as R-l [Hill] writes) is an "epistemological gulag"? a construct of power and thus any form of "ideology critique" that raises questions of "falsehood" and "truth" ("false consciousness") does so through a violent exclusion of the "other" truths by, in [Williams'] words, "staking sole legitimate claim" to the truth in question. Given the injunction of the post-al logic against binaries (truth/falsehood), the project of "epistemology" is displaced in the ludic academy by "rhetoric." The question, consequently, becomes not so much what is the "truth" of a practice but whether it "works." (Rhetoric has always served as an alibi for pragmatism.) Therefore, [France] is not interested in whether my practices are truthful but in what effects they might have: if College Literature publishes my texts would such an act (regardless of the "truth" of my texts) end up "cutting our funding?" [he] asks. A post-al leftist like [France], in short, "resists" the state only in so far as the state does not cut [his] "funding." Similarly, it is enough for a cynical pragmatist like [Williams] to conclude that my argument "has little prospect of effectual force" in order to disregard its truthfulness. The post-al dismantling of "epistemology" and the erasure of the question of "truth," it must be pointed out, is undertaken to protect the economic interests of the ruling class. If the "truth question" is made to seem outdated and an example of an orthodox binarism ([Hill]), any conclusions about the truth of ruling class practices are excluded from the scene of social contestation as a violent logocentric (positivistic) totalization that disregards the "difference" of the ruling class. This is why a defender of the ruling class such as [Hill] sees an ideology critique aimed at unveiling false consciousness and the production of class consciousness as a form of "epistemological spanking." It is this structure of assumptions that enables [France] to answer my question, "What is wrong with being dogmatic?" not in terms of its truth but by reference to its pragmatics (rhetoric): what is "wrong" with dogmatism, [he] says, is that it is violent rhetoric ("textual Chernobyl") and thus Stalinist. If I ask what is wrong with Stalinism, again (in terms of the logic of [his] text) I will not get a political or philosophical argument but a tropological description.6 The post-al left is a New Age Left: the "new new left" privileged by [Hill] and [Williams]- the laid-back, "sensitive," listening, and dialogic left of coalitions, voluntary work, and neighborhood activism (more on these later). It is, as I will show, anti-intellectual and populist; its theory is "bite size" (mystifying, of course, who determines the "size" of the "bite"), and its model of social change is anti-conceptual "spontaneity": May 68, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and, in [Hill's] text, Chiapas. In the classroom, the New Age post-al pedagogy inhibits any critique of the truth of students' statements and instead offers, as [McCormick] makes clear, a "counseling," through anecdotes, concerning feelings. The rejection of "truth" (as "epistemological gulag"?[Hill]), is accompanied by the rejection of what the post-al left calls "economism." Furthermore, the post-al logic relativizes subjectivities, critiques functionalist explanation, opposes "determinism," and instead of closural readings, offers supplementary ones. It also celebrates eclecticism; puts great emphasis on the social as discourse and on discourse as always inexhaustible by any single interpretation? discourse (the social) always "outruns" and "exceeds" its explanation. Post-al logic is, in fact, opposed to any form of "explanation" and in favor of mimetic description: it regards "explanation" to be the intrusion of a violent outside and "description" to be a respectful, caring attention to the immanent laws of signification (inside). This notion of description which has by now become a new dogma in ludic feminist theory under the concept of "mimesis" (D. Cornell, Beyond Accommodation)?regards politics to be always immanent to practices: thus the banalities about not politicizing the classroom in [Hogan's] "anarchist" response to my text7 and the repeated opposition to binaries in all nine texts. The opposition to binaries is, in fact, an ideological alibi for erasing class struggle, as is quite clear in [France's] rejection of the model of a society "divided by two antagonistic classes" (see my Theory and its Other).

Links – Subjectivity

The aff’s approach to knowledge which privileges subjectivity and uncertainty denies the objectivity in class relations and the oppression that is produced from capital accumulation

Zavarzadeh 94 (Mas'Ud, The Stupidity That Consumption Is Just as Productive as Production": In the Shopping Mall of the Post-al Left," College Literature, Vol. 21, No. 3, The Politics of Teaching Literature 2 (Oct., 1994), pp. 92-114)

The unsurpassable objectivity which is not open to rhetorical interpretation and constitutes the decided foundation of critique is the "outside" that Marx calls the "Working Day" (Capital 1: 340-416). ([France] willfully misrecognizes my notion of objectivity by confusing my discussion of identity politics and objectivity.) The working day is not what it seems: its reality, like the reality of all capitalist practices, is an alienated reality-there is a contradiction between its appearance and its essence. It "appears" as if the worker, during the working day, receives wages that are equal compensation for his labor. This mystification originates in the fact that the capitalist pays not for "labor" but for "labor power": when labor power is put to use it produces more than it is paid for. The "working day" is the site of the unfolding of this fundamental contradiction: it is a divided day, divided into "necessary labor" the part in which the worker produces value equivalent to his wages and the "other," the part of "surplus labor"?a part in which the worker works for free and produces "surplus value." The second part of the working day is the source of profit and accumulation of capital. "Surplus labor" is the OBJECTIVE FACT of capitalist relations of production: without "surplus labor" there will be no profit, and without profit there will be no accumulation of capital, and without accumulation of capital there will be no capitalism. The goal of bourgeois economics is to conceal this part of the working day, and it should therefore be no surprise that, as a protector of ruling class interests in the academy, [Hill], with a studied casualness, places "surplus value" in the adjacency of "radical bible-studies" and quietly turns it into a rather boring matter of interest perhaps only to the dogmatic. To be more concise: "surplus labor" is that objective, unsurpassable "outside" that cannot be made part of the economies of the "inside" without capitalism itself being transformed into socialism. Revolutionary critique is grounded in this truth-objectivity-since all social institutions and practices of capitalism are founded upon the objectivity of surplus labor. The role of a revolutionary pedagogy of critique is to produce class consciousness so as to assist in organizing people into a new vanguard party that aims at abolishing this FACT of the capitalist system and trans-forming capitalism into a communist society. As I have argued in my "Postality" [Transformation 1], (post)structuralist theory, through the concept of "representation," makes all such facts an effect of interpretation and turns them into "undecidable" processes. The boom in ludic theory and Rhetoric Studies in the bourgeois academy is caused by the service it renders the ruling class: it makes the OBJECTIVE reality of the extraction of surplus labor a subjective one-not a decided fact but a matter of "interpretation." In doing so, it "deconstructs" (see the writings of such bourgeois readers as Gayatri Spivak, Cornel West, and Donna Haraway) the labor theory of value, displaces production with consumption, and resituates the citizen from the revolutionary cell to the ludic shopping mall of [France].

***Impact Stuff

Impact – Turns Case – Keynes/Infrastructure

Capitalism causes collective cannibalism of domestic infrastructure – it misallocates resources and turns case

Fraser 12 (Steve,writer and historian @ Columbia "More than Greed," Dissent Vol 59 Num 1 2012, Muse,

Why? Maybe that decision stems from Madrick’s aversion to thinking of the crisis as systemic and to a related faith in the Democratic Party as the repository of the New Deal version of capitalism, a version many progressives would like to restore. But the New Deal not only civilized a broken-down economic system, it also sought successfully to extend the reach of the capitalist marketplace and credit networks not abolish them. It created the political and institutional foundations of mass consumption capitalism. Those foundations eventually crumbled as domestic opportunities for profitable enough capital accumulation grew scarce, a process that in turn exerted a relentless downward pressure on labor costs and the social wage. That is to say, in an increasingly fierce struggle to compete with lower cost foreign producers, American business began to undermine the foundations of “effective demand” among ordinary working people that had kept the system upright for so long. It set in motion a perverse dynamic of disaccumulation or what might be called the auto-cannibalism of an economy eating itself alive. The most developed economy in the world began a process of underdevelopment. Its infrastructure—road, bridges, tunnels, railroads, waterworks, dams, airports, electrical grids—were allowed to decay. The industrial core of the economy was hollowed out by precisely those “financial engineers” Madrick writes [End Page 103] about. Deindustrialization signaled that the old system had broken down. This became a long, secular crisis. Gradually and then at an accelerated rate, it elicited one overriding response; namely, to leverage everything in sight. Everything in this case included capital assets that produced debt-based asset bubbles in stocks or housing or other securities and commodities that provided a kind of “privatized Keynesian” stimulus package for elite financial institutions. Meanwhile, below, a working population found itself drowning in a sea of usurious credit.

Impact – Warming/Extinction

Capitalism guarantees runaway climate change – causes extinction

Foster, 11 (John B, “Capitalism and Degrowth-An Impossibility Theorem”, Monthly Review Vol. 62, Iss. 8; pg. 26, 8 pgs , January 2011, proquest)

In the opening paragraph to his 2009 book, Storms of My Grandchildren, James Hansen, the world's foremost scientific authority on global warming, declared: "Planet Earth, creation, the world in which civilization developed, the world with climate patterns that we know and stable shorelines, is in imminent peril . . . .The startling conclusion is that continued exploitation of all fossil fuels on Earth threatens not only the other millions of species on the planet but also the survival of humanity itself - and the timetable is shorter than we thought."1 In making this declaration, however, Hansen was only speaking of a part of the global environmental crisis currently threatening the planet, namely, climate change. Recently, leading scientists (including Hansen) have proposed nine planetary boundaries, which mark the safe operating space for the planet. Three of these boundaries (climate change, biodiversity, and the nitrogen cycle) have already been crossed, while others, such as fresh water use and ocean accidification, are emerging planetary rifts. In ecological terms, the economy has now grown to a scale and intrusiveness that is both overshooting planetary boundaries and tearing apart the biogeochemical cycles of the planet.2 Hence, almost four decades after the Club of Rome raised the issue of "the limits to growth," the economic growth idol of modern society is once again facing a formidable challenge.3 What is known as "degrowth economics," associated with the work of Serge Latouche in particular, emerged as a major European intellectual movement in 2008 with the historic conference in Paris on "Economic De-Growth for Ecological Sustainability and Social Equity," and has since inspired a revival of radical Green thought, as epitomized by the 2010 "Degrowth Declaration" in Barcelona. Ironically, the meteoric rise of degrowth (décroissance in French) as a concept has coincided over the last three years with the reappearance of economic crisis and stagnation on a scale not seen since the 1930s. The degrowth concept therefore forces us to confront the questions: Is degrowth feasible in a capitalist grow-or-die society - and if not, what does this say about the transition to a new society? According to the Web site of the European degrowth project, "degrowth carries the idea of a voluntary reduction of the size of the economic system which implies a reduction of the GDP."4 "Voluntary" here points to the emphasis on voluntaristic solutions - though not as individualistic and unplanned in the European conception as the "voluntary simplicity" movement in the United States, where individuals (usually well-to-do) simply choose to opt out of the high-consumption market model. For Latouche, the concept of "degrowth" signifies a major social change: a radical shift from growth as the main objective of the modern economy, toward its opposite (contraction, downshifting). An underlying premise of this movement is that, in the face of a planetary ecological emergency, the promise of green technology has proven false. This can be attributed to the Jevons Paradox, according to which greater efficiency in the use of energy and resources leads not to conservation but to greater economic growth, and hence more pressure on the environment.5 The unavoidable conclusion - associated with a wide variety of political-economic and environmental thinkers, not just those connected directly to the European degrowth project - is that there needs to be a drastic alteration in the economic trends operative since the Industrial Revolution. As Marxist economist Paul Sweezy put it more than two decades ago: "Since there is no way to increase the capacity of the environment to bear the [economic and population] burdens placed on it, it follows that the adjustment must come entirely from the other side of the equation. And since the disequilibrium has already reached dangerous proportions, it also follows that what is essential for success is a reversal, not merely a slowing down, of the underlying trends of the last few centuries."6 Given that wealthy countries are already characterized by ecological overshoot, it is becoming more and more apparent that there is indeed no alternative, as Sweezy emphasized, but a reversal in the demands placed on the environment by the economy. This is consistent with the argument of ecological economist Herman Daly, who has long insisted on the need for a steady-state economy. Daly traces this perspective to John Stuart Mill's famous discussion of the "stationary state" in his Principles of Political Economy, which argued that if economic expansion was to level off (as the classical economists expected), the economic goal of society could then shift to the qualitative aspects of existence, rather than mere quantitative expansion. A century after Mill, Lewis Mumford insisted in his Condition of Man, first published in 1944, that not only was a stationary state in Mill's sense ecologically necessary, but that it should also be linked to a concept of "basic communism . . . [that] applies to the whole community the standards of the household," distributing "benefits according to need" (a view that drew upon Marx). Today this recognition of the need to bring economic growth in overdeveloped economies to a halt, and even to shrink these economies, is seen as rooted theoretically in Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen's The Entropy Law and the Economic Process, which established the basis of modern ecological economics.7 Degrowth as such is not viewed, even by its proponents, as a stable solution, but one aimed at reducing the size of the economy to a level of output that can be maintained perpetually at a steady-state. This might mean shrinking the rich economies by as much as a third from today's levels by a process that would amount to negative investment (since not only would new net investment cease but also only some, not all, worn-out capital stock would be replaced). A steady-state economy, in contrast, would carry out replacement investment but would stop short of new net investment. As Daly defines it, "a steady-state economy" is "an economy with constant stocks of people and artifacts, maintained at some desired, sufficient levels by low rates of maintenance 'throughput,' that is, by the lowest feasible flows of matter and energy."8 Needless to say, none of this would come easily, given today's capitalist economy. In particular, Latouche's work, which can be viewed as exemplary of the European degrowth project, is beset with contradictions, resulting not from the concept of degrowth perse, but from his attempt to skirt the question of capitalism. This can be seen in his 2006 article, "The Globe Downshifted," where he argues in convoluted form: For some on the far left, the stock answer is that capitalism is the problem, leaving us stuck in a rut and powerless to move towards a better society. Is economic contraction compatible with capitalism? This is a key question, but one that it is important to answer without resort to dogma, if the real obstacles are to be understood .... Eco-compatible capitalism is conceivable in theory, but unrealistic in practice. Capitalism would require a high level of regulation to bring about the reduction of our ecological footprint. The market system, dominated by huge multinational corporations, will never set off down the virtuous path of eco-capitalism of its own accord .... Mechanisms for countering power with power, as existed under the Keynes-Fordist regulations of the Social-Democratic era, are conceivable and desirable. But the class struggle seems to have broken down. The problem is: capital won .... A society based on economic contraction cannot exist under capitalism. But capitalism is a deceptively simple word for a long, complex history. Getting rid of the capitalists and banning wage labour, currency and private ownership of the means of production would plunge society into chaos. It would bring large-scale terrorism. . ..We need to find another way out of development, economism (a belief in the primacy of economic causes and factors) and growth: one that does not mean forsaking the social institutions that have been annexed by the economy (currency, markets, even wages) but reframes them according to different principles.9

Impact – VTL

Capitalism kills value to life

Kovel 2 (Joel, Professor of Social Studies at Bard, “The Enemy of Nature,” p140-141)

The precondition of an ecologically rational attitude toward nature is the recognition that nature far surpasses us and has its own intrinsic value, irreducible to our practice. Thus we achieve differentiation from nature. It is in this light that we would approach the question of transforming practice ecologically — or, as we now recognize to be the same thing, dialectically. The monster that now bestrides the world was born of the conjugation of value and dominated labour. From the former arose the quantification of reality, and, with this, the loss of the differentiated recognition essential for ecosystemic integrity; from the latter emerged a kind of selfhood that could swim in these icy waters. From this standpoint one might call capitalism a ‘regime of the ego’, meaning that under its auspices a kind of estranged self emerges as the mode of capital’s reproduction. This self is not merely prideful the ordinary connotation of ‘egotistical’ — more fully, it is the ensemble of those relations that embody the domination of nature from one side, and, from the other, ensure the reproduction of capital. This ego is the latest version of the purified male principle, emerging aeons after the initial gendered domination became absorbed and rationalized as profitability and self-maximization (allowing suitable ‘power-women’ to join the dance). It is a pure culture of splitting and non-recognition: of itself, of the otherness of nature and of the nature of others. In terms of the preceding discussion, it is the elevation of the merely individual and isolated mind-as-ego into a reigning principle. ‘~ Capital produces egoic relations, which reproduce capital. The isolated selves of the capitalist order can choose to become personifications of capital, or may have the role thrust upon them. In either case, they embark upon a pattern of non-recognition mandated by the fact that the almighty dollar interposes itself between all elements of experience: all things in the world, all other persons, and between the self and its world: nothing really exists except in and through monetization. This set-up provides an ideal culture medium for the bacillus of competition and ruthless self-maximization. Because money is all that ‘counts’, a peculiar heartlessness characterizes capitalists, a tough-minded and cold abstraction that will sacrifice species, whole continents (viz. Africa) or inconvenient sub-sets of the population (viz. black urban males) who add too little to the great march of surplus value or may be seen as standing in its way. The presence of value screens out genuine fellow-feeling or compassion, replacing it with the calculus of profit-expansion. Never has a holocaust been carried out so impersonally. When the Nazis killed their victims, the crimes were accompanied

Impact – Indifference

The denial of the objective suffering that capitalism produces naturalizes violence and makes us indifferent toward limitless annihilation

Zavarzadeh 94 (Mas'Ud, The Stupidity That Consumption Is Just as Productive as Production": In the Shopping Mall of the Post-al Left," College Literature, Vol. 21, No. 3, The Politics of Teaching Literature 2 (Oct., 1994),pp. 92-114)

What is obscured in this representation of the non-dialogical is, of course, the violence of the dialogical. I leave aside here the violence with which these advocates of non-violent conversations attack me in their texts and cartoon. My concern is with the practices by which the post-al left, through dialogue, naturalizes (and eroticizes) the violence that keeps capitalist democracy in power. What is violent? Subjecting people to the daily terrorism of layoffs in order to maintain high rates of profit for the owners of the means of production or redirecting this violence (which gives annual bonuses, in addition to multi-million-dollar salaries, benefits, and stock options, to the CEOs of the very corporations that are laying off thousands of workers) against the ruling class in order to end class societies? What is violent? Keeping millions of people in poverty, hunger, starvation, and homelessness, and deprived of basic health care, at a time when the forces of production have reached a level that can, in fact, provide for the needs of all people, or trying to overthrow this system? What is violent? Placing in office, under the alibi of "free elections," post fascists (Italy) and allies of the ruling class (Major, Clinton, Kohl, Yeltsin) or struggling to end this farce? What is violent? Reinforcing these practices by "talking" about them in a "reasonable" fashion (that is, within the rules of the game established by the ruling class for limited reform from "within") or marking the violence of conversation and its complicity with the status quo, there by breaking the frame that represents "dialogue" as participation, when in fact it is merely a formal strategy for legitimating the established order? Any society in which the labor of many is the source of wealth for the few-all class societies-is a society of violence, and no amount of "talking" is going to change that objective fact. "Dialogue" and "conversation" are aimed at arriving at a consensus by which this violence is made more tolerable, justifiable, and naturalized.

***Cheating Arguments****

Sustainability

Cap collapse inevitable — multiple in depth warrants subsume solvency

Farrell, ‘11 (Paul, writes the column on behavioral economics. He's the author of nine books on personal finance, economics and psychology, Farrell was an investment banker with Morgan Stanley; executive vice president of the Financial News Network; executive vice president of Mercury Entertainment Corp; and associate editor of the Los Angeles Herald Examiner. He has a Juris Doctor and a Doctorate in Psychology, 8/23/11, http://www.marketwatch.com/story/a-no-growth-boom-will-follow-2012-global-crash-2011-08-23)

But folks, that is the coded message in many recent warnings from environmental economists who finally realize that nothing will wake up the public. Nothing but a catastrophic system failure. Only then, a path to reform, recovery, a new boom. Click to Play Newmark: Why I'm bullish on the markets WSJ Columnist Evan Newmark argues for his stance on bullish markets. It's a good time to buy and to focus on the long-term, he says. (Photo: Reuters.) But wait, you ask: If the consequences are worse than an asteroid slamming into Earth, why don’t we just plan ahead? Avoid the Black Swan? Why wait for some “creative destruction” to wipe out capitalism, reduce the global population to 5 billion? Why? Because our human genes are not good at planning ahead for catastrophes. Our brains are designed for fight-or-flight. Otherwise we procrastinate. We respond best when our backs are against the wall. Then we rally the troops, go to war, so to speak. Until we reach that point, we focus on everyday stuff, like jobs, the kids, short-term buy-sells and ideological stuff like today’s anti-science, anti-intellectual political rhetoric. Free-market capitalism. Don’t tread on me. Stuff like that keeps us in denial about the future. No, we don’t plan, don’t act until a crisis. Not till the asteroid is about to hit. Even then, we pray for divine intervention to rescue us. Or a Churchill to emerge, take charge of the impossible challenge, get people energized and focused on a common cause. Then we’ll charge ahead, solve the problem. Until then, our brains can only think short-term. Massive denial of global catastrophe dead ahead And yet, the facts about the coming catastrophe are so obvious. Just apply a little grade-school math and economic common sense: Our planet’s natural resources can reasonably support about 5 billion people. That’s a fact. Another: Today we have 7 billion. That’s a problem, 2 billion too many. We’re consuming commodities and natural resources at a rate of 1.5 Earths, according to estimates by the Global Footprint Network of scientists and economists. Click to Play China leads on renewable energy Armed with cheap steel, China is gaining ground in the renewable energy industry, while American companies are lagging in the sector. (Photo: Reuters.) Flash forward: This scenario gets scarier than a horror film, very fast. United Nations demographers warn the Earth’s population will reach 10 billion in just one generation, around 2050. That’s two times the 5 billion the Earth can reasonably support. But the equation gets even scarier: Those 10 billion people will demand lifestyle improvements. That increases their consumption of scarce resources by 300% per person. Bottom line: 10 billion people will be consuming the equivalent of six Earths. Very bad news. “You really do have to wonder whether a few years from now we’ll look back at the first decade of the 21st century,” writes Thomas Friedman, a New York Times columnist and author of “Hot, Flat, Crowded,” “when food prices spiked, energy prices soared, world population surged, tornados plowed through cities, floods and droughts set records, populations were displaced and governments were threatened by the confluence of it all — and ask ourselves: What were we thinking? How did we not panic when the evidence was so obvious that we’d crossed some growth/climate/natural-resource/population redlines all at once?” Friedman quotes Paul Gilding, the veteran Australian environmentalist-entrepreneur, who described this moment in a new book called “The Great Disruption: Why the Climate Crisis Will Bring On the End of Shopping and the Birth of a New World.” “The only answer can be denial,” says Gilding. “When you are surrounded by something so big that requires you to change everything about the way you think and see the world, then denial is the natural response. But the longer we wait, the bigger the response required.” Forget global warming — it’s too late Gilding’s “Great Disruption” is an eye-opener. But have no illusions that his or any book will be the wake-up call that will force us to plan ahead for a catastrophe. A former chief executive of Greenpeace, he admits screaming for 30 years to get the public’s attention. He now confesses that his efforts had little impact. Why? The world is too deep in denial. So, finally, he gave up. Nothing was working: “We tried. We failed.” Today his message is simple and blunt: “It’s time to stop worrying about climate change. Instead we need to brace for impact.” Yes, an economic asteroid is closing fast. What will trigger “The Crash” he sees coming? “If you grow an economy or any system up against its limits, it then stops growing and either changes form or breaks down … As our system hits its limits, the following pressures will combine, in varied and unpredictable ways, to trigger a system breakdown and a major economic crisis (or series of smaller crises) that will see us slide into a sustained economic downturn and a global emergency lasting decades.” As Gilding sees it, the coming crash is “not a doom and gloom prediction, but an inevitable physical reality.” And yet, paradoxically, while the faint-hearted panic, this “perfect storm” also signals sell and buy opportunities for savvy investors. Shocks. “A series of ecological, social and economic shocks driven by climate change, particularly melting polar regions, extreme weather events…changes to agricultural output…severe economic stresses…deep concern [among] the public and the global elites…government intervention… a sense of global crisis.” Food. “Increasing demand and lower agricultural output driven by climate change ...sustained increases in food prices…economic and geopolitical instability and tension…developing countries blaming the West for causing climate change.” Water. “A deeply degraded global ecosystem will further reduce the capacity of key ecosystem services, water, fisheries and agricultural land … impact food and water supply … political stability … global security.” Energy. “Rapid increases in oil prices as peak oil is breached. …The trend will be clear… enormous, system-wide economic and political pressure…great conflict.” Surprises. “For example, a serious global terrorist attack wiping out a major city...or a pandemic shutting down global travel...shocks upon shocks upon shocks.” Fear. “As this unfolds, our deeply intertwined and complex global financial market, prone to panic, driven by fear and uncertainty, will suddenly wake up to the long-term implications of all of this…Perhaps driven by a series of major corporate collapses or national economic crises, they will then simply re-price risk in global share markets…This will lead to a dramatic drop in global share markets and a tightening of capital supply.” Markets and economies will crash. Oddly, in all this, Gilding is an eternal optimist. He believes that mankind will follow this “Great Disruption” with a period of great cooperation where all nations of the world will come together to save the planet. What’s unspoken, however, is how this great disruption will stop population from growing to 10 billion. And even more significantly: How the crash will scale Earth’s existing population of 7 billion back to a sustainable 5 billion. Yet, that must happen to make the “new equation” work. Unfortunately, what’s unspoken will probably include new global wars, pandemics, famines, starvation and other cataclysmic events, all before the boom. 20 investment opportunities before and after the collapse A couple of years ago Gilding and Jorgen Randers of Norway detailed 14 market-oriented ways to “get serious about combating climate gas emissions by 50% over a 5-year long focused plan.” Their “One Degree War Plan” would “keep global warming below plus-one degree Centigrade over pre-industrial levels.” These policies may not fit with today’s traditional free-market capitalists and conservative politicians. But after the coming crash, after a great realignment of the economic, political and environmental systems of the world, Gilding and Randers see these as essential policies for a new sustained global economy. You can also see these as investment opportunities for entrepreneurs and financiers even today, certainly all forward-thinkers who are planning ahead. Yes, while the rest of the world is trapped in denial and fear of a coming crash, some adventurous few will plan ahead for the boom coming after the world community downsizes to create a new, sustainable lifestyle. Here’s how Gilding and Randers describe these key sectors: Forests: Cut deforestation and other logging by 50%. Coal: Close 1,000 dirty coal power plants within 5 years. Electricity: Ration electricity, and rapidly drive new efficiency. Carbon Capture Storage: Retrofit 1,000 coal power plants with Carbon Capture Storage. Wind/solar: Erect a wind turbine or solar plant in every town. Deserts. Create huge wind and solar farms in suitable deserts. Waste: Let no waste go to waste; recycle and reuse by-products. Autos: Ration use of dirty cars to cut transport emissions by 50%. Biofulels: Prepare for biofuels power stations using CCS technology. Travel: Strand half of the world’s aircraft. Methane: Capture or burn methane from agriculture and landfills. Food: Move society away from diets of climate-unfriendly protein. Farming: New methods reduce gas emissions, maximize soil carbon. Add these 13 key sectors to the six listed earlier, you get 19. Then, No. 20, their final policy idea for the coming mega-boom era is cultural as well as economic: “Launch a government- and community-led shop-less-live-more campaign.” A new world focusing less on unlimited consumption, more on personal happiness. These policies may not be fashionable in today’s world. But in the post-crash New World, economic theory will change, because growth economics no longer works and the survival of civilization demands a fundamental rethinking of economic theory. So these 20 tips will be gold mines for savvy investors, entrepreneurs and financiers. All investors searching for long-term opportunities in today’s world of uncertainty and extreme volatility should read Gilding’s “The Great Disruption: Why the Climate Crisis Will Bring On the End of Shopping and the Birth of a New World.” Whether liberal or conservative, right- or left-brainer, agree or not, this book will engage you, get you thinking very differently about how to protect the future for you and your family. And fortunately, Gilding’s such an upbeat optimist about global challenges you’ll enjoy being drawn into his new mindset.

