Capitalism K Index

Capitalism K Index	1

Capitalism K Shell	3

Uniqueness: Transition Now	7

Links: Activism/Protest	8

Links: Alternate/Sustainable Technology	9

Links: Alternate/Sustainable Technology	10

Links: Alternate/Sustainable Technology	11

Links: Alternate/Sustainable Technology	13

Links: Cars	14

Links: Democracy	15

Links: Democracy	16

Links: Discounts	17

Links: Economic Inequality	18

Links: Economy	19

Links: Economy	20

Links: Environmental Collapse	21

Links: Environmental Collapse	22

Links: Other Oppressions (Race, gender, etc.)	25

Links: Rail	26

Links: Rail	27

Links: Science/Scientific Investment	28

Links: Transportation	29

Links: Unemployment	30

Impacts: Class Exploitation	31

Impacts: Capitalism Causes Dehumanization	32

Impacts: Economic Collapse	33

Impacts: Extinction	34

Impacts: Extinction	35

Impacts: Environmental Collapse	36

Impacts: Human Exploitation	37

Impacts: International Instability	38

Impacts: Resource Wars/Conflicts	39

Impacts: Resource Wars/Conflicts	40

Impacts: Root Cause	41

Alternative: Anti-Capitalist Revolution	42

Alternative: Anti-Capitalist Revolution	44

Alternative: Anti-Capitalist Revolution	46

Alternative: Nonviolent Individual Anti-Capitalism	47

Alternative: Nonviolent Individual Anti-Capitalism	48

Alternative: Nonviolent Individual Anti-Capitalism	49

Alternative Solves: Health & Human/Non-Human Well-Being	50

Alternative Solves: Technology and Environment	51

Alternative Solves: Technology and Environment	52

Alternative Solves: Technology and Environment	53

Alternative Solvency: Imagination	54

Answers To: Permutation	55

Answers To: Permutation	56

Answers To: Permutation	57

Answers To: Permutation	58

Answers To: Permutation	59

Answers To: Alternative Fails/Indicts	60

Affirmative	61

Affirmative	62

Affirmative	65

Affirmative	66

Affirmative	67

Affirmative	68

Affirmative	69

Affirmative	70

Capitalism K Shell

The affirmative misperceives the conditions of violence in our contemporary social order. Capital is the real metaphysical foundation for all development and catastrophe.

Zizek ’08 (Slavoj, philosopher cultural critic and agent, July 22, Violence: Six Sideways Reflections, page 12)

The notion of objective violence needs to be thoroughly historicized: it took on a new shape with capitalism. Marx described the mad, self-enhancing circulation of capital, whose solipsistic path of parthenogenesis reaches its apogee in today’s meta-reflexive speculation on future. It is far too simplistic to claim that the spectre of this self-engendering monster that pursues its path disregarding any human or environmental concern is an ideological abstraction and that behind this abstraction there are real people and natural objects on whose productive capacities and resources capital’s circulation is based and on which it feeds like a gigantic parasite. The problem is that this “abstraction” is not only in our financial speculators’ misperception of social reality, but that it is “real” in the precise sense of determining the structure of the material social processes: the fate of whole strata of the population and sometimes of whole countries can be decided by the “solipsistic” speculative dance of capital, which pursues its goal of profitability in blessed indifference to how its movement will affect social reality. So Marx’s point is not primarily to reduce this second dimension to the first one, that is, to demonstrate how the theological mad dance of commodities arises out of the antagonisms of “Real life.” Rather his point is that one cannot properly grasp the first (the social reality of material production and social interaction) without the second: it is the self-propelling metaphysical dance of capital that runs the show, that provides the key to real-life developments and catastrophes.

The affirmative feeds capitalism. Transportation is founded by production and consumption that drives the capitalist global order. Improvements and investment in transportation perpetuate logic of accumulation and strengthen capitalism.

Sheppard 1990

Sheppard E, 1990, "Transportation in a capitalist space-economy: transportation demand, circulation time, and transportation innovations" Environment and Planning.

Transportation, as the service of moving commodities between places, plays a unique role in a fully competitive capitalist space-economy. The commodity of transportation is consumed as a part of virtually every economic transaction, linking the production and consumption of a commodity; demand for transportation is derived from spatial configurations rather than being fixed by socially necessary techniques and real wages; and the circulation time taken in transportation is a deduction from capitalists' profits. The impact of circulation time on profits may be calculated precisely. The derived nature of the demand for transportation adds a level of uncertainty to the impact of cost-reducing technical change on profit rates. Given this, cost-reducing and time-reducing technical change in the transportation commodity is one of the few ways of ensuring an increased rate of profit for capitalists, ceteris paribus. The public nature of transportation improvements and the high investments in fixed capital that are required help to explain the central role of the state in capitalism in the improvement of transportation and thus in underwriting capital accumulation.

Exploitation of the working class, extermination, nuclear war, and planetary extinction is inevitable under capitalism.

Callinicos,’04

DIRECTOR OF THE CENTRE FOR EUROPEAN STUDIES AT KINGʼS COLLEGE

[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 armories of nuclear destruction by the superpowers, missile-rattling 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 self emancipation 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. Those who accept the truth of Marx’s views cannot rest content with a mere intellectual commitment. There are all too many of this sort around, Marxists content to live off the intellectual credit of Capital, as Trotsky described them. We cannot simply observe the world but must throw ourselves, as Marx did, into the practical task of building a revolutionary party amid the life and struggles of the working class. ‘The philosophers have interpreted the world,’ wrote Marx, ‘the point, however, is to change it.’ If Marxism is correct, then we must act on it.

The alternative is to embrace historical materialism behind anti-capitalist revolution. This alternative produces a counter politics against reform within the current nation state. Only the alternative can bring equitable resource distribution at the core of the affirmative’s harms.

Blackburn ’76

“Marxism: Theory of Proletarian Revolution” Robin Blackburn--Robin Blackburn is a British socialist historian, a former editor of New Left Review, an author of essays on Marx, capitalism and socialism, and of books on the history of slavery and on social policy.-- New Left Review I/97, May-June 1976

The real originality of Marx and Engels lies in the field of politics, not in economics or philosophy. They were the first to discover the historical potential of the new class that capitalism had brought into existence—the modern proletariat, a class that could encompass a universal liberation from all prevailing forms of oppression and exploitation. The modern workers’ movement, capable of self-determination and self-emancipation, able to draw on the best of bourgeois culture and science, would have no need of utopias or religious exaltation. The political capacity of the proletariat sprang from its objective position within bourgeois society. Thus the analysis of capitalism, and of its historical antecedents and consequences, to be found in the writings of Marx and Engels—however necessarily partial its initial formulations—was a necessary underpinning for their political theory. But the decisive contribution made by the founders of historical materialism was the theory of proletarian revolution. Unfortunately, there has been an increasing tendency in twentieth-century Marxism to identify the philosophical method or epistemology employed by Marx or Engels as their crucial contribution, and to represent these as the touchstone of Marxist orthodoxy. In different ways this is done by the Lukács of History and Class Consciousness, the exponents of Soviet Diamat and Louis Althusser and his collaborators in Reading Capital. There is little equivalent insistence on the originality of the political conceptions of Marx and Engels. Indeed, often attempts are made to suggest that their political ideas are essentially a continuation or development of those of Machiavelli or Montesquieu or Rousseau. This is especially curious since in no domain has Marxism been more original than in that of political theory. Historical materialism either discovered or thoroughly reworked every important political concept: class, party, state, nation, revolution, bureaucracy, programme and so on. Such concepts have developed in conjunction with Marxist political practice and in the course of vigorous political polemics. Moreover, it is evident that all the major divisions of Marxism have arisen over directly political questions, which have thereby furnished the critical determinants of Marxist ‘orthodoxy’. This does not mean that philosophical or epistemological disputes have had no significance for Marxism. It does mean that they have emerged as secondary byproducts of conflicts over substantive political questions. Since Marxism adopts a completely consequent and complete materialism, this should not be so surprising. No standpoint in philosophy can produce proletarian revolutionary politics—but in the long run only materialism is fully consistent with them. ..[1] The class struggle could only be resolved by a victory for the working class and the suppression of capitalism. The working class alone had the collective, co-operative character required to master the new forces of production and to ensure that they did not dominate those who had created them. With the accentuation of the crisis of bourgeois order, the workers as a class would be joined by ‘a portion of bourgeois ideologists who have raised themselves to the level of comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole’. The working class would become the basis for a new type of political movement. ‘All previous historical movements were movements of minorities or in the interests of minorities. The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority.’ Without any stake in capitalist private property, the proletariat’s historical mission is to destroy it. But to do this a revolutionary seizure of political power is necessary: ‘the first step in the revolution by the working class is to raise the working class to the position of ruling class, to win the battle of democracy’. Once the workers had conquered political power, they would be forced to embark on a programme of ‘despotic inroads on the rights of private property and the conditions of bourgeois production’. Because the bourgeois political framework was that of the nation state, ‘the proletariat of each country must, of course, first settle matters with its own bourgeoisie’. But this was the ‘form’ not the ‘substance’ of the proletarian revolution. With the generalization of the proletarian revolution, the global productive forces developed by capitalism would be brought under social ownership and regulation: ‘In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.’ [8]

And, don’t be afraid of the alternative. The spirit of anti-capitalism is a global phenomenon—collaboration increases chances of successful revolution.

Desai, Meghnad (economist and Labour politician) and Said, Yahia (Research Fellow at the London School of Economics and the World Bank economist for Iraq) (2001) The new anti-capitalist movement: money and global civil society. In: Anheier, Helmut K. and Glasius, Marlies and Kaldor, Mary, (eds.) London School of Economics Centre for Civil Society and Centre for the Study of Global Governance, (corp. ed.) Global civil society 2001. Global civil society . Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK, pp. 51-79. ISBN 9780199246441

Civic responses to capitalism are as old as the system itself. Reactions to money are even older. Isolationists, supporters, reformists, and alternatives existed previously in various forms. Most of the time, governments and markets confronted or ignored them when they could not co-opt them. Lately, the individual responses have been coming together, creating something larger than the sum of its components. In Seattle and Prague, a myriad of individuals, organisations, movements, ideas, and methods came together to deliver a message so powerful that it took everyone by surprise. Seattle and Prague, however, are only the most visible expression of global civic responses to capitalism. The various responses are actually working together all the time. The alternatives lend mass appeal and visibility to what would otherwise be marginal isolationist and reformist movements. They also create the space where the various responses come together. The isolationists with their militancy and radical demands keep the issues alive and sharpen the debate. The ultimate winner from these synergies are the reformists, who eventually fill the gap between the supporters and the isolationists with constructive solutions. Civic responses to global capitalism are also coming together across regions despite supporters’ claims to the contrary. The Zapatistas not only were saved by global solidarity; they are also the inspiration for alternatives worldwide. IMF and World Bank reforms are influenced by demonstrations in Turkey, Nigeria, and Argentina as much as they are by riots in Prague and Washington. The Jubilee 2000 campaign would not have achieved what it did had it not been a truly global movement. What is it that brings Ann Pettifor, Katerina Liskova, George Soros, and Walden Bello together to dress down the heads of the World Bank and the IMF? Why would the leaders of the Bretton Woods institutions subject themselves to such public upbraiding? After all, activists were championing Third World issues before Katerina was born. Soros made his millions even earlier, totally unaware of Bello and his fellows in the national liberation movement. Twenty years ago most anti-capitalist activists did not even know who the leaders of the Bretton Woods institutions were, and if they did they wouldn’t have dreamt of sitting with them at the same table. It could be that for the first time in decades the bottom rung seems to have dropped from the global social ladder, that along with overall prosperity there are more and more pockets around the world where people seem to have nothing to lose. Regardless of where they are, people are terrified by widening disparities. Many are all too aware that the Zapatista insurrection and Landless Peasant Movement land occupations are comparatively benign outbursts by those left behind, that unless something is done we can expect more violent eruptions with unpredictable consequences. It could be that even those enjoying the fruits of prosperity are feeling less and less in control of their lives. It is, after all, frustrating to get virtually identical economic policies no matter whom you vote for and to watch your elected representatives facilitate or at best stand by helplessly as markets devour precious public space. Maybe the whole thing is just a successful public relations stunt by the alternatives who are deftly mixing pop culture and information technology to lend a sheen of novelty and broad appeal to tired slogans. The new anti-capitalist movement may just be giving a new form to an old idea. Like its predecessors, it is unlikely to succeed in terms of defeating global capitalism (after all, supporters are the most influential of the civic responses to global capitalism) but it may just transform it. Given the cacophony of voices behind it, the message from Seattle and Prague may be neither coherent nor constructive. It is more like an alarm, a shout of protest and despair. But it is loud enough that corporations, international organisations, and governments can ignore it only at their peril.

Uniqueness: Transition Now

Transition must happen now—new configurations of power necessitate change of system.

Harvey 10 (David Harvey, May 2010, ORGANIZING FOR THE ANTI-CAPITALIST TRANSITION, http://www.marxisthumanistinitiative.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/harvey-paper.pdf, acc 2/28/12, rsb)

The historical geography of capitalist development is at a key inflexion point in which the geographical configurations of power are rapidly shifting at the very moment when the temporal dynamic is facing very serious constraints. Three percent compound annual growth (generally considered the minimum satisfactory growth rate for a healthy capitalist economy) is becoming less and less feasible to sustain without resort to all manner of fictions (such as those that have characterized asset markets and financial affairs over the last two decades). There are good reasons to believe that there is no alternative to a new global order of governance that will eventually have to manage the transition to a zero growth economy. If that is to be done in an equitable way, then there is no alternative to socialism or communism. Since the late 1990s, the World Social Forum became the center for articulating the theme "another world is possible." It must now take up the task of defining how another socialism or communism is possible and how the transition to these alternatives is to be accomplished. The current crisis offers a window of opportunity to reflect on what might be involved.

Links: Activism/Protest

The affirmative’s protest activism is a mere carnival spectacle that is self-destructive—capitalism is the root cause of all violence and crisis. A radical departure and hope in anti-capitalism is the primary ethical obligation.

Žižek ’12 “Occupy Wall Street: what is to be done next” Slavoj Žižek guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 24 April 2012 08.05 EDT Slavoj Žižek is a Slovenian philosopher and cultural critic working in the traditions of Hegelianism, Marxism and Lacanian psychoanalysis. He has made contributions to political theory, film theory and theoretical psychoanalysis.

What to do in the aftermath of the Occupy Wall Street movement, when the protests that started far away – in the Middle East, Greece, Spain, UK – reached the centre, and are now reinforced and rolling out all around the world? In a San Francisco echo of the OWS movement on 16 October 2011, a guy addressed the crowd with an invitation to participate in it as if it were a happening in the hippy style of the 1960s: "They are asking us what is our program. We have no program. We are here to have a good time." Such statements display one of the great dangers the protesters are facing: the danger that they will fall in love with themselves, with the nice time they are having in the "occupied" places. Carnivals come cheap – the true test of their worth is what remains the day after, how our normal daily life will be changed. The protesters should fall in love with hard and patient work – they are the beginning, not the end. Their basic message is: the taboo is broken, we do not live in the best possible world; we are allowed, obliged even, to think about alternatives. In a kind of Hegelian triad, the western left has come full circle: after abandoning the so-called "class struggle essentialism" for the plurality of anti-racist, feminist etc struggles, "capitalism" is now clearly re-emerging as the name of the problem. The first two things one should prohibit are therefore the critique of corruption and the critique of financial capitalism. First, let us not blame people and their attitudes: the problem is not corruption or greed, the problem is the system that pushes you to be corrupt. The solution is neither Main Street nor Wall Street, but to change the system where Main Street cannot function without Wall Street. Public figures from the pope downward bombard us with injunctions to fight the culture of excessive greed and consummation – this disgusting spectacle of cheap moralization is an ideological operation, if there ever was one: the compulsion (to expand) inscribed into the system itself is translated into personal sin, into a private psychological propensity, or, as one of the theologians close to the pope put it: "The present crisis is not crisis of capitalism but the crisis of morality." Let us recall the famous joke from Ernst Lubitch's Ninotchka: the hero visits a cafeteria and orders coffee without cream; the waiter replies: "Sorry, but we have run out of cream, we only have milk. Can I bring you coffee without milk?" Was not a similar trick at work in the dissolution of the eastern european Communist regimes in 1990? The people who protested wanted freedom and democracy without corruption and exploitation, and what they got was freedom and democracy without solidarity and justice. Likewise, the Catholic theologian close to pope is carefully emphasizing that the protesters should target moral injustice, greed, consumerism etc, without capitalism. The self-propelling circulation of Capital remains more than ever the ultimate Real of our lives, a beast that by definition cannot be controlled. One should avoid the temptation of the narcissism of the lost cause, of admiring the sublime beauty of uprisings doomed to fail. What new positive order should replace the old one the day after, when the sublime enthusiasm of the uprising is over? It is at this crucial point that we encounter the fatal weakness of the protests: they express an authentic rage which is not able to transform itself into a minimal positive program of socio-political change.

Links: Alternate/Sustainable Technology

All attempts to combine capitalism with sustainable environmental policies have reproduce the drive for profit.

Smith R. (Institute for Policy Research & Development), London 2011. Green capitalism: the god that failed. Real-World Economics Review 56: 112–144.

There can be no doubt that we are better off for many of these initiatives. But two decades on, for all the organic groceries, the energy efficient lightbulbs, appliances and buildings, the carbon trading and carbon taxes, still, the global ecology is collapsing faster than ever. Climate change, as Bill McKibben tells us in his new book, eaarth, is no longer a distant threat; it’s already upon us. CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions are currently growing at four times the rate they grew in the 1990s. Two thousand ten was the hottest year on record and the 2000s were the hottest decade on record. From peat fires around Moscow to huge floods in Pakistan, super hurricanes, super storms, super winter snowfalls, and floods or, alternately, extended drought (even both in Australia), are becoming the norm. Seas are rising and ice is melting faster than scientists imagined possible even as recently as 2007. Tropical forests continue to fall. Glacier melt is accelerating around the world with dire implications for agriculture from India to China, California to Peru. Rivers are drying up. Soil depletion continues unabated. Water tables are falling relentlessly around the world. Drought has become a permanent feature of the American southwest, of Australia, of regions of Africa and the Middle East, and northern China. Ocean fisheries are collapsing right and left. Coral reefs, scientists now think, could die off in many places by mid-century and over the entire planet by 2100. Penguin colonies are at risk. The collective impact of nearly 7 billion humans pumping their emissions into the atmosphere and dumping their excreta and runoff and toxics into drains and rivers that eventually issue into the seas is not only changing the climate but, incredibly, changing the chemical composition of the world’s vast oceans, threatening the future both of living creatures in the oceans and those who live off the oceans. We’re destroying life and wiping out species so fast that, in Bill McKibben’s words, “We’re running Genesis backward, decreating.” In short, for all the green initiatives, corporate business practices have changed little -- or the little they’ve changed has had no great effect. From Kyoto to Cancun, governments have all made it abundantly clear that they will not accept binding limits on greenhouse gas emissions. They will not sacrifice growth today to save the planet tomorrow. Europe’s cap and trade scheme, the first large scale effort, enriched traders and polluters but failed to put the brakes on the relentless rise of greenhouse gas emissions. What few carbon taxes governments actually imposed have likewise failed to stem emissions. At the end of the day, the project of green capitalism is in disarray. II. Delusions of “Natural Capitalism” Paul Hawken was right: We need a “restorative economy,” an economy that lives within nature’s limits, that minimizes and even eliminates waste from production, and so on. But he was completely wrong to imagine that we could ever get this under capitalism. In what follows I will explain why this is so then discuss what I think are the implications of this critique. To start with, I’m going to state five theses about green capitalism and then develop these arguments in the rest of this paper. First, the project of “sustainable” “green” “natural” capitalism was misconceived and doomed from the start because maximizing profit and saving the planet are inherently in conflict and cannot be systematically aligned even if, here and there, they might coincide for a moment. That’s because, under capitalism, CEOs and corporate boards are not responsible to society; they’re responsible to private owners and shareholders. CEOs might embrace environmentalism so long as this also increases profits but they’re not free to subordinate profit maximizing to saving the world because to do so would be to risk shareholder flight or worse. I claim that profit-maximization is an iron rule of capitalism, a rule that trumps all else and sets the possibilities and limits of ecological reform -- and not the other way around as green capitalism theorists suppose. Second, no capitalist government on earth can impose “green taxes” that would drive the coal industry or any other industry out of business, or even force major retrenchments by suppressing production because, among other important reasons, given capitalism, this would just bring on recession and mass unemployment if not worse. This means the carbon tax strategy to stop global warming is a non-starter. And without green taxes, the entire green capitalist project collapses. Third, green capitalism theorists vastly underestimate the gravity, scope, and speed of the global ecological collapse of we face. They imagine that growth can continue forever if we just tweak the incentives and penalties a bit here and there with green taxes and such. I claim that the capitalist economic system is inherently eco-suicidal, that endless growth can only end in catastrophic global eco-collapse, that no amount of tinkering can alter the market system’s suicidal trajectory, and that, therefore, like it or not, humanity has no choice but to try to find a way to replace capitalism with a post-capitalist ecologically sustainable economy.