Ethics

Ethics First – it’s an independent reason to vote neg – you cannot separate your ethical orientation from the way in which you come to understand politics

Meszaros 95 (Istavan, Prof. Emeritus @ U of Sussex, Beyond Capital: Towards a Theory of Transition, p 409-410)

Politics and morality are so closely intertwined in the real world that it is hardly imaginable to confront and resolve the conflicts of any age without bringing into play the crucial dimensions of both. Thus, whenever it is difficult to face the problems and contradictions of politics in the prevailing social order, theories of morality are also bound to suffer the consequences. Naturally, this relationship tends to prevail also in the positive direction. As the entire history of philosophy testifies, the authors of all major ethical works are also the originators of the seminal theoretical works on politics; and vice versa, all serious conceptualizations of politics have their necessary corollaries on the plane of moral discourse. This goes for Aristotle as much as for Hobbes and Spinoza, and for Rousseau and Kant as much as for Hegel. Indeed, in the case of Hegel we find his ethics fully integrated into his Philosophy of Right, i.e. his theory of the state. This is why it is so astonishing to read in Lukácss ‘Tactics and Ethics’ that ‘Hegel’s system is devoid of ethics’: a view which he later mellows to saying that the Hegelian treatment of ethics suffers the consequences of his system and the conservative bias of his theory of the state. It would be much more correct to say that — despite the conservative bias of his political conception — Hegel is the author of the last great systematic treatment of ethics. Compared to that, the twentieth century in the field of ethics (as well as in that of political philosophy) is very problematical. No doubt this has a great deal to do ‘eith the ever narrowing margin of alternatives allowed by the necessary mode of functioning of the global capital system which produces the wisdom of ‘there is no alternative’. For, evidently, there can be no meaningful moral discourse on the premiss that ‘there is no alternative’. Ethics is concerned with the evaluation and implementation of alternative goals which individuals and social groups can actually set themselves in their confrontations with the problems of their age. And this is where the inescapability of politics makes its impact. For even the most intensely committed investigation of ethics cannot be a substitute for a radical critique of politics in its frustrating and alienating contemporary reality. The slogan of ‘there is no alternative did not originate in ethics; nor is it enough to reassert in ethical/ontolog!cal terms the need for alternatives, no matter how passionately this is felt and predicated. The pursuit of viable alternatives to the destructive reality of capital’s social order in all its forms without which the socialist project is utterly pointless —is a practical matter. The role of morality and ethics is crucial to the success of this enterprise. But there can be no hope of success without the joint re-articulation of socialist moral discourse and political strategy, taking fully on board the painful lessons of the recent past. For the left, on the other hand, politics must be the art of building social force in opposition to the system. The left must not, therefore, see the people or popular social force as something given that can be manipulated and only needs to be stirred up, but as something that has to be built.

Epistemology

Even if they win our alt doesn’t solve you vote negative – capitalism frames decision making – radically breaking away from the way the status quo produces knowledge is key to solving oppression

De Angelis 3 (Massimo, Dept of Economics at East London, The commoner, http://www.ainfos.ca/03/jan/ainfos00479.html)

Once we acknowledge the existence of the galaxy of alternatives as they emerge from concrete needs and aspirations, we can ground today's new political discourse in the thinking and practice of the actualization and the coordination of alternatives, so as each social node and each individual within it has the power to decide and take control over their lives. It is this actualization and this coordination that rescues existing alternatives from the cloud of their invisibility, because alternatives, as with any human product, are social products, and they need to be recognized and validated socially. Our political projects must push their way through beyond the existing forms of coordination, beyond the visible fist of the state, beyond the invisible hand of competitive markets, and beyond the hard realities of their interconnections that express themselves in today forms of neoliberal governance, promoting cooperation through competition and community through disempowerment. As I will argue, this new political discourse is based on the project of defending and extending the space of commons, at the same time building and strengthening communities through the social fields.

Reject their evidence- information has been commodified; there is an economic incentive to falsly portray capitalism as beneficial

Marsh 95- Professor of Philosophy at Fordham University, PhD from Northwestern University

(James, Critique Action and Liberation, p 296-7)

(D) We witness the development of the culture industry in media such as newspapers, magazines, radio, movies, and television. A capitalist "identity logic" extends its sway over more and more of national and social reality, incorporating or denying or completely absorbing or obliterating the noncapitalist or precapitalist other. Such industries are genuine industries owned by big corporate giants such as CBS' or ABC and, therefore, interested in making money and in legitimizing money-making as a way of life. They play, therefore, the economic role of selling products and the ideological role of encouraging attitudes serving corporate objectives in advertising, programming, and reporting. Chomsky, as we have seen, shows the biased way U.S. media reported on the elections in EI Salvador, Nicaragua, and Guatemala in the 1980s. By all the reasonable standards of a free, democratic election, such as multiplicity of candidates, free press, lack of pressure to vote, and absence of terror, Nicaragua's was far more democratic than either Guatemala's or El Salvador's. Yet according to media like The New York Times or CBS, Nicaragua's election approached being totalitarian and EI Salvador and Guatemala were virtual showplace exercises in democracy. (E) Politics is progressively commodified. More and more, rather than being an enterprise of communicative praxis, politics becomes an exercise of selling the president. Rather than being a discussion of issues, politics becomes an exercise in public relations and marketing; good looks become more important than good ideas. Nixon's bad appearance in the 1960 debates with Kennedy was as significant or more significant than Nixon's bad ideas. (F) We note the explosion of new information technologies such as computers, data banks, and VCRs interacting with other media such as television, radio, and movies in such a way as to enhance these and give them new life. Here again, the same double economic and ideological roles are played out. IBM and Apple are businesses selling products, inviting each one of us to purchase a very expensive home computer. The information available through computers becomes useful to buying and selling, and stock market transfers are rendered efficient, expanded, and centralized in a way that they were not before. Computers contribute to a process of automation in which human beings are replaced with technology, production rendered more profitable, and capitalist control more efficient. Relative surplus value arises in a new guise. Old friends, or enemies, come dressed in new clothes bearing gifts. This work of art very powerfully and succinctly sums up the points made in the preceding discussion: the basic capitalist control of media and society, the way in which television functions as a part of a consciousness industry, the role of the media in making money and legitimizing capitalist hegemony and legitimacy, the reification and commodification of the individual consumer, the winning of assent to a degraded, unjust status quo. One is tempted to say to the postmodernist after reading such lines, "mode of information, indeed," except that such a response would be one-sided. It is still the same mode of production, I would argue, the same capitalist beast in modem dress, but the role of information is an aspect of a new regime of capitalist accumulation, what I will later call "flexible accumulation." Information as Baudrillard, Poster, and others have defined it has become essential to capitalism in the way that science, technology, mass media, and an interventionist state did earlier. I do not wish to overstate or oversimplify the above point. Even though a hegemony is exercised by the consciousness industry, such hegemony is always going to be contested, contradictory, won from a context of struggle among competing groups. In contrast to the impression sometimes given by theorists such as Baudrillard and Adorno, hegemony is never total. Like the late capitalist state, late capitalist media are caught in a contradictory tension between accumulation and legitimization, capitalist oligarchy and democracy. Like the state, any given constellation of media policies and programming is contested terrain, an outcome of struggle. For this reason significant differences can be present between different time periods. In the 1930s in the United States, the Federal Communication Commission was established to insure that media operate in "the public interest, convenience, and necessity." Because of democratic pressures exerted from below, the necessity and legitimacy of regulation was institutionalized. In the 1960s and 1970s the media gave far more play to diversity of opinion and critical leftist opinion, programming, and activities than in the 1980s, in which Reagan and Bush led efforts to restrict diversity of opinion in programming, decrease government regulation of media, and inhibit criticism of capitalism. In the 1960s the left used the media to publicize its own activities and agenda; in the 1980s a more conservative media responded by not reporting or underreporting such events and such an agenda. In the 1980s the takeover of NBC by General Electric highlighted the growing, tighter link between media and big business. Media are not only businesses committed to making money but tend to legitimize and publicize and glorify money-making as a way of life and to inhibit or discourage critique from the left. Thus. an intrinsic contradiction exists between the media's institutionalized commitment to open, free, disinterested reporting of news and their commitment to accumulation.

VTL

No value to life outweighs their impacts

Cerni 7 (Paula, cultural logic electronic collection of Marxist Theory and Practice independent writer, “The Age of Consumer Capitalism”, http://clogic.eserver.org/2007/Cerni.pdf)

Thus the powerlessness of the consumer vis-à-vis the production process is experienced as the active tyranny of the finished object — as an object-sized moral law. Morality is now restricted to the single and immediate dimension of “is,” no longer transcended by means of its negation, “ought” ( Marcuse, 1991); while reason similarly limits itself to the set of available options. “If people very strongly desire what they cannot get, they will be unhappy; such desires, therefore, are irrational,” says Jon Elster (1986: 15). In the age of consumer capitalism, then, morality and reason submit to a reality principle that no longer defers pleasure and accepts pain for the sake of future achievements, but asserts the pleasure and pain of the actually experienced world. And so we find the materiality of a there-to-be-consumed world perfectly aligned with the malleable performances of post-modern reflexivity. Dehumanized things and immaterial meanings are two sides of one coin, the objective and subjective aspects of social experience under consumer capitalism.19 That is why the authority of the given material world co-exists with notions of contemporary society as somehow uniquely “cultural,” “virtual,” even “immaterial.” It is why unknowable and impenetrable objects end up reflecting our constructed desires; mere things turn into carriers of social meaning (Douglas and Isherwood, 1996), aesthetic objects (Haug, 1986), or stuff embedded in social narratives (Harré, 2002); people become post-human “informational-material” entities (Hayles, 1999: 11); and an economy of physical plenty melts away into intangible flows of information and knowledge.

Risk the Impossible

The only option is to risk the impossible- we have an ethical obligation to imagine a socialist democracy, regardless of cost

Marsh 95- Professor of Philosophy at Fordham University, PhD from Northwestern University

(James, Critique Action and Liberation, p 334-6)

We affirm, then, the ethical necessity of pursuing ethical community and democratic socialism as the rational embodiment of that vision. Here it is important to be clear about the difference between acquisitive, empirical reason and constitutive, ethical reason. Ethical community as utopia is not primarily something I stand back and predict objectively and scientifically; it is something to which I commit myself ethically and politically. An example from the sphere of personal morality should make the difference clear. When a friend, relative, teacher, or minister counsels an alcoholic to confront her habit, she is not making a prediction. Indeed, it may seem unlikely, given this particular person's past history, that she will lick her habit. Nonetheless, the moral obligation to get over her habit remains. Similarly, an obligation exists to get over our capitalism as a social equivalent of drunkenness. lf the argument of this chapter is correct, we cannot renounce such an attempt at transcendence without giving up on the ethical project or curtailing that project by confining it to the sphere of intimate, interpersonal relations. I am a good father or husband or lover in my private life, but I remain exploitative, cruel, and inhumane in my public, capitalistic life. Such ethical renunciation or curtailment is the death or mutilation of the human; denial of utopia is a living death. Ideologies of scientific elitism, therefore, as they function in capitalist society are correct if there is no such thing as ethical, constitutive reason operating in community. If such constitutive reason is possible and actual in ' human beings as human in community, then scientific elitism is false. Men (and women) acting democratically and participatively do have a capacity to . understand themselves and their lives in a way that is cogent and in touch with reality. Indeed, many of the popular movements in Europe, England, and the United States in the last twenty years such as feminism, environmentalism, civil rights, and antiwar movements, often acting against the advice or opinions of experts, have shown themselves to be right and effective. In the Vietnam War, for example, millions of people in the United States taking to the streets in protest proved the "best and the brightest" in the White House, Pentagon, and State Department wrong. The "best and the brightest" according to the standards of scientific elitism proved to be deluded. The presence of an ethical, political rationality in all of us as human invalidates scientific elitism at its core. As I am arguing it here, a fundamental link exists among dialectical phenomenology, ethical, constitutive rationality, and democracy. Philosophy and ethics, properly understood, are antielitist. To think in a utopian manner, then, about community and socialism is to free ourselves from the excessive hold that science and technology exert over our minds and imaginations. We begin to see that science and technology and expertise, even though they are legitimate within their own proper domains, do not exhaust or monopoly the definition of reason and other forms of reason and knowledge that are more informative, profound, and fundamental. Indeed, compared to certain expressions of art or ethics or philosophy or religion, science and technology are relatively superficial. What revelatory power does a scientific equation have compared to Hamlet's "To be or not to be" speech? What does an empirical study of human populations show me about human life compared to the insight of Marx's Capital? What can a factual study of war show about its horrors compared to Picasso's Guernica? To the extent, therefore. that science and technology dominate in the twentieth century as not only the highest forms of reason but the only forms of reason, they shove other, more profound, more reflective, more fundamental forms of reason to the side and twentieth-century industrial society emerges as an inverted, topsy-turvy, absurd world. What seems normal, factual, rational, and sane in such a world is in fact abnormal, apparent, irrational, and absurd. We begin to suspect and see that science and technology appear as the highest and only forms of reason because capitalism has appropriated science and technology for its own ends as productive force and ideology. In science and technology capitalism has found the forms of rationality most appropriate for itself, perfectly manifesting it, mirroring it, and justifying it. In such an absurd, inverted, topsy-turvy world, fidelity to the life of reason demands critique, resistance, and revolutionary transcendence. One has to pierce the veil of such a world, see through it as absurd rather than accepting it as normal and sane. The prevailing rationality is profoundly irrational. A rationality, however, that confines itself to understanding the facts and accepting the facts as normal cannot pierce the veil. Indeed, piercing the veil becomes irrational according to such a definition of reason. Because such a positivistic definition of reason excludes ahead of time any critical reflection on the overall social context as possibly irrational, such a definition is ideological, legitimating and preserving a repressive status quo whose interest lies in not having the veil pierced.

Role of the Ballot

The role of the ballot is to confront capitalism- We have an a priori ethical responsibility to resist it.

Zizek and Daly 2k4 (Slavoj and Glyn, 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 today’s 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 today’s social reality: the principles of global liberal capitalism. This requires some care and subtlety. For far too long, Marxism has been 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. Zizek’s 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 Marx’s 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 world’s 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 Zizek’s point is that this mystification is magnified through capitalism’s 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 Zizek argues 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 Zizek’s 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.

Threat Construction

Capitalism uses false fear to stifle movements and ensure complicity- rejects their propagandist impacts

Hardt & Negri, 2000 Michael & Antonio, Empire, P 323

The society of the spectacle rules by wielding an age-old weapon. Hobbes recognized long ago that for effective domination “the Passion to be reckoned upon, is Fear.” For Hobbes, fear is what binds and ensures social order, and still today fear is the primary mechanism of control that fills the society of the spectacle. Although the spectacle seems to function through desire and pleasure (desire for commodities and pleasure of consumption), it really works through the communication of fear—or rather, spectacle creates forms of desire and pleasure that are intimately wedded to fear. In the vernacular of early modern European philosophy, the communication of fear was called superstition. And indeed the politics of fear has always been spread through a kind of superstition. What has changed are the forms and mechanisms of the superstitions that communicate fear. The spectacle of fear that holds together the postmodern, hybrid constitution and the media manipulation of the public and politics certainly takes the ground away from a struggle over the imperial constitution. It seems as if there is no place left to stand, no weight to any possible resistance, but only an implacable machine of power.

Fear Mongering

Capitalism uses crisis politics and scare tactics to create the grounds for further capitalist policies- reject their fear mongering

Klien 07 (Naomi, award wining author of the bestselling books No Logo and Fences and Windows also columnist for the nation and the Guardian, Shock doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalsim. Pg 6-7)

This desire for godlike powers of total creation is precisely why free market ideologues are so drawn to crises and disasters. Nonapocalyptic reality is simply not hospitable to their ambitions. For thirty-five years, what has animated Friedman's counterrevolution is an attraction to a kind of freedom and possibility available only in times of cataclysmic change—when people, with their stubborn habits and insistent demands, are blasted out of the way-moments when democracy seems practical impossibility. Believers in the shock doctrine are convinced that only a great rupture-a flood, a war, a terrorist attack-can generate the kind of vast, clean canvases they crave. It is in these malleable moments, when we are psychology unmoored and physically uprooted, that these artists of the real plunge in their hands and begin their work the world.The shock doctrine mimics this process precisely, attempting to achieve on a mass scale what torture does one on one in the interrogation cell. The clearest example was the shock of September 11, which, for millions of people, exploded "the world that is familiar" and opened up a period of deep disorientation and regression that the Bush administration expertly exploited. Suddenly we found ourselves living in a kind of Year Zero, in which everything we knew of the world before could now be dismissed as "pre-9/11 thinking." Never strong in our knowledge of history, North Americans had become a blank slate—"a clean sheet of paper" on which "the newest and most beautiful words can be written," as Mao said of his people.38 A new army of experts instantly materialized to write new and beautiful words on the receptive canvas of our posttrauma consciousness: "clash of civilizations," they inscribed. "Axis of evil," "Islamo-fascism," "homeland security." With everyone preoccupied by the deadly new culture wars, the Bush administration was able to pull off what it could only have dreamed of doing before 9/11: wage privatized wars abroad and build a corporate security complex at home. That is how the shock doctrine works: the original disaster—the coup, the terrorist attack, the market meltdown, the war, the tsunami, the hurricane— puts the entire population into a state of collective shock. The falling bombs, the bursts of terror, the pounding winds serve to soften up whole societies much as the blaring music and blows in the torture cells soften up prisoners. Like the terrorized prisoner who gives up the names of comrades and renounces his faith, shocked societies often give up things they would otherwise fiercely protect. Jamar Perry and his fellow evacuees at the Baton Rouge shelter were supposed to give up their housing projects and public schools. After the tsunami, the fishing people in Sri Lanka were supposed to givc up their valuable beachfront land to hoteliers. Iraqis, if all had gone according to plan, were supposed to be so shocked and awed that they would give up control of their oil reserves, their state companies and their sovereignty to U.S. military bases and green zones.

Serial Policy Failure

Representations of disaster scenarios are tools used by the Washington consensus to artificially justify the expansion of global capital. Their scenarios will only reproduce themselves as a way to cause capitalism to evolve

Klien 07 (Naomi, award wining author of the bestselling books No Logo and Fences and Windows also columnist for the nation and the Guardian, Shock doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalsim. Pg 255-256)

What he was trying to do with the speech, Sachs told me, was "explain what a real crisis was like ... to convey a sense of urgency." People who make policy from Washington, he said, often "don't understand what economic chaos is. They don't understand the disarrary that comes." He wanted to confront them with the reality that "there's also a dynamic that things get farther and farther out of control, until you have other disasters, until Hitler comes back in power, until you have civil war, or mass famine or whatever it is . . . You need to do emergency things to help, because an unstable situation deffinitly has a path of increasing instability, not just a path to normal equilibrium.” I couldn’t help thinking that Sachs wasn't giving his audience enough credit people in that room were well versed in Milton Friedman's crisis theory, and many had applied it in their own countries. Most understood perfectly how wrenching and volatile an economic meltdown could be, but They were taking a different lession from Russia: that a painful and disorienting political situation was forcing Yeltsin to rapidly auction off the riches of the state, a distinctly favorable outcome. It was left to John Williamson, the host of the conference, to steer the discussion back to those pragmatic priorities. Sachs was the one with the star power at the event, but it was Williamson who was the crowd's real guru. Balding, and untelegenic but thrillingly politically incorrect, Williamson was the one who coined the phrase "the Washington Consensus"—perhaps The most quoted and contentious three words in modern economics. He is famous for his tightly .structured closed-door conferences and seminars, each designed to test one of his bold hypotheses. At the conference in January, he had a pressing agenda: he wanted to test what he called the "crisis hypothesis” once and for all. In his lecture Williamson offered no warnings of the imperative to save any country from crisis; in fact, he spoke rhapsodically of cataclysmic events. He reminded his audience of the indisputable evidence that only when countries are truly suffering do they agree to swallow their bitter market medicine; only when they are in shock do they lie down for shock therapy. "These worst of times give rise to the best of opportunities for those who understand the need for fundamental economic reform," he declared. With his unparalleled knack for verbalizing the subconscious of the financial world, Williamson casually pointed out that this raised some intriguing questions: One will have to ask whether it could conceivably make sense to think of deliberately provoking a crisis so as to remove the political logjam to reform For example, it has sometimes been suggested in Brazil that it would be worthwhile stoking up a hyperinflation so as to scare everyone into accepting those changes. . . . Presumably no one with historical foresight would have advocated in the mid-1950s that Germany or Japan go to war in order to get the benefits of the supergrowth that followed their defeat. But could a lesser crisis have served the same function. Is it possible to conceive of a pseudo-crisis that could serve the same positive function without the cost of a real crisis? Williamson's remarks represented a major leap forward for the shock doctrine In a room filled with enough finance ministers and central bank chiefs to hold a major trade summit, the idea of actively creating a serious crisis so that shock therapy could be pushed through was now being openly discussed. At least one conference participant felt obliged to distance himself in his own speech from these risque ideas. "Williamson's suggestion that it might be a good move to provoke an artificial crisis in order to trigger reform should best be read as an idea designed to provoke and tease,” said John Toy, a British economist from the University of Sussex. There was no evidence that Williamson was teasing. In fact, there was plenty of evidence that his ideas were already being acted on at the highest levels of financial decision making in Washington and beyond.

Subjective vs. Objective

Capitalist impacts blinds us from seeing the objective violence that capitalism necessitates.

Zizek 08- Senior Researcher at the Institute for Social Studies, Ljubljana (Slavoj, Violence, p 2-3)

The catch is that subjective and objective violence cannot be perceived from the same standpoint: 'subjective violence is experienced as such against the background of a non-violent zero level. It is seen as a perturbation of the "normal," peaceful state of things. However, objective violence is precisely the violence inherent to this "normal" state of things. Objective violence is invisible since it sustains the very zero-level standard against which we perceive something as subjectively violent. Systemic violence is thus something like the notorious "dark matter" of physics, the counterpart to an all-too visible subjective violence. It may be invisible, but it has to be taken into account if one is to make sense of what otherwise seem to be "irrational" explosions of subjective violence. When the media bombard us with those "humanitarian crises" which seem constantly to pop up all over the world one should always bear in mind that a particular crisis only explodes into media visibility as the result of a complex struggle. Properly humanitarian considerations as a rule play a less important role here than cultural, ideologico-political, and economic considerations. The cover story of Time magazine on 5 June 2006, for example, was "The Deadliest War in the World." This offered detailed documentation on how around 4 million people died in the Democratic Republic of Congo as the result of political violence over the last decade. None of the usual humanitarian uproar was allowed, just a couple of readers' letters-as if some kind of filtering mechanism blocked this news from achieving its full impact in our symbolic space. To put it cynically, Time picked the wrong victim in the struggle for hegemony in suffering. It should have stuck to the list of usual suspects: Muslim women and their plight, or the families of 9/11 victims and how they have coped with their losses. The Congo today has effectively re-emerged as a Conradean "heart of darkness." No one dares to confront it head on. The death of a West Bank Palestinian child, not to mention an Israeli or an American is mediatically worth thousands of times more than the death of a nameless Congolese. Do we need further proof that the humanitarian sense of urgency is mediated, indeed, overdetermined by clear political considerations? And what are these considerations? To answer this, we need to step back and take a look from a different position. When the U.S. media reproached the public in foreign countries jot not displaying enough sympathy for the victims of the 9/11 attacks, one was tempted to answer them in the words Robespierre addressed to those who complain about the innocent victims of revolutionary terror: "Stop shaking the tyrant's bloody robe in my face, Or I will believe that you wish to put Rome in chains.'"

***Alt Stuff

2NC Alt Extension

Method must come first – this debate is not about what the plan does but rather was the plan formulated with accurate knowledge on history – we must ground our debates in accurate historical methods that only Marxism can account for – their method prevents a transition to a society beyond oppression

Tumino 1 (Stephen Prof of English @ Pitt U, “What is Orthodox Marxism and Why it Matters Now More than Ever”, Red Critique)

Any effective political theory will have to do at least two things: it will have to offer an integrated understanding of social practices and, based on such an interrelated knowledge, offer a guideline for praxis. My main argument here is that among all contesting social theories now, only Orthodox Marxism has been able to produce an integrated knowledge of the existing social totality and provide lines of praxis that will lead to building a society free from necessity. But first I must clarify what I mean by Orthodox Marxism. Like all other modes and forms of political theory, the very theoretical identity of Orthodox Marxism is itself contested—not just from non-and anti-Marxists who question the very "real" (by which they mean the "practical" as under free-market criteria) existence of any kind of Marxism now but, perhaps more tellingly, from within the Marxist tradition itself. I will, therefore, first say what I regard to be the distinguishing marks of Orthodox Marxism and then outline a short polemical map of contestation over Orthodox Marxism within the Marxist theories now. I will end by arguing for its effectivity in bringing about a new society based not on human rights but on freedom from necessity. I will argue that to know contemporary society—and to be able to act on such knowledge—one has to first of all know what makes the existing social totality. I will argue that the dominant social totality is based on inequality—not just inequality of power but inequality of economic access (which then determines access to health care, education, housing, diet, transportation, . . . ). This systematic inequality cannot be explained by gender, race, sexuality, disability, ethnicity, or nationality. These are all secondary contradictions and are all determined by the fundamental contradiction of capitalism which is inscribed in the relation of capital and labor. All modes of Marxism now explain social inequalities primarily on the basis of these secondary contradictions and in doing so—and this is my main argument—legitimate capitalism. Why? Because such arguments authorize capitalism without gender, race, discrimination and thus accept economic inequality as an integral part of human societies. They accept a sunny capitalism—a capitalism beyond capitalism. Such a society, based on cultural equality but economic inequality, has always been the not-so-hidden agenda of the bourgeois left—whether it has been called "new left," "postmarxism," or "radical democracy." This is, by the way, the main reason for its popularity in the culture industry—from the academy (Jameson, Harvey, Haraway, Butler,. . . ) to daily politics (Michael Harrington, Ralph Nader, Jesse Jackson,. . . ) to. . . . For all, capitalism is here to stay and the best that can be done is to make its cruelties more tolerable, more humane. This humanization (not eradication) of capitalism is the sole goal of ALL contemporary lefts (marxism, feminism, anti-racism, queeries, . . . ). Such an understanding of social inequality is based on the fundamental understanding that the source of wealth is human knowledge and not human labor. That is, wealth is produced by the human mind and is thus free from the actual objective conditions that shape the historical relations of labor and capital. Only Orthodox Marxism recognizes the historicity of labor and its primacy as the source of all human wealth. In this paper I argue that any emancipatory theory has to be founded on recognition of the priority of Marx's labor theory of value and not repeat the technological determinism of corporate theory ("knowledge work") that masquerades as social theory.

Alternative – Intellectual Rejection Solves

As an intellectual your rejection of capitalism has emancipatory results relentless criticism allows capitalism to be challenged.

Kovel 2 (Joel, Professor of Social Studies at Bard, The Enemy of Nature, p224)

Relentless criticism can delegitimate the system and release people into struggle. And as struggle develops, victories that are no more than incremental by their own terms- stopping a meeting stopping the IMF, the hopes stirred forth by a campaign such as Ralph Nader’s in 2000 – can have a symbolic effect far greater than their external result, and constitute points of rupture with capital. This rupture is not a set of facts added to our knowledge of the world, but a change in our relation to the world. Its effects are dynamic, not incremental, and like all genuine insights it changes the balance of forces and can propagate very swiftly. Thus the release from inertia can trigger a rapid cascade of changes, so that it could be said that the forces pressing towards radical change need not be linear and incremental, but can be exponential in character. In this way, conscientious and radical criticism of the given, even in advance of having blueprints for an alternative, can be a material force, because it can seize the mind of the masses of people. There is no greater responsibility for intellectuals.

Refusing to participate in capitalism is the first step toward hollowing out the system and replacing it with an alternative

Herod 4 (James, renowned philosopher, author, and social activist, “Getting Free”, 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 every thing 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 we’re 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 can’t imply 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. It’s 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.

***Framework/Epistemology***

Framework

Our FW impact turns their policy framework— The Aff’s “we should” mentality assumes:

A) That US imperialism, war-mongering, and oppression are merely a “mistake”

AND	B. ) That the USFG actually cares what they think

Herod 1 (James, renowned marxist philosopher, author, and social activist “A Stake, Not a Mistake: On Not Seeing the Enemy”, October, 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.

Their epistemology turns their fairness and education claims – questioning hegemonic frameworks is key to public deliberation

Fischer 98 (Frank, prof of poli sci at Rutgers, BEYOND EMPIRICISM:POLICY INQUIRY IN POSTPOSITIVIST PERSPECTIVE, Policy Studies Journal Vol 26 No 1)

Nowhere are the implications of this alternative understanding more important than in the contemporary policy curriculum. Still dominated by an outmoded conception of scientific epistemology, the social and policy sciences ill-equip their students (especially doctoral students) for the world they are sent out to confront. Armed with empirical research designs and statistical methods, many often have little or no training in either understanding the normative and interpretive foundations of the tools they have learned to rely upon, or the social settings to which these techniques are to be applied. Some, to be sure, recognize these interpretive dimensions of the practice, but for reasons of examination and employment are compelled to concentrate on empirical methods. As students come to see the limits of these methods, as many do, the disciplinary neglect of these issues and concerns can breed more than a little cynicism. Some are simply turned off; others go through the academic ritual but turn away from--if not against--these methods after jumping over the requisite set of hurdles. For a long time, the argument against changing the curricular focus has turned on the problem of alternatives. Given the absence of credible alternatives, so the argument has gone, it is better to hang on to the traditional--albeit problematic--methods than to step into a methodological void. But this no longer need be the case. Postpositivism, as we have shown here, outlines the beginnings of a new orientation. Not only does it offer a theory of the social sciences that is readily identifiable in our existing practices, it constitutes an incorporation of new methods and approaches rather than a simple ejection of old ones. By giving new life to our methods and practices, it opens the way to a richer and more productive approach to social and policy inquiry.

Criticism is a prior question to the aff—their empiricist formulas masks capitalist ideology in the name of an objective truth

Smith 4 (Steve, Vice-Chancellor Univ of Exeter, Singing Our World Into Existence: International Relations Theory and September 11th, http://www.maxwell.syr.edu/maxpages/faculty/gmbonham/ISA_Presidential_Address.doc)

This raises the question of what kind of social science dominates academic disciplines of Political Science and International Relations? As the perestroika movement in the American Political Science Association has shown, the US academic community is becoming increasingly centred on a specific approach, namely rational choice theory. This approach is a very powerful one. It is the dominant tool in ‘successful’ social sciences such as economics, and its core assumption is simple to express: rational choice theory treats actors as rational, self-interested maximisers of utility (however that is defined). The rational choice theorist is not interested in the internal workings of actors, that is to say, for states, in their internal political debates, or, for individuals, their psychology. Instead the rational choice theorist models behaviour, on the basis of fixed, and pre-given identities, and interests. Such a method is incredibly productive, since it is parsimonious. It is uninterested in history or culture or difference, and instead is only concerned with what kind of game the actors are caught up in. In economics, it can predict with considerable accuracy how an interest rate rise will affect unemployment, or growth. It does this without having a second’s concern with the internal workings of the actors involved. It is a black-box model, focussed on the correlation between inputs and outputs. Now, in International Relations this approach is also increasingly dominant. It lies behind the major research programmes in the US community, either in hard form (mathematical modelling) or in its softer form (accounts based on assumptions of egotistic rational value-maximising actors). Whilst I may disagree about its range and assumptions, I consider it to be an entirely legitimate way of analysing international relations, but, and here is the rub, it is only one such legitimate approach; there are many others, and they commonly involve methodologies and epistemological warrants that are incompatible with rational choice theory. From this two conclusions follow: first rational choice theory is only one way of studying the world, and it should not be seen as the social science enterprise. Second, it has strengths, but it also has weaknesses. The most obvious of these is that it treats interests and identities as given. Thus as soon as you accept the first move in the story you must accept the outcome. Take for example the prisoners’ dilemma game. This yields enormously interesting conclusions about the social world. The point however is the ability of the analysts to define a given problem as a prisoners’ dilemma game. Once that is said then there is no way of coming to anything other than the finding that both actors end up in a worse situation than they need be. But reflect for a second on what is omitted from the game: the actors cannot communicate; there is no shadow of the future; we know nothing of their prior relationship; we do not know if they are guilty; we do not know if they know they are in a prisoners’ dilemma. Note also that the academic is claiming to sit outside the world he or she is reporting on. The game is a real one, and there is a clear gap between the observer and what is being observed. The game theorist is reporting on a world ‘out there’. This last point should cause us to think, since surely it is the game theorist who pronounces that this is indeed such and such a game, and surely it matters precisely if it is that game and not some other game. My point is that the game is at best a framework placed on the social world. So, the logic is not one of ‘this is a prisoners’ dilemma therefore we can predict the outcome’ but rather ‘ because we are able to make the prior intellectually justified but nonetheless political move of saying that this situation is a prisoners’ dilemma game, then we predetermine that the result will be the one we expect’. In short, the important move is the framing of the question, and in International Relations that translates into being able to make such reifying statements such as ‘the international political system is anarchical’, or ‘actors are self-interested’, or ‘the real world is so and so’. Rational choice theory is silent on this matter of the prior conditions for ascribing to a situation that it fits rational choice theory. What I am saying is that rational choice theory is technologically very efficient. It gets results. It predicts behaviour. It works. But why does it work? Is it because it is right, or because it presents itself, and becomes accepted, as the truth. Does it work because it has indeed captured the way the world is, because it corresponds with the way the world is, or does it dominate scholarly activity because it serves some interests; remember, it is an approach located within a particularly powerful academic community itself based in the dominant power in the world? In essence I am asking if the discipline of International Relations is marked by any less hegemonic behaviour than the international political system itself. My point is that the dominant method in the dominant IR academic community is producing a discipline that is marked by political assumptions masquerading as technical ones. Note that rational choice theory treats identities and interests as given, and never enquires into how these come about. As such it buys into a political economy of the possessive individual, itself a creation of 17th Century social contract theorists such as Hobbes and Locke. It takes the relationship between economics and politics as given, whereas in fact they were always taught as political economy until the 19th Century. Crucially it treats these features of the social world, especially as they have unfolded in the US, as if they apply throughout the world and apply for all time, even projecting them backwards into history. But I want to insist that this is a misleading account of the relationship between knowledge and the world. The act of any social theorist can never be to report neutrally on a world pre-formed and separate to him or her. There is no view from nowhere; all views make assumptions about actors, identities and interests, and all of them mix together statements about what is and what should be. So-called normative theory, a real no-no for the US academic community because it is ‘not scientific’, does this explicitly, but I want to insist that rational choice theory does it by stealth, by a sleight of hand, by pretending that the world is ‘out there’ whereas in fact it is a particular reading of that world, a reading influenced by the social location of the scholar concerned. This takes me back to Max Weber, and to one of his other most fascinating essays, ‘Politics as a Vocation’(Weber, 1948b), which was written as a public lecture at Munich University in 1918. Speaking about the nature of political activity, he makes a famous distinction between two ethical positions that might guide us in these political actions. The first of these is the ethic of ultimate ends, the second the ethic of responsibility. The ethic of ultimate ends refers to the notion that the ethical person acts rightly and leaves the results to work out; it is not the person’s fault if good intentions lead to bad results. On the other hand, someone acting according to the ethic of responsibility has to take account of the foreseeable results of one’s actions. Yet neither position can escape the logical problem that sometimes you have to use morally dubious means to achieve ‘good ends’. And, given that the decisive means for politics is violence, then the ethical dilemma for the political activist is obvious. Politics, for Weber, is ‘a strong and slow boring of hard boards’, and the ethical person cannot rely simply on a notion of an ethic of ultimate ends. Politics involves judgement and choice, which Martin Hollis called the ‘dirty hands’ problem, namely that there is no neutral place to decide technically on the ‘right’ way forward. Thus, echoing Luther, Weber voices his admiration for the person who says ‘here I stand I can do no other’. That is the ethic of responsibility in action. And it carries with it the danger that ‘[w]hoever wants to engage in politics at all…must know that he is responsible for what may become of himself under the impact of these paradoxes…he lets himself in for the diabolic forces lurking in all violence…He who seeks the salvation of the soul, of his own an of others, should not seek it along the avenue of politics, for the quite different tasks of politics can only be solved by violence’ (Weber 1948b: 125-126). So, I feel it is in the discipline of International Relations. There can be no equivalent to the ethic of ultimate ends, that is to say there is no possibility of a neutral observation of the world of international relations; all engagement is partial, all engagement carries with it a set of ethical consequences that rest, in the final analysis, on violence. Weber, then, seems to have one view of scholarly activity (as shown by the statements from ‘Science as a Vocation’, quoted above), and a very different one of political activity. Academic scholarship should not engage with normative questions, or introduce political perspectives into enquiry. Political activity rests upon the possibilities of violence, and as such can never avoid the ethic of responsibility. Yet, I believe that this draws too sharp a distinction between scholarship and the world of political activity. Specifically, I do not think that academics can avoid the moral and political ramifications of their scholarship, since that scholarship is based in a set of social forces towards which it is either supportive (either explicitly or implicitly) or opposed. In essence, then, scholarship cannot be neutral; it is unavoidably partial, is unavoidably political, and unavoidably has ethical consequences. Crucially, this is the case whether or not the scholar is explicit about these ramifications. Indeed, the pretence of value-neutrality, of using ‘objective’ data, is particularly problematic. As Weber commented in several essays, there is no more effective way of taking a political position than ‘letting the facts speak for themselves’. In my view, no scholar can avoid the dirty hands problem in his or her teaching of, or research into, international relations.

Method First

Method first – it validates ones ontological and epistemological universe

Hollis and Smith 96 (Martin and Steve, Profs of IR, A Response: Why Epistemology Matters)

Now, there are two problems with this: first it seems a very odd way of distinguishing between ontology and epistemology. It implies, inter alia, that historians who write biographies are epistemologists, whilst historians who survey periods and movements are ontologists. That strikes us as nonsensical. The second problem is that they fail to see the extent to which Gidden’s claims are only possible precisely because he has already made an epistemological choice. Indeed, this choice is spelt out very clearly in the preface to the book Jabri and Chan cite. Giddens explicitly rejects structural sociology, seeing the focus of social theory as being on the actors and their interpretations of situations. In this critically important way he has already dealt with epistemology! Far from downplaying the role of epistemology in favour of ontology, his stress on ontology can only be made because he has already decided what kinds of criteria allow us to judge what kinds of things exist in the social world. For Giddens, the appropriate epistemological position is one of what we call ‘Understanding’. He defines social structures as the rules and resources that are grounded in the knowledgeable activities of human agents. Structures are not external to actors but are internal to them. Here, Giddens shows just how important epistemology is: it is only because he is working n the right-hand column of our two-by-two matrix that he can say that epistemology is secondary. After all, if you settle epistemological questions by fiat you are then likely to see them as settled! Thus, whilst Gidden’s work is seen by Jabri and Chan as promoting a conception of structuration that overcomes questions of epistemology by concentrating instead on questions of ontology, the paradox is that he has done no such thing.

AT: Our Knowledge Good

You should be skeptical of their truth claims – capitalism informs both their goal and method which channels knowledge through the network of capital only reinforcing its dominance

Meszaros 95 (Istavan, Prof. Emeritus @ U of Sussex, Beyond Capital: Towards a Theory of Transition, p 71)

The capital system is an irrepressibly expansion oriented mode of social metabolic control. Given the innermost determination of its nature, the material reproductive and the political functions must be radically separated in it —producing thereby the modern state as the structure of alienation par excellence — just as production and control must be radically divorced in it. But ‘expansion’ in this system can only mean capital-expansion to which everything else must be subordinated, and not the development of positive human aspirations and the coordinated provision of the means for their satisfaction. This is why in the capital system the wholly fetishistic criteria of expansion must impose themselves on society also in the form of the radical separation and alienation of the power of decision making from everyone — including the ‘personifications of capital’ whose freedom’ consists in imposing on others capital’s imperatives — at all levels of societal reproduction, from the domain of material production to the highest levels of politics. For once the objectives of social existence are defined by capital in its own way, ruthlessly subordinating all human values and aspirations to the pursuit of capital-expansion, there can be no room for decision making, other than one strictly concerned with finding the instruments best suited for reaching the predetermined goal.

Evaluating the historical conditions and material causes of the case harms is more productive than discussing instrumental adoption – pinpointing specific causes abstracted from capitalism create circular justifications and strengthen capital

Meszaros 95 (Istavan, Prof. Emeritus @ U of Sussex, Beyond Capital: Towards a Theory of Transition, p 105-6)

The reason why capital is structurally incapable of addressing causes as causes—in contrast to treating all newly arising challenges and complications as more or less successfully manipulatable effects—is because it happens to be its own causal foundation: a varitable, unholy ‘causa sui’. Anything that might aspire at socioeconomic legitimacy and viability must be accompanied within its predetermined structural framework. For as a mode of social metabolic control capital cannot tolerate the intrusion of any principle of socioeconomic regulation that might constrain its expansion-oriented dynamics. Indeed, expansion as such is not simply a relative—to a greater or lesser extent commendable, and in that light under certain circumstances freely adopted whereas under other consciously rejected—economic function but an absolutely necessary way of displacing the capital system's emerging problems and contradictions, in accord with the imperative of avoiding like plague their underlying causes. The self propelling causal foundations of the system cannot be questioned under any circumstance. If troubles appear in it, they must be treated as temporary ‘disfunctions’, to be remedied by reasserting with ever greater rigour the imperative of expanded reproduction. It is for this reason that there can be no alternative to the pursuit of expansion—at all cost—in all varieties of the capital system. So long ad the scope for unobstructed expansion is objectively present, the process of displacing the system’s contradictions can go on unhindered. When things do not go well, i.e., when there is a failure in economic growth and corresponding advancement, the difficulties are diagnosed in terms of the circular proposition which runs away from the underlying causes and highlights only their consequences by saying that ‘there is not enough growth.’ Dealing with problems in this perverse circular way, constantly repeating even at times of major recessions that ‘everything is in place’ for healthy expansion, creates the illusion that capital’s mode of social metabolic control is in no need of fundamental change. Legitimate change must be always envisaged as limited alteration and improvement of what is already given. Change must be brought about by innovation undertaken strictly at the instrumental level, which is supposed to make it self evidently beneficial. Since, however, the necessary historical qualifying conditions and implications of continued expansion are systematically disregarded or brushed aside as irrelevant, the assumption of the permanence and unquestionable viability of capital's causa sui is utterly fallacious.

***AT: Affirmative Arguments***

AT: Perm

Wholesale rejection is the only viable method- capitalism cannot be compartmentalized

Kovel 2 (Joel, Professor of Social Studies at Bard, The Enemy of Nature, p 142-3)

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

Reformism DA – Their political project becomes a consumable single issue movement that doesn’t produce a universal demand on the system – it incorporates it into existing structures of domination

Zizek, 99 (Slavoj, Senior Researcher at the University of Ljubljana, 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 media’s 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!” Today’s 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, Lenin’s 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 today’s 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). It’s the same with all New Social Movements, up to the Zapatistas in Chiapas: the systemic politics is always ready to “listen to their demands,” 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 one’s 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”)

Interpassivity DA – the call for reform without complete abandonment of capitalist coordinates leads to passive acceptance of capitalism that coopts the alt

Zizek, 02 (Slavoj, Senior Researcher at the University of Ljubljana Revolution at the gates p.169- 171)

Indeed, since the "normal" functioning of capitalism involves some kind of disavowal of the basic principle of its functioning (today's model capitalist is someone who, after ruthlessly generating profit, then generously shares parts of it, giving large donations to churches, victims of ethnic or sexual abuse etc., posing as a humanitarian), the ultimate act of transgression is to assert this principle directly, depriving it of its humanitarian mask. I am Therefore tempted to reverse Marx's Thesis 11: the first task today is Precisely not to succumb to the temptation to act, to intervene directly and Change things (which then inevitably ends in a culdesac of debilitating impossibility: "What can we do against global capital? "), but to question he hegemonic ideological coordinates. In short, our historical moment is ,till that of Adorno:To the question "What should we do?" I can most often truly answer only with "I don't know." I can only try to analyse rigorously what there is. Here people reproach me: When you practise criticism, you are also obliged to say how one should make it better. To my mind, this is incontrovertibly a bourgeois prejudice. Many times in history it so happened that the very works which pursued purely theoretical goals transformed consciousness, and thereby also social reality. 5If, today, we follow a direct call to act, this act will not be performed in an empty space it will be an act within the hegemonic ideological coordinates those who "really want to do something to help people" get involved in (undoubtedly honourable) exploits like Medecins sans frontieres ,Greenpeace, feminist and antiracist campaigns, which are all not only tolerated but even supported by the media, even if they seemingly encroach an economic territory (for example, denouncing and boycotting companies which do not respect ecological conditions, or use child labour they are tolerated and supported as long as they do not get too close to a certain limit. This kind of activity provides the perfect example of interpassivity: of doing things not in order to achieve something, but to prevent something from really happening, really changing. All this frenetic humanitarian, politically Correct, etc., activity fits the formula of "Let's go on changing something all the time so that, globally, things will remain the same!". If standard Cultural Studies criticize capitalism, they do so in the coded way hat exemplifies Hollywood liberal paranoia: the enemy is "the system", the hidden "organization", the antidemocratic "conspiracy", not simply capitalism and state apparatuses. The problem with this critical stance is not only that it replaces concrete social analysis with a struggle against abstract paranoiac fantasies, but that in a typical paranoiac gesture it unnecessarily redoubles social reality, as if there were a secret Organization behind the "visible" capitalist and state organs. What we should accept is that there is no need for a secret " organizationwithin an organization": the "conspiracy" is already in the "visible" organization as such, in the capital system, in the way the political space and state apparatuses work.

AT: Authoritarianism/No Alt Solve

Non-unique – capitalism makes authoritarianism inevitable – only the risk the alt averts it

Meszaros 95 (Istavan, Prof. Emeritus @ U of Sussex, Beyond Capital: Towards a Theory of Transition, p 146)

In view of the fact that the most intractable of the global capital system’s contradictions is the one between the internal unrestrainability of its economic constituents and the now inescapable necessity of introducing major restraints, any hope for finding a way out of this vicious circle under the circumstances marked by the activation of capital’s absolute limits must be vested in the political dimension of the system. Thus, in the light of recent legislative measures which already point in this direction, there can be no doubt that the full power of the state will be activated to serve the end of squaring capital’s vicious circle, even if it means subjecting all potential dissent to extreme authoritarian constraints. Equally there can be no doubt that whether or not such a remedial action (in conformity to the global capital system’s structural limits) will be successfully pursued, despite its obvious authoritarian character and destructiveness, will depend on the working class’s ability or failure to radically rearticulate the socialist movement as a truly international enterprise. In any event, what makes matters particularly serious is the fact that the far-reaching issues themselves which confront humankind at the present stage of historical development cannot be avoided either by the ruling capital system or by any alternative to it. Although, as a matter of historical contingency, they have arisen from the activation of capital’s absolute limits, they cannot be conveniently bypassed, nor their gravity wished out of existence. On the contrary, they remain the overriding requirement of all-embracing remedial action in the reproductive practices of humankind for as long as the vicious circle of capital’s present-day historical contingency is not irretrievably consigned to the past. Indeed, paradoxically, the ability to meet in a sustainable way the absolute historical challenge that had arisen from the perverse historical contingencies and contradictions of the capital system constitutes the measure of viability of any social metabolic alternative to the ruling order. Consequently, the struggle to overcome the threatening absolute limits of the capital system is bound to determine the historical agenda for the foreseeable future.

The failure of socialism in the past was reliance on the state and competition – this meant capitalism wasn’t jettisoned completely and coopted the Soviet experiment

Meszaros 95 (Istavan, Prof. Emeritus @ U of Sussex, Beyond Capital: Towards a Theory of Transition, p 421-22)

The implosion of the Soviet type capital system had brought a seven decades long historical experience to its conclusion, making all theorizations and political strategies conceived in the orbit of the Russian revolution — whether positively disposed towards it or representing various forms of negation — historically superseded. The collapse of this system was inseparable from the structural crisis of capital which began to assert itself in the 1970s. It was this crisis which clearly demonstrated the vacuity of the earlier strategies, from Stalin’s projection of establishing the highest stage of socialism on the foundation of ‘overtaking U.S. capitalism’ in per capita pig iron production to the equally absurd post-Stalinist slogan of building a fully emancipated communist society by ‘defeating capitalism through peaceful competition’. For under the capital system there can be no such thing as ‘peaceful competition’; not even when one of the competing parties continues to delude itself of being free from the crippling structural constraints of capital in its historically specific form. The disintegration of the Communist parties in the East took place parallel to the implosion of the Soviet system. In the Western capitalist countries, however, we were witnessing a much more complicated process. For the crisis of the Western Communist parties preceded the collapse in Russia and elsewhere in the East by well over a decade, as the fate of the once most powerful French and Italian Communist parties demonstrated. This circumstance, again, underlined the fact that the crucial underlying cause was the deepening structural crisis of the capital system in general, and not the difficulties of political response to the baffling vicissitudes in Russia and in Eastern Europe. To be sure, after the implosion of the Soviet system all of the Western Communist parties tried to use the events in the East as the belated rationalization and justification for their abandonment of all socialist aspirations. Most of them even changed their name, as if that could alter anything for the better. Indeed, the same kind of rationalization and reversal of actual historical chronology, in the interest of justifying an obvious turn to the right, characterized also the Italian Socialists and the British Labour Party. The real problem was that under the new circumstances of capital’s structural crisis the former working class parties, Communist and non-Communist alike, had no strategy to offer as to how their traditional constituency — labour — should confront capital which was bound to impose on the working people growing hardship under the worsening conditions. Instead, they resigned themselves to the meek — called ‘realistic’ — acceptance of what could be obtained from the shrinking margins of capital’s troubled profitability. Understandably, in terms of political ideology this turn of events presented a much greater problem to the Communist than to the non-Communist parties. ‘The stillborn strategies of ‘Eurocommunism’ and ‘great historic compromise’ were attempts to come to terms with this difficulty, in the hope of finding a new constituency in the middle ground’ while retaining some of the old rhetorics. But it all came to nothing and ended in tears for many devoted militants who once genuinely believed that their party was moving in the direction of a future socialist transformation. The disintegration of the left in Italy, among others, in the last few years bears witness to the gravity of these developments, underlying the enormity of the challenge for the future.

AT: Aberdeen No Root Cause

Aberdeen is wrong – Greed can’t monocausally explain war – only materialist criticism does

Jackson, ‘7 (Richard, Centre for International Politics, University of Manchester, “Toward an Understanding of Contemporary Intrastate War”, Government and Opposition, Vol. 42, No. 1, pp. 121–137, 2007, Wiley Library)

Collier’s approach has since gained real political and academic currency, despite the fact that he has recently moderated his position to emphasize the interaction of greed and grievance in war initiation.9 The notion that the exploitation of natural resources for purposes of self-enrichment is the principal driver of war has become a central element of United Nations and World Bank policies towards intrastate wars, notably through efforts to reduce trades in ‘conflict goods’. The greed hypothesis has also generated a vast body of scholarship, and is a central component of the ‘new wars’ argument. Mary Kaldor’s influential thesis suggests that contemporary warfare is ‘new’, in part because its aims are greed-based, it exploits the global networks engendered by neo-liberal globalization and it blurs the distinctions between war and organized crime.10 Although Collier’s greed hypothesis is a partial corrective to the view that intrastate war can be explained by reference to its irrational and inexplicable primordial qualities, it remains a powerful expression of the ‘new barbarism’ approach, not least because it reduces the actors in intrastate war to little more than thieves and bandits. As such, the greed hypothesis functions to de-politicize and de-legitimize violent forms of subaltern counter-hegemonic resistance, securitize aid and development activities and legitimize the global liberal project.11 Like the earlier IPA research project volumes, Rethinking the Economics of War finds no case study evidence that greed can be considered the sole motivation or cause of intrastate war, or even a significant initiating factor. As the study’s editors put it: ‘It is notable that none of the conflicts explored in this book started as a greed-based rebellion. Contrary to Collier’s earlier predictions, neither greed nor the existence of lootable, resource-based wealth was an important cause or trigger of the conflict’ (p. 11). Further, the evidence from actual cases suggests that even though war always requires a resource base for its continuation, greed is rarely an important variable in the persistence of war; the pursuit of wealth is virtually always a means to a political end rather than an end in itself. Instead, the editors conclude that ‘grievances and identities – political factors – are still central to understanding the roots and objectives of war’ (p. 12), and that wars result from a complex interplay of failing state structures, a set of material grievances, hostile social identities, and political entrepreneurs who are willing and able to mobilize groups (pp. 262–70).

AT: Capitalism Inevitable

They need to win their epistemology is right before winning this claim – cap inev is class ideology and used as an alibi for capital

Kovel 2 (Joel, Professor of Social Studies at Bard, The Enemy of Nature, p 223)

The belief that there can be no alternative to capital is ubiquitous – and no wonder, given how wonderfully convenient the idea is to the ruling ideology.2 That, however, does not keep it from being nonsense, and a failure of vision and political will. Whether or not the vision of ecosocialism offered here has merit, the notion that there is no other way of organizing an advanced society other than capital does not follow. Nothing lasts for ever, and what is humanly made can theoretically be unmade. Of course It could be the case that the job of changing it is too hard and capital is as is as humanity can go, in which instance we must simply accept our fate stoically and try to palliate the results. But we don't know this and cannot know this. There is no proving it one way or the other, and only inertia, fear of change or opportunism can explain the belief in so shabby an idea as that there can be no alternative to capital for organizing society.