Links: Alternate/Sustainable Technology

The affirmative embodies the failures of the current Left—any focus away from capital reentrenches neoliberal logic.

Won-hyung 6/27 “The ‘world’s most dangerous philosopher’ is back in South Korea”—The Hankeyoreh Posted on : Jun.27,2012 11:41 KSTModified on : Jun.27,2012 13:53 KST; Choi Won-hyung staff reporter; Slavoj Žižek is a Slovenian philosopher and cultural critic working in the traditions of Hegelianism, Marxism and Lacanian psychoanalysis. He has made contributions to political theory, film theory and theoretical psychoanalysis. [http://english.hani.co.kr/arti/english_edition/e_entertainment/539796.html]

Slavoj Zizek, a Slovenian cultural theorist known for his radical blend of real politik and pop culture, is visiting Korea this week after having been away since his 2003 appearance at the Conference of Korean Philosophers. The first stop on his itinerary this time was a conversation with Hong Se-hwa, a noted progressive writer in Korea. The meeting coincided with the 62nd anniversary Monday of the start of the Korean War, saw Zizek talking about the current crisis in the capitalist system, and what “progressives” and “leftists” should be aiming for at such a time. He also spent two hours sharing his thoughts on the division of the Korean Peninsula and the continuity of the regime in Pyongyang. Hong began the conversation on the topic of the recent second round of elections in Greece as a way of gauging the direction of the financial crisis in Europe..Hong went on to ask about the difficulties leftists are facing around the world. He noted the South Korean example, in which the military dictatorship was brought to an end by the June 1987 democracy struggle, but the next ten years of reformist liberal administrations ended up dividing the working class and strengthening big business through intensive restructuring. Zizek was pessimistic about the prospects, observing that the left, despite its critique of capitalism, was unable to do anything when crisis struck, and remains in a profound state of crisis. Whereas the left wing of the past believed it was enough to know what would happen and organize people who agreed with it, he argued, the current situation is one where there is no way of knowing what is going on, and the left is not asking the “big questions.” He also said another limitation of the current left is its tacit acceptance of democracy and capitalism, with an interest on how to make things better by working within the system. He argued that the left, rather than presenting a utopian perspective and dogma for a solution, needs to be a presence asking the question of what an be offered to people, from a perspective that problematizes a system that divides people through embracing and excluding -- what the philosopher calls the “new Apartheid.” The important thing, he added, was not giving answers but asking the right questions. What practical steps need to be taken to rebuild the left? According to Zizek, the question of what people really feel represents change is more important what how many people have called for the same thing. The task of the left, he added, was to look squarely at a complex reality where pragmatism is bound together with idealism. The conversation segued into accounts of the difficulties faced by the South Korean labor movement. Hong described the occupation of a crane last year by Korean Confederation of Trade Unions member Kim Jin-suk to protest layoffs at Hanjin Heavy Industries and Construction, the Hope Bus campaign to support her struggle, and the plight of layoff victims at Ssangyong Motors, who failed to draw the same level of interest from civil society despite the deaths of 22 union members in the wake of the firings. Zizek said that helping out when the basic social system is not functioning properly is not an issue of philosophy. Like coming to the aid of someone who lies bleeding in the street, he said, helping people is a fundamental part of an ethical society that goes beyond the discussion on neoliberalism. The philosopher showed a particular interest in the division of the peninsula and the North Korean regime. He noted that unlike other communist countries where bureaucrats dominate the system, North Korea follows a heredity succession, even going so far as to invoke supernatural phenomena. Zizek said he was very interested in what contributed to North Korea developing such a unique system in the present day and age. He also said that despite opting for “isolation” over the years, Pyongyang was actually far more dependent on the outside, relying on food aids and focusing on establishing diplomatic relations with Washington and Tokyo. Zizek’s visit attracted notice because he was the one who suggested it. He plans to meet with the public in seven o’clock lecture meetings at the Kyung Hee University Peace Hall on Wednesday and the Konkuk University New Millennium Hall on Thursday. He is scheduled to depart Saturday after a weeklong stay.

Links: Alternate/Sustainable Technology

Popularity drives profits—the affirmative increases capitalist interest in alternative energy.

Nick Schulz (writer in residence at the American Enterprise Institute and the editor of TCS Daily)., "The Greening of Capitalism," The New Atlantis, Number 16, Spring 2007, pp. 92-97.

After the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, the great British economist John Maynard Keynes returned to Cambridge for most of the next twenty years to write and teach. It was an extraordinarily fruitful period for him. It was there that he penned his most famous work, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, published in 1936. But prior to publishing his General Theory, Keynes produced several other smaller and lesser-known volumes that helped him develop his famous opus. Among these was an essay entitled “The End of Laissez-Faire,” based on lectures he had delivered in Oxford and Berlin. Looking back on it today, that short work is striking for its prescience. Keynes notes that “one of the most interesting and unnoticed developments of recent decades has been the tendency of big enterprise to socialize itself.” He continues: A point arrives in the growth of a big institution...at which the owners of the capital, i.e. the shareholders, are almost entirely dissociated from the management, with the result that the direct personal interest of the latter in the making of great profit becomes quite secondary. When this stage is reached, the general stability and reputation of the institution are more considered by the management than the maximum of profit for the shareholders. The shareholders must be satisfied by conventionally adequate dividends; but once this is secured, the direct interest of the management often consists in avoiding criticism from the public and from the customers of the concern....They are, as time goes on, socializing themselves. Keynes was allied with the anti-conservative Bloomsbury set and a critic of the then-emerging highly dynamic industrial capitalism that was based upon an unapologetic pursuit of profit. For Keynes the tendency of large firms towards socialization was in some significant ways a good thing—not unambiguously good, but beneficent in the long run. From our vantage point today, it is unsurprising that large, multinational companies seek ways of “avoiding criticism from the public and from the customers.” That is good business practice. The interesting wrinkle that Keynes noted, and the one that should concern us today, is that they would do this at a cost in profit and enterprise. And in this Keynes foreshadowed what has come to be known as the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) movement. The premises of CSR are that corporate entities, particularly large and powerful ones, have responsibilities that extend beyond ensuring the most desirable returns for their owners, the shareholders. They have obligations to their communities, to the environment, to society (however it is defined), to abstract notions of justice and fairness, and to future generations. Corporate Social Responsibility means firms are obligated, in a sense, to socialize themselves—just as Keynes saw they were already beginning to do. The embrace of CSR has been swift and firm in American business schools and boardrooms. It is given high priority in the planning and positioning of major business enterprises. Most major corporations have senior executives charged with developing CSR policies for their firms. The advance of CSR initiatives has also spawned a cottage industry of management consultants who help firms modify their practices and products in a business climate where reputation matters as much as—and sometimes more than—maximizing profit. Green to Gold, the new book from Yale University professors Daniel C. Esty and Andrew S. Winston, is a kind of CSR manual. The authors accept uncritically what Keynes perceived: that the managers of firms of a certain size will go to great lengths to avoid criticism. Their book is designed to help these firms in their efforts. The present political and cultural climate of opinion places a premium on environmental sensitivity—or at least the appearance of it. Ecological causes are in fashion. “Green is the new black,” as Vanity Fair magazine recently proclaimed. Or as Esty and Winston put it, there is a “green wave” growing and building momentum through our culture and politics. The consequences for commerce are enormous. The question for the authors is not whether but how, and how quickly, firms become “wave riders” and embrace environmentalism. To the extent that business interests and the environment are seen to be in conflict with one another, the environment is winning in the court of public opinion. It is doing so in the court of political opinion as well. For example, today’s Republican Party is widely viewed as the more “pro-business” of the two dominant American political parties. And yet many of the party’s stars are quick to demonstrate green sensibilities. California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has pushed some of the most stringent (some would say fanciful) environmental regulations in the country. Republican Senator and leading presidential aspirant John McCain has lobbied for years for strong global warming regulations. Senator McCain models his political attitudes on those of Teddy Roosevelt, who pushed Progressive-era environmental and conservation reforms. It is true that the party’s present standard-bearer, President George W. Bush, is widely vilified by green interest groups. But contrary to this perception, President Bush pushed for adoption of alternative energy technologies, particularly wind energy, while serving as governor of Texas. And he is promoting the development of hydrogen technologies and alternative fuel sources, such as switchgrass, devoting considerable sums of federal largesse to those efforts. None of this is surprising. As countries advance economically and become richer, they become greener and cleaner as well. So even while debates continue over how best to <CONTINUED>

<CONTINUED> address challenges like global warming, there is nonetheless a thick green thread stitched into today’s supposedly “anti-environment” Republican Party. And such attitudes are, of course, even more prominent and significant on the political left. Given this state of affairs, there is a sizeable niche for authors like Esty and Winston to peddle advice on how best to ride the wave. Green to Gold is chockablock with interesting and illuminating examples of firms that adopted green strategies and used them to enhance their reputations and get an edge over competitors. Toyota’s commercial success with its Prius hybrid automobile is one example of what the authors term “green to gold” thinking. Toyota anticipated public and political demand, embraced an environmental ethos, and developed products in keeping with that spirit. As Esty and Winston point out, Toyota’s decision to “go green” has also done wonders for the company’s bottom line, in the form of a popular and brisk-selling automobile. Some critics have pointed out that the Prius is not as “green” as its image would suggest. For example, the nickel and other metals required for its battery power system are mined by methods that are far from friendly to the environment. But that point is largely irrelevant from the green-to-gold point of view. For Esty and Winston, the perception that the Prius is eco-friendly is what matters in the marketplace. As the authors argue, “The logic of corporate environmental stewardship need not stem from a personal belief that caring for the natural world is the right thing to do. If critical stakeholders believe the environment matters, then it’s the right thing to do for your business.”

Links: Alternate/Sustainable Technology

Building alternative energy infrastructure supports abusive “green capitalism” policies—a world of capital and a world of ecological diversity cannot coexist.

Sullivan, Sian (2009) Green capitalism, and the cultural poverty of constructing nature as service provider. Radical Anthropology 3 , pp. 18-27. ISSN 1756-090X.

The new global multi-billion dollar trade in carbon, in particular, is providing a market-based model, embraced by both business and major environmental organisations, for pricing and exchanging environmental products across the environmental spectrum under the rapidly proliferating arenas of PES and the proposed programme administered by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD). A critical component of the logic underlying these approaches is an assumption that environments, emissions and effects in very different locations somehow are equivalent and therefore substitutable, such that they allow negative impacts in one location to be offset against environmental investments in another. So the REDD programme proposes equivalence between carbon emitted in the fossil-fuel fumes of cars and industry etc., with that stored in living and decomposing biomass in the myriad configurations of long-evolved and diverse assemblages of species. Emissions therefore can be offset against newly priced carbon stored in standing forests, principally in ‘developing countries’. An accompanying logic is that the new financial value accruing to standing forests will act to reduce the carbon emissions produced by their potential transformation into different landscapes which currently might be more economically profitable (to some people at least); examples might include the clear-felling of the Amazon for hamburger-cattle, soya or oil production. But significant questions remain. Are the molecules of CO2 emitted through fossil-fuel burning really equivalent to the carbon stored in complex terrestrial ecosystems whose assemblages have evolved over many millennia? Do such offsetting schemes actually reduce environmental impacts (e.g. levels of CO2 emissions), or do they instead provide incentives to continue to profit from these emissions and their trade? And how does trade in derived environmental products relate to and affect the peoples, livelihoods and lifeworlds located in the landscapes from which these products are derived? Nevertheless, new markets for ecosystem services and other ecological products now are proliferating, with an accompanying array of brokers advertising ecological wares online. Websites and companies abound with names such as ‘Ecosystem Marketplace’ (www ecosystemmarketplace. com), ‘Species Banking’ (www. speciesbanking.com) and ‘Climate Change Capital’ (www. climatechangecapital.com). At the same time, the major global conservation charities such as Conservation International (CI), The Nature Conservancy, and the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) are embracing PES as a critical tool for generating and distributing the finance needed for conservation activities. A CI glossy brochure called Nature Provides, published in August 2009, thus announces the forthcoming launch of ARIES – Artificial Intelligence for Ecosystem Services – described as a “web-based technology... offered to users worldwide to assist rapid ecosystem service assessment and valuation at multiple scales, from regional to global.”36 This alliance between investment capital, business and environmental organisations is being fostered by the world’s oldest and largest global environmental organisation – the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) – a network of governments, donor agencies, foundations, member organizations and corporations (www.iucn.org). An onlooker at the four-yearly IUCN World Conservation Congress in Barcelona in October 2008, for example, would be forgiven for thinking that multinational corporations now are the planet’s conservationists. At this event, the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) was particularly visible. This is a network of the Chief Executive Officers of some 200 corporations, whose mission statement is “to provide business leadership as a catalyst for change toward sustainable development, and to support the business license to operate, innovate and grow in a world increasingly shaped by sustainable development issues.”37 The image in Figure 1, taken at the prominent WBCSD stand at the 2008 World Conservation Congress, is suggestive of its planetary reach and ambition. It depicts the brand logos of many of the world’s largest multinationals, stretching across an abstract earth, smoothed of difference, diversity and inequality. This is a world good for capital. But is it also good for cultural and ecological diversity?

Links: Cars

Car production and infrastucture is capitalist.

Dawson ’10 (Michael, Author of “Courting Carmageddon: Capitalism and Transportation in the United States”“Issues of Enormous Importance,” http://www.deathbycar.info/2010/11/maliability-shield/ )

For reasons I will explain in my forthcoming book, Courting Carmageddon: Capitalism and Transportation in the United States, manufacturing and selling automobiles is roughly as heedless of and harmful to public health as manufacturing and selling nicotine-delivery devices. Car crashes alone have killed more than 2 million U.S. residents in the past half-century. Of course, thanks to their physical size and complexity and their enormous infrastructural and convenience implications, cars are far more important to corporate capitalists than cigarettes ever were. Hence, they are also far more off-the-table in terms of public debate and defense.

Links: Democracy

True democracy is impossible within capitalism. Capitalism is solely concerned with growth and is unsustainable.

Jensen 07 (journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin and a member of the board of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center. He is the author of The Heart of Whiteness: Race, Racism, and White Privilege and Citizens of the Empire: The Struggle to Claim Our Humanity.)

This one is easy. Capitalism is a wealth-concentrating system. If you concentrate wealth in a society, you concentrate power. Is there any historical example to the contrary? For all the trappings of formal democracy in the contemporary United States, everyone understands that the wealthy dictates the basic outlines of the public policies that are acceptable to the vast majority of elected officials. People can and do resist, and an occasional politician joins the fight, but such resistance takes extraordinary effort. Those who resist win victories, some of them inspiring, but to date concentrated wealth continues to dominate. Is this any way to run a democracy?

If we understand democracy as a system that gives ordinary people a meaningful way to participate in the formation of public policy, rather than just a role in ratifying decisions made by the powerful, then it’s clear that capitalism and democracy are mutually exclusive. Let’s make this concrete. In our system, we believe that regular elections with the one-person/one-vote rule, along with protections for freedom of speech and association, guarantee political equality. When I go to the polls, I have one vote. When Bill Gates goes the polls, he has one vote. Bill and I both can speak freely and associate with others for political purposes. Therefore, as equal citizens in our fine democracy, Bill and I have equal opportunities for political power. Right? This one is even easier. Capitalism is a system based on the idea of unlimited growth. The last time I checked, this is a finite planet. There are only two ways out of this one. Perhaps we will be hopping to a new planet soon. Or perhaps, because we need to figure out ways to cope with these physical limits, we will invent ever-more complex technologies to transcend those limits. Both those positions are equally delusional. Delusions may bring temporary comfort, but they don’t solve problems. They tend, in fact, to cause more problems. Those problems seem to be piling up. Capitalism is not, of course, the only unsustainable system that humans have devised, but it is the most obviously unsustainable system, and it’s the one in which we are stuck. It’s the one that we are told is inevitable and natural, like the air.

Links: Democracy

Democracy under the current system props up capitalism.

David C Korten (economist, author, and former Professor of the Harvard Business School) . (1998). Do corporations rule the world? And does it matter? Organization & Environment, 11(4), 389-398. Retrieved June 27, 2012, from ABI/INFORM Global. (Document ID: 65946025)

The third theme has to do with the false assumption that the triumph of capitalism is the triumph of democracy and the market economy. The relationship of capitalism to democracy and the market is in fact nearly identical in nature to the relationship of a cancer to the body. We get cancer when some of our cells forget that they are part of our body and pursue their own unlimited growth by feeding on the body on which its own existence depends. The capitalist cancer similarly seeks unlimited growth by feeding on democracy and the market economy. One key to resolving our crisis, as I will elaborate later, is to cure the cancer so we can restore health to democracy and the market. Those who coined the term capitalism in the mid-1850s used it to refer to an economic and social regime in which the ownership and benefits of capital are appropriated by the few to the exclusion of the many-in particular, the many whose labor makes the capital productive. It is a definition that describes perfectly what some call "the new global capitalism."

Links: Discounts

Capitalism is based on temporal fixes to its infrastructure, including discounted rates in the market.

Lawson, 09

James, PhD, Department of Political Science, University of Victoria, “Aboriginal Dispossession in the Emergence of a Capitalist Resource Extractve Region: The Ottawa valley, 1800-1830s http://www.cpsa-acsp.ca/papers-2009/Lawson.pdf

In the first place, moments of crisis are to a greater or later extent open-ended, and we are led not only to sympathize with the actors who face them, but also to draw lessons for ourselves in a contemporary context where the future is still veiled. This open-endedness has at least two sides. Subjectively, moments of crisis present actual actors, both individual and collective, with (conditional) moments of decision. Objectively, moments of crisis can usually be resolved in a number of different material ways, though never any way we might wish. These transformations will not only change our surroundings: they will also change us. In the second place, because capital as a process consists of contradictory social relationships conditioned by contradictory social structures, these moments of individual and collective decision are also necessarily moments of encounter and conflict between both individuals and collectivities. Decisions are made strategically rather than technocratically. Usually, however, insufficient attention is given to the spatio-temporal ‘envelopes’ in which certain kinds of encounters are possible and others are impossible. In short, these envelopes set the stage for certain kinds of narrative plot to play out, and simultaneously establish barriers to the possibility of other plots.

Links: Economic Inequality

Economic inequality is inevitable under capitalism.

Lazzaro 2011

Lazzaro, Joseph. 2011, Editor of International Business Times, International Business Times

Roubini, a New York University professor who four years ago accurately forecast the global financial crisis, said the current global economic system -- capitalism -- will remain in its current crisis, a crisis that economist Karl Marx predicted more than a century ago, until major systemic reforms are implemented. Roubini said social unrest and demonstrations are all being driven by the same thing, a crisis period for capitalism itself. The current crisis is the global economy's most serious crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s -- and it was triggered by financial intermediation run amok and a destructive redistribution of income and wealth, from labor to capital.The nations that have recently seen social unrest and political demonstrations "are all driven by the same issues and tensions: growing inequality, poverty, unemployment, and hopelessness. Even the world's middle classes are feeling the squeeze of falling incomes and opportunities," Roubini said."While these protests have no unified theme, they express in different ways the serious concerns of the world's working and middle classes about their prospects in the face of the growing concentration of power among economic, financial, and political elites," Roubini wrote in an op-ed column for Reuters."The causes of their concern are clear enough: High unemployment and underemployment in advanced and emerging economies; inadequate skills and education for young people and workers to compete in a globalized world; resentment against corruption, including legalized forms like lobbying; and a sharp rise in income and wealth inequality in advanced and fast-growing emerging-market economies."Corporations in advanced economies are now cutting jobs due to inadequate final demand, Roubini said, but cutting jobs weakens final demand further because it reduces labor income and demand.The result? Free markets don't generate enough final demand, Roubini said. In the United States, for example, slashing labor costs has sharply cut labor income as a percentage of gross domestic product. With credit exhausted, the effects on demand of decades of redistribution of income and wealth -- from labor to capital, from poor to rich, and from households to corporations -- have become severe.

Links: Economy

Capitalism sustains the privatization of resources and labor that makes inequality inevitable.

Molson 2008

Molson George, October 2008, http://georgemolson.wordpress.com/2008/10/14/the-cause-of-inequality-in-¨free-market¨-capitalism/

The underlying cause of inequality goes unrecognized in modern free-market capitalism, however its source is not regarding free markets, but the establishment of private property. The problem can be understood as follows: Imagine that you have an area of land that a group of people are occupying as a commons. Before the establishment of private property everyone has equal access to the land and therefore it can be said that they have equal equity in the land. Now imagine that the government intervenes and decides to privatize a part of that land. By virtue of doing so the government has given exclusive occupancy rights to a single holder, and taken away the occupancy rights of every other person without giving them fair compensation (commonly known as the enclosure of the commons). Inequality has therefore been created by government intervention and the disenfranchised masses should be compensated for their lost equity from the property that they were formerly able to occupy freely, but no longer can. A simple solution to this problem does, however, exist; if the value of the private parcel of land can be evaluated and the market rate of return is known, then the private parcel of land should be taxed annually or monthly at the market rate of return (the rental value of the property) and the proceeds of this tax should be divided amongst everyone else who can no longer use the land as compensation for lost accessibility. The implications of this model are far reaching. Surprisingly, even if it were used as a substitute for all other taxes, it would create a more equal distribution of income than most modern nation-states currently exhibit. The discovery of this underlying inequality is not entirely new, but was rather first recognized by the late economist Henry George who wrote a book in 1879 called Progress and Poverty. One of the major implications of this model of taxation is that by virtue of offering a mechanism for redistributing income in the form of a residual income it offers the possibility of implementing a fully market-based approach for determining spending for items such as health care, education, and pensions in place of existing centralized government decisions. For example, if a person were sick, disabled, in need of funds for education, or retired and requiring additional income, they could simply choose to occupy land with a lower than average market value, and would receive a net residual income from the other property-owners as compensation for using less than their share of property. It should be noted at this time that such a tax would not be applied to all private property, but only those resources that occur naturally, and not the portion of the value of goods that have been appreciated due to labor activity or value-added processes. The rational being applied here is that since no person is responsible for creating natural resources, no person or group of people should have an exclusive claim to them, but rather equal equity should be assumed. Labor, on the other hand, is created at the discretion of individuals and is considered the produce of their efforts and therefore should not be taxed. It is recognized that for the purposes of utility and practicality private property does need to be allocated, but should only exist with proper resolution of the aforementioned problem, as described above. Given that the government is an organization that has a monopoly on the use of force, and that it enforces private property rights with the backing of physical force, the resulting inequality should be considered an externality of government intervention. Contrasting this with the current policies of most developed economies, current fiscal policy unduly taxes labour (through income tax) while ignoring the inequalities created by the granting of private property entitlements. This results in the artificial depression of labour rates while keeping return on capital artificially higher than it otherwise would be. Seen from the perspective of demographics, it keeps the incomes of the relatively small portion of people who derive the majority of their income from the ownership of capital artificially higher, while keeping the wages of the majority of people who work for their income artificially lower- a scenario which is both inequitable and falls short of its meritocratic claims. To summarize, I am stating that governments are responsible for creating the single largest cause of inequality, and attempt to remedy the resulting otherwise unlivable income disparity by unduly taxing labour, which is little more than a cosmetic remedy for a deep underlying problem. Moreover, if left unchecked this otherwise hidden inequality will result in an ever-growing disparity between the rich and the poor, of which there is already great empirical evidence for.

Links: Economy

Economic collapse is inevitable and driven by capitalism.

Easterling 03 (Stuart Easterling, December 2003, International Socialist Review, MARX'S THEORY OF ECONOMIC CRISIS, http://www.isreview.org/issues/32/crisis_theory.shtml, acc 6/27/12, rsb)

Capitalism is an economic system that is inherently crisis-prone. It is driven by forces which cause it to be unstable, anarchic and self-destructive. This is as true today as it was over 150 years ago, when Karl Marx and his collaborator Frederick Engels described capitalism in the Communist Manifesto as "a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, [that it] is like the sorcerer, who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells."1 Indeed, today’s world of wild stock market booms and slumps, recurring layoffs and long-term unemployment, corporate scandals and power blackouts, seems to fit their description better than ever before. The present economic downturn is no exception. The United States is currently in the middle of the longest period of job losses since the Great Depression of the 1930s. In fact, the U.S. economy today has 2.6 million fewer jobs that it did two years ago. Meanwhile, over two million people have lost health insurance coverage and personal bankruptcies hit a record of over 1.5 million households in 2002.2 In short, economic crises–recessions and depressions–were a part of capitalism at its birth and, despite promises to the contrary, continue to plague the system to this day.

Links: Environmental Collapse

Capitalism is the root cause of environmental collapse.

David C Korten (economist, author, and former Professor of the Harvard Business School) . (1998). Do corporations rule the world? And does it matter? Organization & Environment, 11(4), 389-398. Retrieved June 27, 2012, from ABI/INFORM Global. (Document ID: 65946025)

In the early 1970s, I was an active member of the Academy of Management. I am delighted to be back. I am especially delighted to be meeting with the Organizations and the Environment interest group on the theme "What Matters Most." Your section name goes right to the heart of what matters most because our very survival as a species depends on finding new ways to organize ourselves to meet human needs while maintaining a sustainable relationship to a finite living planet. Our present system makes power accountable to money rather than to life. Consequently, it is destroying life to make money. This is the bottom line, so to speak. I realize that in the eyes of some mainstream economists, life is a special interest, but in my narrow view, I believe it qualifies as a topic that matters. We must create a system that makes power accountable to life, or money will destroy us. This means that we can no longer afford to leave the design of our economic systems to professional economists who lack both the necessary skills and interests to design an economy that serves life. It needs serious attention from talented professionals who value people, nature, and our living planet more than they value money and people who have expertise in the design of large-scale behavioral systems. It struck me as I was preparing for this presentation that a substantial portion of the professional academicians in all the world who fit this description may be gathered here in this room today. That is why it is my privilege to be speaking to you. Given your own expertise, I am not going to spend time today documenting the seriousness of our situation. I assume you are all well aware that we are engaged in the systematic destruction of our planet's life support system, that the social fabric of human society is disintegrating, that the already unconscionable gap between rich and poor is growing rapidly, and that we are seeing a rapid concentration of global economic power under the control of some 200 megacorporations that operate beyond the reach of any state or other public authority. Instead, I want to share some insights from my forthcoming book titled The Post-Corporate World: Life After Capitalism; three interlinked themes are important to understanding and resolving the source of our deepening social and environmental crisis. The first theme deals with the nature of wealth-specifically, the relationship between money and wealth. With a moment's reflection, it is quite obvious that money is not wealth. It is an accounting chit, a number that by social convention we agree to accept in trade for things of real value. However, because a lot of people who should know better-including a few business school professors--confuse the two, we have come to embrace policies and institutions that are destroying the real wealth of the planet and society-most particularly our natural, human, social, and institutional capital-to make money. The second theme deals with the question you have been waiting breathlessly for me to answer: "Do Corporations Rule the World?" The answer is no, not really. Did I surprise you on that one? The truth is, the corporation is only an instrument of global rule. The real power resides in the global financial system that effortlessly brings economies crashing down when a government's policies give it offense and that buys and sells corporations and hires and fires their workers for quick profits with reckless abandon. It is a system that is running on autopilot, delinked from human sensibility and beyond human control.

Links: Environmental Collapse

The affirmative harms are symptoms of the dangers within the current capitalist order. The issue is not technology, but the way that capital orders global social relations. Radical departure from capitalism is a necessary precondition to avoid endless ecological destruction.

John Bellamy Foster (professor of sociology at the University of Oregon), "Capitalism and Environmental Catastrophe"" John Bellamy Foster, "Capitalism and Environmental Catastrophe" N.p., 29 Oct. 2011. Web. 27 June 2012. <http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2011/foster291011.html>.

The Occupy Wall Street movement arose in response to the economic crisis of capitalism, and the way in which the costs of this were imposed on the 99 percent rather than the 1 percent. But "the highest expression of the capitalist threat," as Naomi Klein has said, is its destruction of the planetary environment. So it is imperative that we critique that as well.1 I would like to start by pointing to the seriousness of our current environmental problem and then turn to the question of how this relates to capitalism. Only then will we be in a position to talk realistically about what we need to do to stave off or lessen catastrophe. How bad is the environmental crisis? You have all heard about the dangers of climate change due to the emission of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere -- trapping more heat on earth. You are undoubtedly aware that global warming threatens the very future of the humanity, along with the existence of innumerable other species. Indeed, James Hansen, the leading climatologist in this country, has gone so far as to say this may be "our last chance to save humanity."2 But climate change is only part of the overall environmental problem. Scientists, led by the Stockholm Resilience Centre, have recently indicated that we have crossed, or are near to crossing, nine "planetary boundaries" (defined in terms of sustaining the environmental conditions of the Holocene epoch in which civilization developed over the last 12,000 years): climate change, species extinction, the disruption of the nitrogen-phosphorus cycles, ocean acidification, ozone depletion, freshwater usage, land cover change, (less certainly) aerosol loading, and chemical use. Each of these rifts in planetary boundaries constitutes an actual or potential global ecological catastrophe. Indeed, in three cases -- climate change, species extinction, and the disruption of the nitrogen cycle -- we have already crossed planetary boundaries and are currently experiencing catastrophic effects. We are now in the period of what scientists call the "sixth extinction," the greatest mass extinction in 65 million years, since the time of the dinosaurs; only this time the mass extinction arises from the actions of one particular species -- human beings. Our disruption of the nitrogen cycle is a major factor in the growth of dead zones in coastal waters. Ocean acidification is often called the "evil twin" of climate change, since it too arises from carbon dioxide emissions, and by negatively impacting the oceans it threatens planetary disruption on an equal (perhaps even greater) scale. The decreased availability of freshwater globally is emerging as an environmental crisis of horrendous proportions.3 All of this may seem completely overwhelming. How are we to cope with all of these global ecological crises/catastrophes, threatening us at every turn? Here it is important to grasp that all of these rifts in the planetary system derive from processes associated with our global production system, namely capitalism. If we are prepared to carry out a radical transformation of our system of production -- to move away from "business as usual" -- then there is still time to turn things around; though the remaining time in which to act is rapidly running out. Let's talk about climate change, remembering that this is only one part of the global environmental crisis, though certainly the most urgent at present. Climate science currently suggests that if we burn only half of the world's proven, economically accessible reserves of oil, gas, and coal, the resulting carbon emissions will almost certainly raise global temperatures by 2° C (3.6° F), bringing us to what is increasingly regarded as an irreversible tipping point -- after which it appears impossible to return to the preindustrial (Holocene) climate that nourished human <CONTINUED>

<CONTINUED> civilization. At that point various irrevocable changes (such as the melting of Arctic sea ice and the ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica, and the release of methane from the tundra) will become unstoppable. This will speed up climate change, while also accelerating vast, catastrophic effects, such as rising sea levels and extreme weather. Alternatively, if our object is the rational one of keeping warming below 2° C, climate science now suggests that we should refrain from burning more than a quarter of the proven, economically exploitable fossil fuel reserves (unconventional sources such as tar sands are excluded from this calculation).4 The central issue in all of this, it is important to understand, is irreversibility. Current climate models indicate that if we were to cease burning fossil fuels completely at the point that global average temperature had increased by 2°C, or 450 parts per million (ppm) carbon concentration in the atmosphere (the current level is 390 ppm), the earth would still not be close to returning to a Holocene state by the year 3000. In other words, once this boundary is reached, climate change is irreversible over conceivable human-time frames.5 Moreover, the damage would be done; all sorts of catastrophic results would have emerged. Recently climate scientists, writing for Nature magazine, one of the world's top science publications, have developed a concrete way of understanding the planetary boundary where climate change is concerned, focusing on the cumulative carbon emissions budget. This is represented by the trillionth ton of carbon. So far more than 500 billion tons of carbon have been emitted into the atmosphere since the industrial revolution. In order to have an approximately even chance (50-50) of limiting the increase in global average temperature to 2°C, the cumulative CO2 emissions over the period 1750-2050 must not exceed one trillion tons of carbon; while in order to have a 75 percent chance of global warming remaining below 2°C, it is necessary not to exceed 750 billion tons of carbon. Yet, according to present trends, the 750 billionth ton of carbon will be emitted in 2028, i.e., about sixteen years from now. If we are to avoid burning the 750 billionth ton of carbon over the next four decades, carbon dioxide emissions must fall at a rate of 5 percent per year; while to avoid emitting the trillion ton, emissions must drop at a rate of 2.4 percent a year. The longer we wait the more rapid the decrease that will be necessary. The trillionth ton, viewed as the point of no return, is the equivalent of cutting down the last palm tree on Easter Island. After that it is essentially out of our hands. 6 This takes us to the social question. The problem we face when it comes to the appropriate response to impending climate catastrophe is not so much one of climate science -- beyond understanding the environmental parameters in which we must act -- as social science. It is an issue of social conditions and social agency. We live in in a capitalist society, which means a societyin which the accumulation of capital, i.e., economic growth carried out primarily on the terms of the 1 percent at the top (the ruling capitalist class), is the dominant tendency. It is a system that accumulates capital in one phase simply so that it can accumulate still more capital in the next phase -- always on a larger scale. There is no braking mechanism in such a system and no social entity in control. If for some reason the system slows down (as it is forced to periodically due to its own internal contradictions) it enters an economic crisis. That may be good temporarily for the environment, but it is terrible for human beings, particularly the bottom portion of the 99 percent, faced with rising unemployment and declining income. Overall, capitalism is aimed at exponential growth. It cannot stand still. The minimum adequate growth rate of the system is usually thought to be 3 percent. But this means that the economy doubles in size about every 24 years. How many such doublings of world output can the planet take? Hence, there is a direct and growing contradiction between capitalism and the environment, a contradiction that becomes more and more apparent as the size of the capitalist economy begins to rival the basic biogeochemical processes of the planet. Naomi Klein has rightly characterized the age we live in as "disaster capitalism" because of its dual economic and ecological crises -- and due to the increasingly exploitative means the rich employ to enable them to prosper in the midst of increasing destruction.7 There are two predominant ways of addressing the climate crisis and the environmental problem generally. One is to look for technological ways out -- often seen as being spurred by the creation of carbon markets, but the onus is on the technology. The argument here is that through the massive introduction of various advanced technologies we can have our pie and eat it too. We can get around the environmental problem, it is suggested, without making any fundamental social changes. Thus, the pursuit of profits and accumulation can go on as before without alteration. Such magic-technological answers are commonly viewed as the only politically feasible ones, since they are attractive to corporate and political-power elites, who refuse to accept the need for system change. Consequently, the establishment has gambled on some combination of technological miracles emerging that will allow them to keep on doing just as they have been doing. Predictably, the outcome of this high-stake gamble has been <CONTINUED>

<CONTINUED> a failure not only to decrease carbon emissions, but also to prevent their continued increase. The turn to those alternative technologies that are already available (for example, solar power) has been hindered by the fact that they are often less profitable or require changes in social organization to be implemented effectively. As a result, greater emphasis is placed on: (1) nuclear energy (a Faustian bargain if there ever was one); and (b) carbon capture and sequestration technology for coal-fired plants, which is neither economically nor ecologically feasible at present, and hence only serves to keep coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel, going. Beyond this the only option that the vested interests (the 1% and their hangers-on) have left is to push for geoengineering technologies. This involves such measures as dumping sulfur dioxide particles in the atmosphere to block the suns rays (with the danger that photosynthesis might be decreased), or fertilizing the ocean with iron to promote algal growth and absorb carbon (with the possibility that dead zones might expand). These geoengineering schemes are extremely dubious in terms of physics, ecology, and economics: all three. They involve playing God with the planet. Remember the Sorcerer's Apprentice! Nevertheless, such technological fantasies, bordering on madness, continue to gain support at the top. This is because attempts to shift away from our currently wasteful society in the direction of rational conservation, involving changes in our way of life and our form of production, are considered beyond the pale -- even when the very survival of humanity is at stake. The other approach is to demand changes in society itself; to move away from a system directed at profits, production, and accumulation, i.e., economic growth, and toward a sustainable steady-state economy. This would mean reducing or eliminating unnecessary and wasteful consumption and reordering society -- from commodity production and consumption as its primary goal, to sustainable human development. This could only occur in conjunction with a move towards substantive equality. It would require democratic ecological and social planning. It therefore coincides with the classical objectives of socialism. Such a shift would make possible the reduction in carbon emissions we need. After all, most of what the U.S. economy produces in the form of commodities (including the unnecessary, market-related costs that go into the production of nearly all goods) is sheer waste from a social, an ecological -- even a long-term economic -- standpoint. Just think of all the useless things we produce and that we are encouraged to buy and then throw away almost the moment we have bought them. Think of the bizarre, plastic packaging that all too often dwarfs the goods themselves. Think of military spending, running in reality at $1 trillion a year in the United States. Think of marketing (i.e. corporate spending aimed at persuading people to buy things they don't want or need), which has reached $1 trillion a year in this country alone. Think of all the wasted resources associated with our financial system, with Wall Street economics. It is this kind of waste that generates the huge profits for the top 1 percent of income earners, and that alienates and impoverishes the lives of the bottom 99 percent, while degrading the environment.8 What we need therefore is to change our economic culture. We need an ecological and social revolution. We have all the technologies necessary to do this. It is not primarily a technological problem, because the goal here would no longer be the impossible one of expanding our exploitation of the earth beyond all physical and biological limits, ad infinitum. Rather the goal would be to promote human community and community with the earth. Here we would need to depend on organizing our local communities but also on creating a global community -- where the rich countries no longer imperialistically exploit the poor countries of the world. You may say that this is impossible, but the World Occupy Movement would have been declared impossible only a month ago. If we are going to struggle, let us make our goal one of ecological and social revolution -- in defense of humanity and the planet.