This is the link –they conflates ideology with inevitability

Murphy 4 (John, Professor of Sociology at the University of Miami, Caro Associate Professor of Sociology at Barry University, and Choi, Professor of Sociology at San Diego State Universty, Globalization With A Human Face,” p2-3

What is diabolical is that the market is touted to hold everyone’s future. Because persons no longer direct history, but are simply products of this process, there appears to be no alternative to the spread of markets and their worldwide integration. And anyone who chooses another approach to conceptualizing order—an alternative social or economic logic—is simply obstinate and denying reality. The logic of the market is deemed irrefutable. Furthermore, the image that is emanating from most political leaders in Europe and North America is that utopian thought is passé. The days of what Marcuse called the “Great Refusal” are long past.4 For many observers, history has delivered the best of possible worlds—an economic windfall to select groups that will eventually enhance everyone. What persons need now are patience and perseverance, and the magic of the market will do the rest. But many groups are becoming restless. In their opinion, the ideology of the market has become stale and an impediment to achieving a better life. Stated simply, they have not abandoned their utopian ideals of fairness and justice, and are looking for ways to realize these aims. In some cases, revolutionary fervor persists. But in general, they have decided to challenge the inherent ability of history to deliver a more propitious future. They are saying “enough,” and are searching for alternative models of economic regulation and social order. As a result, large numbers of persons have been protesting in most major cities over the spread and costs of neoliberalism. Although most mainstream politicians have been deaf to these calls for a more responsible order, the chants for a new direction continue. And contrary to the claims made by many pundits, these protesters have not abandoned their utopian impulse and have decided to make a different history. In other words, they have recognized that only ideology can bring history to an end, and that the recent picture created by this political device is an illusion. They have understood, accordingly, that history ends only when no more persons are left to decide their own fate. The invitation extended to join the globalized world is thus considered by many to be a ruse to get persons to jettison their own perspectives on the future. To prosper, all they have to do is assimilate to specific political mandates that have been cloaked in historical necessity. But critics of globalization have decided to change the rules of history and defy this view of progress. Their refusal, however, will not necessarily destroy civilization, as some conservative critics claim, but merely expose how the newly globalized world has been rigged in favor of the rich and ignores the needs and desires of most persons. The powerful and their supporters scream that these challenges are irrational and doomed to fail. Without a doubt, if these powerful forces continue to meddle in the social experiments of others, defeats will likely occur. But these failures have nothing to do with flaunting the laws of history or human nature. They occur most often because the rich and powerful want to discredit alternatives to their worldview and thus undermine any threats to their social or economic privileges.

Capitalism is not inevitable – proven through it’s maintenance

Kovel 2 (Joel, Professor of Social Studies at Bard, The Enemy of Nature, p115-116)

This reasoning is, I believe, valid, and necessary for grasping how capital becomes the efficient cause of the crisis. But it is incomplete, and fails to clear up the mystery of what capital is, and consequently what is to be done about it. For example, it is a commonly held opinion that capitalism is an innate and therefore inevitable outcome for the human species. If this is the case, then the necessary path of human evolution travels from the Olduvai Gorge to the New York Stock Exchange, and to think of a world beyond capital is mere baying at the moon. It only takes a brief reflection to demolish the received understanding. Capital is certainly a potentiality for human nature, but, despite all the efforts of ideologues to argue for its natural inevitability, no more than this. For if capital were natural, why has it only occupied the last 500 years of a record that goes back for hundreds of thousands? More to the point, why did it have to be imposed through violence wherever it set down its rule? And most importantly, why does it have to be continually maintained through violence, and continuously re-imposed on each generation through an enormous apparatus of indoctrination? Why not just let children be the way they want to be and trust that they will turn into capitalists and workers for capitalists - the way we let baby chicks be, knowing that they will reliably grow into chickens if provided with food, water and shelter? Those who believe that capital is innate should also be willing to do without police, or the industries of culture, and if they are not, then their arguments are hypocritical.

AT: Innovation

Tech innovation can’t sustain capitalism – they cede long-term planning to short-term profits and consumption

Liodakis, 10 (George, Professor of Political Economy at the Technical University of Crete, Greece, “Political Economy, Capitalism, and Sustainable Development”, Sustainability, 8/18/10, proquest)

Coming now to a more detailed explanation of this increasing ecological rift, we might stress that, under capitalism, an increase in labour productivity is essentially tantamount to a reduction in the amount of abstract socially necessary labour required for the production of any particular commodity (including labour power itself), which is a condition for an increased extraction and appropriation of surplus value [19]. This, as I have noted, is the dominant goal of capitalism, and hence all increases in the productivity of labour should serve this goal. Under this context, an increasing productivity of labour does not imply a process economizing on labour or any other productive resources. On the contrary, insofar as capital can proceed with a free appropriation of nature “as a gift to capital”, there will be a permanent bias towards developing a labour-saving technology, but this technology is conducive to a maximum throughput of natural resources and energy, which further implies a rapidly increasing depletion of natural resources and an increasing pollution contributing to a systemic environmental degradation. A labour-saving technology, therefore, and a rising productivity of labour do not necessarily imply an increasing social and ecological efficiency, but rather an increasing potential for material and energy throughput, with an enhanced ecologically damaging impact. What is more, even a resource-saving technological innovation cannot have, under capitalism, an environmentally protective impact insofar as it will, most likely, imply lower commodity prices and hence an increasing market demand, which will result in an increased (rather than decreased) extraction of the natural resource concerned. This implication is clearly related with the so-called Jevon‟s Paradox [10,14,18]. Economic efficiency, at a societal level, is not simply a technical issue (a matter of input/output relation) and should not be understood, in general, as market (capitalist) efficiency. In fact it is largely determined, not only by the dominant goals of production, but also by the prevailing social relations and the scale of production, as well as relations of distribution and property regimes. Apart from other reasons, it should be noted that, insofar as negative externalities (cost shifting) are not taken into account and positive externalities are insufficiently utilized due to the fragmented and (individually) antagonistic character of capitalist production, a maximum social efficiency goal cannot be achieved under capitalism, and this has clear and significant ecological implications [14,16,18,23]. This would also largely apply within a context of “market socialism”, but on this issue we will return below. It should further be stressed that the expropriation and privatization of common property under contemporary capitalism has increased class tensions, economic inequality and environmental degradation, while mal-distribution and inequality undermine economic efficiency and the sustainability of production [16,17,30-32]. On the other hand, a large number of studies have recently questioned the assumed efficiency of private property and pointed out a remarkably efficient allocation and utilization of resources in some traditional or alternative property regimes, such as common property or open access regimes, which partly explains the long run sustainability of these regimes [18,31-34]. Despite this evidence, the rapid privatization and commodification of natural resources within the context of the current neoliberal and rapidly globalizing capitalism, along with the commodification of scientific research and technological innovation, tend to a detrimental and multifaceted ecological impact [35]. Among other forms of this ecological degradation, one might stress the rapid loss of biological diversity and the recent dramatic climate changes, as having far-reaching both ecological and economic implications. While this ecological degradation may imply an upward push of the regulating cost of production without immediately putting absolute barrier to the reproduction of capital, this process cannot continue without ultimately causing crucial and perhaps insurmountable economic and environmental problems. Here, of course, we need to take into account the possibility of extending nature, of producing a “second nature” or alternative natures, which may have important implications for the sustainability of capitalism. There is an extensive research concerning this production of a “second nature” or alternative natures and their socioeconomic and ecological implications [29,36-38]. As E. Swyngedouw points out: “While one sort of sustainability seems to be predicated upon feverishly developing new natures ... forcing nature to act in a way we deem sustainable or socially necessary, the other type is predicated upon limiting or redressing our intervention in nature, returning it to a presumably more benign condition so that human and non-human sustainability in the medium and long term can be assured. Despite the apparent contradictions of these two ways of „becoming sustainable‟ (one predicated upon preserving nature‟s status quo, the other predicated upon producing new natures), they share the same basic vision that technonatural and sociometabolic interactions are urgently needed if we wish to secure the survival of the planet and much of what it contains” [39]. Although the possibility of producing new nature may extent the potential terrain of capitalist accumulation, and this may have important implication for an epoch characterized by a tendency towards a universal subsumption of nature under capital, it must be stressed that it does not imply that capitalism could ever escape all natural constraints. It is a rather limited and consequential potential [40]. Distinct from this potential of producing new nature, Neo-Malthusian approaches to the environmental problem, by assuming a finite availability of natural resources, have tended to overstress natural limits, presenting them usually in a naturalistic and absolute manner, while blaming overpopulation as the main source of environmental degradation and crisis [4,6]. On the other hand, Marx and contemporary Marxists, without ignoring natural and biological limits, conceive that social (organizational) or technological factors may, occasionally, relax or defer such limits. Reflecting on Marx‟s view, P. Burkett points out that, “with its exploitative scientific development of productive forces, its in-built tendency to „reproduce itself upon a constantly increasing scale‟, and the attendant extension of production‟s natural limits to the global, biospheric level, capitalism is the first society capable of a truly planetary environmental catastrophe, one that could ultimately threaten even capital‟s own material requirements” [23]. As I have argued, referring to a particular example, “The increasing water scarcity, the declining quality of water, and the inequitable pattern of its use across countries and in each particular country, along with a green-house warming that increasingly dries up mother earth, are not of course the result of some natural evolution, nor mainly the result of overpopulation, but rather an outcome of a few centuries of capitalist development and a particularly rapid economic growth during the last half of the twentieth century” [14]. In this case, as also in the case of energy, neo-Malthusian approaches are misleading insofar as they naturalize external limits (emphasizing natural scarcity), while largely ignoring the potentially important impact of drastic technological and organizational changes on both the supply and the demand side. On the latter side, quantitative and qualitative developments in social needs may be more the result of changes in technology and social organization, than the result of any population growth. But more importantly, neo-Malthusian approaches are misleading because they erroneously divorce the allocation of resources from the scale of production and, taking at face value the presumable allocative efficiency of the market mechanism, end up stressing a fixed scale of production and hence a steady-state model as a necessary condition for the sustainability of capitalism [41]. As R. Smith has plausibly argued, however, economic growth (and growthmania) is an inherent tendency of the market system and capitalism, and therefore a sustainability of capitalism through a steady-state adjustment is impossible [42]. It becomes rather clear from the preceding analysis and an increasing number of studies that capitalism, as a specific mode of production, tends to undermine the most basic conditions of ecological sustainability, jeopardizing thus the survival of human beings and of the capitalist system itself [14,15,43,44]. It would be rather misleading, however, to consider ecological sustainability separately from the conditions of economic and social sustainability of capitalism. Although this is not the place to expand on the deeper causes of the currently evolving and aggravated economic crisis, which tends to directly and indirectly undermine the conditions of economic and social sustainability of capitalism, we should briefly take into account the fundamental role of the law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall [28], lying behind the overaccumulation crisis of the early 1970s which continues, with some fluctuations, until the currently aggravated worldwide recession. This crisis, through a variety of processes and mechanisms, has fuelled the exacerbation of ecological crisis in various forms. Among these processes, we might consider the intensification of capitalist competition, the increasing externalities (cost-shifting), and the over-exhaustive exploitation of both labour power and natural resources. At the same time, there is an equally important dialectical feedback of the exacerbated ecological crisis on the further aggravation of economic and social crisis. At this point it may be pertinent to briefly address the “dematerialization” hypothesis as it might possibly have significant implications for both ecological crisis (reduction of materials and energy use) and the economic crisis caused by a rising organic composition of capital, namely the relation between constant to variable capital (C/V), and falling profits rates (as noted above). According to this hypothesis, the increasing information and knowledge content of production in modern capitalism, along with a relative expansion of the sector of services and a more energy-efficient technology imply a significant reduction in the material requirements of production. There are good reasons however, to argue that this “dematerialization” has not any significant real dimensions [45,46]. More importantly, I would further argue that this presumable “dematerialization” trend cannot have a significant impact on the material requirements of production, negating the tendency towards a rising composition of capital. The capitalist imperatives behind this rising organic composition of capital relate to three interrelated processes. In the first place, any process of production in capitalism encompasses a use-value production and a valorization process, and labour has necessarily to be materialized through the use and transformation of energy and natural resources. Secondly, competition implies the need of an incessant mechanization and automation drive aiming at an increased labour productivity. Thirdly, the capitalist need to discipline and exploit labour in production can again be met by an increasing mechanization. This increasing mechanization requires increased energy and resource use and implies further a potentially maximum throughput of material resources with a minimum labour power. It follows, therefore, that these necessities cannot be significantly changed by any “dematerialization” trend, and hence it cannot have any significant ameliorating impact of economic and ecological crisis. Capital, of course, deploys all sorts of strategies and methods to stave off or ameliorate crisis, and popular pressure may also have some effect in limiting the implications of economic and ecological crisis. Despite this pressure and all attempts or policies aiming at an ecological adjustment, however, it is rather impossible to adequately tackle the ecological problem within the context of the currently prevailing capitalist relations of production [10,14,18,21]. As the evidence available indicates, most of these attempts, aiming at a green redevelopment, dematerialization and a decoupling of capitalist economic growth from its negative ecological impact, have rather poor effects and cannot over all ensure the conditions for the sustainability of capitalism [46]. And as M. Singer notes, “although capitalism has produced an impressive array of technological innovations, as a global system it is characterized by inherent features that make it unsustainable and, further, that current efforts to implement green modifications to increase sustainability do not really address the central environment-society contradictions of this socioeconomic system” [44]. It becomes increasingly clear that the growing metabolic rift between society and nature, the exacerbated economic and ecological crisis, the expanding commodification of environmental goods and the rapid shrinkage of the public goods provision lead to an increasing degradation in the quality of life and undermine the required conditions for a sustainable human development [17,18,27]. While sustainable human development should be considered as being a major concern by itself and a crucial condition for the overall sustainability of society, mainstream theorizing and policy implementation regarding sustainable development are essentially concerned only with the sustainability of capitalist profitability (and growth), and not with the sustainability of the ecosystem or the conditions required for a sustainable human development. According to Burkett‟s interpretation of Marx, the intensification of the contradiction between production for profit and production for the satisfaction of human needs is a condition for capitalism‟s historical crisis, “[which] represents a generalized crisis of capitalist relations as a form of human-need satisfaction and human development, and this cannot be reduced to long-run profitability problems” [23]. It is such a crisis that we face today, which clearly manifests the economic, ecological and social un-sustainability of the capitalist mode of production. The preceding analysis confirms our argument that a specific treatment of the social organization of production, which is essentially ignored by mainstream economics, is crucial for exploring the conditions of social and ecological sustainability. In light of the barriers to capitalist sustainability associated with the immanent features of the CMP, several researchers clearly point to the need for a historical transcendence of this particular mode of production [14,23,44,47]. The crucial question is, therefore, to envisage the appropriate social forces and transitional processes, as well as the specific organizational restructuring of society ensuring both social equity and sustainability, and ecological sustainability.

Turn – Organizing the economy around innovation creates economics of speed- leads to rapid investment shifting and product development- that’s unsustainable and makes financial collapse inevitable

Goldman et al. ‘6 (Robert Goldman, Stephen Papson, Noah Kersey, Landscapes of the Social Relations of Production in a Networked Society, Fast Capitalism 2.1, http://www.uta.edu/huma/agger/fastcapitalism/2_1/SocialRelations.html)

The formula for success is knowledge, power, mobility, and determination. Situated in positions of power, the corporate elite imagistically embody these attributes -- they are active, informed, determined, focused, surrounded by technology. Even when the body is not moving, information continues to flow via cell phones and electronic information tools integrated into the scenes. Embodied in pinstripes, wingtips, and the other accoutrements of power, these scenes suggest that markets may be volatile but capital is composed and disciplined in its pursuit of opportunities. Nowhere is this scenario more graphically played out than in the 1999 ad campaign for Salomon Smith Barney that reveals a world moving at warp speed while the elite investment bankers calmly survey it as they spot the “opportunities” that will pay off. These representations resemble what Thomas Friedman (1999) dubs the “Electronic Herd” in The Lexus and the Olive Tree. His metaphor embraces the volatility of markets in conjunction with the diffusion of capital across the electronic circuits of finance. According to Friedman, no corporation or nation-state can risk losing the favor of the Herd. In the global economy this can be catastrophic to market values. Those who comprise the Herd compete to maximize the rate of return on investments, which translates into manically scouring the planet for opportunities or cutting losses as quickly as possible when it is time to sell. The manic need to invest is matched by panic selling. Combined with the ability to transfer funds and monies electronically, a stock can be cut in half in hours, or a country’s currency thrown into crisis with a rapidity hitherto unknown. Friedman’s metaphor of the electronic herd pictures an economic elite dashing about in a global free market economy fueled by technological innovation and the liquidity of capital forms (currency, stocks, commodities). The figures who compose this grouping are constructed as dynamic, mobile, and technologically sophisticated. They fluidly traverse the world of nonplaces and occupy office suites in corporate towers surrounded by personal communication technologies. And yet, even in these idealized abstractions, uncertainties and anxieties seep through. Narratives of success are sprinkled with hints of impending crisis, or stories of those who made the wrong choices - the wrong office equipment, the wrong software, the wrong package delivery service. The exhilaration associated with accelerated social, economic, and technological change mixes with an undercurrent of apprehension. Speed may mean winning, but it can also lead to crashing. There are more losers than winners in casino capitalism. The landscape of risk is omnipresent.

AT: Transition Wars

No transition wars – there aren’t any resources

Bennett and Nordstrom 2k – Department of Political Science, Pennsylvania State University (D. Scott, Timothy, “Foreign Policy Substitutability and Internal Economic Problems in Enduring Rivalries,” The Journal of Conflict Resolution, Vol. 44, No. 1, Feb., pp. 33-61, JSTOR)

This leads to our first hypothesis, which is as follows: Hypothesis 1: Poor economic conditions lead to diversionary actions against the rival. Conflict settlement is also a distinct route to dealing with internal problems that leaders in rivalries may pursue when faced with internal problems. Military competition between states requires large amounts of resources, and rivals require even more attention. Leaders may choose to negotiate a settlement that ends a rivalry to free up important resources that may be reallocated to the domestic economy. In a "guns versus butter" world of economic trade-offs, when a state can no longer afford to pay the expenses associated with competition in a rivalry, it is quite rational for leaders to reduce costs by ending a rivalry. This gain (a peace dividend) could be achieved at any time by ending a rivalry. However, such a gain is likely to be most important and attractive to leaders when internal conditions are bad and the leader is seeking ways to alleviate active problems. Support for policy change away from continued rivalry is more likely to develop when the economic situation sours and elites and masses are looking for ways to improve a worsening situation. It is at these times that the pressure to cut military investment will be greatest and that state leaders will be forced to recognize the difficulty of continuing to pay for a rivalry. Among other things, this argument also encompasses the view that the cold war ended because the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics could no longer compete economically with the United States.

Their evidence relies on flawed models – economic collapse forces countries to focus inward – solves risk of conflict

Bennett and Nordstrom 2k – Department of Political Science, Pennsylvania State University (D. Scott, Timothy, “Foreign Policy Substitutability and Internal Economic Problems in Enduring Rivalries,” The Journal of Conflict Resolution, Vol. 44, No. 1, Feb., pp. 33-61, JSTOR)

Most scholarly works that examine the effects of domestic economic woes on international behavior have focused on the theoretical possibility that leaders undertake adventurous foreign policies under conditions of worsening economic, social, and political problems (Levy 1989). Commonly known as either externalization or diversion, the main thrust of the argument is that political elites can solidify their relationship with their domestic constituents by transferring the public's attention from economic issues to the foreign enemy. Underlying the process is the assumption that the military action will cause the citizens to "rally 'round the flag" (Mueller 1973) and thereby the patriotic mass will see political elites in a more positive light. Early studies attributed to his rallying effect to a suspected in-group/out-group relationship. Simmel (1955) argued that an altercation with an out-group (the target of the externalization efforts) helps promote cohesion within the in-group (the troubled leader's citizenry) because it is natural for individuals to pull together with those they know when confronted by outsiders. Transferring the argument to action, it may be that if political elites realize that this in-group/out-group dynamic exists, then they will make advantageous use of externalization tactics. Auxiliary arguments might suggest that leaders will prefer short, manageable conflicts to boost their support without risking the long term costs of war. An additional implication of the theory when applied strategically to pairs of conflictual states is that while states with problems are likely to be conflict initiators, states without such problems are more likely to be the targets of diversion. If diversionary logic holds and states want to initiate a cheap and manageable incident to divert attention without imposing major costs, then leaders would prefer to initiate against states in a good economic or domestic situation. If the target is in bad shape domestically, then leaders in that target may have their own incentives to escalate the conflict to divert public attention. Initiators thinking strategically may try to avoid conflict against such an opponent. While diversionary conflict theory has been the subject of much scholarly attention, the evidence supporting the argument has been mixed. On one hand, studies that take the historical case study approach tend to support the notion that leaders do externalize when faced with domestic problems (Levy 1988, 667); in a related body of work, some case studies of deterrence failures have shown that these cases are often characterized by an attacker who is motivated by internal problems (e.g., Jervis, Lebow, and Stein 1985). On the other hand, quantitative studies of externalization have not provided consistent support. Across studies of externalization in general (e.g., Leeds and Davis 1997) or in the context of specific states' foreign policies (Fordham 1998; Gowa 1998; Meernik 1994; Meernik and Waterman 1996; Ostrom and Job 1986; Morgan and Bickers 1992; Mintz and Russett 1992), findings about whether quantitative data support the theory have been mixed. The nature of the results has led some to question the validity of the theories. For example, Bruce Bueno de Mesquita (1985) posits that the logical flaw in externalization theory lies in the psychological nature of the original scapegoat hypothesis on which externalization theory is based. While the international relations version of this theory is indeed written in psychological terms (in-group/out-group), it may be that "the logical foundation for the leap from individual psychology to national action remains non-existent" (1985, 130). Similarly, Levy (1989, 266) puts forth four problems with the original causal process as described by Simmel (1955), Coser (1956), and other early writers on externalization(:1 ) little attention is paid to the direction of the relationship between internal problems and external conflict, (2) attempts to develop or test alternative theoretical relationships are rare,( 3) precise specifications of when externalization should occur theoretically are rare, and (4) the conditions under which externalization conditions should hold are unexplored. The conclusion that Levy draws from these theoretical issues is that many of the empirical studies suffer from problems of misspecified models (1989, 267). An additional possible source of discrepancies in findings about diversionary conflict may be attributable to differences in research design and variable measurement. Studies have used a variety of research designs, different dependent variables (uses of force, major uses of force, militarized disputes), different estimation techniques, and different data sets covering different time periods and different states. Even the central concept of externalization, namely, domestic trouble, is unclear. Most studies to date have used presidential popularity, overall presidential success, the election calendar, or a misery index composed of inflation and unemployment as indicators of presidential problems. Cross-national studies have most frequently examined what James (1988, 103) categorizes as manifest conflict, a category which includes protest demon strations, political strikes, armed attacks, and deaths from domestic violence. This category can be opposed to latent conflict, which exists when sources of trouble are present but have not yet led to the physical manifestations of dissatisfaction. Diversionary conflict theory as presented is typically so general in its discussion of internal problems that it opens a Pandora's box of possible indicators of domestic conflict, and all of the types of measures discussed above fit with the theory. The vague nature of the theory may be contributing to this possible problem of model misspecification, but there are few arguments that suggest one indicator is superior to the others. Alternative relationships between domestic economic performance and international conflict also have been proposed, perhaps most importantly by Blainey (1973, 74). Blainey offers the alternative hypothesis about economics and war that economically challenged countries are more likely to be the target of aggressive military acts than their initiator (1973, 86). Faced with a poor target in a bad economic situation, who is faced with an unhappy populace and possibly limited resources, potential conflict initiators are likely to see opportunity. The argument also parallels the historical notion that leaders would only go to war when their coffers were full-in bad times, leaders may simply not be able to afford to go to conflict. Blainey's argument appears to pose a challenge to diversionary conflict theory in its emphasis on what is the most likely direction of conflict. Note, however, that its prediction (weak states become targets) differs from a strategic application of diversionary conflict theory. By coming at externalization from the substitutability perspective, we hope to deal with some of the theoretical problems raised by critics of diversionary conflict theory. Substitutability can be seen as a particular problem of model specification where the dependent variable has not been fully developed. We believe that one of the theoretical problems with studies of externalization has been a lack of attention to alternative choices; Bueno de Mesquita actually hints toward this (and the importance of foreign policy substitution) when he argues that it is shortsighted to conclude that a leader will uniformly externalize in response to domestic problems at the expense of other possible policy choices (1985, 130). We hope to improve on the study of externalization and behavior within rivalries by considering multiple outcomes in response to domestic conditions.5 In particular, we will focus on the alternative option that instead of externalizing, leaders may internalize when faced with domestic economic troubles. Rather than diverting the attention of the public or relevant elites through military action, leaders may actually work to solve their internal problems internally. Tying internal solutions to the external environment, we focus on the possibility that leaders may work to disengage their country from hostile relationships in the international arena to deal with domestic issues. Domestic problems often emerge from the challenges of spreading finite resources across many different issue areas in a manner that satisfies the public and solves real problems. Turning inward for some time may free up resources required to jump-start the domestic economy or may simply provide leaders the time to solve internal distributional issues. In our study, we will focus on the condition of the domestic economy (gross domestic product [GDP] per capita growth) as a source of pressure on leaders to externalize. We do this for a number of reasons. First, when studying rivalries, we need an indicator of potential domestic trouble that is applicable beyond just the United States or just advanced industrialized democracies. In many non-Western states, variables such as election cycles and presidential popularity are irrelevant. Economics are important to all countries at all times. At a purely practical level, GDP data is also more widely available (cross-nationally and historically) than is data on inflation or unemployment. 6 Second, we believe that fundamental economic conditions are a source of potential political problems to which leaders must pay attention. Slowing growth or worsening economic conditions may lead to mass dissatisfaction and protests down the road; economic problems may best be dealt with at an early stage before they turn into outward, potentially violent, conflict. This leads us to a third argument, which is that we in fact believe that it may be more appropriate in general to use indicators of latent conflict rather than manifest conflict as indicators of the potential to divert. Once the citizens of a country are so distressed that they resort to manifest conflict (rioting or engaging in open protest), it may be too late for a leader to satisfy them by engaging in distracting foreign policy actions. If indeed leaders do attempt to distract people's attention, then if protest reaches a high level, that attempt has actually failed and we are looking for correlations between failed externalization attempts and further diversion.

AT: Gibson-Graham

Totalizing Rejection is necessary – creates fissures within capitalist ideology that makes emancipation possible – the ballots endorsement is key

Holloway 5 (John, 8-16, Ph.D Political Science-University of Edinburgh , “Can We Change The World Without Taking Power?”, http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/5616)

On the question of fissures. We often feel helpless because capitalism weighs so heavily on us. But when we say No we start off with an appreciation of our own strength. When we rebel we are in fact tearing a little hole in capitalism. It is very contradictory. By rebelling we are already saying no to the command of capital. We are creating temporary spaces. Within that crack, that fissure, it is important that we fight for other social relations that don't point towards the state, but that they point towards the sort of society we want to create. At the core of these fissures is the drive to self-determination. And then it is a question of working out what does this mean, and how to be organised for self-determination. It means being against and beyond the society that exists. Of expanding the fissures, how to push these fissures forward structurally. The people who say we should take control of the state are also talking about cracks. There is no choice but to start with interstices. The question is how we think of them, because the state is not the whole world. There are 200 states. If you seize control of one, it is still only a crack in capitalism. It is a question of how we think about those cracks, those fissures. And if we start off from ourselves, why on earth should we adopt capitalist, bourgeois forms for developing our struggle? Why should we accept the template of the concept of the state?

***AT: Impact Turns***

AT: That’s Just Bad Capitalism

There is no idealized capitalism – the exploitation that runs rampant in the global economy and the trend of environmental degradation are necessary outcomes of capital’s expansion.

Kovel 02 (Joel, Alger Hiss Professor of Social Studies at Bard College, The Enemy of Nature: The End of Capitalism or the End of the World? pg 72-73)

As globalization propagates the mechanisms of accumulation around the globe, society after society is swept into the vortex of eco-destruction. Dependent and unequal development accompanied by massive debt becomes the midwife of this process. Wherever a debt is incurred, there will be pressure to discharge it by sacrificing ecological integrity Indonesian President Suharto, a great friend of globalization, put this clearly after the imposition of a structural adjustment programme. No need to worry, said the amiable leader of the world’s fourth largest nation, Indonesia could always exchange its forests for the money owed to the banks. The devastating effects of global debt on nations of the South25 are discomfiting to global capital — indeed, Jesse Helms, like the Walrus and the Carpenter, was reduced to tears by testimony to this effect. The scandal has led to a flurry of efforts to bring the load down, with some $50 billion in debts being retired in 2000. Alas, the South owed at the time about $2.3 trillion - twenty-six times as much — nor do the terms of forgiveness free it from the wheel of accumulation. As a recent account reported, ‘The IMF, the World Bank, the United States and others say that African countries must open up to the global economy and control wasteful internal spending and inflation if debt relief is to be put to lasting use.’ In other words: give us your forests and cheap labour by other means, and we will forgive the debt that you can’t pay under any circumstances. Because of debt’s injustice, the IMF is usually considered the heavy villain in the regime of globalization. ‘Doctor Death’, Time magazine called it recently, in an impressive sign that elite opinion is fracturing.2’ This is a reasonable assessment of the organization that has brought at least 90 poor nations under its spell. But the IMF, or ‘bad cop’ of globalization, should not be singled out as the source of the problem, an impression fostered in a recent essay by Joseph Stiglitz, chief economist of the World Bank from 1996 to November 1999. We met Stiglitz, you may recall, in the last chapter, joining the chorus of world economic leaders extolling the wonders of unlimited growth. Now, however, he has become something of a whistleblower, and caused something of a sensation by an article in the .New Republic that confirmed all the worst suspicions as to how utterly secretive, anti- democratic and ruthlessly attentive to short-term profitability is the IMF. Using as examples the handling of the Asian and Russian fiscal crises of 1997—99, Stiglitz leaves no doubt that the placing of ‘profits over people’, as the saying has it, has caused calamities of Holocaust proportions throughout much of the world. However, he has no intention of calling into question the capitalist system as a whole, but would have us believe that this disaster was the fault of bad capitalists at the IMF and the Treasury Department, and that their sin lay in not taking the advice of the World Bank, with its superior economists and good capitalism. The fantasy is widespread that somewhere a virtuous and all-knowing capitalist can be found, a fairy prince who will rescue the mismanaged global economy. As the World Bank plays ‘good cop’ in this scheme of’ things, and no doubt has some well—intentioned individuals working for it (just like any bank, or indeed, Monsanto, Chevron, etc., etc., even the IMF), many are disposed to believe that the Stiglitzs of the world can rescue us with their superior technical wisdom. When plain people go to Lourdes in search of miracle cures, the intelligentsia proclaim them superstitious. Yet many are willing to trust a profit-making Bank that puts technical intelligence in the service of accumulation, a bank that helped finance enterprises such as Union Carbide’s plant in Bhopal, and put into place the ecodestructive Green Revolution for which Bhopal was built, and was a great supporter of Suharto, and has built huge fossil-fuel-consuming projects throughout the South while prating of the need to control global warming. Those persuaded by recent propaganda to think that this leopard has changed its spots might ponder the case of Bolivia, the poorest country in South America. Having been pressured by the Bank to sell off its airline, electric utilities and national train service to private interests, the desperate nation was at length coerced into selling chunks of its water system to a consortium headed by the US construction giant, the Bechtel corporation, along with partners from Italy, Spain and four Bolivian companies an authentic spectacle of globalization at work, commodifying an essential substratum of life. Thanks to the Bank, the investors only had to put up less than $20,000 initial capital for a water system worth millions. With Bank loans, the consortium set about diverting various rivers no doubt with the ecological cart’ that usually attends enterprises of this sort and then, to cover the costs, attempted, again with the Bank’s blessing, to force through price increases of as much as $20 a month this in a country where the median working family income is $100 a month.

AT: Data Good

Capitalism commodifies science and statistics to further manipulate control over the system

Internationalist Perspective ‘9 [ “Capitalism, Technology, and the Environment, http://internationalist-perspective.org/IP/ip-archive/ip-archive.html]

Capitalist science – and surely we can use this term for science under the historical reign of capital – serves this purpose, this project, by making the whole field of its study, of its scope, into measurable, quantifiable, manipulable objects and processes of control and exploitation. And this scope, this field ultimately reaches the entirety of society and the entirety of nature. It begins with the historically progressive project of comprehending the world, by developing an accumulating understanding of the ‘laws of nature’ (physics, astronomy, chemistry). Before long, it turns to the study of the biological realm, and of the human being itself, as it differentiates itself from the rest of the animal world. The human social realm itself becomes the ultimate ‘frontier’, the final mystery for science. Scientific management of production employing any (and potentially all) natural resources in existence, together with potentially limitless administration and social and political control over society are the planned outcome of this historical project of capital and of the trajectory of the science that serves it. Science under the domination of society by capital has itself been transformed by capital, by its needs and its aims, but also by its ideological vision of the world itself. That vision, coming out of Descartes’ isolated subject of consciousness, seeing the external world as a homogenous res extensa, and then, as Marx so well described in the opening paragraphs of the Grundrisse, with the bourgeois viewpoint as that of the isolated, autonomous individual a la Robinson Crusoe. “In this society of free competition, the individual appears detached from the natural bonds etc. which in earlier historical periods make him the accessory of a definite and limited human conglomerate.” (ibid., p.83) Of course, this isolated individual not only confronts “social” but also natural connectedness in his pursuit of his private aims. Following on Lukács’ insights on this, the isolated individual viewpoint, in which contemplation as opposed to practice is the mode of orientation, the understanding of the world is fragmented, fractured, partial. And, correspondingly, the world in the vision of the bourgeoisie is a fragmented, fractured world. It is a world of separated, isolated facts and objects, taken out of their concrete connectedness with each other and with the larger natural and social context in which they exist. Abstraction and generalization are the means to obtain knowledge of the world on this basis. Concepts and categories for classifying the properties of objects and conditions in the world by means of quantifiable measurement are developed in order to be able make general(izable) predictions about different kinds of phenomena. Science proceeds on this basis during the bourgeois epoch to make comprehensible in a quantified format, using empirically based concepts, the natural and then social world for the purposes of the bourgeoisie’s, then the capitalist class’ historical project of controlling and exploiting the world, nature and society, to the greatest extent that it can. While not true of absolutely all of modern science, the bulk of all actual scientific research in capitalist society serves this end. The development of the technological productive forces, as fundamental as it is to the progress of capitalist society, obviously plays a large role in the direction taken by such science, of its priorities, of what it chooses to investigate, and what it either chooses to ignore or is incapable of comprehending. This approach to understanding the world is perfectly suited to the law of value and its increasing hegemony over capitalist society.

Turn- The statistics capitalism uses blinds us from seeing the objective violence that capitalism necessitates.

Zizek 08- Senior Researcher at the Institute for Social Studies, Ljubljana (Slavoj, Violence, p 2-3)

The catch is that subjective and objective violence cannot be perceived from the same standpoint: 'subjective violence is experienced as such against the background of a non-violent zero level. It is seen as a perturbation of the "normal," peaceful state of things. However, objective violence is precisely the violence inherent to this "normal" state of things. Objective violence is invisible since it sustains the very zero-level standard against which we perceive something as subjectively violent. Systemic violence is thus something like the notorious "dark matter" of physics, the counterpart to an all-too visible subjective violence. It may be invisible, but it has to be taken into account if one is to make sense of what otherwise seem to be "irrational" explosions of subjective violence. When the media bombard us with those "humanitarian crises" which seem constantly to pop up all over the world one should always bear in mind that a particular crisis only explodes into media visibility as the result of a complex struggle. Properly humanitarian considerations as a rule play a less important role here than cultural, ideologico-political, and economic considerations. The cover story of Time magazine on 5 June 2006, for example, was "The Deadliest War in the World." This offered detailed documentation on how around 4 million people died in the Democratic Republic of Congo as the result of political violence over the last decade. None of the usual humanitarian uproar was allowed, just a couple of readers' letters-as if some kind of filtering mechanism blocked this news from achieving its full impact in our symbolic space. To put it cynically, Time picked the wrong victim in the struggle for hegemony in suffering. It should have stuck to the list of usual suspects: Muslim women and their plight, or the families of 9/11 victims and how they have coped with their losses. The Congo today has effectively re-emerged as a Conradean "heart of darkness." No one dares to confront it head on. The death of a West Bank Palestinian child, not to mention an Israeli or an American is mediatically worth thousands of times more than the death of a nameless Congolese. Do we need further proof that the humanitarian sense of urgency is mediated, indeed, overdetermined by clear political considerations? And what are these considerations? To answer this, we need to step back and take a look from a different position. When the U.S. media reproached the public in foreign countries jot not displaying enough sympathy for the victims of the 9/11 attacks, one was tempted to answer them in the words Robespierre addressed to those who complain about the innocent victims of revolutionary terror: "Stop shaking the tyrant's bloody robe in my face, Or I will believe that you wish to put Rome in chains.'"

Your faith in data is misleading free market ideologies faith in statistics ignore the everyday elements of humanity dooming their predictions to failure

Greider 97 (William, the bestselling author of Who Will tell the People and Secrets of the Temple, is the National Editor of Rolling Stone, One World Ready or Not The Manic Logic of Global Capitalism pg 259-261)

The power of global finance includes an extraordinary ability to create its own version of reality and persuade others to believe in it. When investment analysts determine the financial outlook for a company or a nation, their portraiture is based on statistical indicators, market trends and political intelligence—an analysis cleanly abstracted from the messy facts of daily life. The financial data seem so concrete an logical, so consistent with orthodox principles of economics, that others are regularly seduced by the market’s self-confidence assumptions. Governments, press and politicians typically embrace thse financial projections and amplify them into a general metaphor of economic progress. When the messy truth intervenes, the duped ones are often reluctant to accept it. The case of Mexico is the most vivid—and tragic—example, among many others in recent years, of how supposedly learned people can be swept up in the enthusiasms of financial investors and led to accept a quite fanciful version of what another country is really like, what is happein there. President Clinton and his senior advisors (as well as their Republican predecessors)were taken into finance’s reality warp and they zealously promoted the mythology of a newly modernized Mexico. But then so did leading figures from business, finance and academic economics. Their illusions were faithfully rebroadcast by the establishment media, the leading newspapers and commentators, while dissenters were dismissed as reactionary. Mexico, it was said, was about to enter the front ranks of trading nations reforming and modernizing its industrial system dismantling an outmoded nationalist economic structure and the political corruption endemic in its state-controlled enterprises. The educated middle class, its confidence and incomes growing, demanded political reform and provided a dynamic market of consumers and, Mexico was enjoying a fabulous investment boom. Instead of the ruling party’s old power cliques, the nation was now led by reform-minded technocrats—men educated at Harvard, Yale, and Stanford—who understood that Mexico must embrace global integration if it wished to prosper. In the United States as well as Mexico, these progressive assumptions were articulated as the common understanding of the Mexican reality, the context in which Clinton and bipartisan elites promoted the North American Free Trade Agreement between the two countries in 1993. Despite the supporting data, almost none of it turned out to be true. Two years later Mexico was in ruin, its economy contracting by a devastating 7 percent, its domestic commerce frozen by a banking crisis that was devouring both financial institutions and industrial firms. At least on million jobs were destroyed, probably many more. Wage incomes fell in value by nearly one third. With incomes shrinking, as many as one in five Mexicans fell dangerously behind on their loans for cars, homes, businesses. More than eight thousand firms failed. The reformers turned out to be corrupt themselves. Former president Carlos Salinas de Gortari was in disgraced exile (though still serving on the board of the Wall Street Journal). His brother was in prison, accused of stealing hundreds of millions in state assets and of complicity in murder. For the first time since Mexico’s revolutionary turbulence in the 1920s assassination was revived as a tool of political conflict. Salinas’s handpicked presidential nominee was murdered; so was a young reform politician about to become the majority leader in Congress. An armed uprising in the southern state of Chiapas provoked heightened paranoia among other governors, and violent clashes occurred in the states of Guerrero, Morelos and Oaxaca in which troops or police fired murderously upon peasants marching in protest. The U.S. government, meanwhile evidently rediscovered what its investigative agents had always known—namely, that a major sector of Mexican commerce was involved in drug trafficking protected by highly placed patrons in the PRI (Partido Revlutionario Institucional), the political party that has held an uninterrupted monopoly on power for nearly seventy years. Instead of prospering, ordinary Mexicans formed a swollen new wave of immigrants, heading north. Reality is often quite prosaic alongside the glamorous mythmaking. In hindishgt, as financiers acknowledged, the Mexican boom of the early 1990s was mainly confined to its financial sector, not is real economy of domestic production and employment. It was fed by borrowed money and selling off state assets. Rather than political reforms, the financial boom was fundamentally driven by a single fact of global finance: the opportunity to arbitrage the differences in interest rates between the U.S. and foreign financial markets. By borrowing in New York’s money market where interest rates were then comparatively low, an investor could buy Mexican stocks or short-term government notes and capture the sptread between returns of 5 to 6 percent in America and 12 to 14 percent in Mexico. As more investors were inspired to do this, the price of Mexican stocks naturally soared and the Bolsa de Valores index doubled, tripled, even quadrupled during a span of only three years. Smart investors (including major Mexican bans) reaped fabulous returns—as much as 80 to 100 percent—by borrowing in America and buying Mexican financial assets they might hold no more than a few weeks or months. Dumb investors thought it would last forever The Mexican bubble popped in December 1994—a harrowing collapse in financial values when the foreign investors panicked and fled en masse. The proximate trigger was the Mexican government’s dwindling reserves of the foreign currencies needed to redeem the mounting short term debt paper held by the overseas lenders. When this condition became critical, the government was compelled to devalue the peso, which for several years it had propped up at overvalued lelves to attract the foreign money. The global investors felt betrayed and rushed for the door, all at once dumping exican assets of every kind Something like $2.5 billion flew out of the country. Instead of modest devaluation, the national currency collapsed, losing half of its purchasing power during a few frantic weeks. In the aftermath, there were endless disputes in the press and among policy makers over how clumsily the devaluation crisis had been handled by Mexico City or why American investors, including some of Wall Street’s largest brokerages, had not seen it coming. When market illusions are shattered, a search always begins to identify the human errors that might explain it.

AT: Fear of Communism

Fears of socialism bringing the apocalypse are excuses from the right to justify endless violence and ignore that capitalism has caused far worse genocidal violence.

Klien 07 (Naomi, award wining author of the bestselling books No Logo and Fences and Windows also columnist for the nation and the Guardian, Shock doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalsim. Pg 19-20)

Usually it is extreme religious and racially based idea systems that demand wiping out entire peoples and cultures in order to fulfill a purified vision of the world. But since the collapse of the Soviet Union, there has been a powerful collective reckoning with the great crimes committed in the name of Communism. The Soviet information vaults have been cracked open to researchers who have counted the dead-through forced famines, work camps, and assassinations. The process has sparked heated debate around the world about how many of these atrocities stemmed from ideology invoked, as opposed to its distortion by adherents like Stalin, Ceausescu, Mao and Pol Pot. “It was flesh-and-blood Communism that imposed wholesale repression culminating in a state-sponsored reign of terror,” writes Stephane Courtois, coauthor of the contentious Black Book of Communism. "Is the ideology it self blameless?"45 Of course it is not. It doesn't follow that all forms of Communism are inherently genocidal, as some have gleefully claimed, but it was certainly an interpretation of Communist theory that was doctrinaire, authoritarian, and contemptuous of pluralism that led to Stalin's purges and to Mao's reeducation camps. Authoritarian Communism is, and should be, for ever tainted by those real-world laboratories. But what of the contemporary crusade to liberate world markets? The coups, wars and slaughters to install and maintain pro-corporate regimes have never been treated as capitalist crimes but have instead been written off as the excesses of overzealous dictators, as hot fronts of the Cold War, and now of the War on Terror. If the most committed opponents of the corporatist economic model are systematically eliminated, whether in Argentina in the seventies or in Iraq today, that suppression is explained as part of the dirty fight against Communism or terrorism—almost never as the fight for the advancement of pure capitalism.

AT: Cap Solves War

Capitalism creates a cycle of winnable wars. It is only a matter of time before they go nuclear

Mészáros, 3 – Chair of philosophy at Sussex University (Monthly Review, István Mészáros, “Militarism and the Coming of Wars,” 6-08, http://monthlyreview.org/0603meszaros.htm)

1.It is not for the first time in history that militarism weighs on the consciousness of the people as a nightmare. To go into detail would take far too long. However, here it should be enough to go back in history only as far as the nineteenth century when militarism, as a major instrument of policy making, came into its own, with the unfolding of modern imperialism on a global scale, in contrast to its earlier—much more limited—varieties. By the last third of the nineteenth century the British and French Empires were not the only prominent rulers of vast territories. The United States, too, made its heavy imprint by directly or indirectly taking over the former colonies of the Spanish Empire in Latin America, adding to them the bloody repression of a great liberation struggle in the Philippines and installing themselves as rulers in that area in a way which still persists in one form or another. Nor should we forget the calamities caused by “Iron Chancellor” Bismarck’s imperialist ambitions and their aggravated pursuit later on by his successors, resulting in the eruption of the First World War and its deeply antagonistic aftermath, bringing with it Hitler’s Nazi revanchism and thereby very clearly foreshadowing the Second World War itself. The dangers and immense suffering caused by all attempts at solving deep-seated social problems by militaristic interventions, on any scale, are obvious enough. If, however, we look more closely at the historical trend of militaristic adventures, it becomes frighteningly clear that they show an ever greater intensification and an ever-increasing scale, from local confrontations to two horrendous world wars in the twentieth century, and to the potential annihilation of humankind when we reach our own time. It is most relevant to mention in this context the distinguished Prussian military officer and practical as well as theoretical strategist, Karl Marie von Clausewitz (1780-1831), who died in the same year as Hegel; both of them killed by cholera. It was von Clausewitz, director of the Military School of Berlin in the last thirteen years of his life, who in his posthumously published book—Vom Kriege (On War, 1833)—offered a classic definition of the relationship between politics and war that is still frequently quoted: “war is the continuation of politics by other means.” This famous definition was tenable until quite recently, but has become totally untenable in our time. It assumed the rationalityof the actions which connect the two domains of politics and war as the continuation of one another. In this sense, the war in question had to be winnable, at least in principle, even if miscalculations leading to defeat could be contemplated at the instrumental level. Defeat by itself could not destroy the rationality of war as such, since after the—however unfavorable—new consolidation of politics the defeated party could plan another round of war as the rational continuation of its politics by other means. Thus the absolute condition of von Clausewitz’s equation to be satisfied was the winnability of war in principle, so as to recreate the “eternal cycle” of politics leading to war, and back to politics leading to another war, and so on ad infinitum. The actors involved in such confrontations were the national states. No matter how monstrous the damage inflicted by them on their adversaries, and even on their own people (just remember Hitler!), the rationality of the military pursuit was guaranteed if the war could be considered winnable in principle. Today the situation is qualitatively different for two principal reasons. First, the objective of the feasible war at the present phase of historical development, in accordance with the objective requirements of imperialism—world domination by capital’s most powerful state, in tune with its own political design of ruthless authoritarian “globalization” (dressed up as “free exchange” in a U.S. ruled global market)—is ultimately unwinnable, foreshadowing, instead, the destruction of humankind. This objective by no stretch of imagination could be considered a rational objective in accord with the stipulated rational requirement of the “continuation of politics by other means” conducted by one nation, or by one group of nations against another. Aggressively imposing the will of one powerful national state over all of the others, even if for cynical tactical reasons the advocated war is absurdly camouflaged as a “purely limited war” leading to other “open ended limited wars,” can therefore be qualified only as total irrationality. The second reason greatly reinforces the first. For the weapons already available for waging the war or wars of the twenty first century are capable of exterminating not only the adversary but the whole of humanity, for the first time ever in history. Nor should we have the illusion that the existing weaponry marks the very end of the road. Others, even more instantly lethal ones, might appear tomorrow or the day after tomorrow. Moreover, threatening the use of such weapons is by now considered an acceptable state strategic device. Thus, put reasons one and two together, and the conclusion is inescapable: envisaging war as the mechanism of global government in today’s world underlines that we find ourselves at the precipice of absolute irrationality from which there can be no return if we accept the ongoing course of development. What was missing from von Clausewitz’s classic definition of war as the “continuation of politics by other means” was the investigation of the deeper underlying causes of war and the possibility of theiravoidance. The challenge to face up to such causes is more urgent today than ever before. For the war of the twenty first century looming ahead of us is not only “not winnable in principle.” Worse than that, it is in principle unwinnable. Consequently, envisaging the pursuit of war, as the Bush administration’s September 17, 2002 strategic document does, make Hitler’s irrationality look like the model of rationality.

4. This type of logic blinds us from seeing the objective violence capitalism necessitates.

Zizek 08- Senior Researcher at the Institute for Social Studies, Ljubljana (Slavoj, Violence, p 2-3)

The catch is that subjective and objective violence cannot be perceived from the same standpoint: 'subjective violence is experienced as such against the background of a non-violent zero level. It is seen as a perturbation of the "normal," peaceful state of things. However, objective violence is precisely the violence inherent to this "normal" state of things. Objective violence is invisible since it sustains the very zero-level standard against which we perceive something as subjectively violent. Systemic violence is thus something like the notorious "dark matter" of physics, the counterpart to an all-too visible subjective violence. It may be invisible, but it has to be taken into account if one is to make sense of what otherwise seem to be "irrational" explosions of subjective violence. When the media bombard us with those "humanitarian crises" which seem constantly to pop up all over the world one should always bear in mind that a particular crisis only explodes into media visibility as the result of a complex struggle. Properly humanitarian considerations as a rule play a less important role here than cultural, ideologico-political, and economic considerations. The cover story of Time magazine on 5 June 2006, for example, was "The Deadliest War in the World." This offered detailed documentation on how around 4 million people died in the Democratic Republic of Congo as the result of political violence over the last decade. None of the usual humanitarian uproar was allowed, just a couple of readers' letters-as if some kind of filtering mechanism blocked this news from achieving its full impact in our symbolic space. To put it cynically, Time picked the wrong victim in the struggle for hegemony in suffering. It should have stuck to the list of usual suspects: Muslim women and their plight, or the families of 9/11 victims and how they have coped with their losses. The Congo today has effectively re-emerged as a Conradean "heart of darkness." No one dares to confront it head on. The death of a West Bank Palestinian child, not to mention an Israeli or an American is mediatically worth thousands of times more than the death of a nameless Congolese. Do we need further proof that the humanitarian sense of urgency is mediated, indeed, overdetermined by clear political considerations? And what are these considerations? To answer this, we need to step back and take a look from a different position. When the U.S. media reproached the public in foreign countries jot not displaying enough sympathy for the victims of the 9/11 attacks, one was tempted to answer them in the words Robespierre addressed to those who complain about the innocent victims of revolutionary terror: "Stop shaking the tyrant's bloody robe in my face, Or I will believe that you wish to put Rome in chains.'"

AT: Cap -> Democracy

You have no historical basis for this argument in China Sigapore Iran and Russia Capitalism caused regimes that were substantially less democratic then before

Greider 97 (William, the bestselling author of Who Will tell the People and Secrets of the Temple, is the National Editor of Rolling Stone, One World Ready or Not The Manic Logic of Global Capitalism pg 37-38)

This retreat from principal begs the question: What was the Cold War really all about? Was it about securing freedom for enslaved peoples, as every patriot believed, or was it about securing free markets for capitalism, as Marxists critics often argued? The goal of human rights that leading governments once described as universal has been diluted by a new form of commercial relativism. The triumphant dogma of free-market capitalism leads to democracy by a process of gradual evolution. This rationale, though not supported by history, provides a comforting refuge for policy thinkers in many leading nations, especially the United States, as they back away from the Cold War’s moral principals. Once people begin to enjoy the rising incomes generated by industrial development, it argued, they will begin to demand individual freedoms. In time, a newly prosperous middle class emerges with the influence to insist upon free expression and the equitable power sharing of a stable democracy. Thus, the wisest course is to do business with these repressive regimes and let things evolve, engaging them in the wealth-creating process that eventually will unravel their monopoly on power. South Korea and Taiwan are frequently cited as proof that authoritarian regimes did indeed evolve into more open and democratic societies, through civil rebellions were required to force matters and neither has yet accepted a genuinely open economy and society. Promoters of the evolutionary thesis do not cite opposite examples like Iran, Chile or Singapore-where rapid industrialization led to varieties of anti-democracy. The conventional faith that democracy follows inevitably from industrial capitalism is simply wrong as historical fact-oblivious to the actual experience of industrial societies and the richly complicated social origins of political freedom. England, the United States, France and some other societies did evolve to systems of civil democracy and popular sovereignty, through the consolidation of individual rights was tortuously slow and imperfect, spread across centuries and regularly advanced only by political upheaval or violent conflict. England’s Parliament was a self-perpetuating “commerce of landlords” that for centuries protected propertied wealth against disenfranchised workers and peasants. Basic rights of citizenship in the American republic were secured for all men (though not for women) only in the crucible of civil war. France required political revolution In Germany and Japan, the rise of industrial capitalism did not lead to democracy, but to twentieth-century fascism. The repressive corporate states that emerged in those societies were able to supervise enormously productive economic systems without the bother of individual freedom or electoral accountability. These fascist systems did not evolve into democracies or reform voluntarily. They changed because they were destroyed by World War II. In Russia and China, the turmoil of industrialism led eventually to a different political resolution for those vast, agrarian societies-state communism. The centralized bureaucratic regimes in China and Russia failed as modern economic systems and, in hindsight, were not so different from the feudal structures that had always ruled over those countries. A mandarin class continues to run things in China, only the mandarians are called Communists. They describe their newly reformed economic system as “market socialism with Chinese characteristics.” The point of these historical citations is wariness. Facile theories about the inevitability of democracy skip over not just visible facts of history, but also the individual dynamics of societies, the complicated interplay of culture and class structures that in some places to the opposite The promise of a democratic evolution requires special skepticism is the theory is being promoted by economic players who actually benefit from the opposite conditions-the enterprises doing business in low-cost labor markets where the absence of democratic rights makes it much easier to suppress wages. A corporation that has made strategic investments based on the cost advantages offered by repressive societies can hardly be expected to advocate their abolition.