Links: Other Oppressions (Race, gender, etc.)

Capitalism is the foundation to other oppressions.

Harvey 12 (David Harvey, 2012, THE SOCIALIST REGISTER, THE URBAN ROOTS OF THE FINANCIAL CRISES: RECLAIMING THE CITY FOR THE ANTI-CAPITALIST STRUGGLE, http://occupythecrisis.wordpress.com/2012/03/26/david-harvey-middle-path-between-autonomism-and-statism/, acc 6/28/12, rsb)

Anti-capitalist struggle is about the abolition of that class relation between capital and labour in production that permits the production and appropriation of surplus value by capital. The ultimate aim of anti-capitalist struggle is, quite simply, the abolition of that class relation. Even and particularly when this struggle has to be seen, as it invariably does, through the prisms of race, ethnicity, sexuality and gender, it must eventually reach into the very guts of what a capitalist system is about and wrench out the cancerous tumour of class relations at its very centre.

Links: Rail

Railroads are historically tied to the emergence and perpetuation of capital.

Gras 2003

N.B.S. Gras, 2003, PH.D from Harvard Univeristy, Business Professor at University of Minnesota; Graducate School of Business Administration; Harvard University, Business and Capitalism: An Introduction to Business History

It was the in railroad transportation that financial capital was born in America. It was born in the need which railroads and the holders of railroad securities felt control in the interest of transportation and transportation profits. The need for outside control existed in the 1860’s when Drew, Fisk and Gould mishandled railroads, particularly the Erie Railroad. All of these men were industrial capitalists who, without being primarily interested in the operation of railroads, came to manipulate the finance of railroads. All of these men were industrial capitalists who, without being primarily interested in the operation of railroads, came to manipulate the finance of railroads.

Capitalists gain from High-Speed Rail.

Landsbaum 12 (Mark Landsbaum, 21/3/12, The Orange County Register, Orange Punch: HIGH-SPEED RAIL ABOUT TO GO IN REVERSE?, http://orangepunch.ocregister.com/2012/03/21/high-speed-rail-about-to-go-in-reverse/68445/, acc 6/26/12, rsb)

Some folks who want to undo the boondoggle also known as California’s High-Speed Rail project took a step closer to that reality yesterday when their ballot initiative was cleared to collect signatures. Republican state Sen. Doug LaMalfa and former congressman George Radanovich seek to derail the train, but now need signatures of 504,760 registered voters to qualify their measure for the November ballot. They’ve have until Aug. 13. We’re hoping they get what they need. But a few obstacles remain, and they aren’t insubstantial. The Moonbeam Express is like watching a train wreck in slow motion First, it’s costly to collect those signatures, so it’s no certainty that enough paid signature gatherers will collect enough signatures. It’ll cost them, or someone, about two or three bucks per name to get this on the ballot. Second, if we know anything about campaigns, it’s going to be even more costly to promote the ballot initiative if it makes it to the ballot. And there are monied interests on the other side who want to derail the derailing. These crony capitalists stand to make lots of dough in government contracts for the high-speed rail, even if trains never roll on the tracks. It should be instructive that the people who stand most to gain from this train for certain will make their money irrespective of whether the train is completely built or carries a single passenger. Voters should remember that when they see the barrage of advertising in favor of the train and against the ballot initiative. When government gets to the size and scope of ours, it attracts plenty of trough-feeders who have plenty of money to spend to pursue the massive amounts in government contracts they stand to gain from such crony capitalism. Anyone remember the overwhelming campaign against Prop. 23, financed by those who intend to game the Global Warming Solutions Act to redistribute your money, including those “alternative” energy providers whose products would be unsellable without such laws? Rather than killing this economy-crippling law, the folks whose pockets will be lined by gaming its Draconian rules spent plenty to persuade voters into keeping it on the books. Meanwhile… A reader has complained about my column Sunday on the train. He disputes my premise that it is a government scheme to force you to change your lifestyle. He says “No one will force you to take a high-speed rail trip. Economics will do that.” He mistakes government coercion for economics. If the government didn’t tax you to pay for this boondoggle, it simply wouldn’t be an option, economic or otherwise. No private provider is about to pop for the tens of billions needed to build a train that won’t operate at a profit. And the government couldn’t have taxed you to pay for this boondoggle if its promoters had been honest about its price. Instead of the advertised $33 billion, it now is estimated to cost almost $100 billion. If the government hadn’t lied to you about how long it would take, irrespective of cost, to build this boondoggle, voters would certainly have been more reluctant to buy in. Instead of the completion date of 2020, as advertised, it now will take at least until 2032. Those aren’t economic influences. Those are government deceptions intended to coerce you into transforming the way you live. And if people really believe the current admitted-to price and completion date aren’t going to change, they are dumb enough to continue swallowing the lies and propaganda. But then, they may be.

Links: Rail

California proves—rail helps capitalists.

Frezza 12 (Bill Frezza, fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, 12/3/12, Real Clear Markets, CAN CALIFORNIA'S ECONOMIC SELF-IMMOLATION BE EXPORTED?, http://www.realclearmarkets.com/articles/2012/03/12/can_californias_economic_self-immolation_be_exported_99559.html, acc 6/26/12, rsb)

Cultural leaders making headlines cursing the 1% have made it a virtue to force California taxpayers to help pay for electric cars purchased by millionaires. An unholy alliance of environmentalists, crony capitalists and their political enablers are still trying to build a high speed rail line to nowhere, even though cost estimates have ballooned to $100 billion. It's as if the whole state has been driven insane after watching Al Gore's movie.

Links: Science/Scientific Investment

Investment in science reproduces violent capitalism.

Marsh 95

(James L., Professor of Philosophy at Fordham University, Critique, Action, and Liberation p. 281-282 GAL)

Next, since the rulers in late capitalism claiming to rule in the interests of all are either a technological and scientific elite or politicians and managers advised by such an elite, they are in principle incapable of evaluating and defending the basic goals and priorities of society, because positive science deliberately prescinds from value questions. The most that science can do is ascertain the best means for achieving goals already judged to be valid. Legitimation, however, if it is to be fully rational, applies to the goals of a society and not simply to the means of achieving them. We have the choice, therefore, of either accepting the word of elites that the goals are in fact consonant with our best interests, a claim that the elite as a scientific elite cannot justify, or disagreeing with the elite. If we take its word on this matter, then we have simply made an irrational leap of faith that whatever is is right.

Democracy becomes whatever the current practice is. If we disagree with this question-begging approach and begin to think of rational alternatives to the system, then we have ceased being uncritically ruled by elites.

Links: Transportation

Transportation efficiency and improvements feeds capitalism.

Princen, Maniates and Conca, 2002

(Thomas Princen, Michael Maniates, and Ken Conca, July 2002, Confronting Consumption)

It is important to understand that technical progress that leads to improved production efficiency of capital and labor is a necessary but not sufficient condition for improvements in consumption efficiency. In general, improved efficiency of production simply lowers the costs of producing stuff and transfers the resulting savings toward additional consumption. Gains made in improving the fuel efficiency of the U.S. motor fleet, for example, have been more than offset by trends toward larger vehicles, more cars per household, and more miles per car? A study by Peter Freund and George Martin demonstrated that even though the automobile fuel efficiency in the United States improved con siderably (34 percent) between 1970 and 1990, total fuel consumption during the same period increased by 7 percent. The number of multicar families had increased and the family drove more miles.3 This paradox is sometimes referred to as "Jevons's paradox" after economist Stanley Jevons, who pointed out in 1864 that efforts to conserve English coal by increasing the coal-use efficiency of British steam engines ended UP making steam power cheaper compared to human and animal power, in the end stimulating increased coal consumption .4 Likewise, production efficiencies unaccompanied by brakes on consumption tend to bring the consumption of energy and materials to levels greater than what existed before the production efficiencies were introduced. Energy-efficiency gains will thus only be successful in uncoupling improved quality of life from increased energy use if they are accompanied by comprehensive political and economic strategies to reduce consumption. Without such a strategy, discussed in detail later in this chapter, improved efficiency leads to lower costs and increased consumption. <68>

Links: Unemployment

Capitalism inherently produces unemployment and exploitation.

Zizek 12 (Slavoj Zizek, International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, 25/5/12, Australian Religion and Ethics, CAPITALISM CAN NO LONGER AFFORD FREEDOM, http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2012/05/25/3511327.htm, acc 6/27/12, rsb)

In his recent re-reading of Marx's Capital, Fredric Jameson identifies the inherent contradiction of the world market: that it is the very success of capitalism (higher productivity, and so forth) which produces unemployment (renders more and more workers useless), and thus that what should be a blessing (less hard labour required) becomes a curse. As Jameson puts it, the world market is thus "a space in which everyone has once been a productive laborer, and in which labor has everywhere begun to price itself out of the system." That is to say, in the ongoing process of capitalist globalization, the category of the unemployed acquires a new dimension beyond the classic notion of the "reserve army of labor," and should now include "those massive populations around the world who have, as it were, 'dropped out of history', who have been deliberately excluded from the modernizing projects of First World capitalism and written off as hopeless or terminal cases." We should thus include among the unemployed those so-called "failed states" (like Congo and Somalia), victims of famine or ecological disasters, those trapped in pseudo-archaic "ethnic hatreds," objects of philanthropy or (often the same people) of the "war on terror." The category of the unemployed should thus be expanded to encompass a wide range of the global population, from the temporary unemployed, through the no-longer employable and permanently unemployed, up to people living in slums and other types of ghettos (that is, all those often dismissed by Marx himself as "lumpen-proletarians") and, finally, all those areas, populations or states excluded from the global capitalist process, like blank spaces in ancient maps. Does not this extension of the circle of the "unemployed" point to the fact that what once lay in the inert background of History becomes a potential agent of emancipatory struggle? Just recall Marx's dismissive characterization of the French peasants in his Eighteenth Brumaire: "the great mass of the French nation is formed by the simple addition of homologous magnitudes, much as potatoes in a sack form a sack of potatoes ... Insofar as there is merely a local interconnection among these small-holding peasants, and the identity of their interests forms no community, no national bond, and no political organization among them, they do not constitute a class. They are therefore incapable of asserting their class interest in their own name, whether through a parliament or a convention. They cannot represent themselves, they must be represented." In the great twentieth-century revolutionary mobilizations of peasants (from China to Bolivia), these "sacks of potatoes" excluded from the historical process began actively to represent themselves. But Jameson then makes the crucial observation that this new category of the "unemployed" is itself a form of capitalist exploitation - the exploited are not only workers producing surplus-value appropriated by capital, they also include those structurally prevented from getting caught up in the capitalist vortex of exploited wage labour, including entire geographical zones and even nation states.

Impacts: Class Exploitation

Capitalism is the foundation of destruction and precarious existence for the middle and working class.

John Gray 2011 (BBC NEWS 6/27/12, Political Philosopher, Author, Former Professor of European Thought at London School of Economics)

As a side-effect of the financial crisis, more and more people are starting to think Karl Marx was right. The great 19th Century German philosopher, economist and revolutionary believed that capitalism was radically unstable. It had a built-in tendency to produce ever larger booms and busts, and over the longer term it was bound to destroy itself. Marx welcomed capitalism's self-destruction. He was confident that a popular revolution would occur and bring a communist system into being that would be more productive and far more humane. Marx was wrong about communism. Where he was prophetically right was in his grasp of the revolution of capitalism. It's not just capitalism's endemic instability that he understood, though in this regard he was far more perceptive than most economists in his day and ours. More profoundly, Marx understood how capitalism destroys its own social base - the middle-class way of life. The Marxist terminology of bourgeois and proletarian has an archaic ring. But when he argued that capitalism would plunge the middle classes into something like the precarious existence of the hard-pressed workers of his time, Marx anticipated a change in the way we live that we're only now struggling to cope with. He viewed capitalism as the most revolutionary economic system in history, and there can be no doubt that it differs radically from those of previous times. Hunter-gatherers persisted in their way of life for thousands of years, slave cultures for almost as long and feudal societies for many centuries. In contrast, capitalism transforms everything it touches. It's not just brands that are constantly changing. Companies and industries are created and destroyed in an incessant stream of innovation, while human relationships are dissolved and reinvented in novel forms. Capitalism has been described as a process of creative destruction, and no-one can deny that it has been prodigiously productive. Practically anyone who is alive in Britain today has a higher real income than they would have had if capitalism had never existed.

Impacts: Capitalism Causes Dehumanization

Capitalism causes dehumanization.

Greenberg 08 (Paul Greenberg, nationally syndicated columnist, 15/12/08, The Washington Times, GREENBERG: WHEN CAPITALISM DEHUMANIZES, http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2008/dec/15/modern-times/?page=all#pagebreak, acc 6/26/12, rsb)

It might have been a vision of the future borrowed from “Modern Times,” Charlie Chaplin’s classic protest against the industrial age. Made in 1936, the almost silent movie still speaks powerfully. Whether as comedy or tragedy. Perhaps its most famous scene is the one in which Charlie, a k a The Little Tramp, is caught in the maw of a giant conveyor belt at the Electro Steel Corp., where he is supposed to tighten the same bolts on the same widgets in the same way at the same rate as they pass by in endless succession. At last, man had become machine, or at least part of it. The machine never stops, even feeding Our Hero to keep him on the job. It eliminates any need for him to think. He has become just another cog in its works. But when Charlie pauses to brush away a fly, or just itch and scratch, the result is (1) chaos on down the production line as the clockwork system is thrown off pace, and (2) a pink slip for Charlie. The whole, tragicomic scene came back on reading Vanessa O’Connell’s story in the Wall Street Journal on the not-so-newest thing in retailing: “Stores count seconds to trim labor costs.” Here’s how it begins: “SHELBY TOWNSHIP, Mich. - Daniel A. Gunther has good reason to keep his checkout line moving at the Meijer Inc. store north of Detroit. A clock starts ticking the instant he scans a customer’s first item, and it doesn’t shut off until his register spits out a receipt. “To assess his efficiency, the store’s computer takes into account everything from the kinds of merchandise he’s bagging to how his customers are paying. Each week, he gets scored. If he falls below 95 percent of the baseline score too many times, the 185-store megastore chain, based in Walker, Mich., is likely to bounce him to a lower-paying job, or fire him. … ” The system is called “labor-waste elimination.” Dozens of retail chains are listed among the clients of the company that offers it - the “Operations Workforce Optimization Unit of Accenture Ltd.” That elevated and expanded moniker makes the simple Electro Steel Corp. in Charlie Chaplin’s film sound like yesterday’s next big thing. The discreet language used to describe how the system works may be very 21st century, but the system itself sounds remarkably like Charlie Chaplin’s nightmare vision of a dehumanized future. This approach to work - dividing each job into parts and timing each employee to see how long it takes him to perform each segment - springs from the theories of Frederick Winslow Taylor. He’s the efficiency expert who introduced time-motion studies early in the last century. His approach soon became known (and detested) as Taylorism. Today’s version is fine with some shoppers. “I am 84,” says one, “and I get behind some old person and I can’t stand it.” Another shopper is not a fan of the new system. “Everybody is under stress,” she says of the cashiers. “They are not as friendly.” She says some old folks feel so rushed at the store, they’ve stopped coming back. Me, I’m not 84 yet but I’ve grown more sympathetic toward the old in recent years. (I wonder why.) Reactions to this Labor Waste Elimination System may vary, depending on how much value you place on human contact versus a quick profit. I was exposed to the conflict between these competing values at an early age. As a child, I spent a lot of time in my father’s little shoe repair and dry goods store. He was the shoemaker, my mother the seamstress. Whenever he would throw something extra in a customer’s bag - call it lagniappe - she would give him a cold stare. She didn’t like to see him give away the merchandise. He tried to explain: “Sarah, it’s not just the one sale that counts. It’s the return business. They’ll be back.” She had her doubts. He on the other hand thought of commerce as friendship. He knew his clientele, mainly sharecroppers in from the country or city laborers, not just by name but through instinct. When he retired, he opened a little booth in a friendly competitor’s store to close out his accounts receivable. How many of his customers would you guess came by to settle their debts? Upward of 95 percent, which they tell me is remarkable. Talk about return business; sometimes he had dealt with generations of the same family. When it came to extending credit, the old man had an eye for character; he didn’t just go by the numbers in his little card file of payments. Frederick W. Taylor, the granddaddy of American efficiency experts, was big on numbers. He timed how long it took to do a job and how many movements it required. I wonder what numerical value he would have placed on friendship.

Impacts: Economic Collapse

Capitalism inevitably causes economic collapse.

Roubini ’11 8/12/2011 “Nouriel Roubini: Karl Marx Was Right” [live.wsj.com/video/nouriel-roubini-karl-marx-was-right/68EE8F89-EC24-42F8-9B9D-47B510E473B0.html#!68EE8F89-EC24-42F8-9B9D-47B510E473-B0] Ph.D. in international economics from Harvard University

Roubini: Well, businesses are not doing anything, they’re not actually helping. The world’s tail risk has made them more nervous. There’s options devaluating. They claim they’re not doing pacts because there is excess capacity and not hiring workers because there’s not enough final demand, but there’s a paradox and a catch-22. If you are not hiring workers there is not enough labor income, there is not enough consumer confidence, there is not enough consumption, there is not enough final demand. And the last 2-3 years we’ve had actually worse than this because we had the massive redistribution of income from labor to capital from wages to profits, inequality of income and wealth has increased. The margin of propensity to spend of a household is greater than the margin of propensity to spend of a firm because they have a higher margin of propensity to save, firms compared to households. So that the redistribution of income and wealth makes the problem of excessive lack of aggregate demand even worse. Karl Marx said it right, at some point Capitalism can destroy itself because you cannot keep on shifting income from labor to capital without not having excess capacity and a lack of aggregate demand, and that’s what’s happening. We thought that markets work, they’re not working, and what’s individually rational, every firm wants to survive and thrive and thus slashing labor costs even more, my labor costs are somebody else’s labor income and consumption. That’s why it’s a self-destructive process. At least in Germany they did some labor holding. In the US we don’t believe in it and we have unemployment rate at 16%. Constable: Let’s just recap that because that was important and it seems to me to be a big deal what you said. You said markets are not working and that Karl Marx was right that Capitalism could self-destruct. Do you think we are now at the point where Capitalism is self-destructing? Roubini: We’re not yet there but I think there is a risk that this is the second leg of what happened in the Great Depression. We had a severe economic and financial crisis and then we kicked the can down the road with too much private debt, households, banks, governments. You cannot resolve this problem with liquidity. At some point when there’s too much debt either you grow yourself out of it but there is not going to be enough economic growth, it’s anemic, either you save yourself out of it, but if everybody spends less and saves more in the private and public sector you have the Keynesian paradox of thrift. Everybody saves more, there is less demand, you go back to recession and that ratio becomes higher or you can inflate yourself out of the debt problem, but that has a lot of collateral damage. So if you cannot grow yourself or save yourself or inflate yourself out of an excessive debt problem, you need debt restructure and debt reduction for households, for governments, for financial institutions, for highly leveraged institutions, and we’re not doing it. We’re creating zombie households, zombie banks and zombie governments and you could have a depression.