Turn- Capitalism causes alliances of corporate governments that destroy democracy

Greider 97 (William, the bestselling author of Who Will tell the People and Secrets of the Temple, is the National Editor of Rolling Stone, One World Ready or Not The Manic Logic of Global Capitalism pg 190-191)

Exploration in this realm will doubtless continue-discreetly offscrean form public debate-but corporate convergence contains the seeds of a great political crisis. Sooner or later, as the global system progresses along these lines, people will begin to grasp that enormous economic power is becoming concentrated in a very few hands and on a plane beyond national systems of accountability. Furthermore, convergence requires marriages of convenience between vastly different systems of enterprise-some firms that are freestanding and mainly accountable to shareholders, others that function as members of broad business networks and are intimately supervised by their governments. What if someday the People’s Republic of China has the industrial girth to demand a partnership? Or some of the ambidextrous transnational conglomerates formed by ethnic Chinese families from Asian nations? U.S. multinationals would find themselves negotiating market share with foreign governments. But, of course, if one government is at the table representing its own global producers, then all governments must be there, doing the same for their companies. If that becomes the mode for organizing and rationalizing global commerce, it does not require a gloomy imagination to see the grave implications for democracy. A hybridized system, evolving from necessity, may encourage the corporate state as the principal mechanism of governance-a governance in which public and private distinctions lose their meaning and the separate sources of economic and political power are coalesced. That form of capitalism would profoundly violate democratic values and deprive individuals everywhere of a right to self-determination. Americans who are appalled by the prospect should note that many successful trading nations already have similar arrangements. Against the present reality of intense and freewheeling competition, my observations on the future perhaps sound far-fetched. One can reasonably doubt whether such a system could ever be successfully put together or that it would function reliably, given the diverse multitude of competing interests. Still, it is troubling enough to observe that the architecture is already partially visible and, income quarters, a subject of active discussion. Back in the 1980s, most Americans would not have believed that only a few hundred corporations would someday dominate the nation’s commercial life or that five hundred global firms could rule the world’s. They would have been quite skeptical and amused by the suggestion that someday their local banks and businesses would be owned and managed from New York or London, Frankfurt or Tokyo. The future often seems improbable until it happens.

AT: Cap -> Freedom/ Rights

Their defenses of capitalism are ideological mystifications – capitalism by nature disavows its exclusions, ensuring that none of the rights and freedoms they say capitalism protects can actually be practiced.

Glyn Daly, Senior Lecturer in Politics in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at University College, Northampton, 2004, Conversations With Zizek, p. 16-17

The response of the left to global capitalism cannot be one of retreat into the nation-state or into organicist forms of community’ and popular identities that currently abound in Europe and elsewhere. For Zizek it is, rather, a question of working with the very excesses that, in a Lacanian sense, are in capitalism more than capitalism. It is a question, therefore, of transcending the provincial ‘universalism’ of capitalism. To illustrate the point, Zizek draws attention to the category of ‘intellectual property’ and the increasingly absurd attempts to establish restrictive dominion over technological advances — genetic codes, DNA structures, digital communications, pharmaceutical breakthroughs, computer programs and so on — that either affect us all and/or to which there is a sense of common human entitlement. Indeed, the modern conjuncture of capitalism is more and more characterized by a prohibitive culture: the widespread repression of those forms of research and development that have real emancipatory potential beyond exclusive profiteering; the restriction of information that has direct consequences for the future of humanity; the fundamental denial that social equality could be sustained by the abundance generated by capitalism. Capitalism typically endeavours to constrain the very dimensions of the universal that are enabled by it and simultaneously to resist all those developments that disclose its specificity-artificiality as merely one possible mode of being. The left, therefore, must seek to subvert these ungovernable excesses in the direction of a political (and politicizing) universalism; or what Balibar would call egaliberte. This means that the left should demand more globalization not less. Where neo-liberals speak the language of freedom —either in terms of individual liberty or the free movement of goods and capital — the left should use this language to combat today’s racist obsessions with ‘economic refugees, ‘immigrants’ and so on, and insist that freedoms are meaningless without the social resources to participate in those freedoms. Where there is talk of universal rights, the left must affirm a responsibility to the universal; one that emphasizes real human solidarity and does not lose sight of the abject within differential discourses. Reversing the well-known environmentalists’ slogan, we might say that the left has to involve itself in thinking locally and acting globally. That is to say, it should attend to the specificity of today’s political identities within the context of their global (capitalist) conditions of possibility precisely in order to challenge those conditions.

The majority of evidence proves otherwise-Capitalism deprives people of their agency denies them any hope of freedom

Greider 97 (William, the bestselling author of Who Will tell the People and Secrets of the Temple, is the National Editor of Rolling Stone, One World Ready or Not The Manic Logic of Global Capitalism pg 388-389)

In this global marketplace defend as free trade, it seems, but the people. Multinational enterprise can come and go from one market to the next, investors may insist upon terms for the use of their capital, governments may demand concessions in exchange for commercial opportunities. These contractual rights do not extend to the citizens, however, in large portions of the global system. In many developing countries, people are rigorously regulated by the state as a commodity-wage labor-and often forcibly deprived of the most basic individual freedoms-the right to speak one’s mind or associate freely with others. The general evidence of repression poses an ancient contradiction for capitalism: while it claims to promote human freedom, it profits concretely from the denial of freedom, most especially freedom for the workers employed by capitalist enterprise. Indeed, what draws producers to many locations around the world is the knowledge that labor surpluses allow piteously low industrial wages and that the government will prevent the workers from doing anything about it. In wealthy countries, business interests often complain that labor laws and unions prop up wage levels, but in poorer countries the same companies rely upon heavy-handed labor regulation, including the prohibition of free trade unions, to suppress wages The economies of globalization thus relies upon a barbaric transaction –the denial of individual rights-as a vital element of profitability. The fact that this practice is widely accepted and commercially efficient or that it has a long, notorious history from earlier industrial eras does not remove the moral stain. Exploration involves extracting profit from the inherent weakness of other human beings-people who are unable, for whatever reason, to defend themselves against domination. The presence of exploitative conditions is usually reflected in two complementary facts: First, the industrial wage is so low that it cannot sustain a minimal livelihood, even for young single workers in very poor countries. Second, the power of the state is actively employed to prevent workers from overcoming their weakness. Exploitation speaks the same language in every age. The rationale offered by modern multinational corporations in defense of these practices is cloaked in public relations euphemisms, but is not essentially very different from what the English mill owners said in the early nineteenth century or even, for that matter, how American slave owners once justified themselves. Commerce, it is explained, helps “civilize” the backward peasants recruited for factory work. These people are not yet equipped for the experience of individual expression, democracy or labor rights, but their jobs and wage incomes will, in time, “educate” them to expect more from life. Meanwhile, they are grateful for the work. Any interference deprives them of opportunity. This benevolent claim, like some other aspects of the global system, sounds more plausible at a distance than it does up close. The reality on the ground, in one country after another, is swelling conflict-vigorous, often violent clashes between workers and authorities as powerless people attempt to organize their collective voice and demand improvements. These new labor agitators are usually inexperienced young people, most often women since they are the bulk of the low-wage workforces. Their struggles to be heard are indeed sometimes clumsy since many are quite bewildered by their new circumstances as industrial workers. They are also extraordinarily brave, given the forces aligned against them-the companies, the police and military, their own government.

AT: Cap -> Environment

Extend Kovel- capitalism necessitates the destruction of the environment for resources- empirically proven this outweighs all other links

More Evidence

Trainer, 96 (Ted, University of New South Wales, “Towards a Sustainable Economy”, Jon Carpenter Oxford Publishing, pages 42-43)

Our way of life is ecologically unsustainable Our resource-affluent way of life also causes many serious environmental problems. We are destroying vital ecological systems. Consider, for example, the greenhouse problem, acid rain, the destruction of forests, the spread of deserts and the loss of plant and animal species. At the present rate, more than a million species will disappear in the next 25 years, because the expansion of human economic activity is destroying habitats. We farm in ways that lose 5 tonnes of topsoil for each person on earth every year (that is 15 times the amount of food we eat), we are destroying the protective ozone layer in the atmosphere, and we are polluting the ground waters and seas. One of the most unsustainable aspects of our society is the way we continually take large quantities of nutrients from the soil, eat them and then throw them away. We are depleting our soils at a rapid rate. In Chapter 12 it will be argued that we can only have a sustainable agriculture if we change to highly localised economic systems in which most of our food is produced close to where we live and all food wastes can be recycled. Most of these ecological problems are direct consequences of the sheer amount of producing and consuming going on. There is, for example, no way of solving the greenhouse problem without drastically reducing the amount of fuel being burnt, and therefore the volume of production taking place. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has concluded that in order to keep the carbon content ofthe atmosphere from increasing, let alone reduce it (as we should be doing) we will have to cut carbon input to the atmosphere by 60-80 per cent. If by 2060 we achieve a 60 per cent reduction and share the energy among 11 billion people then world average fossil fuel use would be about one-eighteenth the present Australian average. How can we do anything like this unless we drastically reduce energy use and therefore fossil fuel use? One of the most disturbing recent observations is the fact that in the last decade a number ofcrucial biological and ecological indices seem to be approaching or to have passed their peaks. This is true of world cropland area, irrigated area, fertiliser use, and meat, timber, wool and grain production. Some key yields such as rice and wheat seem to be tapering towards upper limits. World fish catch has clearly fallen from levels that will not be attained again. Yet we are only providing well for one billion people, and we might soon have 11 billion on the planet. Now add to this analysis the implications of continued economic growth. Fig 6.la represents the present volume of world economic output, distributed across its 5.4 billion people. Figure 6.lb represents output assuming that all the people living in the Third World in 2060 have risen to the living standards the rich countries have now, and incomes in rich countries rise by 3 per cent p.a. until then. World output would be about 19 times as great as it is now. Anyone assuming that all the world's people can be as rich as the rich world's people would be by 2060, given only 3 per cent annual growth until then, must believe that the world's resources and ecosystems can sustain 88 times present annual volumes ofoutput. And 3 per cent growth rate is not sufficient to make our economy healthy! In the 1980s Australia averaged 3.2 per cent annual growth and just about all its economic and social problems became worse. Unemployment at least doubled and the foreign debt multiplied by 10. Prime Minister Keating has emphasised that we need 4.5 per cent growth to start bringing unemployment down. Let us assume we were to average 4 per cent annual growth until 2060, and that by then all the world's people had risen to the 'living standards' we would have then. Total world economic output would be 220 times what it is today. There is no chance whatsoever of reaching even a 19-fold increase in present output. Yet conventional economists proceed as if we can rise to and beyond these levels; they never acknowledge any need to worry about there being any limits to the growth of production and consumption. The environmental problem is basically due to overproduction and overconsumption, yet we have an economy in which there must be constant and limitless increase in production and consumption. Again, the problem is due to our economy and cannot be solved until we develop a quite different economy

Capitalism creates a mentality of greed that environmental protection rational impossible

Kovel 02 (Joel, Professor of Social Studies at Bard, The Enemy of Nature, pg 77-79)

If the ruling class - those persons who through ownership and/or control hold the reins of the system in their hands - were to prove capable of appreciating just how much trouble we are all in, then just maybe they could install necessary changes in time. If, however, they are structurally incapable of dealing with the crisis, then this greatly reinforces the indictment made here. I say structural, because the behaviour of elites cannot be reduced to ordinary motivations like greed or domination, as greedy or domineering as they may in fact be. When we are talking of class interest and of how individuals become personifications of great institutional forces, all the innumerable variations that make the human psyche interesting are subjected to a few basic rules, and a remarkable uniformity of behaviour prevails. Of course, an individual member of the elite can rebel and step aside. But what does it matter that a few capitalists think differendy from their fellows if their ideas are drowned out by the preponderant force of class opinion? In actuality, a member of the elite who starts seeing things radically differently either gets back into line or is excluded from power; he simply ceases being a member of the elite, and gets replaced by someone more in accord with the needs of capital. For the remainder, the system imposes a powerful and uniform set of constraints, as the dominant social forces induce some psychological elements and inhibit others, while providing ideals, rationalizations and norms of conduct - in short, a kind of moral universe within which behaviour is shaped and given structure. Each society selects for the psychological types that serve its needs. It is quite possible in this way to mold a great range of characters toward a unified, class purpose. To succeed in the capitalist marketplace and rise to the top, one needs a hard, cold, calculating mentality, the ability to sell oneself, and a hefty dose of the will to power. None of these traits is at all correlated with ecological sensibility or caring, and they are all induced by the same force field that shapes investment decisions. The three statements by elite figures given above are of course not representative of the public face put to the world by the ruling classes. In fact, Summers has claimed that his remarks were meant to be 'ironic’ . It so however, it is the irony that states a factual truth with a face-saving twist, for the substance of the remark, along with those by Wolfensohn and Skilling, hold a mirror to the actual trajectory of capital. Capital speaks through these powerful figures, in all its ruthless calculatedness, its willingness to jettison the unprofitable, and its reduction of nature to resources and sinks. What they are saying, then, is authentic even if it may be denied. Putting the matter this way removes us from thinking of the capitalist elites as being motivated by 'greed' or some internally driven psychological state. Of course greed plays a role. How could it not when stupendous fortunes can be had for compliance with the rules of the game? But the question is how greed, or the drive for power, or cold and calculating ways of thought, lead to blindness and rigidity. These are the salient traits, and they arise from the intersection of psychological tendencies with the concrete world of the capitalist. Consider some of the ways in which this works itself out anti-ecologically. First, the bigger the system gets - which is to say, the more it fulfills its destiny of expansion - the more grandiose becomes the capitalist way of thought. And the more grandiose, the more removed. If you sit at the heart of the world's financial centers, fly in private jets, manipulate billion of dollars with the tap of a keypad and control a productive apparatus capable of diverting rivers and sending missions to Mars, you are not likely to experience the humility of a St Francis or the patient tenacity of a Rachel Carson. And lacking this, you are no more likely to experience fellow-feeling for the web of life than for the poor people of Africa. In short, ecological consciousness is blocked by the ruling class position. This grandiosity is greedily reinforced by a sense of personal invulnerability, which insulates capitalists from the consequences of their actions except as these affect the bottom line of profit. Ordinary people are not so protected. The reason that so many people of colour, for example, have toxic waste dumps in their neighborhoods (estimates have run as high as 60 per cent) is transparently that such people do not sit at the command structures of the corporations that pollute. Those who do, by contrast, see to it that the poisons they make stay out of their own neighbourhoods. This keeps the elites away from direct evidence of the destabilizing effects of capitalist production. And it feeds the fantasy that they can always surround themselves with protection against a nature out of balance.

AT: Cap -> Green Technology

Extend Kovel- capitalism necessitates the destruction of the environment for resources- empirically proven this outweighs all other links

More Evidence

Trainer, 96 (Ted, University of New South Wales, “Towards a Sustainable Economy”, Jon Carpenter Oxford Publishing, pages 42-43)

Our way of life is ecologically unsustainable Our resource-affluent way of life also causes many serious environmental problems. We are destroying vital ecological systems. Consider, for example, the greenhouse problem, acid rain, the destruction of forests, the spread of deserts and the loss of plant and animal species. At the present rate, more than a million species will disappear in the next 25 years, because the expansion of human economic activity is destroying habitats. We farm in ways that lose 5 tonnes of topsoil for each person on earth every year (that is 15 times the amount of food we eat), we are destroying the protective ozone layer in the atmosphere, and we are polluting the ground waters and seas. One of the most unsustainable aspects of our society is the way we continually take large quantities of nutrients from the soil, eat them and then throw them away. We are depleting our soils at a rapid rate. In Chapter 12 it will be argued that we can only have a sustainable agriculture if we change to highly localised economic systems in which most of our food is produced close to where we live and all food wastes can be recycled. Most of these ecological problems are direct consequences of the sheer amount of producing and consuming going on. There is, for example, no way of solving the greenhouse problem without drastically reducing the amount of fuel being burnt, and therefore the volume of production taking place. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has concluded that in order to keep the carbon content ofthe atmosphere from increasing, let alone reduce it (as we should be doing) we will have to cut carbon input to the atmosphere by 60-80 per cent. If by 2060 we achieve a 60 per cent reduction and share the energy among 11 billion people then world average fossil fuel use would be about one-eighteenth the present Australian average. How can we do anything like this unless we drastically reduce energy use and therefore fossil fuel use? One of the most disturbing recent observations is the fact that in the last decade a number ofcrucial biological and ecological indices seem to be approaching or to have passed their peaks. This is true of world cropland area, irrigated area, fertiliser use, and meat, timber, wool and grain production. Some key yields such as rice and wheat seem to be tapering towards upper limits. World fish catch has clearly fallen from levels that will not be attained again. Yet we are only providing well for one billion people, and we might soon have 11 billion on the planet. Now add to this analysis the implications of continued economic growth. Fig 6.la represents the present volume of world economic output, distributed across its 5.4 billion people. Figure 6.lb represents output assuming that all the people living in the Third World in 2060 have risen to the living standards the rich countries have now, and incomes in rich countries rise by 3 per cent p.a. until then. World output would be about 19 times as great as it is now. Anyone assuming that all the world's people can be as rich as the rich world's people would be by 2060, given only 3 per cent annual growth until then, must believe that the world's resources and ecosystems can sustain 88 times present annual volumes ofoutput. And 3 per cent growth rate is not sufficient to make our economy healthy! In the 1980s Australia averaged 3.2 per cent annual growth and just about all its economic and social problems became worse. Unemployment at least doubled and the foreign debt multiplied by 10. Prime Minister Keating has emphasised that we need 4.5 per cent growth to start bringing unemployment down. Let us assume we were to average 4 per cent annual growth until 2060, and that by then all the world's people had risen to the 'living standards' we would have then. Total world economic output would be 220 times what it is today. There is no chance whatsoever of reaching even a 19-fold increase in present output. Yet conventional economists proceed as if we can rise to and beyond these levels; they never acknowledge any need to worry about there being any limits to the growth of production and consumption. The environmental problem is basically due to overproduction and overconsumption, yet we have an economy in which there must be constant and limitless increase in production and consumption. Again, the problem is due to our economy and cannot be solved until we develop a quite different economy

Our link outweighs your turn - technological innovations only mask the very human relation with nature that causes environmental destruction ensuring the future devastation is always worse

Kovel 02 (Joel, Professor of Social Studies at Bard, The Enemy of Nature, pg 76-77)

To draw out the broad ecological outlines of capitalist society is one thing to prove that this will inexorably lead to ecocatastrophe unless capital is overthrown is another. Here the question becomes not what capital is doing to ecosystems, human and natural, but whether it can adapt and change its ways, given the gathering breakdown of its natural ground - or to be more exact, whether it can do so in time to permit a mending of its relations with nature. Everyone appreciates how fabulously adaptable capital has been. It has eluded destruction time and again, so much so that its capacity to adapt to ecological breakdown is pretty well taken for granted. Market society has been fabulously successful in producing wealth. Why not, so the standard argument runs, will it not be just as successful in producing ecological integrity? But where this line of reasoning goes astray is in not realizing that this time, the lesion arises from capitalist production as such. The problem afflicting previous crises was how to resume a pattern of growth interrupted by one stress or another. Now, however, it is precisely the pattern of growth that causes the problem. Yes, capital can produce 'green commodities' or anti-pollution devices; it can even recycle and conserve resources as well as energy. But because it does so as capital, it does so by producing itself before anything else, and this gathering sea of capital will have the effects documented above, essentially washing out the marginal gains achieved by efforts at recuperation. This proposition is no more provable than its converse, the popularly assumed idea that capital will work its way out of the ecological crisis. The question is, rather, whether it -is more plausible, and for this purpose we may introduce yet another line of reasoning. Capitalist production includes all those forces that enter into the generalized production of commodities. But these include the prevalent human dispositions that enter into production. If it is true that capitalism induces a kind of mentality turned away from recognizing nature, we mean for this to be understood as one of the elements (in Marxist terms, a 'force of production') making the ecological crisis more intractable. In plain language, one of the biggest ecological problems with capitalism is the capitalist.

Even if they win this is true in the abstract the laws of competition under capitalism would prevent the actual implementation of any policy or technology that would solve warming

Kovel 02 (Joel, Professor of Social Studies at Bard, The Enemy of Nature, pg 80-81)

Another core trait of the capitalist is the fetish of technology. Since technology raises the rate of surplus value extraction, it is a key to profit ability, and so becomes invested with the godlike power of capital. The capitalist therefore not only overestimates the technological, he himself becomes like a machine. In his hard, cold calculatedness, he thinks 'instrumentally', that is, reductively and in terms of parts rather than wholes. This is doubly useful in that it permits ready-made rationalizations of one's behaviour, and the isolation and separation of such traits as could stir forth some ecological awareness. Of course the capitalist does not only think; he is also a passionate, desiring creature. The problem is that capital selects for such passions as are recklessly ecodestructive, particularly the desire to win at all cost. The main mechanism of this is the relentless competition built into the heart of the system, which assures that only the rabidly self-seeking and ruthless are elected to patrol the higher reaches of capital. There is nothing mysterious about this, but its significance is easily overlooked in the macho world of capitalist culture. This is a much more cogent factor in capital's antiecological regime than simple greed. The attitude was summed up by recendy deposed Coca-Cola president and CEO Douglas Ivester. Friend ship, admiration and respect, said Ivester, are not 'really my priority. This is what I really want. I want your customers, I want your space on the shelves, I want your space of the consumer's stomach. And I want every single bit of beverage growth potential that is out there.'33 Just as capital can never stop expanding, therefore, so can its personifications never have enough. How can people of this sort ever be expected to wake up to the ecological crisis? The effect is accentuated inasmuch as the regime of finance capital places an emphasis on short-term profitability. The very fluidity sought by capital imposes ever greater demands that profits be realized right away or sooner. This is a main reason why nothing substantial will be done about global warming under the present regime. Sure, all sorts of constructive measures are on the drawing board. But to take them seriously involves the unthinkable measure of cutting into immediate profits. If capitalists could all plan together, this might be possible. But that in turn runs against the law of competition.

AT: Cap -> Technology

Technology has ultimately a destructive nature as long as it is used within a capitalist system

Internationalist Perspective, 9 [“Capitalism, Technology, and the Environment, http://internationalist-perspective.org/IP/ip-archive/ip-archive.html]

5. As far as I am concerned, and as was claimed in the previous two points, there can no longer be any debate about the claim that capitalist society’s relationship with the natural environment has become catastrophic, not just for the health and very survival of that environment, but also for humankind itself, which requires that environment in order to reproduce itself through history. And it is equally undeniable that capitalist society’s relationship with the natural environment has been facilitated or mediated by the technology of that society. For the past 150-200 years, that technology has primarily been (various forms of) large-scale industrial productive technology. The question eventually must arise: is it merely the specific usage that capitalism makes of this (and associated) technology that is the determinant factor here, or is it rather the technology itself that is determinant owing to its limited possibilities of use? This question needs to be unpacked, although it usually isn’t, with the positivist, productivist, traditional Marxist invariably asserting that it is only the usage that capitalism makes of this essentially ‘neutral’ technology that is at fault. (While the technophobic pro-environment opponent of this destruction lays all of the blame on the technology by itself, as a completely autonomous force, thereby letting capital off the hook.) Obviously the capitalist’s usage of the technology is at fault, and an essential part of the problem. But the question is really whether this technology itself is actually neutral, capable of an entirely opposing deployment; or, in fact, has not capital itself already developed and perfected this technology in its own image, with its own imperatives and aims, its own perspective – which is of course that of the maximum domination and exploitation of everything that exists – to such an extent that any possible usage of it (e.g. by associated producers) will prove damaging (and ultimately destructive) to the people and the natural environment that it interacts with? This is the real question posed here. How one answers this question determines how one sees humankind’s future relationship with technology after the emancipation of the proletariat from the dictatorship of the capitalist class: as either (a) a further and even intensified development of the technology bequeathed by capitalism in the same direction as was previously driven by the law of value, or (b) a radical rupture with that trajectory by means of a primary focus given to further technological development at the service of qualitative rather than strictly quantitative criteria and aims, with a principle focus given to the quality of the relations between the people of the society and between nature and the people which this technology mediates.

Current technological development is unsustainable - it will collapse the system

Greider ‘97 (William, the bestselling author of Who Will tell the People and Secrets of the Temple, is the National Editor of Rolling Stone, One World Ready or Not The Manic Logic of Global Capitalism pg 103-105)

The great contest of technology sweeps across every industrial sector, a harrowing competition that discards the old way of making things and invents future benchmarks for quality and efficiency. No enterprise can stand aside and none can feel permanently triumphant. The race for technological improvements drives on two levels at once: improving their product while, on the other level, they try to extract time and cost from the design and manufacturing processes. The new industrial leaders are those brilliantly managed firms that do both simultaneously, and vast literature is devoted to recounting their achievements. There is another dimension to the technological revolution, however, that is seldom discussed in the business books: the gathering vulnerability of an industrial system that is ruled by persistent excess supply. The same technological imperative that continuously reduces costs and improves quality has also generated a seemingly permanent and expanding surplus in the productive capacity of the world. Crudely stated, technology competition leads companies to invest in more output of goods than global marketplace consumers can possibly absorb. New factories, designed to produce more from less, naturally increase their capacity for production, but the output potential expands faster than older, less efficient factories are being closed. This underlying imbalance is compounded by the accelerating drive for globalization, as firms both modernize and rush and rush to build new production in the developing markets. A perverse syllogism is thus at work, company by company, sector by sector: the burdensome presence of overcapacity quickens the price competition and threatens market shares, but the only obvious response is to create more new capacity-that is, to build new factories that will be more cost efficient than one’s rivals. The resulting surpluses are often lamented by business leaders but generally regarded as a revolutionary condition beyond anyone’s control. From a manager’s viewpoint, the challenge is to make sure that the market’s overcapacity becomes the other guy’s problem. That some other firm will be compelled to swallow losses in sales and close down its factories. Meanwhile, it is hoped that the newly developing economies will create enough new consumers so that the market eventually comes back into balance. Economists conventionally assume the same. As orthodox theory teaches, markets are always self-correcting, so the surpluses are a temporary consequence of competition and will work themselves out as supply comes into balance with demand. Theory notwithstanding, the global system is headed in roughly the opposite direction for most major manufacturing sectors. The productive overcapacity is neither temporary not diminishing. Autos are the leading example of this dilemma-too many cars chasing too few buyers-but the same trend is visible in steel, aircraft, chemicals, computers, consumer electronics, drugs, tires and some others. The particulars vary from one sector to another but the overriding fact in gross surplus of capacity, despite the many years of plant closings, and the overhang grows steadily larger in most cases. Of all imperatives driving the behavior of global enterprises, this constitutes a central source of their anxiety. For the global system as a whole, it represents a fundamental disorder threatening to destabilize the free-running commerce. At a minimum, the growing imbalance between supply and demand guarantees that the storm of dislocations and shakeout must continue. Whether these are described as restructuring or deindustrialization, more factories must be closed, more employees discarded, more production moved elsewhere. The scale of adjustments that will be inescapable grows larger as the industrial overcapacity expands. No one can predict who exactly must absorb these loses- which companies or which nations- but the usual pattern is that the old gives way to the new, more costly locales cede to less expensive ones. A calamitous possibility also lurks in these facts: the threat that accumulative overcapacity will lead to some sort of decisive breakdown, a financial crisis or an implosion of global commerce, perhaps precipitated by producers. In the 1920s, similar imbalances developed from similar causes, and the root cause of the eventual market breakdown was excess supply and inadequate demand. Capital was being invested in new productive capacity based on expectations that could not possibly be fulfilled by a marketplace already burdened by plentiful goods and scarce buyers. When that reality could no longer be denied, the optimism of financial investors collapsed; so did financial prices. The Great Depression followed. An alternative threat that these surpluses pose for the free-running global system is political: How much more loss and upheaval can be absorbed by the political systems of advanced nations before the popular stress generates a reactionary counterrevolution? No one, of course, can know the answer, but the symptoms of rebellion are already visible in many leading economies. One foreboding fact is the evasion and denial of political leaders in those nations. None is yet willing even to discuss the global economy in those terms.