Impacts: Extinction

Nuclear war and planetary extinction is inevitable under capitalism.

Bellamy 05

(John Bellamy, Oregon University Department of Sociology Professor. Monthly Review, “Naked Imperialism” September 2005.http://www.monthlyreview.org/0905jbf.htm AD 7/8/09)

From the longer view offered by a historical-materialist critique of capitalism, the direction that would be taken by U.S. imperialism following the fall of the Soviet Union was never in doubt. Capitalism by its very logic is a globally expansive system.The contradiction between its transnational economic aspirations and the fact that politically it remains rooted in particular nation states is insurmountable for the system. Yet, ill-fated attempts by individual states to overcome this contradiction are just as much a part of its fundamental logic. In present world circumstances, when one capitalist state has a virtual monopoly of the means of destruction, the temptation for that state to attempt to seize full-spectrum dominance and to transform itself into the de facto global state governing the world economy is irresistible. As the noted Marxian philosopher István Mészáros observed in Socialism or Barbarism? (2001)—written, significantly, before George W. Bush became president: “What is at stake today is not the control of a particular part of the planet—no matter how large—putting at a disadvantage but still tolerating the independent actions of some rivals, but the control of its totality by one hegemonic economic and military superpower, with all means—even the most extreme authoritarian and, if needed, violent military ones—at its disposal.” 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.

Impacts: Extinction

Capitalism is the foundation for environmental destruction, civil war, and continual violence.

Harman, 97

Editor of the Socialist Worker 1997 (Chris,Economics of the Madhouse,Pg 90‐1)

The system may have entered a new phase. But the way it operates is not new. It is, in its essentials exactly the way described by Marx The only sense in which Marx is “outdated” is not that the system is more rational than he thought but rather his picture understates the destructiveness of the system.

Capitalists do not merely battle against each other on the markets. They also use the state to force rival capitalists to accept their dictates, supplementing economic competition with displays of military prowess. American capitalism seeks to persuade European and Japanese capitalism to accept its dictates by proving that it alone has the power to wage war in the vital oil rich regions of the middle east; Iranian and Turkish capitalists rely on the help of their states as they compete with each other for influence and contracts in the southern belt of the former USSR; Turkish and Greek capitalists encourage a mini-arms race as each seeks to establish a dominate role in the Balkan countries once controlled by Russia; Germany backs Croatia, the US backs Bosnian Muslims, and Greece backs the Serbs to the horrific wars in the former Yugoslavia; the Russian military wage vicious wars to hang onto vital oil pipelines through Chechnya and in the Tadjik republic bordering Afghanistan; China the Philippines,Malaysia and Vietnam clash over control of the oil reserves thought to lie close to the uninhabited islands in the China Sea; Israel tries to carve Egypt out from economic influence in the Arabian peninsula. The result is that at any point in time there are half a dozen wars or civil wars using the most horrendous forms for “conventional” weaponry in one part of the world or another. Alongside the slaughter and devastation afflicting ever wider sections of humanity is another threat to us all which is hardly visible in Marx’s time- the threat of destruction of the environment we depend on to survive. Marx and Engels were fully aware that the mad drive to capital accumulation led to pollution, the poisoning of the ground and air, the adulteration of foodstuffs and the spread of horrific epidemics. Engels wrote vividly of these things in his book Anti-duhring. But they lived in a time when capitalist industry was confined to relatively small areas of the globe and the devastation was local devastation, affecting chiefly the workers employed in a particular factory, mill or mining village. Today capitalist industry operates on a global scale and its impact is on the global environment- as is shown by the way in which radioactive clouds over Chernobyl spread across the whole of Europe, by the way in which the seas are being fished clean of fish, by the damage to the ozone layer by the gases used in aerosols and refrigerators. Above all there is the threat of the ‘greenhouse’ gases destabilizing the whole world’s climate, flooding low lying countries turning fertile regions into desert.

Impacts: Environmental Collapse

Environmental collapse, exploitation, extinction, and imperialism are inevitable under capitalism—only the alternative solves.

International Viewpoints 2007

2007, Savage Capitalism - the Ecosocialist Alternative, http://www.internationalviewpoint.org/spip.php?article1311

Capitalism is about generating ever larger amounts of profits, which requires ever larger numbers of commodities and ever larger inputs of labour to exploit. So, 28 years down the line we live in a society with 42 brands of washing powder available at most supermarkets, 93 different personal bank account options, 72 family saloon car models available, 17 celebrity magazines, 56 brands of mp3 player in the shops (not counting the internet) and 541 different types of telephone you can install for your landline.Cheap airlines go to 423 destinations from Britain, but domestic rail transport is unaffordable by most people! In return for all this, people work longer and harder, have less secure pensions and a more difficult old age, bad public services and health care, and the poorer sections of society have a much worse quality of life overall. The gap between what is possible under the Sherman/Jenkins scenario and the realities of daily life today is immense. It is this massive intensification of the production of (often useless and environmentally damaging) commodities that has given an extra twist to the environmental crisis. All this has happened not only because of the general priorities of any form of capitalism, but because of the present phase of ‘savage capitalism’, stalking the earth with all sense of social responsibility abandoned, increasing amounts of surveillance, violence, war and torture, and aimed at short term profits squeezed from the labour of the poor, rather than the development of social solidarity, peace and the possibility for most people to live a happy life. It is now obvious that this morbid phase of capitalism has brought upon humanity the biggest ever threat to its existence – the threat of environmental catastrophe. The overall threat to humanity and the planet we sum up here under four headings – environmental catastrophe, imperialist war and the crushing of the third world, savage capitalism in everyday life and the surveillance- security lockdown state. They are all linked; they all are part of a single system of power and exploitation. ‘Neoliberalism’, with the added ingredient of US-style neoconservatism, has degenerated into a new and more barbarous phase – ‘savage capitalism’. This new phase of capitalism forces an inevitable conclusion – only by a total transformation in politics and production, in other words a transformation of our social relations, can a sustainable future for humanity be established. We are facing the biggest crisis of human civilisation ever. No previous crisis has ever posed the existence human civilisation so directly. Revolutionary answers are needed, qualitative answers which go way beyond the standard ‘no to’ slogans of daily campaigns, and point the way to an eco-socialist alternative.

Impacts: Human Exploitation

Human exploitation is inevitable under capitalism.

Seligman ’99 (Carole, A national committee member of Socialist Action, “Capitalism and War,” http://www.socialistaction.org/news/199909/war.html)

But no national capitalist state can have a self-contained economy because natural resources are unevenly distributed around the world. Also, the consumer market for the things produced cannot absorb the total, so markets for these things must be sought outside the national boundaries. Capital investment outlets must be sought outside the national boundaries as well. The difficulties of finding markets for over-produced goods, and new sources for capital investment of profits, are magnified in the imperialist stage of capitalist development-where technology creates more efficient production using fewer workers, leading to a tendency for the rate of profits to decline (even while the gross amount of profits increase). So the imperialist countries try to solve their problems (of increasing their profits by finding markets for their goods and investments) by lowering their costs for raw materials; by gaining, or holding control over sources of these raw materials and extending the range of the available commodity market; by getting new outlets for capital investment; and by the super-exploitation of peoples in the less developed areas of the world. Technology is the part of this cycle that has so raised the stakes of imperialist wars over previous wars. After all, all history is the history of warring social classes. None of it was peaceful.

Impacts: International Instability

The crisis of capitalism downturn snowballs internationally.

Walsh 88 (Lynn Walsh, 11/1988, Socialism Today, CAPITALISM'S ECONOMIC AND POLITICAL CRISIS, http://www.marxist.net/economic/crisis1.htm, acc 6/27/12, rsb)

Asia, whose inter-regional and external trade makes up a third of the world total, has entered a deep slump, which is remorselessly spreading around the globe. Warning the US Congress against complacency, the financier George Soros said (15 September): 'The global capitalist system which has been responsible for our prosperity is falling apart at the seams'. Some commentators are now warning of the onset of a world depression. The capitalist ruling elite is also realising another nightmare: they are now facing not only economic disaster but also the beginnings of a deep social and political crisis. This is already clear in Asia. Far from being merely a cyclical downturn, cumulative losses are leading to a breakdown of society's productive capacity, opening the door to social turmoil and political upheavals. The fall of Suharto in Indonesia is just the overture. It has also began to dawn on the gurus that, just as the economic contagion is spreading, political turmoil will also become a world-wide epidemic. In the sphere of international relations, the Indo-Pakistan nuclear tests and the US missile strikes on Afghanistan and Sudan are early symptoms of increased volatility.

Impacts: Resource Wars/Conflicts

Resource wars and conflict are inevitable under capitalism.

Trainer ’95 (Ted, Author of books focused on the transition to a better society, September 15, The Conserver Society, page 162)

A peaceful world order in which all can feel secure is totally impossible if there is a determination to pursue affluence and growth. Everyone wants peace and security, but what the peace movement has almost entirely overlooked is the fact that if everyone continues to pursue higher material living standards and GNP then in the long run there can be no other outcome than more and more conflict of various kinds. This is simply because there is no possibility of all people living as affluently as the few in rich countries do now, let alone living at the levels we insist on growing to as the years go by. There is a gigantic struggle going on over the distribution of resources, and this can only become more intense in future years. Following are some of the types of conflict and violence that inevitably result.

Impacts: Resource Wars/Conflicts

Capitalism makes resource wars inevitable.

Gabrielle ’08 (University professor, “Capitalism, Development, and Resource Wars,” http://gabrielles-blog.blogspot.com/2008/04/capitalism-development-and-resource.html )

Another possible effect of capitalism on resource-dependent economies is government corruption. Contrary to the ever-present economic perspective that scarcity leads to competition over resources, many other factors need to be taken into consideration: the geographical emplacement of the resource, the need for economic purposes and the desire to secure the resource for further use, the intrinsic versus the potential value of the resource, as well as the notion of greed (especially over lootable resources) of the capitalism system (Diamond, 2005). In the advent of a large possession of valuable natural resources, the degree to which the present government is internationalized, centralized and privatized consists of factors possibly leading to conflict over these resources. If the only source of state revenue is resource-centered, it might lead to intrastate conflict because resources are needed to sustain the economy of the state, while its leaders become dependent on the revenue from global markets from resource extraction. Corruption comes into play when the degree of these revenues flowing towards the government is disproportionately high compared to those being localized, thus creating the perfect incentives for crony-politics and state officials corruption. Finally, the degree of privatization of the resource leads to wealth being easily used for patronage networks, cronyism and corruption when the networks of control outside the formal institutions of the state are rare (Pegg, 2003).

Impacts: Root Cause

Capitalism is the root of all impacts, including environmental destruction, global warming, rape, civil rights abuses, and war.

Cook 2006

Deborah Cook, Professor of Philosophy, University of Windsor, 2006, “Staying Alive: Adorno and Habermas on Self-Preservation Under Late Capitalism.”

In the final analysis, society must be fundamentally transformed in order rationally to accommodate instincts that now run wild owing to our forgetfulness of nature in ourselves. By insisting on mindfulness of nature in the self, Adorno champions a form of rationality that would tame self-preservation, but in contrast to Habermas, he thinks that the taming of self-preservation is a normative task rather than an accomplished fact. Because self-preservation remains irrational, we now encounter serious environmental problems like those connected with global warming and the greenhouse effect, the depletion of natural resources, and the death of more than one hundred regions in our oceans. Owing to self-preservation gone wild, we have colonized and destabilized large parts of the world, adversely affecting the lives of millions, when we have not simply enslaved or murdered their inhabitants outright. Famine and disease are often the result of ravaging the land in the name of survival imperatives. Wars are waged in the name of self-preservation: with his now notoriously invisible weapons of mass destruction, Saddam Hussein was said to represent a serious threat to the lives of citizens in the West. The war against terrorism, waged in the name of self-preservation, has seriously undermined human rights and civil liberties; it has also been used to justify the murder, rape, and torture of thousands. As it now stands, the owners of the means of production ensure our survival through profits that, at best, only trickle down to the poorest members of society. Taken in charge by the capitalist economy, self-preservation now dictates that profits increase exponentially to the detriment of social programs like welfare and health care. In addition, self-preservation has gone wild because our instincts and needs are now firmly harnessed to commodified offers of satisfaction that deflect and distort them. Having surrendered the task of self-preservation to the economic and political systems, we remain in thrall to untamed survival instincts that could well end up destroying not just the entire species, but all life on the planet.

Alternative: Anti-Capitalist Revolution

Anti-Capitalist Revolution is imminent and backed by empirical support.

Faulkner, Neil (archaeologist, historian, Editor of Military Times, Features Editor of the magazine Current Archaeology) . "Global Crisis and Anti-capitalist Revolution." Home. N.p., 5 May 2010. Web. 27 June 2012. <http://www.counterfire.org/index.php/theory/55-the-crisis/4900-global-crisis-and-anti-capitalist-revolution>.

Revolutions tend to be sudden, highly infectious, and immensely powerful mechanisms of change. The Great French Revolution of 1789 exploded when the people of Paris armed themselves, took to the streets, and prevented a royalist military coup. Thereafter, between 1789 and 1794, the masses intervened repeatedly in the political process to drive the revolution forwards against the resistance of half-hearted moderates, counter-revolutionaries, and foreign armies of invasion (90). The revolutionary movement subsided after 1815, but then erupted again in 1848 with a wave of copycat insurrections in Paris, Berlin, Vienna, Budapest, Rome, and other European cities. Though the revolutionaries were defeated, the impetus they gave to reform was unstoppable. Europe’s rulers knew they had to manage change from above or risk further explosions from below. France became a republic, Italy was united for the first time, and Germany was forged into a modern nation-state (91). In February 1917, the police dictatorship of the Russian Tsar was overthrown by working-class insurrection. In October 1917, under the leadership of the Bolshevik Party, the Russian working class seized power. The factories were run by workers’ councils, the land was given to the peasants, and Russia withdrew from the First World War. For a few brief years, until the revolution was destroyed by economic collapse, civil war, and foreign invasion, Russia was the most democratic country in the world (92). The Bolshevik Revolution sparked a chain reaction of revolutions from Germany to China. The revolutions in Germany and Austria-Hungary ended the First World War. The revolutionary movement as a whole, between 1917 and 1923, came close to bringing down the entire world capitalist system (93). World capitalism has remained pregnant with revolution ever since. In 1936, revolution in Spain blocked a fascist-backed military coup. In 1956, revolution in Hungary greeted a Soviet invasion. In 1968, ten million workers joined a general strike in France, hundreds of thousands occupied their factories, and students and young workers fought pitched battles with riot police in central Paris (94). In 1979, revolution brought down a vicious, heavily-armed, US-backed dictatorship in Iran. In 1989, a wave of revolutions across Eastern Europe brought down a succession of Stalinist dictators, despite their networks of informers, secret police, and political prisons (95). Revolution is history’s mechanism for effecting change against entrenched and unpopular elites. Britain is no exception. It was the English Revolution of 1640-9 that broke the power of the monarchy and established parliamentary government (96). It was mass movements like the Chartists and the Suffragettes that won the vote for ordinary people (97). It was working-class revolt that brought down the Tory government of Edward Heath in 1973-4 and that of Margaret Thatcher in 1989-90 (98). In 1924, the Hungarian Marxist theoretician Georg Luk√°cs, reflecting on the great epoch of war and revolution that had just passed, wrote of ‘the actuality of the revolution’. He regarded the Russian revolutionary leader Lenin as the supreme exponent of this principle. It is worth recalling, in the context of our own age of crisis, what Luk√°cs had in mind. "Historical materialism is the theory of the proletarian revolution… The stature of a proletarian thinker, of a representative of historical materialism, can therefore be measured by the depth and breadth of his grasp of this and the problems arising from it; by the extent to which he is able accurately to detect beneath the appearances of bourgeois society those tendencies towards proletarian revolution which work themselves in and through it to their effective being and distinct consciousness… The genius … for whom the true essence, the living, active main trends of an age are clear, sees them at work behind every event of his time … Lenin always saw the problems of the age as a whole: the onset of the last phase of capitalism and the possibilities of turning the now inevitable final struggle between bourgeoisie and proletariat in favour of the proletariat - of human salvation… The actuality of the revolution: this is the core of Lenin’s thought … The theory of historical materialism … presupposes the universal actuality of the proletarian revolution. In this sense, as both the objective basis of the whole epoch and the key to understanding of it, the proletarian revolution constitutes the <CONTINUED>

<CONTINUED> living core of Marxism… The actuality of the revolution provides the key-note of a whole epoch… The actuality of the revolution therefore implies the study of each individual daily problem in concrete association with the socio-historic whole, as moments in the liberation of the proletariat…" (99) For Luk√°cs, international working-class revolution was a vital necessity and an ever-present possibility against which all political action should be judged. The eventual defeat of the revolutionary wave of 1917-23 does not alter the essential validity of that insight. On the contrary, it confirms it, for the result was the barbarism of Stalin and Hitler. An ancient Biblical myth sees the end of the world heralded by the appearance of four horsemen - the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, representing Conquest, Slaughter, Famine, and Death. The prospect before humanity today can seem truly apocalyptic. Late monopoly-capitalism has developed the productive forces of the global economy to an unprecedented degree. But these forces are not subject to democratic control and rational planning; they are propelled by the economic and military imperatives of competitive capital accumulation. In consequence, despite their potential to emancipate the whole of humanity from material need, they now threaten the opposite: the survival of industrial civilisation itself. The ignorance, cupidity, and irresponsibility of our rulers in the face of this crisis are rooted in the irrationality of the system. Climate catastrophe, economic slump, and imperialist war have their roots in the madness of the market: the blind economic and military competition which propels the nation-states and mega-corporations of monopoly-capitalism. This madness produced the First World War, the Second World War, and the horrors of Stalin’s gulags and Hitler’s extermination-camps. The history of the last century argues unequivocally that the system is deeply pathological, irrational, and destructive. Now, at the beginning of the 21st century, the compound crisis of contemporary capitalism again threatens the lives of hundreds of millions and the well-being of billions of the world’s people. It is perhaps the most serious crisis in human history. Another ancient Biblical myth was sometimes counterposed to that of the Four Horseman. In this version of the Apocalypse, the culmination was a popular Jubilee. Tax-collectors and landlords would be swept away. Slaves and serfs would be set free. The land would be restored to the people who worked it. A new Golden Age of freedom and plenty would begin. To turn Apocalypse into Jubilee in the early 21st century, four things are required: 1. We have to understand the necessity for total system change. Only by linking different campaigns, protests, and struggles together in a general assault on the system that is at the root of humanity’s problems can we hope to solve them. 2. We have to understand the centrality of the working class to any serious strategy for system change. Only by mobilising the majority of ordinary working people can we find the power to confront and defeat corporate capital and the nation-states. 3. We have to connect the anti-capitalist protests of the activist minority with the general anti-capitalist mood of the discontented majority, so that fresh, larger, more powerful forces are drawn into protests, strikes, and demonstrations. 4. We have to foster this rising anti-capitalist movement until it swells into a new world-revolutionary wave comparable with, and greater than, those of 1789, 1848, 1917, 1968, and 1989. Another world has become an absolute historical necessity. Another world is possible. The revolution is, in this sense, an ‘actuality’. But it is not a certainty. It has to be fought for. Its achievement depends on what all of us do. And the historical stakes have never been higher.