AT: Cap -> Poverty

Capitalism makes poverty inevitable.

Wilsdon, writer for the Socialist Alternative, 2005

Tony, Socialist World.net, September 26 page http://www.socialistworld.net/eng/2005/09/26us.html

The simple fact is the creation of poverty is a product of our economic system. It is a necessary by-product of capitalism. It flows from the internal workings of the system, which allows a few rich owners of vast capital to extract the labor of its workers for a pittance. The extreme polarization of wealth in the U.S. has been accelerated and exacerbated by the neo-liberal policies pursued by both major parties during the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, and so far this decade. The fact that the presidential candidates for both the (…) To boost their profits, employers have ruthlessly attacked wages, benefits, and working conditions. Both political parties collaborated in refusing to raise the minimum wage, resulting in tens of million of workers seeing their living standards drop below the poverty line. Restrictions have been increased on eligibility for unemployment benefits. Fewer and fewer workers now qualify for any unemployment benefits, resulting in tens of millions dropping off the rolls and forced to live without any income. Inherent in capitalism has been the maintenance of a sizeable pool of unemployed workers living on the edge of poverty who are desperate for jobs. It keeps workers competing with each other to get jobs, allowing corporate owners to keep wages low. This was first described by Karl Marx, the founder of scientific socialism, as an essential weapon used by capitalists to keep down wages. When this political and economic system is judged by future inhabitants of the planet, this policy will be judged, correctly, as one of the greatest crimes against humanity

*Read epistemology indicts*

AT: Cap -> Trade/ Exchange

Their focus on exchange value and the laws of the market jacks our relationship with nature - makes environmental degradation inevitable

Kovel 02 (Joel, Professor of Social Studies at Bard, The Enemy of Nature, pg 195-196)

Ecological politics can be translated into a framework of values. The Bruderhof care very little for exchange-value , opting instead for a radically Christian intrinsic value. The economy has its laws; but whether those laws are obeyed depends on the subjective balance within individuals, which in turn depends upon their social relations. This can be sketched as a kind of coefficient between the two kinds of economic value. If we call use-value uv, and exchange-value xv, then the coefficient, uv/xv, expresses in a rough sort of way the balance of forces disposing toward acceptance and rejection of the capitalist force field. I say 'rough' not because these elements are indeterminate, but because they are qualitative and profoundly political. They exist not as something we can measure and put on a graph, but as collective practices and sets of meanings, which have been struggled over and command in varying degrees the loyalties of people. When we say more, or less, with respect to use - and exchange - values, we mean it in the sense of 'more fully realized'. From this angle, capitalism comprises that society that sees to it that xv»uv, so that people internalize the signals of the market and obey them as gospel; and furthermore, that the use values of commodities are configured to the needs of exchange- and surplus-value, and not to those of nature's intrinsic value, nor to that of a fulfilled human nature, whence we get sports utility vehicles, caffeinated sof drinks, Roundup Ready soy beans, Huey helicopters, submission to globalization - and coordinatively, the loss of contact with nature and its reduction to mere matter and energy. The 'usefulness5 of this kind of formulation derives from its potential to pry off the heavy stone laid over the possibilities of transforming capital, thereby opening the field to a wider and more differentiated range of action. Under normal capitalist conditions, exchange-value prevails and use-values are subordinated and degraded, both as they stand and as they are constantly multiplied to subserve endless, wasteful and destructive commodities. Only consider, for example, the indifference with which people throw things out once they are 'used': the spectre of Styrofoam cups (even at gatherings of ecologically active groups); the shelves of Toys 'R Us groaning with plastic items awaiting their batteries and the swift transfer to the dump. Like the passage from the straight razor endlessly sharpened to the bag full of throwaway razors, life itself has become disposable. My grandfather repaired watches, one of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of his kind in New York City. Now his successors are as rare as snow leopards, and they work on items of conspicuous consumption while I wonder whether to throw away the Casio and buy another because the strap has broken. What is cost effective? This has become the 'to be or not to be' question of capitalism, and in the search for surplus value it drives sensuously creative labour out of the- market and replaces hand-craft with automated technical prowess. In a liberated and ecologically sane world, use-values would take on a character independent of exchange-value, not to rule but to serve the needs of human nature and nature. They would, in other words, be shifted in the direction of intrinsic value. There is no necessary reason why this could not happen - although it cannot happen without a social transformation that expands democracy, allows the great range of human powers to be expressed and consolidated, and incorporates the great, countervailing intentions necessary to nullify capital's force field. Were there enough ecological militants about, organized according to coherent praxes that were not mere voluntarisms, but linked across a great international theatre of action, well then, the capitalist order could be surpassed. It would not stand one day if enough of the people said no! in thunder to it. Of course there is a big hedge here: if enough people decide, including soldiers and police, who arc people, too.

This makes extinction inevitable

Kovel 02 (Joel, Professor of Social Studies at Bard, The Enemy of Nature, pg viii)

Here, far from the pieties, the effects of capital's ruthless pressure to expand are encountered. Imperialism was such a pattern, manifest politically and across nations. But this selfsame ever-expanding capital was also the superintendent and regulator of the industrial system whose exhalations were trapping solar energy. What had proved true about capital in relation to empire could be applied, therefore, to the realm of nature as well, bringing the human victims and the destabilizations of ecology under the same sign. Climate change was, in effect, another kind of imperialism. Nor was it the only noxious ecological effect of capital's relentless growth. There was also the sowing of the biosphere with organochlorines and other toxins subtle as well as crude, the wasting of the soil as a result of the Green Revolution, the prodigious species losses, the disintegration of Amazonia, and much more - spiraling, interpenetrating tentacles of a great crisis in the relationship between humanity and nature.

AT: Cap -> Space Colonization

1. USSR MADE IT TO SPACE FIRST- No reason the alternative prevents space colonization- rejecting capitalism doesn’t mean rejecting technology- no reason post- alternative people can’t colonize space.

2. Doesn’t solve extinction- capitalism will inevitable cause extinction through wars and competition- taking it to space doesn’t dissolve it.

3. Turn- Only non capitalist technology has the potential to save lives.

Internationalist Perspective, 9 [ “Capitalism, Technology, and the Environment, http://internationalist-perspective.org/IP/ip-archive/ip-archive.html]

As far as I am concerned, and as was claimed in the previous two points, there can no longer be any debate about the claim that capitalist society’s relationship with the natural environment has become catastrophic, not just for the health and very survival of that environment, but also for humankind itself, which requires that environment in order to reproduce itself through history. And it is equally undeniable that capitalist society’s relationship with the natural environment has been facilitated or mediated by the technology of that society. For the past 150-200 years, that technology has primarily been (various forms of) large-scale industrial productive technology. The question eventually must arise: is it merely the specific usage that capitalism makes of this (and associated) technology that is the determinant factor here, or is it rather the technology itself that is determinant owing to its limited possibilities of use? This question needs to be unpacked, although it usually isn’t, with the positivist, productivist, traditional Marxist invariably asserting that it is only the usage that capitalism makes of this essentially ‘neutral’ technology that is at fault. (While the technophobic pro-environment opponent of this destruction lays all of the blame on the technology by itself, as a completely autonomous force, thereby letting capital off the hook.) Obviously the capitalist’s usage of the technology is at fault, and an essential part of the problem. But the question is really whether this technology itself is actually neutral, capable of an entirely opposing deployment; or, in fact, has not capital itself already developed and perfected this technology in its own image, with its own imperatives and aims, its own perspective – which is of course that of the maximum domination and exploitation of everything that exists – to such an extent that any possible usage of it (e.g. by associated producers) will prove damaging (and ultimately destructive) to the people and the natural environment that it interacts with? This is the real question posed here. How one answers this question determines how one sees humankind’s future relationship with technology after the emancipation of the proletariat from the dictatorship of the capitalist class: as either (a) a further and even intensified development of the technology bequeathed by capitalism in the same direction as was previously driven by the law of value, or (b) a radical rupture with that trajectory by means of a primary focus given to further technological development at the service of qualitative rather than strictly quantitative criteria and aims, with a principle focus given to the quality of the relations between the people of the society and between nature and the people which this technology mediates.

AT: Cap -> Science

As long as science is influence by capitalism it will have ultimately a destructive nature

Internationalist Perspective, 9 [ “Capitalism, Technology, and the Environment, http://internationalist-perspective.org/IP/ip-archive/ip-archive.html]

Capitalist science – and surely we can use this term for science under the historical reign of capital – serves this purpose, this project, by making the whole field of its study, of its scope, into measurable, quantifiable, manipulable objects and processes of control and exploitation. And this scope, this field ultimately reaches the entirety of society and the entirety of nature. It begins with the historically progressive project of comprehending the world, by developing an accumulating understanding of the ‘laws of nature’ (physics, astronomy, chemistry). Before long, it turns to the study of the biological realm, and of the human being itself, as it differentiates itself from the rest of the animal world. The human social realm itself becomes the ultimate ‘frontier’, the final mystery for science. Scientific management of production employing any (and potentially all) natural resources in existence, together with potentially limitless administration and social and political control over society are the planned outcome of this historical project of capital and of the trajectory of the science that serves it. Science under the domination of society by capital has itself been transformed by capital, by its needs and its aims, but also by its ideological vision of the world itself. That vision, coming out of Descartes’ isolated subject of consciousness, seeing the external world as a homogenous res extensa, and then, as Marx so well described in the opening paragraphs of the Grundrisse, with the bourgeois viewpoint as that of the isolated, autonomous individual a la Robinson Crusoe. “In this society of free competition, the individual appears detached from the natural bonds etc. which in earlier historical periods make him the accessory of a definite and limited human conglomerate.” (ibid., p.83) Of course, this isolated individual not only confronts “social” but also natural connectedness in his pursuit of his private aims. Following on Lukács’ insights on this, the isolated individual viewpoint, in which contemplation as opposed to practice is the mode of orientation, the understanding of the world is fragmented, fractured, partial. And, correspondingly, the world in the vision of the bourgeoisie is a fragmented, fractured world. It is a world of separated, isolated facts and objects, taken out of their concrete connectedness with each other and with the larger natural and social context in which they exist. Abstraction and generalization are the means to obtain knowledge of the world on this basis. Concepts and categories for classifying the properties of objects and conditions in the world by means of quantifiable measurement are developed in order to be able make general(izable) predictions about different kinds of phenomena. Science proceeds on this basis during the bourgeois epoch to make comprehensible in a quantified format, using empirically based concepts, the natural and then social world for the purposes of the bourgeoisie’s, then the capitalist class’ historical project of controlling and exploiting the world, nature and society, to the greatest extent that it can. While not true of absolutely all of modern science, the bulk of all actual scientific research in capitalist society serves this end. The development of the technological productive forces, as fundamental as it is to the progress of capitalist society, obviously plays a large role in the direction taken by such science, of its priorities, of what it chooses to investigate, and what it either chooses to ignore or is incapable of comprehending. This approach to understanding the world is perfectly suited to the law of value and its increasing hegemony over capitalist society.

***Affirmative Answers***

Aff – Perm

Perm solves – disengagment from politics destroys activism against capital – hypothesizing about policy making is key to creating space for the critique

David E. McClean, 2001, “The Cultural Left and the Limits of Social Hope,” Am. Phil. Conf., www.american-philosophy.org/archives/past_conference_programs/pc2001/Discussion%20papers/david_mcclean.htm

Yet for some reason, at least partially explicated in Richard Rorty's Achieving Our Country, a book that I think is long overdue, leftist critics continue to cite and refer to the eccentric and often a priori ruminations of people like those just mentioned, and a litany of others including Derrida, Deleuze, Lyotard, Jameson, and Lacan, who are to me hugely more irrelevant than Habermas in their narrative attempts to suggest policy prescriptions (when they actually do suggest them) aimed at curing the ills of homelessness, poverty, market greed, national belligerence and racism. I would like to suggest that it is time for American social critics who are enamored with this group, those who actually want to be relevant, to recognize that they have a disease, and a disease regarding which I myself must remember to stay faithful to my own twelve step program of recovery. The disease is the need for elaborate theoretical "remedies" wrapped in neological and multi-syllabic jargon. These elaborate theoretical remedies are more "interesting," to be sure, than the pragmatically settled questions about what shape democracy should take in various contexts, or whether private property should be protected by the state, or regarding our basic human nature (described, if not defined (heaven forbid!), in such statements as "We don't like to starve" and "We like to speak our minds without fear of death" and "We like to keep our children safe from poverty"). As Rorty puts it, "When one of today's academic leftists says that some topic has been 'inadequately theorized,' you can be pretty certain that he or she is going to drag in either philosophy of language, or Lacanian psychoanalysis, or some neo-Marxist version of economic determinism. . . . These futile attempts to philosophize one's way into political relevance are a symptom of what happens when a Left retreats from activism and adopts a spectatorial approach to the problems of its country. Disengagement from practice produces theoretical hallucinations"(italics mine).(1) Or as John Dewey put it in his The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy, "I believe that philosophy in America will be lost between chewing a historical cud long since reduced to woody fiber, or an apologetics for lost causes, . . . . or a scholastic, schematic formalism, unless it can somehow bring to consciousness America's own needs and its own implicit principle of successful action." Those who suffer or have suffered from this disease Rorty refers to as the Cultural Left, which left is juxtaposed to the Political Left that Rorty prefers and prefers for good reason. Another attribute of the Cultural Left is that its members fancy themselves pure culture critics who view the successes of America and the West, rather than some of the barbarous methods for achieving those successes, as mostly evil, and who view anything like national pride as equally evil even when that pride is tempered with the knowledge and admission of the nation's shortcomings. In other words, the Cultural Left, in this country, too often dismiss American society as beyond reform and redemption. And Rorty correctly argues that this is a disastrous conclusion, i.e. disastrous for the Cultural Left. I think it may also be disastrous for our social hopes, as I will explain. Leftist American culture critics might put their considerable talents to better use if they bury some of their cynicism about America's social and political prospects and help forge public and political possibilities in a spirit of determination to, indeed, achieve our country - the country of Jefferson and King; the country of John Dewey and Malcom X; the country of Franklin Roosevelt and Bayard Rustin, and of the later George Wallace and the later Barry Goldwater. To invoke the words of King, and with reference to the American society, the time is always ripe to seize the opportunity to help create the "beloved community," one woven with the thread of agape into a conceptually single yet diverse tapestry that shoots for nothing less than a true intra-American cosmopolitan ethos, one wherein both same sex unions and faith-based initiatives will be able to be part of the same social reality, one wherein business interests and the university are not seen as belonging to two separate galaxies but as part of the same answer to the threat of social and ethical nihilism. We who fancy ourselves philosophers would do well to create from within ourselves and from within our ranks a new kind of public intellectual who has both a hungry theoretical mind and who is yet capable of seeing the need to move past high theory to other important questions that are less bedazzling and "interesting" but more important to the prospect of our flourishing - questions such as "How is it possible to develop a citizenry that cherishes a certain hexis, one which prizes the character of the Samaritan on the road to Jericho almost more than any other?" or "How can we square the political dogma that undergirds the fantasy of a missile defense system with the need to treat America as but one member in a community of nations under a "law of peoples?" The new public philosopher might seek to understand labor law and military and trade theory and doctrine as much as theories of surplus value; the logic of international markets and trade agreements as much as critiques of commodification, and the politics of complexity as much as the politics of power (all of which can still be done from our arm chairs.) This means going down deep into the guts of our quotidian social institutions, into the grimy pragmatic details where intellectuals are loathe to dwell but where the officers and bureaucrats of those institutions take difficult and often unpleasant, imperfect decisions that affect other peoples' lives, and it means making honest attempts to truly understand how those institutions actually function in the actual world before howling for their overthrow commences. This might help keep us from being slapped down in debates by true policy pros who actually know what they are talking about but who lack awareness of the dogmatic assumptions from which they proceed, and who have not yet found a good reason to listen to jargon-riddled lectures from philosophers and culture critics with their snobish disrespect for the so-called "managerial class."

Aff – No Root Cause

Capitalism isn’t the root cause of anything

Aberdeen 3 (Richard. “The Way,” http://freedomtracks.com/uncommonsense/theway.html)

If one examines “the course of human events” closely, it can correctly be surmised that the “root” cause of humanity’s problems comes from individual human greed and similar negative individual motivation. The Marx/Engles view of history being a “class” struggle ¹ does not address the root problem and is thus fundamentally flawed from a true historical perspective (see Gallo Brothersfor 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.

Aff – Transition Wars

Transition from cap causes transition wars – cultures are embedded within the capitalist framework

Aligica 3 (Paul, Fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University and Adjunct Fellow at the Hudson Institute, “The Great Transition and the Social Limits to Growth: Herman Kahn on Social Change and Global Economic Development”, April 21, http://www.hudson.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=publication_details&id=2827)

Stopping things would mean if not to engage in an experiment to change the human nature, at least in an equally difficult experiment in altering powerful cultural forces: "We firmly believe that despite the arguments put forward by people who would like to 'stop the earth and get off,' it is simply impractical to do so. Propensity to change may not be inherent in human nature, but it is firmly embedded in most contemporary cultures. People have almost everywhere become curious, future oriented, and dissatisfied with their conditions. They want more material goods and covet higher status and greater control of nature. Despite much propaganda to the contrary, they believe in progress and future" (Kahn, 1976, 164). As regarding the critics of growth that stressed the issue of the gap between rich and poor countries and the issue of redistribution, Kahn noted that what most people everywhere want was visible, rapid improvement in their economic status and living standards, and not a closing of the gap (Kahn, 1976, 165). The people from poor countries have as a basic goal the transition from poor to middle class. The other implications of social change are secondary for them. Thus a crucial factor to be taken into account is that while the zero-growth advocates and their followers may be satisfied to stop at the present point, most others are not. Any serious attempt to frustrate these expectations or desires of that majority is likely to fail and/or create disastrous counter reactions. Kahn was convinced that "any concerted attempt to stop or even slow 'progress' appreciably (that is, to be satisfied with the moment) is catastrophe-prone". At the minimum, "it would probably require the creation of extraordinarily repressive governments or movements-and probably a repressive international system" (Kahn, 1976, 165; 1979, 140-153). The pressures of overpopulation, national security challenges and poverty as well as the revolution of rising expectations could be solved only in a continuing growth environment. Kahn rejected the idea that continuous growth would generate political repression and absolute poverty. On the contrary, it is the limits-to-growth position "which creates low morale, destroys assurance, undermines the legitimacy of governments everywhere, erodes personal and group commitment to constructive activities and encourages obstructiveness to reasonable policies and hopes". Hence this position "increases enormously the costs of creating the resources needed for expansion, makes more likely misleading debate and misformulation of the issues, and make less likely constructive and creative lives". Ultimately "it is precisely this position the one that increases the potential for the kinds of disasters which most at its advocates are trying to avoid" (Kahn, 1976, 210; 1984).

Aff – AT: Environment

Capitalism key to environmental protection

Taylor 3 (Jerry, director of natural resource studies at CATO, Happy Earth Day? Thank Capitalism, http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=3073)

Indeed, we wouldn't even have environmentalists in our midst were it not for capitalism. Environmental amenities, after all, are luxury goods. America -- like much of the Third World today -- had no environmental movement to speak of until living standards rose sufficiently so that we could turn our attention from simply providing for food, shelter, and a reasonable education to higher "quality of life" issues. The richer you are, the more likely you are to be an environmentalist. And people wouldn't be rich without capitalism. Wealth not only breeds environmentalists, it begets environmental quality. There are dozens of studies showing that, as per capita income initially rises from subsistence levels, air and water pollution increases correspondingly. But once per capita income hits between $3,500 and $15,000 (dependent upon the pollutant), the ambient concentration of pollutants begins to decline just as rapidly as it had previously increased. This relationship is found for virtually every significant pollutant in every single region of the planet. It is an iron law. Given that wealthier societies use more resources than poorer societies, such findings are indeed counterintuitive. But the data don't lie. How do we explain this? The obvious answer -- that wealthier societies are willing to trade-off the economic costs of government regulation for environmental improvements and that poorer societies are not -- is only partially correct. In the United States, pollution declines generally predated the passage of laws mandating pollution controls. In fact, for most pollutants, declines were greater before the federal government passed its panoply of environmental regulations than after the EPA came upon the scene. Much of this had to do with individual demands for environmental quality. People who could afford cleaner-burning furnaces, for instance, bought them. People who wanted recreational services spent their money accordingly, creating profit opportunities for the provision of untrammeled nature. Property values rose in cleaner areas and declined in more polluted areas, shifting capital from Brown to Green investments. Market agents will supply whatever it is that people are willing to spend money on. And when people are willing to spend money on environmental quality, the market will provide it. Meanwhile, capitalism rewards efficiency and punishes waste. Profit-hungry companies found ingenious ways to reduce the natural resource inputs necessary to produce all kinds of goods, which in turn reduced environmental demands on the land and the amount of waste that flowed through smokestacks and water pipes. As we learned to do more and more with a given unit of resources, the waste involved (which manifests itself in the form of pollution) shrank. This trend was magnified by the shift away from manufacturing to service industries, which characterizes wealthy, growing economies. The latter are far less pollution-intensive than the former. But the former are necessary prerequisites for the latter. Property rights -- a necessary prerequisite for free market economies -- also provide strong incentives to invest in resource health. Without them, no one cares about future returns because no one can be sure they'll be around to reap the gains. Property rights are also important means by which private desires for resource conservation and preservation can be realized. When the government, on the other hand, holds a monopoly on such decisions, minority preferences in developing societies are overruled (see the old Soviet block for details). Furthermore, only wealthy societies can afford the investments necessary to secure basic environmental improvements, such as sewage treatment and electrification. Unsanitary water and the indoor air pollution (caused primarily by burning organic fuels in the home for heating and cooking needs) are directly responsible for about 10 million deaths a year in the Third World, making poverty the number one environmental killer on the planet today. Capitalism can save more lives threatened by environmental pollution than all the environmental organizations combined.

Aff – Ethics

Capitalism is the only moral economic system – gives individuals the right to choose and breeds moral responsibility

Billings 83 (Donald B., Professor of Economics at Boise State University, The Freeman: Ideas on Liberty, “The Moral Case for Competitive Capitalism”, July, http://www.fee.org/vnews.php?nid=1277)

<Following the lead of the economist Benjamin Rogge, it is in fact the case that “. . . the most important part of the case for economic freedom is not its dramatic success in promoting economic growth, but rather its consistency with certain fundamental moral principles of life itself.”[7] For personal freedom, and therefore economic and political freedom, is not “ethically indifferent” but a necessary condition of morality. Friedrich Hayek reminds us of certain fundamental conditions of the moral life. It is . . . an old discovery that morals and moral values will grow only in an environment of freedom, and that, in general, moral standards of people and classes are high only where they have long enjoyed freedom—and proportional to the amount of freedom they have possessed . . . That freedom is the matrix required for the growth of moral values—indeed not merely one value among many but the source of all values—is almost self-evident. It is only where the individual has choice, and its inherent responsibility, that he has occasion to affirm existing values, to contribute to their further growth, and to earn moral merit.[8] Morality and the Market It appears that the free market system, in which only voluntary and mutually beneficial exchange are permitted, is a necessary condition for a moral order in which the integrity of the individual conscience is respected. Hayek points out in The Road to Serfdom that only: where we ourselves are responsible for our own interests . . . has our decision moral value. Freedom to order our own conduct in the sphere where material circumstances force a choice upon us, and responsibility for the arrangement of our own life according to our own conscience, is the air in which alone moral sense grows and in which moral values are daily recreated in the free decision of the individual. Responsibility, not to a superior, but to one’s conscience, the awareness of a duty not exacted by compulsion . . . and to bear the consequences of one’s own decision, are the very essence of any morals which deserve the name.[9] “Surely,” adds Hayek on another occasion, “it is unjust to blame a system as more materialistic because it leaves it to the individual to decide whether he prefers material gain to other kinds of excellence.”[10] Whatever the goals of individuals, whether virtuous or not, the “vulgar calculus of the marketplace” still seems to be the most humane way mankind has found for dealing with the economic problems of scarcity and the difficult allocation of resources. Murray Rothbard forcefully reminds us that “. . . in a world of voluntary social cooperation through mutually beneficial exchanges . . . it is obvious that great scope is provided for the development of social sympathy and human friendships.” Indeed, “it is far more likely that feelings of friendship and communion are the effects of a regime of contractual social cooperation rather than the cause.”[11] Capitalism tends to favor those who respect the sanctity of their contracts because of the respect for and enforcement of private property rights. The work ethic; encouraged by the institution of private property, represents an important source of moral responsibility as well as a continuous reminder that our actions always entail costs—a pervasive characteristic of human existence. These essential ingredients of a free market order, Arthur Shenfield tells us, define a set of social institutions which encourages mutual respect for each and every individual. What we want above all for ourselves, and which therefore we must accord to our neighbor, is freedom to pursue our own purposes . . . As a corollary to this freedom we want others to respect our individuality, independence, and status as responsible human beings . . . This is the fundamental morality which capitalism requires and which it nurtures. It alone among economic systems operates on the basis of respect for free, independent responsible persons. All other systems in varying degrees treat men as less than this.[12]>

Aff – Solves War

Free Trade solves war – Destroys all incentives for expansion, and empirically proven

Gartzke 2005 (Erik, associate professor of political science at Columbia University and author of a study on economic freedom and peace contained in the 2005 Economic Freedom of the World Report, “Future Depends on Capitalizing on Capitalist Peace,” 10/18, Windsor Star, http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=5133)

With terrorism achieving "global reach" and conflict raging in Africa and the Middle East, you may have missed a startling fact - we are living in remarkably peaceable times. For six decades, developed nations have not fought each other. France and the United States may chafe, but the resulting conflict pitted french fries against "freedom fries," rather than French soldiers against U.S. "freedom fighters." Tony Blair and Jacques Chirac had a nasty spat over the EU, but the English aren't going to storm Calais any time soon. The present peace is unusual. Historically, powerful nations are the most war prone. The conventional wisdom is that democracy fosters peace but this claim fails scrutiny. It is based on statistical studies that show democracies typically don't fight other democracies. Yet, the same studies show that democratic nations go to war about as much as other nations overall. And more recent research makes clear that only the affluent democracies are less likely to fight each other. Poor democracies behave much like non-democracies when it comes to war and lesser forms of conflict. A more powerful explanation is emerging from newer, and older, empirical research - the "capitalist peace." As predicted by Montesquieu, Adam Smith, Norman Angell and others, nations with high levels of economic freedom not only fight each other less, they go to war less often, period. Economic freedom is a measure of the depth of free market institutions or, put another way, of capitalism. The "democratic peace" is a mirage created by the overlap between economic and political freedom. Democracy and economic freedom typically co-exist. Thus, if economic freedom causes peace, then statistically democracy will also appear to cause peace. When democracy and economic freedom are both included in a statistical model, the results reveal that economic freedom is considerably more potent in encouraging peace than democracy, 50 times more potent, in fact, according to my own research. Economic freedom is highly statistically significant (at the one-per-cent level). Democracy does not have a measurable impact, while nations with very low levels of economic freedom are 14 times more prone to conflict than those with very high levels. But, why would free markets cause peace? Capitalism is not only an immense generator of prosperity; it is also a revolutionary source of economic, social and political change. Wealth no longer arises primarily through land or control of natural resources. New Kind of Wealth Prosperity in modern societies is created by market competition and the efficient production that arises from it. This new kind of wealth is hard for nations to "steal" through conquest. In days of old, when the English did occasionally storm Calais, nobles dreamed of wealth and power in conquered lands, while visions of booty danced in the heads of peasant soldiers. Victory in war meant new property. In a free market economy, war destroys immense wealth for victor and loser alike. Even if capital stock is restored, efficient production requires property rights and free decisions by market participants that are difficult or impossible to co-ordinate to the victor's advantage. The Iraqi war, despite Iraq's immense oil wealth, will not be a money-maker for the United States. Economic freedom is not a guarantee of peace. Other factors, like ideology or the perceived need for self-defence, can still result in violence. But, where economic freedom has taken hold, it has made war less likely. Research on the capitalist peace has profound implications in today's world. Emerging democracies, which have not stabilized the institutions of economic freedom, appear to be at least as warlike - perhaps more so - than emerging dictatorships. Yet, the United States and other western nations are putting immense resources into democratization even in nations that lack functioning free markets. This is in part based on the faulty premise of a "democratic peace." It may also in part be due to public perception. Everyone approves of democracy, but "capitalism" is often a dirty word. However, in recent decades, an increasing number of people have rediscovered the economic virtues of the "invisible hand" of free markets. We now have an additional benefit of economic freedom - international peace. The actual presence of peace in much of the world sets this era apart from others. The empirical basis for optimistic claims - about either democracy or capitalism - can be tested and refined. The way forward is to capitalize on the capitalist peace, to deepen its roots and extend it to more countries through expanding markets, development, and a common sense of international purpose. The risk today is that faulty analysis and anti-market activists may distract the developed nations from this historic opportunity.

Our epistemology is most accurate

Weede 2004 (Erich, professor of sociology at the University of Bonn, Germany, In Winter 1986-87, he was Visiting Professor of International Relations at the Bologna Center of The Johns Hopkins University, “BALANCE OF POWER, GLOBALIZATION, AND THE CAPITALIST PEACE,” http://www.fnf.org.ph/downloadables/Balance%20of%20Power,%20Globalization%20and%20Capitalist%20Peace.pdf)

If one does research or summarize the research of others – of course, most of the ideas, theories, and evidence discussed below have been produced by others – one cannot avoid some epistemological commitments. In the social sciences the fundamental choice is whether to pursue an ideographic or a nomothetic approach. Almost all historians choose the ideographic approach and focus on the description of structures or events, whereas most economists and psychologists choose the nomothetic approach and focus on the search for law-like general statements. Sociologists and political scientists are still divided – sometimes even by the Atlantic Ocean. In American political science the nomothetic approach dominates the flagship journal of the profession, the American Political Science Review, as well as more specialized journals, such as International Studies Quarterly, the Journal of Conflict Resolution, or World Politics. In German political science, however, the nomothetic approach has advanced little beyond electoral studies. My own approach is definitely nomothetic. This is related to my training in psychology at one of the first German universities focusing on quantitative research methods in the early 1960s, the University of Hamburg. This epistemological orientation has been reinforced by graduate training in international politics at one of the first American universities emphasizing quantitative research in the late 1960s, Northwestern University, which is located in a suburb of Chicago. Nomothetic research focuses on hypothesizing, testing and establishing law-like general statements or nomological propositions. Examples of such propositions are: The higher average incomes in a nation are, the more likely is democratic government. Or, the more economic freedom in a nation prevails, the less frequently it is involved in war. One characteristic of such propositions is that they say something about observable reality. Whenever you say something about reality, you risk that others find out that you are wrong. If we observed that most poor countries were democracies, but most rich countries were autocracies, then we should reject or, at least, modify the proposition about prosperity and democracy mentioned above.1 Nomothetic researchers look for refutations. They try to falsify their propositions or theories (Popper 1934/1959). If the empirical evidence is compatible with one's theory, then one keeps the hypothetical propositions and regards them as supported – until negative evidence turns up. Although certitude about possession of the truth is beyond the capabilities of human inquiry, growth of knowledge is conceivable by the successive elimination of errors. This epistemological approach borrowed from Popper were easily applicable, if most of our propositions were deterministic, if they claimed to be valid without exceptions. Then, finding a single exception to a general statement – say, about prosperity and democracy – would suffice to falsify the proposition. Looking at poor India nevertheless being democratic, or at fairly rich Kuwait nevertheless being autocratic, would suffice to reject the theory.2 Unfortunately, almost no theory in macroeconomics, macrosociology, or international relations delivers deterministic propositions. Instead we have only probabilistic statements of the type that more prosperous countries are more likely to be democratic than others, or that economically freer countries are more likely to avoid war involvement than others. Probabilistic assertions never can be falsified by pointing to single events which do not fit with theoretical expectations. Instead we have to look at relative frequencies, at correlations or regression coefficients. We need statistical tools to evaluate such propositions. We typically ask the question whether a hypothesized relationship is so strong that it could only rarely occur because of random measurement or sampling error. Probabilistic propositions are regarded as supported only if they jump certain thresholds of significance which are ultimately defined by mere conventions. Researchers are interested in causal propositions, that is, in statements about causes and effects, or determinants and consequences. Such statements can be used for explanation, forecasting, or policy interventions. We need to know more than the mere existence of some association or correlation between, say, prosperity and democracy, or economic freedom and the avoidance of military conflict. We need to know whether prosperity promotes democracy, or whether democracy promotes growth, or whether, possibly, both statements might be defensible or, for the time being, taken for 'true'. While a correlation between two variables, like prosperity and democracy, is equally compatible with the simple alternative causal propositions that prosperity causes democracy, and that democracy causes prosperity, this ambiguity no longer necessarily applies in more complex theoretical models. There, we tend to explain a single effect by a number of causes. For example, one may contend that democracy is promoted by prosperity as well as by a capitalist economic order (or economic freedom). We can take such a theoretical contention – which may be true or false, compatible with the data or not – as a starting point for specifying a regression equation.3 If both theoretical statements – about the democratizing effects of prosperity and capitalism – were true, then the regression coefficients of both variables should be positive and significant. If this is what we find in empirical research, then we regard the two propositions as provisionally supported. But final proofs remain impossible in empirical research. It is conceivable that some nonbeliever in the two propositions suggests a third measurable determinant of democracy. Before it actually is included in the regression equation, one never knows what its inclusion results in. Possibly, the previously significant and positive regression coefficients of prosperity and capitalism might be reduced to insignificance or even change signs. Then a previously supported causal proposition would have to be overturned and rejected. The claim of causality implies more than observable association or correlation. It also implies temporal precedence of causes before effects. If one wants to test the causal proposition that prosperity contributes to democratic government, or that economic freedom contributes to the avoidance of military conflict, then one should measure prosperity or economic freedom before their hypothesized effects occur – certainly not later. If there is doubt about the direction of causality, as there frequently is, one might also look at the relationships between, say, earlier prosperity and later democracy as well as between earlier democracy and later prosperity. Although such investigations may become technically complicated, it might suffice here to keep the general principles in mind. From causal propositions we derive expectations about correlation or regression coefficients. But conclusions from correlations to causal propositions are not justified. One simply can never 'verify' causal statements by correlations. From causal propositions we also derive expectations about temporal precedence. As long as empirical evidence fits one's theoretical expectations, one regards the propositions or theory as provisionally supported and works with them. There is another complication. As illustrated by the debate about the effects of trade and economic interdependence on the avoidance of military conflict below, full accordance of empirical studies and verdicts with theories is the exception rather than the rule – if it ever happens at all. That is why some philosophers of science (for example, Kuhn 1962; Lakatos 1968-69) have been critical of the idea of falsification and warned against premature rejection of propositions. If 'anomalies' or 'falsification' are more or less ubiquitous, then our task is no longer so easy as to choose between theories which have been falsified and therefore deserve rejection and those which are compatible with the facts and therefore deserve to be accepted until negative evidence turns up. Then our task becomes to choose between competing theories, for example about the conflict reinforcing or pacifying impact of trade, and to pick those which fit the data relatively better than others. So, the claim advanced in this review of the literature cannot be that the empirical evidence fits the capitalist peace idea perfectly, but merely that the evidence fits it much better than competing explanations of military conflict and notions about the negative impact of capitalism on the avoidance of conflict and war or the irrelevance of democracy do. The epistemological discussion above could provide no more than a crude 'feel' for empirical research in the social sciences and its pitfalls. Although certitude is beyond reach, it is better to rely on testable, tested and so far supported propositions than on a hodgepodge of ambiguous hunches, contradictory thinking, and unsystematically evaluated empirical evidence.

Aff – Inevitable

CAPITALISM IS INEVITABLE

Joseph Stromberg historian in residence at the Mises Institute July 9 2004 http://mises.org/article.aspx?Id=1562

In addition, he may have been the first to anticipate the way in which the terms left and right would eventually come to mean their precise opposite in the reforming economies of Eastern Europe. He was fascinated but not entirely surprised by the events in old Yugoslavia, where a Stalinist system had been forced to reform into a more market oriented economy. In fact, he noted that the trend had begun in the 1960s, and extended all over Eastern Europe. What was essentially happening, Rothbard wrote, was that socialism had been tried and failed and now these countries were turning to market models. Keep in mind that this was 1973, when hardly anyone else believed these countries capable of reform: "In Eastern Europe, then, I think that the prospects for the free market are excellent--I think we’re getting free-market capitalism and that its triumph there is almost inevitable." Ten years later, it was still fashionable to speak of authoritarian regimes that could reform, as contrasted with socialist totalitarianism that could not be reform and presumably had to be obliterated. Rothbard did not believe this, based on both theory and evidence. Rothbard saw that all sectors in all countries moving either toward capitalism or toward socialism, which is to say, toward freedom or toward control. In the US, the trends looked very bleak indeed but he found trends to cheer in the antiwar movement, which he saw as a positive development against military central planning. “Both in Vietnam and in domestic government intervention, each escalating step only creates more problems which confront the public with tile choice: either, press on further with more interventions, or repeal them--in Vietnam, withdraw from the country." His conclusion must have sounded impossibly naive 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

Aff – G&G

The negatives representation of capitalism as an entity so gigantic that we can’t help but feel overwhelmed in the face of it, destroys concrete political action and feeds capitals strength

J.K. Gibson-Graham, the pen name of Katherine Gibson, Senior Fellow of Human Geography at Australian National University, and Julie Graham, professor of Geography at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 1996, The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It), p. viii-x

In a very different discursive setting, I had recently encountered Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s description of what she calls the “Christmas effect.” To Sedgwick’s mind what is so depressing about Christmas is the way all the institutions of society come together and speak “with one voice (1993: 5): the Christian churches, of course, but also the state (which establishes school and national holidays), commerce, advertising, the media (revving up the Christmas frenzy and barking out the Christmas countdown), social events and domestic activities, “they all . . . line up with each other so neatly once a year, and the monolith so created is a thing one can come to view with unhappy eyes” (p. 6). Sedgwick points to a similar monolithic formation in the realm of expectations about sexuality, where gender, object choice, sexual practices (including the privileging of certain organs and orifices), and “lifestyles” or life choices are expected to come together in predictable associations. This set of expectations, which counters and yet constrains the sexual experience of so many, is not just the occasion of seasonal distress. It is a source of lifelong oppression, a matter of survival, and a painful constrictor of sexual possibility, if not desire. In my comments as a discussant I seemed to be chafing against a similarly constraining “Christmas effect” in the realm of social theory. The researchers had set out to produce a rich and differentiated set of stories about industrial and community change, but they ended up showing how households and communities accommodated to changes in the industrial sector. In their papers things not only lined up with but revolved around industry, producing a unified social representation centered on a capitalist economy (the sort of thing that’s called a “capitalist society” in both everyday and academic discussion). But Sedgwick’s questions about Christmas, the family, and sexuality suggested the possibility of other kinds of social representations: “What if. . . there were a practice of valuing the ways in which meanings and institutions can be at loose ends with each other? What if the richest junctures weren’t the ones where everything means the same thing?” (1993: 6). For this research project following Sedgwick’s suggestions might mean that unstable gender identities, inabilities to adapt to the new shiftwork schedule, and noncapitalist economic activities should be emphasized rather than swept under the rug. The vision of households, subjects, and capitalist industry operating in harmony (and in fact coming together in a new phase of capitalist hegemony) might be replaced by alternative social representations in which noncapitalist economic practices proliferated, gender identities were renegotiated, and political subjects actively resisted industrial restructuring, thereby influencing its course. More generally, Sedgwick’s vision suggests the possibility of representing societies and economies as non-hegemonic formations. What if we were to depict social existence at loose ends with itself, in Sedgwick’s terms, rather than producing social representations in which everything is part of the same complex and therefore ultimately “means the same thing” (e.g., capitalist hegemony)? What might be the advantages of representing a rich and prolific disarray? I was particularly attuned to these problems and possibilities because I had myself been a producer, in my earlier work as a political economist, of representations of capitalist hegemony. As a member of a large and loosely connected group of political economic theorists who were interested in what had happened to capitalist economies following on the economic crisis of the 1970s, I had engaged in theorizing the ways in which industrial production, enterprises, forms of consumption, state regulation, business culture, and the realm of ideas and politics all seemed to undergo a change in the 1970s and 80s from one hegemonic configuration to another. It didn’t matter that I was very interested in the differences between industries or that I did not see industrial change —even widespread change — as emanating from or reflecting a macrologic of “the economy.” I was still representing a world in which economy, polity, culture, and subjectivity reinforced each other and wore a capitalist face. Chasing the illusion that I was understanding the world in order to change it, I was running in a well-worn track, and had only to cast a glance over my shoulder to see, as the product of my analysis, “capitalist society” even more substantial and definitive than when I began. In those exciting early days I had yet to take seriously the “performativity” of social representations — in other words, the ways in which they are implicated in the worlds they ostensibly represent. I was still trying to capture “what was happening out there,” like the researchers on the panel. I wasn’t thinking about the social representation I was creating as constitutive of the world in which I would have to live. Yet the image of global capitalism that I was producing was actively participating in consolidating a new phase of capitalist hegemony.1 Over a period of years this became increasingly clear to me and increasingly distressing. My situation resembled that of the many other social theorists for whom the “object of critique” has become a perennial and consequential theoretical issue. When theorists depict patriarchy, or racism, or compulsory heterosexuality, or capitalist hegemony they are not only delineating a formation they hope to see destabilized or replaced. They are also generating a representation of the social world and endowing it with performative force. To the extent that this representation becomes influential it may contribute to the hegemony of a “hegemonic formation”; and it will undoubtedly influence people’s ideas about the possibilities of difference and change, including the potential for successful political interventions.2

Aff – Sustainability

Capitalism is self-correcting

National Post 8 ("Don't Panic," National Edition, April 26, 2008 Saturday, Lexis)

But history shows that human adaptation invariably intervenes --especially in parts of the world that have the benefit of a market economy. Scarcity drives innovations that pull the world back from the brink. Consumers take high prices as their cue to consume less; producers take the same cue to produce more. A new equilibrium is reached, just as college microeconomics textbooks would predict. That's why we aren't losing any sleep over the latest predictions from Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce chief economist Jeffrey Rubin, which were fronted prominently on Friday's National Post. New inventions, new oil discoveries and improvements in existing technologies will conspire to spare us Mr. Rubin's parade of horribles, which include $2.25-a-litre gasoline and tens of thousands of job losses in the auto-making sector. In a report entitled The Age of Scarcity, released on Thursday, Mr. Rubin predicts that by 2012, demand for oil, gas and diesel in the rest of the world will exceed that in OECD countries. As developing nations get richer, they will begin competing with the current industrialized world for diminishing resources. This will drive up the cost of everything from energy to food to computer components. Mr. Rubin predicts this will lead to the biggest economic disruption in North America since the 1973 oil crisis. But that same historical comparison suggests a reason Canadians should be suspicious of this ominous forecast: While the oil shortages of the 1970s displaced millions of assembly-line workers and led to a temporary slowdown of the North American economy, the adaptations they spurred ultimately made industry more efficient and ordinary people more prosperous. North American manufacturing is far more productive and energy-efficient now than it was 30 years ago, as well as producing far less pollution. (Many Canadians under 30, who have been reared on a constant diet of dire environmental claims, may have trouble believing this, but despite the rapid growth of our economy in the last three decades, smog is actually less toxic and our waters less polluted than in 1970.) In an interview with the National Post, Mr. Rubin fell into a common trap: He assumed growth is a zero-sum game, whereby someone must lose ground every time someone else gains it. "I think there will be fewer people on the road in North America in five years than there is right now," Mr. Rubin said on Thursday. "For everybody who's about to get on the road by buying a new Tata or a Chery car in the developing world, someone's going to have to get off the road in this part of the world. There's just not enough gasoline to go around." Anyone tempted to buy into this line of thinking would do well to remember the famous bet between Paul R. Ehrlich, author of the apocalyptic 1968 book The Population Bomb, and economist Julian Simon. Mr. Erlich predicted that by the late 1970s, the world would begin to run out of oil and metals, and that "wide-scale famine caused by declining food production" would cause hundreds of millions of deaths annually. Mr. Simon, on the other hand contended, that "natural resources are not finite in any serious way; they are created by the intellect of man, an always renewable resource." In 1980, he bet Mr. Ehrlich $1,000 that by 1990 a basket of any five commodities of his choosing would cost less than it had 10 years earlier. By the end-is-nigh thinking embraced by Mr. Ehrlich (and, to a lesser extent, Mr. Rubin), he should have won easily. Instead, Mr. Simon won. The five commodities chosen were, after inflation, 40% cheaper in 1990 than they had been a decade before. The same pattern is beginning to unfold in 2008. In just a few short months, rising prices for fuel have prompted the sort of market-driven energy efficiencies and environmental solutions that the green movement has failed to achieve through years of hectoring, regulating and legislating. Full-sized SUV sales have plummeted, home builders are designing smaller, low-consumption houses, airlines and railways are switching to more efficient planes and engines and car makers are scrambling to lighten their models. Thanks to just a 30% increase in pump prices, the automobile sector is likely to raise fleet fuel efficiency more than all the laws demanding higher standards passed in the past 35 years combined. There is no doubt that our society is changing because of the scarcity in food and fuel that Mr. Rubin highlights. But it defies the principles of economics to imagine that such scarcity will persist indefinitely. If there is one trend we can depend on, it is that the law of supply and demand will intervene to blunt the economic shocks that even the most prosperous nations must inevitably face.

Scarcity arguments and biased and flawed

Taylor 2 (Jerry, Cato Natural Resource Studies Director “Sustainable Development: A Dubious Solution in Search of a Problem,” August 26, http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa449.pdf]

If resources are growing more abundant while the concentration of pollutants in air sheds and watersheds continues to decline, how can we explain the proliferation of various stylized sustainability indices that point to a deterioration of the planet’s resource base? There are five common weaknesses with such reports. First, they are almost always built upon a selective but fundamentally arbitrary or irrelevant set of indicators. Second, they are often built not upon actual resource data but upon hypotheses or theories about resource health that do not comport with the data or that rest upon highly suspect data fundamentally inconsistent with the larger data sets available to analysts. Third, they ignore the well-documented propensity of capitalist societies to create and invent new resources when old resources become relatively more scarce (that is, they assume that resources are fixed and finite when they are not). Fourth, they are highly aggregated and often subjective calculations of data sets that lack common denominators. Finally, they are frequently heavily biased by ideological assumptions about politics and government action. Accordingly, they provide little help to policy analysts or political leaders.

Aff – Epistemology

Our knowledge production is accurate

DOUGLAS W. HANDS 84 Department of Economics University of Puget Sound What Economics Is Not: An Economist's Response to Rosenberg Source: Philosophy of Science, Vol. 51, No. 3 (Sep., 1984), pp. 495-503 http://www.jstor.org/stable/187496

1. Economic Predictions. Much of Rosenberg's discussion is directed toward explaining the "predictive weakness" (p. 297) of modem economics and the discipline's inability (or lack of desire) to "improve its predictive content" (p. 301). This failure to generate successful predictions and to improve the few predictions which are made is taken as an empirical fact about even the most applied economic theories. No evidence is provided, or even suggested, to support this empirical claim. Rosenberg certainly needs to provide evidence for the ubiquitous predictive failure of applied economic theory. Such criticism is by no means "well known" or "standard" in the literature on economic methodology. It is "standard" to argue that economic theories are insulated from direct falsification, that they are built on inadequate behavioral foundations, and that in their most abstract form they fail to yield predictions or even to systematically connect up with applied theories which might yield predictions. But systematic predictive failure is not a standard methodological criticism of applied economic theory. The reason why such predictive failure is not a standard criticism is quite simple: Rosenbergh as exaggerated the extent of this failure. Predictive failure is simply not the ubiquitous fact of modem economic theory which Rosenberg assumes. While nowhere near the standards of the best natural science, applied economic theories (both micro and macro) do generate an ocean of successful predictions, on everything from the impact of trucking deregulation to the demand for consumer credit. Rosenberg's claim that economic predictions have not "improved"(p . 301) with time is also exaggerated. While there is always room for more improvement, modem macroeconometric models provide extraordinary accuracy relative to pre-World War I business cycle models. Where substantial errors do occur, such as the inability to predict t he inflationary impact of the OPEC induced supply-sides hock, the models are improved so that failures of the same type are less likely to reoccur.3 Rosenberg even goes so far as to argue that more predicatively successful alternatives currently exist (at least in the micro domain) and are neglected, ostensibly because of an irrational professional attraction to intentional and external views of human behavior. He tells us that even if a more predictive theory were available: "it is not likely to actually deflect practicing economists from their intentional external research pro-gram . . . the reason is that they are not really much interested in questions of empirical applicability at all. Otherwise some of the attractive nonintentional and/or nonextremal approaches to economic behavior that are available would long ago have elicited more interest from economists than they have" (p. 308). An adequate defense of this position would of course require a demonstration of both the predictive failure of traditional microeconomics and the predictive success of the proposed alternatives. We have already questioned the validity of the former; Rosenberg merely asserts the latter. Contrary to Rosenberg's claim, predictive success is an important criterion of theory choice in economics. One of the reasons for this is that economic predictions are consumed by the business community. These business interests do not care whether the underlying economic theory is intentional or nonintentional. In fact, they do not even care whether the predictions are from scientific theories or not. They are only concerned with (and pay for) predictive accuracy. In addition to these business interests, labor unions, governments, and other organizations are also consumers of economic predictions. These groups approach economic theory with the same nomological nonchalance as the corporate consumers. Of course, the fact that organizational consumers of economic predictions often purchase information based on traditional economic models does not imply that these models constitute "science" or that there is no room for nontraditional models. The argument is only that the survivability of the traditional approach in such applications indicates that (relative to the available alternatives), its predictive failings are not as great as Rosenberg would have us believe.

Resources are limited and finite---as such all human action is motivated by self-interest and rationality

Shughart 6 William F. Shughart II F. A. P. Barnard Distinguished Professor of Economics The University of Mississippi, "Terrorism in rational choice perspective" No date listed, latest citation from 2006 home.olemiss.edu/~shughart/Terrorism%20in%20rational%20choice%20perspective.pdf

In the economist’s model of rational human behavior, all individuals are assumed to be motivated by selfinterest. They seek to maximize their senses of personal well-being, or utility, an objective that includes not only the satisfaction derived from consuming goods and services purchased on the market, but also the psychic pleasure associated with the attainment of any other desired end. What is of chief importance here is that self-interest is not to be understood narrowly as selfishness; the aim of economically rational economic man (or woman) is not solely to maximize private income or wealth. Other-regarding preferences indulged by actions such as providing aid and comfort to family and friends, bestowing charity on strangers or supporting a revolutionary cause fall within the ambit of the rational-choice model. So, too, does striving to gain entrée to a believed-in afterlife. Faced with a limited budget and unlimited wants, the problem confronting abstract economic man simply is to select the particular combination of market and non-market goods that, in the chooser’s own judgment, yields the greatest possible level of satisfaction. Terrorists are rational actors on that definition. Rationality in the spirit of Homo oeconomicus is not necessarily to be found in terrorists’ stated intentions, though. Indeed, living in a “fantasy world” (Laqueur 1999, p. 28), the Red Army Faction (Baader-Meinhof Group), Italy’s Brigate Rosse, France’s Action Directe and other left-wing terror groups of the 1960s and 1970s generally had no well-articulated purposes beyond “destruction of the current Western system” of liberal democracy (Kellen 1990, p. 55) and no practical plans for replacing it, except perhaps, as in the pipedreams of their Russian nihilist forebears, with a “universally allhuman social republic and harmony” (Dostoevsky [1872] 1994, p. 53). But terrorists are rational in two important means-ends senses. First, while the globe is terrorist-targetrich, the resources commanded by individual terrorists and terrorist groups unavoidably are limited. Every terrorist faces a budget constraint and, whether acting alone or in concert with others, consequently must deploy money, munitions and manpower cost-effectively, allocating the available resources over time and space so as to maximize terrorism’s net returns, in whatever form those returns are expected to materialize. Second, terrorists respond rationally to measures taken to counter them. When some targets are hardened, they shift attention to softer ones. If a country elevates its counterterrorist efforts, terrorists move their operations to less vigilant states. Terrorists, in short, behave as if they are guided by the same rational-choice calculus that animates human action in more ordinary settings. They evaluate the alternatives available to them and choose the option that promises the largest expected benefit relative to cost; they respond, moreover, “in a sensible and predictable fashion to changing risks” (Enders and Sandler 2006, p. 11) and, one might add, to changing rewards. Many of the causes and consequences of terrorism are, in short, amenable to explanation by the economist’s model of demand and supply.