Alternative: Anti-Capitalist Revolution

We are reaching the end of the global capitalist system- revolution feasible

The Rise and Future Demise of the World Capitalist System: Concepts for Comparative Analysis Immanuel Wallerstein (attended Columbia University, where he received a B.A. in 1951, an M.A. in 1954 and a Ph.D. degree in 1959, and subsequently taught until 1971, when he became professor of sociology at McGill University. As of 1976, he served as distinguished professor of sociology at Binghamton University (SUNY) until his retirement in 1999, and as head of the Fernand Braudel Center for the Study of Economies, Historical Systems and Civilizations until 2005. Comparative Studies in Society and History , Vol. 16, No. 4 (Sep., 1974), pp. 387-

This brings us back to one of the questions with which we opened this paper, the seemingly esoteric debate between Liu Shao-Chi and Mao Tse-Tung as to whether China was, as Liu argued, a socialist state, or whether, as Mao argued, socialism was a process involving continued and continual class struggle. No doubt to those to whom the terminology is foreign the discussion seems abstrusely theological. The issue, however, as we said, is real. If the Russian Revolution emerged as a reaction to the threatened further decline of Russia's structural position in the world-economy, and if fifty years later one can talk of the U.S.S.R. as entering the status of a core power in a capitalist world-economy, what then is the meaning of the various so-called socialist revolutions that have occurred in a third of the world's surface? First let us notice that it has been neither Thailand nor Liberia nor Paraguay that has had a 'socialist revolution' but Russia, China and Cuba. That is to say, these revolutions have occurred in countries that, in terms of their internal economic structures in the pre-revolutionary period, had a certain minimum strength in terms of skilled personnel, some manufacturing, and other factors which made it plausible that, within the framework of a capitalist world-economy, such a country could alter its role in the world division of labor within a reasonable period (say 30-50 years) by the use of the technique of mercantilist semi-withdrawal. (This may not be all that plausible for Cuba, but we shall see.) Of course, other countries in the geographic regions and military orbit of these revolutionary forces had changes of regime without in any way having these characteristics (for example, Mongolia or Albania). It is also to be noted that many of the countries where similar forces are strong or where considerable counterforce is required to keep them from emerging also share this status of minimum strength. I think of Chile or Brazil or Egypt-or indeed Italy. Are we not seeing the emergence of a political structure for semi-peri-pheral nations adapted to stage four of the capitalist world-system? The fact that all enterprises are nationalized in these countries does not make the participation of these enterprises in the world-economy one that does not conform to the mode of operation of a capitalist market-system: seek-ing increased efficiency of production in order to realize a maximum price on sales, thus achieving a more favorable allocation of the surplus of the world-economy. If tomorrow U.S. Steel became a worker's collective in which all employees without exception received an identical share of the profits and all stockholders were expropriated without compensation, would U.S. Steel thereby cease to be a capitalist enterprise operating in a capitalist world-economy? What then have been the consequences for the world-system of the emergence of many states in which there is no private ownership of the basic means of production? To some extent, this has meant an internal 414 IMMANUEL WALLERSTEIN reallocation of consumption. It has certainly undermined the ideological justifications in world capitalism, both by showing the political vulner-ability of capitalist entrepreneurs and by demonstrating that private ownership is irrelevant to the rapid expansion of industrial productivity. But to the extent that it has raised the ability of the new semi-peripheral areas to enjoy a larger share of the world surplus, it has once again de-polarized the world, recreating the triad of strata that has been a funda-mental element in the survival of the world-system. Finally, in the peripheral areas of the world-economy, both the con-tinued economic expansion of the core (even though the core is seeing some reallocation of surplus internal to it) and the new strength of the semi-periphery has led to a further weakening of the political and hence econ-omic position of the peripheral areas. The pundits note that 'the gap is getting wider', but thus far no-one has succeeded in doing much about it, and it is not clear that there are very many in whose interests it would be to do so. Far from a strengthening <CONTINUED>

<CONTINUED>

of state authority, in many parts of the world we are witnessing the same kind of deterioration Poland knew in the sixteenth century, a deterioration of which the frequency of military coups is only one of many signposts. And all of this leads us to conclude that stage four has been the stage of the consolidation of the capitalist world-economy. Consolidation, however, does not mean the absence of contradictions and does not mean the likelihood of long-term survival. We thus come to projections about the future, which has always been man's great game, his true hybris, the most convincing argument for the dogma of original sin. Having read Dante, I will therefore be brief. There are two fundamental contradictions, it seems to me, involved in the workings of the capitalist world-system. In the first place, there is the contradiction to which the nineteenth-century Marxian corpus pointed, which I would phrase as follows: whereas in the short-run the maximiza-tion of profit requires maximizing the withdrawal of surplus from imme-diate consumption of the majority, in the long-run the continued produc-tion of surplus requires a mass demand which can only be created by redistributing the surplus withdrawn. Since these two considerations move in opposite directions (a 'contradiction'), the system has constant crises which in the long-run both weaken it and make the game for those with privilege less worth playing. The second fundamental contradiction, to which Mao's concept of socialism as process points, is the following: whenever the tenants of privilege seek to co-opt an oppositional movement by including them in a minor share of the privilege, they may no doubt eliminate opponents in the short-run; but they also up the ante for the next oppositional movement created in the next crisis of the world-economy. Thus the cost of 'co-op-

THE WORLD CAPITALIST SYSTEM 4I5 tion' rises ever higher and the advantages of co-option seem ever less worthwhile. There are today no socialist systems in the world-economy any more than there are feudal systems because there is only one world-system. It is a world-economy and it is by definition capitalist in form. Socialism involves the creation of a new kind of world-system, neither a redistributive world-empire nor a capitalist world-economy but a socialist world-government. I don't see this projection as being in the least utopian but I also don't feel its institution is imminent. It will be the outcome of a long struggle in forms that may be familiar and perhaps in very new forms, that will take place in all the areas of the world-economy (Mao's continual 'class struggle'). Governments may be in the hands of persons, groups or move-ments sympathetic to this transformation but states as such are neither progressive nor reactionary. It is movements and forces that deserve such evaluative judgments. Having gone as far as I care to in projecting the future, let me return to the present and to the scholarly enterprise which is never neutral but does have its own logic and to some extent its own priorities. We have adumbrated as our basic unit of observation a concept of world-systems that have structural parts and evolving stages. It is within such a frame-work, I am arguing, that we can fruitfully make comparative analyses-of the wholes and of parts of the whole. Conceptions precede and govern measurements. I am all for minute and sophisticated quantitative indi-cators. I am all for minute and diligent archival work that will trace a concrete historical series of events in terms of all its immediate com-plexities. But the point of either is to enable us to see better what has happened and what is happening. For that we need glasses with which to discern the dimensions of difference, we need models with which to weigh significance, we need summarizing concepts with which to create the knowledge which we then seek to communicate to each other. And all this because we are men with hybris and original sin and therefore seek the good, the true, and the beautiful.

Alternative: Anti-Capitalist Revolution

The alternative solves for resource wars/conflict.

Buick & Crump ’86 ( Adam and John, members of the World Socialist Party, State Capitalism: the Wages System Under New Management, final chapter)

Abundance removes conflict over resource allocation since by definition there is enough for everyone, and so there are no mutually exclusive choices, no opportunity is forgone and there is no opportunity-cost. The golden age, a communist steady-state equilibrium, will have been reached. Gradual change, growth, will be simple and painless. The task of planning becomes one of simple routine; the role of economics is virtually eliminated. There is then no reason for various individuals and groups to compete, to take possession for their own use of what is freely available to all (Nove, 1983, p. 15). There would then be no economic goods, i. e., no goods that are relatively scarce; and there would hardly be any need for a study of economics or economizing. All goods would be free goods, like pure air used to be (Samuelson, 1980, p. 17 emphases in original).

Alternative: Nonviolent Individual Anti-Capitalism

Nonviolent, individual anti-capitalism is the best mechanism for revolution.

Martin, Brian. 2002. “Nonviolence Versus Capitalism”. Philosophy and Social Action, 28 (4),

October-December: 31-46. (Professor at the University of Wollongong in Australia)

Chapters 7 through 12 discussed campaigns, namely organised efforts to bring about change. Campaigns are planned and are readily observed, making it easy to analyse them. However, there is another approach to change, based on small, local, individual actions. Manifestations of this sort of change include: • not noticing or not commenting on a friend or neighbour’s purchase of fashionable clothes or the latest appliance; • making information publicly available, by leaflets, newsletters or the web, in violation of intellectual property laws; • bending business rules in order to help those in need rather than put profit first; • spending extra time visiting friends rather than earning more money; • refusing to buy goods from especially exploitative companies; • not wearing clothing bearing commercial slogans or symbols; • sharing possessions; • doing things for others on a voluntary or barter basis, rather than using money; • abstaining from unnecessary purchases; • donating land, goods or labour for communal benefit; • making critical comments about capitalist ways of viewing the world. These are examples of the many possible “small ways” of acting that challenge or gently undermine the capitalist framework. Do these provide a real threat to capitalism as a system? They are not as easy to analyse as campaigns. Some of the “actions” may be quite subtle, such as the tone of voice used when friends discuss job options or when employees discuss corporate policies. Yet such small actions may have, in combination, significant effects. The advantages of campaigns are obvious: they directly confront social problems and build alternatives. But because they are visible, they can be more readily attacked or coopted. And because they involve collective action, they are susceptible to internal conflict over status, positions and control. Small ways of acting avoid these problems: they are too individual and fleeting to be the subject of major counterattack. They can be done by anyone at virtually any time, without requiring coordination or organisation. Their shortcoming is that they often have little or no effect. Campaigns and small individual actions reinforce each other. Campaigns make issues visible, giving encouragement for individual action. Small actions provide a supportive climate for campaigning. In short, campaigning and cultural change go hand in hand. It is easier to observe and analyse campaigns. Perhaps it would be valuable to study and consciously use some of the small ways of acting. No one knows for sure how to go about replacing capitalism with a better system. There are many possible ways to proceed, and not enough assessment of what works and what doesn’t. It is almost certain to be a very long-term process. Therefore it makes a lot of sense to learn as much as possible about how best to go about it. There is a need for experimentation, innovation and evaluation. There is a lot to be done. With participatory approaches, there should be a lot of people to do it.

Alternative: Nonviolent Individual Anti-Capitalism

Nonviolent individual anti-capitalism works—history is on our side.

Martin, Brian, "Nonviolent futures" Faculty of Arts - Papers (2001). Available at: http://works.bepress.com/bmartin/4

The mass actions in Seattle in November–December 1999 were a dramatic example of nonviolent action against corporate globalisation though, in typical fashion, the mass media focussed on violence by a tiny proportion of the protesters, obscuring the important role of nonviolence philosophy and training in making the action so powerful. Of course, nonviolent action has been used against capitalists since the rise of capitalism, with grassroots workers' movements relying primarily on nonviolent means of resistance such as slow-downs, strikes, occupations and boycotts. However, opposition to capitalism as a system has long been claimed by socialists as their exclusive domain, following either the Leninist route of armed struggle or the electoral route of socialist parties and social democracy, in both cases with the aim of capturing state power. For socialists, nonviolent action is at most a tool on the road to ‘real power’ exercised by the state. However, it is also possible to formulate an anticapitalist strategy that is nonviolent in both method and outcome [28]. There are a number of visions of economic systems that are both noncapitalist and nonviolent, without the coercive power of the state that is used under capitalism to protect private property and smash challenges to capitalists such as workers and local communities taking control over production. For example, the Gandhian model of sarvodaya [29] involves self-reliance and self-government at the village level. A nonviolent strategy against capitalism would involve undermining the violent foundation of capitalism — namely the power of the state to protect capitalist relations of production — undermining the legitimacy of capitalism and building a nonviolent alternative to capitalism. It would need to be a participatory process and it would need to reflect its goals in its methods. Many campaigns in a range of areas can contribute to such a strategy, including initiatives for workers' control [30], establishment of alternative money systems [31], and challenges to expansion of property relations to intellectual products, such as patenting of genetic material or copyrighting of software. Nonviolent action has been widely used in these and many other areas, to challenge aspects of capitalism or build alternatives, but so far this has not been consistently oriented to building a nonviolent economic system as an alternative to capitalism.

Alternative: Nonviolent Individual Anti-Capitalism

Nonviolence is more successful than violent methods.

Maria Stephan, Former Research Fellow, Intrastate Conflict Program/International Security Program, 2003-2005, Erica Chenoweth, Former Associate, International Security Program, 2006–2008; Former Research Fellow, International Security Program, 2008–2010 "Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict." International Security 33, no. 1 (Summer 2008): 7-44.

The central contention of this study is that nonviolent resistance methods are likely to be more successful than violent methods in achieving strategic objectives. We have compared the outcomes of 323 nonviolent and violent resistance campaigns from 1900 to 2006, and we have compared these large-n ªndings with comparative case studies of nonviolent campaigns in Southeast Asia. Based on the combined statistical and qualitative research, we can make several claims. First, resistance campaigns that compel loyalty shifts among security forces and civilian bureaucrats are likely to succeed. Such operational successes occur among violent campaigns occasionally, but nonviolent campaigns are more likely to produce loyalty shifts. Although in the quantitative study these ªndings are qualiªed by data constraints, our case studies reveal that three violent campaigns were unable to produce meaningful loyalty shifts among opponent elites, whereas such shifts did occur as a result of nonviolent action in the Philippines and East Timor. In addition, repression against nonviolent campaigns in the Philippines and East Timor resulted in well-timed international sanctions against the opponent regime, which proved instrumental in the success of these nonviolent campaigns. The domestic and international political costs of repressing nonviolent campaigns are higher than for repressing violent campaigns. Our case studies also suggest that violent and nonviolent campaigns that fail to achieve widespread, cross-cutting, and decentralized mobilization are unlikely to compel defection or evoke international sanctions in the ªrst place. Broad-based campaigns are more likely to call into question the legitimacy of the opponent. The political costs of repressing one or two dozen activists, easily labeled “extremists,” are much lower than repressing hundreds or thousands of activists who represent the entire population. More research is needed to develop measures of the degree and nature of mass mobilization over time. It should be possible to measure the level of participation in a nonviolent campaign, including how broad based the resistance is regarding geographical region, sector, and demography. The degree of unity in the nonviolent opposition is another important internal factor that could be assessed empirically.113 Furthermore, the diversiªcation of nonviolent tactics could be measured to determine whether expanding the repertoire of nonviolent tactics or their sequencing enhances the success of nonviolent movements. In addition to these recommendations for future research, our ªndings also suggest several policy implications. First, although there is no blueprint for success, nonviolent campaigns that meet the criteria identiªed above are more likely to succeed than violent campaigns with similar characteristics. Second, targeted forms of external support were useful in the East Timorese and Philippines cases. Although there is no evidence that mass nonviolent mobilization can be successfully begun or sustained by external actors, organized solidarity groups that maintained steady pressure on governments allied with the target regimes were helpful, suggesting that international groups can enhance the campaign’s leverage over the target.115 External assistance, however, may be counterproductive if, by association, it hurts the credibility of a movement. Third, given the critical role played by the media in facilitating backªre, supporting the creation and maintenance of independent sources of media and technology that allow nonviolent actors to communicate internally and externally is another way that governmental and nongovernmental actors can support nonviolent campaigns. Fourth, technical capacity-building in elections monitoring and human rights documentation are other useful tools for nonviolent activists. Fifth, the provision of educational materials (e.g., books, ªlms, DVDs, and videogames) that highlight lessons learned from other historical nonviolent movements has been cited by nonviolent activists as critical to their mobilization.116 Mounting evidence of nondemocratic regimes using internet surveillance, prohibitive laws targeting local and international NGOs, and more traditional threats and intimidation directed at civil society groups will likely pose added challenges to those committed to political change through nonviolent means.117Ultimately, it is worth recalling Thomas Schelling’s writings about the dynamics of a conºict between violent and nonviolent opponents: “[The] tyrant and his subjects are in somewhat symmetrical positions. They can deny him most of what he wants—they can, that is, if they have the disciplined organization to refuse collaboration. And he can deny them just about everything they want—he can deny it by using the force at his command. . . . They can deny him the satisfaction of ruling a disciplined country, he can deny them the satisfaction of ruling themselves. . . . It is a bargaining situation in which either side, if adequately disciplined and organized, can deny most of what the other wants, and it remains to see who wins.”118

Alternative Solves: Health & Human/Non-Human Well-Being

The alternative creates a concern for health and human/non-human well-being.

Buick & Crump ’86 ( Adam and John, members of the World Socialist Party, State Capitalism: the Wages System Under New Management, final chapter)

Under capitalism there is, in the end, only one criterion: monetary cost, which, as a measure of economic value, is ultimately a reflection of the average time taken to produce a good from start to finish. The managers of capitalist enterprises are obliged by the working of the market to choose the technical methods of production which are the cheapest, i. e. which minimize production time and therefore monetary cost. All other considerations are subordinate, in particular the health and welfare of the producers and the effects on the natural environment. Many commentators have long pointed out the harmful effects which production methods geared to minimizing production time have on the producers (speed-up, pain, stress, accidents, boredom, overwork, long hours, shiftwork, nightwork, etc., all of which harm their health and reduce their welfare), while more recently scientists have documented the damage such production methods cause to nature (pollution, destruction of the environment and wildlife, exhaustion of non-renewable resources). Socialism, as a society geared to producing only uses values and not exchange value, would take these other considerations into account and subordinate the choice of production methods to the welfare of human beings and the protection of their natural environment. No doubt this would lead in many cases to the adoption of production methods which, by capitalist standards, would be inefficient and irrational in the sense that were they to be adopted under capitalism they would cost more and so be unprofitable. This is why such methods are not adopted under capitalism, where it is exchange value and not use value that counts, and why capitalism would have to be replaced by socialism if the original aim of production as a means to serve and enhance human welfare were to be restored.

Alternative Solves: Technology and Environment

The alternative is the only means to equally distribute environmentally-safe technology, transportation, and infrastructure. Capitalism taints technology and reproduces inequality.

Nance 2009

Nance, Kevin. "International Marxist Tendency." Capitalism, Socialism and the Environment. International Marxist Tendency, 3 Sept. 2009. Web. 27 June 2012. <http://www.marxist.com/capitalism-socialism-environment.htm>.

Right now, we have tens of millions of people out of work, with an economy in the dumps, and a dependence on fossil fuels. Capitalism, we are constantly told will “balance itself out,” and indeed, it eventually will, but this will only be at the cost of misery for a majority of the population of the planet and the health of the planet itself. Personally, I like New York City, but unless we harmonize our economic development with the environment, it is likely to be under water in the next couple hundred years. Under a democratically planned socialist economy, we would have the flexibility to organize the economy as our needs change. There would not be millions of unemployed workers, as we could easily train them to create, install, and perform upkeep on solar panels or wind turbines, or to build hydro-electric power plants, and many other truly “green” technologies. We could put our best and brightest minds to use, not in developing earth-destroying technologies for the benefit of the minority, but in the exploration of technologies such as nuclear fusion, which unlike current nuclear fission, could potentially provide a limitless, safe source of cheap power for generations to come. Or we could look at the failing auto industries and easily, through a universal plan of production, retool them for the production of hydrogen cars and vastly expand public transportation. We could also organize the construction industry to make homes that are better insulated so that we could use less fuel to heat our them. But under capitalism, this will never happen. For the future of humanity and for the earth, we need socialism. It’s as simple as that.

Alternative Solves: Technology and Environment

Post-capitalist systems effectively promote technological knowledge and progress.

Buick & Crump ’86 ( Adam and John, members of the World Socialist Party, State Capitalism: the Wages System Under New Management, final chapter)

Socialism, being based on the common ownership of the means of production by all members of society, is not an exchange economy. Production would no longer be carried on for sale with a view to profit as under capitalism. In fact, production would not be carried on for sale at all. Production for sale would be a nonsense since common ownership of the means of production means that what is produced is commonly owned by society as soon as it is produced. The question of selling just cannot arise because, as an act of exchange, this could only take place between separate owners. Yet separate owners of parts of the social product are precisely what would not, and could not exist in a society where the means of production were owned in common. Conventional academic economics in the West rejects the definition of economics as the study of the forces which comes into operation when wealth is produced to be exchanged. But even on the alternative definition it offers that economics is the study of the allocation of scarce resources to meet some human needs (1)socialism would not be an economy. For socialism presupposes that productive resources (materials, instruments of production, sources of energy) and technological knowledge are sufficient to allow the population of the world to produce enough food, clothing, shelter and other useful things, to satisfy all their material needs.

Alternative Solves: Technology and Environment

The alternative is the only way to produce equitable transportation and resource distribution.

Buick & Crump ’86 ( Adam and John, members of the World Socialist Party, State Capitalism: the Wages System Under New Management, final chapter)

Socialist production would be production solely for use. The products would be freely available to people, who would take them and use them to satisfy their needs. In socialism people would obtain the food, clothes and other articles they needed for their personal consumption by going into a distribution centre and taking what they needed without having to hand over either money or consumption vouchers. Houses and flats would be rent-free, with heating, lighting and water supplied free of charge. Transport, communications, health care, education, restaurants and laundries would be organised as free public services. There would be no admission charge to theatres, cinemas, museums, parks, libraries and other places of entertainment and recreation. The best term to describe this key social relationship of socialist society is free access, as it emphasises the fact that in socialism it would be the individual who would decide what his or her individual needs were. As to collective needs (schools, hospitals, theatres, libraries and the like), these could be decided by the groups of individuals concerned, using the various democratic representative bodies which they would create at different levels in socialist society. Thus production in socialism would be the production of free goods to meet self-defined needs, both individual and collective.

Alternative Solvency: Imagination

Imagining the alternative is the precondition to resolve the crises under current capitalism.

Hunt 6/27 “Love or Fear: Our Choice”—Michele Hunt in the Huffington Post Online Posted: 06/27/2012 8:27 am. Ms. Hunt is internationally known for her work as a change catalyst and “thinking partner” to leaders of organizations and communities on leadership development, organizational transformation, and organizational effectiveness. She works with leaders and their teams to help transform their organizations to higher levels of participation, teamwork and performance. Her work is rooted in the principles of shared vision, values, alignment and continuous learning. [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michele-hunt/love-or-fear-our-choice_1_b_1629500.htm]l

How do you want to spend the rest of your life? In what kind of world do you want your children and grand children to live -- a world built on fear or a world built on love? I believe the opposite of love is not hate -- it is fear. Hate grows from fear, just as joy springs from love. Love liberates us and opens us up to possibilities; with love we can flourish. Fear makes cowards of us and as cowards; we become closed, cautious, suspicious and mean. For centuries, maybe since the beginning of humankind, the foundation of our global society has been fear. We only need to look at the wars, conflict, pain and destruction we humans have inflicted on each other and on our environment to understand fear as the root cause. How we think matters! It is all that matters, for it shapes our beliefs, and our beliefs shape our decisions and behaviors. Most people were raised to believe that people are basically bad: they are lazy; can't be trusted and have limits on tier growth. Those core assumptions have brought this world to where it is today -- a collective mindset of cynicism, self-doubt, and a propensity for violence. Is this good enough for us? Don't we deserve so much more? We have been flung into the 21st century, and all bets are off. Nothing is working; chaos and conflict define our reality and we have no solutions on how to "fix" this mess. We do, however, have the opportunity to change, to transform. We have the opportunity to try looking at the world through love. Imagine a world where the collective mindset is love. What would our priorities be? How would we behave? What kind of institutions and organizations would we design? How would we shape our lives? If our basic assumption about life is rooted in love, I believe: Our children would be first, for they are the end point of life filled with all we know and hope for. They are the beginning of the future. Families would be a priority, for they shape us. Communities (however defined) would be places we cherish -- those are the places where we can express ourselves, contribute our gifts, "polish our gifts" and feel a sense of belonging. Work would be an expression of who we are and what we want to create together -- a joyful act. Just take a moment and imagine a world where love is the core assumption that everything else grows from: Imagine a society that values people, families, communities and the environment above money, status and things? Imagine a society that places our schools in the center of our communities and people, services and community activities revolve around the schools. Our schools are community centers? Imagine a society where ethical decision-making is rewarded? Imagine a society where businesses are DreamMakers rather than merely MoneyMakers; they develop innovative products and services that solve real problems, charter new ground while serving the greater good. They are committed to "Sustainable Value" (doing well and doing good) and they see this approach to doing business, as an investment rather than a corporate responsibility. They create workplaces worthy of people's commitment; places that spawn creativity and innovation by unleashing the human spirit. They invest in the communities where their people and customers live and work. Imagine a society that realizes democratic capitalism instead of elite capitalism? Imagine a world where we regard our planet as sacred ground -- and as good stewards, our decisions and behavior nurtures and sustains our planet for our children and generations to come? Imagine a world where we regard war as a primitive, immature and an immoral way to resolve conflict. We see ourselves as too smart, too evolved and too ethical to engage in war. We human beings built these institutions, organizations, communities and societies and we have the capacity, the intelligence and the creativity to re-conceptualize, redesign and rebuild it. We need to move from our current state of fear and paralysis, which is grounded in fear, and choose love. Love will give us the courage and the will to create the world WE ALL want and deserve. It is our choice; we are the people (individually and collectively) who will shape the future of humankind -- is it Love or Fear? ...and then the day came when the risk to remain tight in the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.

Answers To: Permutation

The permutation fails: only complete negation from outside the structure is key to solve the pitfalls of prior movements. Relying on the system to fix its own problems risks extinction and cnotinued inequality.

Istvan Meszaros, Professor at the University of Sussex, “The Challenge and Burden of Historical Time.” 2008 P 251-252,

Past history testifies to many instances of not only noble efforts dedicated to introducing significant social changes in order to overcome some major contradictions but also to some partial successes in the originally envisaged direction. All too often, however) the successes have been sooner or later rolled back by the subsequent restoration of the dependency relations of the earlier status quo. The primary reason for such developments was the fateful inertia of structural inequality reproduced in one form or another throughout history, despite some change in personnel from time to time at the apex of society. For structural inequality acted as an anchor, with shorter or longer chains attached to it, invariably dragging the ship back to a position from which there seemed to be no possibility of further progress in the journey, no matter how well intentioned might have been some of the personnel of the ship during a major historical tempest. And to make things worse, this historically determinate and humanly alterable predicament of the people dominated by the existing order was on a regular basis conceptualized and ideologically rationalized as a fatality of nature, even when it had to be conceded that the prevailing structural inequality was very far from being an all-round beneficial one. The necessary corollary of this kind of rationalization-and justification of the unjustifiable-was that social iniquity as an allegedly unalterable determination of nature (said to be well in tune with "human nature") is permanent and tenable. But what if the notion of permanence as such is put into question by evidence of a clearly identifiable and menacing historical change? For as soon as it must be admitted that human historical time is not measurable in terms of the permanence of nature) not to mention the fact that the lasting temporality of nature itself on our planet is being catastrophically undermined by the ongoing destructive intervention in nature by perverse socioeconomic forces, the whole reasoning of anti-historical justification collapses. At that point, it becomes imperative to orient our- selves well within the potentialities and limitations of real historical time, with a view to radically overcoming the perilous social antagonisms that point in the direction of putting an end to human history. At that point in time, exactly where we stand today, the elaboration of the required remedies in the form of a sustainable alternative social order, together with appropriate safeguards to make that order irreversible, becomes an unavoidable historical challenge. For without successfully meeting that challenge, given the urgency of a unique historical time when the survival of humanity is at stake-under the shadow of both the apparently uncontrollable accumulation and deployment of the "real" and not cynically and self-servingly fictionalized weapons of mass destruction, and of capital's devastating encroachment on nature, humankind cannot risk relapsing into an ever more destructive social order, as if we had the infinity of time at our disposal before we have to undertake some corrective action.

Answers To: Permutation

The permutation fails—contradiction is part of capitalism’s internal logic. Only full rejection and transcendence of capitalism solves.

Lawson, 09

James, PhD, Department of Political Science, University of Victoria, “Aboriginal Dispossession in the Emergence of a Capitalist Resource Extractve Region: The Ottawa valley, 1800-1830s http://www.cpsa-acsp.ca/papers-2009/Lawson.pdf

Both the establishment and the ongoing maintenance of capitalism, whether as a mode of production or as a wider social formation, are crisis-ridden. They depend on moments and places in which limits to accumulation are encountered and then transformed into thresholds. This informs the leading trope in David Harvey’s now-classic interpretation of Marx’s principal works on capital, Limits to Capital (1982). In it, the contradictions encountered at every moment of the unfolding of capital’s inner logic constitute ‘limits to capital’. At each stage in Harvey’s exposition, these limits are partly and temporarily overcome, notably through mechanisms of temporal deferral and spatial displacement. And each stage, the circuit of capital is temporarily restored. But at each subsequent stage, Harvey also finds that capital’s contradictions are ultimately intensified and multiplied rather than resolved. Harvey therefore re-affirms Marx’s classical overall conclusion that capitalism’s contradictions cannot be resolved: capitalism itself must be transcended.

Answers To: Permutation

The sequencing of the permutation is wrong—the proletariat should lead the revolution against the state.

Marx 1848

The Communist Manifesto (1848)—Karl Marx and Freidrich Engel Oxford Paperbacks Edited with an Introduction and Noteds by David McLellan Karl Heinrich Marx was a German philosopher, economist, sociologist, historian, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. His ideas played a significant role in the development of social science and the socialist movement.

Our bourgeois, not content with having the wives and daughter of their proletarians at their disposal, not to speak of common prostitutes, take the greatest pleasure in seducing each other’s wives. Bourgeois marriage is in reality a system of wives in common and thus, at the most, what the Communists might possibly be reproached with is that they desire to introduce, in substitution for a hypocritically concealed, an openly legalized community of women. For the rest it is self-evident that the abolition of the present system of production must bring with it the abolition of the community of women springing from that system, i.e., of prostitution both public and private. The Communists are further reproached with desiring to abolish countries and nationality. The working men have no country. We cannot take from them what they have not got. Since the proletariat must first of all acquire political supremacy, must rise to be the national class, must constitute itself the nation, it so far, itself national, though not in the bourgeois sense of the world.

Answers To: Permutation

The alternative alone solves.

Harman, C (journalist and political activist, and a member of the Central Committee of the Socialist Workers Party ). 2000: Anti-capitalism: theory and practice.

International Socialism 88

But if there are 'weaknesses' as well as 'strengths' in the movement, there needs to be discussion on how to deal with them. Otherwise the weaknesses will recur, providing opportunities for those who want to crush the movement to do so. The lesson of Washington--and even more so of 1 May in London--is that it is not good enough for everyone to do their own thing. There has to be some willingness to engage in the democratic formulation of decisions that are binding on everyone involved. Otherwise any minority, if it is determined enough, can undertake actions that have consequences for a majority that does not agree with them.	The decentralised, 'network' style of operating of the NGOs is not in fact something historically novel. This was exactly how the activists operated, for instance, at the end of the 18th century--through the corresponding societies in Britain or even the Jacobin clubs in the earlier stages of the French Revolution--using the most advanced means of communications at the time, letter writing. But when people wanted to move from decentralised propaganda and agitation to any sort of serious struggle to break the existing concentrations of power, they had to look to more centralised forms of organisation--the Jacobins in 1792-1794, the United Irishmen, Babeuf's 'Conspiracy of Equals'.102 This was precisely because the decentralised model did not allow the movement to decide in a united way when it was to concentrate its forces to move in one direction or another, but left it open to minorities to wreck any action by moving too soon or by standing back when everyone else moved. The institutions of global capitalism may be like 'boulders' it is difficult to break apart. But simply trying to walk round them leaves the initiative in their hands to suddenly turn on you and destroy you. In fact, every day they destroy thousands of people through their Structural Adjustment Programmes, their debt collection, their cutbacks in welfare, their environmental destruction, their wars. We cannot simply 'walk round' this. Nor is it good enough to say there are lots of ideas in the movement and to leave it at that. Of course there are vast numbers of ideas in the movement. Hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of people are beginning, for the first time, to challenge the global system. They come from a vast range of backgrounds and experiences, and bring with them the differing ideas that have developed there. No one can dictate what they think and how their ideas develop. But that does not mean there are not arguments over ideas, or that any of us should abstain from those arguments. In fact, the movement will not be able to develop beyond a certain point unless such arguments are resolved. It is no good, when faced with an important argument about what to do next, simply to say, 'Isn't it wonderful we're having this argument?' You have to engage in the argument, not simply comment on it. And if you think that experience shows that 'democratic socialism' or 'social anarchy' has failed dismally in the past, you have to say so as effectively as you can. This is particularly important if the new generation of anti-capitalists are to succeed in making the connection with the millions or workers and poor people who are engaged every day in acts of resistance, big or small, to neo-liberalism and capitalist globalisation. In such struggles their whole livelihoods, and sometimes their lives, are at stake. They need to be able to work out a coherent direction, ways of getting solidarity from their fellows, ways of countering vicious attacks from the other side. Clarity of ideas is not a luxury in such cases. It is a necessity if terrible defeats are to be avoided. The only way to gain such clarity for the different points of view in the movement to engage in fraternal debate at the same time as unite in struggle. The heads of the giant multinationals and the world's states were right to be worried about Seattle. It crystallised a new mood of opposition to what their system is doing to people. It focused the aspirations of a substantial minority of people in every continent and every country. And in the bare ten months since, that mood has been growing. Even while I've been writing this article there have been further mass protests in Millau in southern France, against the G8 meeting in Okinawa in Japan, outside the Democratic Party convention in Los Angeles, and planning is underway to challenge the World Economic Forum in Melbourne, and the IMF and World Bank in Prague. Only a minority of those who have built these events see themselves as Marxists. Many, particularly in the United States, do not yet even see themselves as socialists. Yet in building movements against the system they are treading the same path that Karl Marx and Frederick Engels set out on nearly 160 years ago. In the process, they will be forced to face up to many of the issues that confronted Marx and Engels, and others who've followed the same path since. It is up to all of us to help build the new movement--and to help it to learn to deal with these issues.

Answers To: Permutation

The affirmative’s plan action is antithetical to a radical break from capitalism. The alternative alone solves.

Žižek in Yale Daily News ‘12 http://www.yaledailynews.com/news/2012/apr/18/zizek-calls-for-reexamination-of-capitalism/ “Zizek calls for reexamination of capitalism” –Diana Li (Staff Reporter for the Yale Daily News) Slavoj Žižek is a Slovenian philosopher and cultural critic working in the traditions of Hegelianism, Marxism and Lacanian psychoanalysis.

Philosopher and former Slovenian presidential candidate Slavoj Žižek explained his concerns with the current state of capitalism Tuesday night. In Sheffield-Sterling-Strathcona Hall room 114 packed with Yale undergraduates and prospective freshmen, Žižek and members of the Yale Political Union debated whether capitalism is the “opiate of the masses.” Žižek argued that capitalism and democracy are no longer synonymous — since nations like China and Singapore are developing capitalist economies but are not democratic governments — and that capitalist systems should be reexamined. While he offered no clear revision of what capitalism should look like, Žižek maintained that people need to consider how the system could radically change from its current state. “I am afraid that this eternal marriage between democracy and capitalism is slowly coming to an end,” he said. “We have to reinvent capitalism.” Žižek emphasized that an inability to assess capitalism critically and to consider radical changes to the system have repeatedly caused Western nations to advocate ineffective solutions to the challenges they face. New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, Žižek noted, has argued that even if people had known in the early 2000s that their actions would cause a recession to strike in 2008, they would not have acted differently because of an inability to redefine the capitalist mindset. He cited the European Union’s proposed plans to stabilize Greece’s economy as another example. “Everyone knows these plans are total bulls---,” Žižek said. “They won’t work, and everyone knows this, but nonetheless we pretend to believe.” Žižek said few members of Western societies can imagine a shift in the deeply entrenched capitalist mindset, one he said people accept and practice without questioning. But he said the most important step for people of Western countries to take today is to “start being engaged in radical dreams” rather than resisting change. “We can imagine the end of the earth, or the end of the world — that’s all very easy to imagine,” he said. “But to imagine a small change in capitalism, in the market, is impossible for us.” The Chinese government, on the other hand, introduced a law in April 2011 that prohibited artistic works that involved alternate universes or time travel, Žižek said. He described the law as an attempt to discourage Chinese citizens from imagining how their lives could change, but he added that the law and the government’s concern also demonstrated that the Chinese people are “still at least able to dream.” Žižek attributed part of the failure to question capitalism to the extensive influence of powerful government officials. For example, he said Congress was at first strongly against the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, a $787 billion stimulus package intended to stimulate jobs and spur the economy, but that President Barack Obama and former President George W. Bush, among others, persuaded Congress to pass the act. Žižek cautioned against creating atmospheres in which individuals can wield disproportionate influence, which he said skews democratic processes and damages the capitalist system. “It’s so easy to blame people. The problem is not people like Bernie Madoff — there were always people like that,” Žižek said. “It was the social context that allowed him to do what he did that was the problem.”

Answers To: Alternative Fails/Indicts

Concerns over the new form of system are irrelevant—the most important question is to resolve the worst forms of exploitation that exist under current capitalism and to promote a new equitable society outside of capital.

Buick & Crump ’86 ( Adam and John, members of the World Socialist Party, State Capitalism: the Wages System Under New Management, final chapter)

Although it is possible to imagine that capitalism could be replaced by some new form of class society in which some other method of exploitation would replace the wages system, we shall concern ourselves here only with the replacement of capitalism by a society from which, to remain deliberately vague for the moment, exploitation and privilege would be absent. Since capitalism is a worldwide class society and exchange economy, it is clear that the exploitation-less alternative to capitalism would have to be a classless world society without exchange. In a classless society every member is in a position to take part, on equal terms with every other member, in deciding how the means of production should be used. Every member of society is socially equal, standing in exactly the same relationship to the means of production as every other member. Similarly, every member of society has access to the fruits of production on an equal basis.

Affirmative

The affirmative produces a democratization of transport, which is a necessary redistribution to drastically alter current dangerous capitalism.

Smith R. (Institute for Policy Research & Development), London 2011. Green capitalism: the god that failed. Real-World Economics Review 56: 112–144.

Fourth, green capitalism theorists grossly overestimate the potential of “clean” “green” production and “dematerializing,” the economy whereas, in reality, much if not most of the economy from resource extraction like mining and drilling to metals smelting and chemicals production, as well as most manufacturing, cannot be greened in any meaningful sense at all. This means that the only way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by the 80% that scientists say we need to do to save the humans, is to enforce a drastic contraction of production in the industrialized countries, especially in the most polluting and wasteful sectors. Most industries will have to be sharply retrenched. Some, the very worst polluting and wasteful, will have to be closed down entirely. Since, under capitalism, industries can’t be expected to voluntarily commit economic suicide, even to save the humans, the only way to carry out these necessary contractions and closures is to nationalize industry and socialize the losses, redeploy labor to sectors society does actually need to develop, like renewable energy, public transit, decent housing for all, and so on, and shorten the working day to spread the remaining work around. Fifth, consumerism and overconsumption are not “dispensable” and cannot be exorcised because they’re not just “cultural” or “habitual.” They are built into capitalism and indispensable for the day-to-day reproduction of corporate producers in a competitive market system in which capitalists, workers, consumers and governments alike are all locked into an endless cycle of perpetually increasing consumption to maintain profits, jobs, and tax revenues. We can’t shop our way to sustainability because the problems we face cannot be solved by individual choices in the marketplace. The global ecological crisis we face cannot be solved by even the largest individual companies. Problems like global warming, deforestation, overfishing, species extinction, the changing ocean chemistry are even beyond the scope of nation states. They require national and international cooperation and global economic planning. This requires collective bottom-up democratic control over the entire world economy. And since a global economic democracy could only thrive in the context of a rough economic equality, this presupposes a global redistribution of wealth as well.

Affirmative

Alternate energies are destructive only if entrepreneurs control the distribution of technology—the affirmative is an example of a new technoeconomic development that alters current capitalist dangers.

S. Prudham (Professor in the Department of Geography, cross-appointed to the Centre for Environment at the University of Toronto) Pimping climate change: Richard Branson, global warming, and the performance of green capitalism Environment and Planning A, 41 (2009), pp. 1594–1613

Green capitalism relies on the role of the entrepreneurial bourgeois subject as a price-guided innovator propelling more environmentally friendly technoeconomic development. But the success of green capitalism and the central role of the entrepre- neur rests on more than the `objective' (quantitative and qualitative) characteristics of resulting produced natures. Rather, green capitalism must also be accepted as legitimate. In order for this to happen, the entrepreneur must be seenöin political and cultural termsöto be an architect of, rather than an obstacle to, a greener future. On the one hand, this wider social sanction is consistent with the existing status of entrepreneurs as elites through the cultural worth and politics of recognition ascribed to accumulation for its own sake, as indicated by Marx in the extended quote above. But, on the other hand, it requires both extension and qualification of the scope of the entrepreneur's expertise into matters pertaining to environmental change. Specifically, accumulation as an end in itself is no longer (if it ever really was) adequate; rather, the viability of investment schemes, and with them the legitimacy of the green entrepre- neur, turns on the realization of value in a market, which requires some form of social sanction (formal or otherwise) of the commodities produced by green capitalists. How a politics of worth articulates with commodities in the circulation and realization of value is a complex matter indeed (see eg Henderson, 2004; Sayer, 2003). But, for green capitalism to `work', environmentalism and capitalism must be understood not as antagonisms but, rather, as a combatable fusion embodied in technoeconomic trajectories, as well as in the figure of the bourgeois subject himself or herself. In some ways, this curious combination is the most remarkable feature of green capitalism as a cultural logic. There are parallels here between green capitalism and aspects of what have come to be called `neoliberalism'. I have contributed previously to arguments that the reworking of long-standing political and economic variants of liberalism in relation to socionatural relations, the politics of environmental change, and environmentalism is constitutive of what we have come to understand as neo- liberalism (Heynen et al, 2007; McCarthy and Prudham, 2004). But therein lies something of the problem. Both analytically and politically, we must attend to the specific ways in which what we understand to be the `core' of neoliberalism comes to articulate with such disparate projects and outcomes, and how it is that political subjectivities are reworked in ways that undermine any sense that neoliberalism is simply something that `they' are doing to `us' (Larner, 2003). The alternative is to treat these combinations and permutations as self-evident manifestations of an all- encompassing neoliberalism without ever bothering to even seek explanation for how `it' happened. As Larner (2000)ödrawing on Hall (1988)öcorrectly observed, this is exactly a problem of hegemony, and thus of exploring how what would seem in some ways odd or counterintuitive comes (eventually) to seem normal and even common sense. This requires engaging in some understanding of the politics of legitimacy, to see how it is that particular discursive formations, institutional arrangements, social movements, actors, and material practices come to constitute the terrain of consent. Thinking along similar lines, Brown examines the relationship between neoliber- alism and neoconservatism, (2006, page 692) and asks how it is that neoliberal capitalism as ``a rationality that is expressly amoral at the level of both ends and means'' can be made to articulate and combine with one ``that is expressly moral and regulatory'' (ie neoconservatism). The same question pertains to green capitalism. How is it that the entrepreneurial subject, the capitalist, comes to have the foundation of his or her elite status extended beyond the scope of accumulation as an inherent good, so that expanded rounds of capital accumulation and social decision making led in significant measure by the entrepreneur comes to constitute a pivotal part of <CONTINUED>

<CONTINUED>

the solution in meeting the challenges of environmental change and environmentalism? This is a political problem for the would-be green capitalist such as Branson; it is also a question for critics of green capitalism to grapple with, more so perhaps than has been the case to date. Obviously, this is a complex question. Yet, as in Brown's analysis, it points to the need to understand the reworking of political rationalities in relation to state and society, in this context focusing on how a cultural politics of the green entrepreneurial subject comes to have coherence. And I argue that part of the answer lies in examining the ways in which `performances' help to embody and thereby actively construct a fusion of ostensibly disparate political and cultural agendas. In this framing, Branson's announcements and actions do `work' through the performance of green capitalism. Here, I draw on notions of subjectivity and identity emphasizing the performances of individual subjects through which powerful norms of social behavior are reproduced and embodied. This notion draws primarily on the work of Butler (1990), whose concern has been to explain the regulation and propagation of prevailing norms of cultural identity and behavior in realms such as sexuality, class, and race. According to Butler, the reproduction of such norms is secured in part through their being enacted and embodied by discrete performances of subjects. Crucially, such performances not only cite and reproduce prevailing norms, but at the same time offer the potential to creatively modify and subvert norms through variations in the specific manner in which they are enacted and in the particular sociospatial and temporal contexts for discrete performances. As Nash notes, ``For Butler the concept of performativity is an attempt to find a more embodied way of rethinking the relationships between deter- mining social structures and personal agency. Rather than either essentialist genders located in bodily difference or a kind of free-floating, fluid choice of gender identity, Butler suggests that women and men learn to perform the sedimented forms of gendered social practices that become so routinized as to appear natural'' (2000, pages 654 ^ 655). These norms can, indeed, become so powerful that they become reified as essential material forms independent of their cultural productions. As this happens, identities and subjectivities come to be viewed as pure, stable abstractions rather than embodied performances constituted in part by specific material practices which sustain their coherence (for review and critique see McDowell, 1999; McDowell and Court, 1994; Pratt, 2004).Yet, for Butler, this coherence is always unstable, on the one hand making necessary iterative performances, and on the other hand rendering norms available for subversion (intentional or otherwise), transformation, and critical interrogation. As Nash goes on to note, while Butler has been concerned, in particular, with norms of gender and (hetero)sexuality, the notion of performance may be used pro- ductively to examine all manner of normalized, regulated, but also embodied and iterative subjectivities. McDowell and Court (1994) focus, for example, on gendered norms in the workplace performances of men and women in the world of banking and finance. Similarly, and more germane to the notion of Branson's announcements as performances of green capitalism, Thrift (2001) has discussed the performative dimen- sions of a supposedly new economy whose stability relies on its narrative repetition as well as on its embodied citation by managerial classes of capital. These performances help make self-evident what is meant by the phrase `new economy', and what behav- ioral norms are consistent with it. In a separate work (Thrift, 2000), he articulates a view of how speed, agility, rapid adaptation, and other hallmark features of the permanent state of emergency in which contemporary capitalist firms exist are per- formed not only by managers in such firms, but also within the broader spatial spheres in which they perform. I find this idea of norms performed iteratively through embodied social practice productive (in more ways than one) in thinking about and coming to critical terms with Branson as a would-be green entrepreneurial activist. Branson occupies a singular political and cultural niche as an almost self-appointed archetype of the post-Thatcherite capitalist, independent, entrepreneurial, mercurial, innovative, and most definitely a celebrity. To whatever degree Branson wilfully seeks to convey and affect these mean- ings, there can be little doubt of his association with them. His emergence as a successful if not iconic entrepreneur originated in his sales of recorded music at discount prices during the late 1960s and early 1970s under the name of Virgin, leading to his eventual founding of Virgin Records. Branson diversified into the transportation sector in 1984 with the launch of Virgin Atlantic Airways, seeking to compete with the more established (and stodgy) British Airways. This was followed in 1997 by the launch of Virgin Trains, Branson's attempt to capitalize on the dismantling and privatization of British Rail. He has consistently sought to draw attention to himself and his companies with splashy business launches, highly

<CONTINUED>

<CONTINUED> personalized feuds with competitors (notably British Airways), and heavily publicized long-distance adventures by boat and balloon. These latter seemingly bear little direct relation to his businesses beyond free publicity for Virgin; yet, they speak volumes about Branson's brand of entrepreneurial perfor- mance as heroic, splashy, highly public, mercurial, and (in significant ways) even macho fusions of adventure and business. Branson's public persona is one of dashing, daring ambition and a wilful courtship with controversy, masculinized and often (hetero)sexualized in over-the-top ways. Metaphorically, Branson's escapades, includ- ing, for instance, his risky adventures aboard boats and balloons, seem self-consciously intended to draw attention to and underwrite the need for acumen, panache, and a spirit of conquest in business (ad)ventures embodied in the heroic male entrepreneurial subject. And his attention-seeking ways have worked. Courted by the British Conservatives and Third Way Labour alike, Branson was actually knighted in 1999 for `service to entrepreneurship' (BBC News 2004). In this context, and particularly in post-Thatcher- era Britain, Branson has come to embody the ideal of the British, but increasingly transnational, neoliberal capitalist subject. He is the singular icon of the new British business class, reinvigorated, lean, able to compete not only with Britain's older generation of corporatist (both business and state) establishment, but, equally, with the new, ostensibly less staid international capitalist class. He is, in this context, a national (and nationalist) figure, named by BBC news readers as Britain's top entrepreneur in 2003 by a whopping 57% of 15 000 voters in an online poll (the second-highest vote getter garnered 17% support). And, yet, he is also a transnational celebrity entrepreneur, made evident in part by his choice of Washington DC for the September 2006 announcement and by his choice of accompaniment in Bill Clinton. Some might argue that Branson's singular, mercurial persona is inconsistent with the focus in the literature on everyday, even mundane performances of gender, class, and racial norms (indeed, this point has been raised in response to multiple presen- tations of this paper before academic audiences). Yet, despite Branson's apparent singularity, I would argue he cites and performs an already-existing, virulent, muscular neoliberal, masculinist subjectivity reworked to fit the green capitalist agenda. The highly stylized dimensions of Branson's performed persona constitute one part of his `symbolic capital' by definition expressed in relation to existing discursive norms and expectations (Bourdieu, 1984). As such, Branson's status and `distinction' were always already more than what could be captured by the strictly financial foundations of his fame. It is important to remember here that, for Butler, performance points to the need for prevailing discursive norms to be embodied in actions, gestures, and the like through everyday repetitions that, via their very repetition in specific circumstances by particular bodies, become open to subversion in unpredictable and sometimes creative ways. It is through performance that not only structure but also agency come together, in bodies always in a state of being produced (Wright, 2006). Such productions not only are themselves effects, but also have effects. Branson, in this context, both signi- fies the hybridization of environmentalism and capitalism, and is a vector of this hybridization. I see it as entirely consistent then to argue that Branson performs green capitalism in part through creatively fusing environmentalism and entrepreneurialism. To emphasize, this is not to say that Branson creates or single-handedly authors the notion of green capitalism, nor that he alone performs the green entrepreneur; he clearly does not. Branson's persona, carefully cultivated though it may be, exists in relation to already existing, taken-for-granted notions of the entrepreneur as cultural elite in a more-than capitalist society. Moreover, if Branson is in some ways the paradigmatic example of the heroic (masculine?) neoliberal subject, individually freed from the shackles of excessive government to choose his path, this is not the same as saying he is the sole source of this powerful narrative of neoliberal political rationality (Guthman and DuPuis, 2006). Similarly, he builds on, as much as authors, an estab- lished narrative foundation for green capitalism. Yet, it equally flies in the face of his obvious fame to argue that Branson is merely mundane. In this sense, Branson pimps `climate' by doing some of the cultural work necessary to fuse capitalism and envi- ronmentalism. I do not use the term `pimp' lightly here. Rather, I chose it to convey exactly the sense of sensationalism and self-promotion, but also exploitation, and, in the spirit of Butler's gendered theorization of performance, a virile form of masculine display.

Affirmative

The alternative fails and produces violence—the desire for freedom and growth is innate. Attempting to replace the system risks totalitarianism, violence, poverty and war.

Aligica ’03 (Paul Aligica, 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).

Affirmative

The alternative is a recreation of transitions that overlooks mass death and will create more violence.

Flood ’04 (Andrew, Anarchist organizer and writer, “Civilization, Primitivism, Anarchism,” http://www.anarkismo.net/newswire.php?story_id=1451)

However it is worth doing a little mental exercise on this idea of the oil running out. If indeed there was no alternative what might happen? Would a primitivist utopia emerge even at the bitter price of 5,900 million people dying? No. The primitivists seem to forget that we live in a class society. The population of the earth is divided into a few people with vast resources and power and the rest of us. It is not a case of equal access to resources, rather of quite incredible unequal access. Those who fell victim to the mass die off would not include Rubert Murdoch, Bill Gates or George Bush because these people have the money and power to monopolise remaining supplies for themselves. Instead the first to die in huge number would be the population of the poorer mega cities on the planet. Cairo and Alexandria in Egypt have a population of around 20 million between them. Egypt is dependent both on food imports and on the very intensive agriculture of the Nile valley and the oasis. Except for the tiny wealthy elite those 20 million urban dwellers would have nowhere to go and there is no more land to be worked. Current high yields are in part dependent on high inputs of cheap energy. The mass deaths of millions of people is not something that destroys capitalism. Indeed at periods of history it has been seen as quite natural and even desirable for the modernization of capital. The potato famine of the 1840's that reduced the population of Ireland by 30% was seen as desirable by many advocates of free trade.(16) So was the 1943/4 famine in British ruled Bengal in which four million died(17). For the capitalist class such mass deaths, particularly in colonies afford opportunities to restructure the economy in ways that would otherwise be resisted. The real result of an 'end of energy' crisis would see our rulers stock piling what energy sources remained and using them to power the helicopter gunships that would be used to control those of us fortunate enough to be selected to toil for them in the biofuel fields. The unlucky majority would just be kept where they are and allowed to die off. More of the 'Matrix' then utopia in other words. The other point to be made here is that destruction can serve to regenerate capitalism. Like it or not large scale destruction allows some capitalist to make a lot of money. Think of the Iraq war. The destruction of the Iraqi infrastructure may be a disaster for the people of Iraq buts it's a profit making bonanza for Halliburton and co[18]. Not coincidentally the Iraq war, is helping the US A, where the largest corporations are based, gain control of the parts of the planet where much future and current oil production takes place.

Affirmative

Transition will fail and create chaos, preventing social transformation.

Ted Trainer, lecturer in the School of Social Work, University of New South Wales, March 2000, Democracy and Nature, Vol. 6, No. 1, “Where are we, where do we want to be, how do we get there?” http://www.democracynature.org/dn/vol6/trainer_where.htm

If there is a boom we in the Eco-village Movement should welcome it, through gritted teeth, because it will give us the time we desperately need. The last thing we want is a collapse of the system in the immediate future. We are far from ready. Hardly any of the hundreds of millions of people who live in rich world cities have any idea of an alternative to the consumer way and their settlements have no provision for anything but maximising the throughput of resources. By all means let’s have a collapse a little later, but the prospects for The Simpler Way depend greatly on how extensively the concept can be established before the mainstream runs into serious trouble. We need at least two more decades to build the understanding, and the most effective way to do that is by developing examples.

Economic decline without attitude shift prompts authoritarian take-over—increasing oppression and stopping any transition.

F.E. Trainer, academic in the Department of Social Work, Social Policy and Sociology, University of New South Wales and the author of numerous books on the environment and population issues, 1985, Abandon Affluence!, p. 275

In keeping with the first part of this chapter the following sections can only be suggestions as to how things could work out if we apply a lot of effort and are luckier than we deserve to be. There is a good chance that we will not get there and that we will slide into some form of totalitarian society. If the material living standards of the overdeveloped countries begin to fall markedly owing to rising costs or to events in the Third World, while people remain convinced that affluence is supremely important, then it is likely that they will accept authoritarian rule by governments promising to restore prosperity and to secure the empire if they are given extraordinary powers. These governments would inevitably rule in the interests of a rich few and force the rest to endure the sort of repression and deprivation now character- istic of many Third World countries. (Stretton, 1977, Ch. 1, gives a chillingly plausible account of this eventuality.) Everything depends on whether or not publics go on clinging to affluence or realise that de-development is required. The problem is therefore entirely one of world-view. Our fate hangs on whether or not enough people come to understand and accept the general alternative philosophy outlined in this chapter. The task before us is, there- fore, an educational one. It is to raise public awareness about the mistaken path we are following, about the impossibility of affluence and growth for all, and about the fact that there is a promising alternative. If we succeed at this task the revolution will be won by default. If enough people opt for a somewhat frugal, self-sufficient and communal alternative way of life then that is what we will have, irrespective of what corporations and politicians might prefer and regardless of their resistance.

Affirmative

The alternative views capitalism as totalizing. This view creates political cynicism, fragmentation and conservatism – the perm solves best.

Gibson-Graham 96 (Katharine, human geography@ Australian National University, Julie, geography@U of Massachusetts, The End of Capitalism (As We Know It), p. 263-64)

One of our goals as Marxists has been to produce a knowledge of capitalism. Yet as “that which is known,” Capitalism has become the intimate enemy. We have uncloaked the ideologically-clothed, obscure monster, but we have installed a naked and visible monster in its place. In return for our labors of creation, the monster has robbed us of all force. We hear – and find it easy to believe – that the left is in disarray. Part of what produces the disarray of the left is the vision of what the left is arrayed against. When capitalism is represented as a unified system coextensive with the nation or even the world, when it is portrayed as crowding out all other economic forms, when it is allowed to define entire societies, it becomes something that can only be defeated and replaced by a mass collective movement (or by a process of systemic dissolution that such a movement might assist). The revolutionary task of replacing capitalism now seems outmoded and unrealistic, yet we do not seem to have an alternative conception of class transformation to take its place. The old political economic “systems” and “structures” that call forth a vision of revolution as systemic replacement still seem to be dominant in the Marxist political imagination. The New World Order is often represented as political fragmentation founded upon economic unification. In this vision the economy appears as the last stronghold of unity and singularity in a world of diversity and plurality. But why can’t the economy be fragmented too? If we theorized it as fragmented in the United States, we could being to see a huge state sector (incorporating a variety of forms of appropriation of surplus labor), a very large sector of self-employed and family-based producers (most noncapitalist), a huge household sector (again, quite various in terms of forms of exploitation, with some households moving towards communal or collective appropriation and others operating in a traditional mode in which one adult appropriates surplus labor from another). None of these things is easy to see. If capitalism takes up the available social space, there’s no room for anything else. If capitalism cannot coexist, there’s no possibility of anything else. If capitalism functions as a unity, it cannot be partially or locally replaced. My intent is to help create the discursive conception under which socialist or other noncapitalist construction becomes “realistic” present activity rather than a ludicrous or utopian goal. To achieve this I must smash Capitalism and see it in a thousand pieces. I must make its unity a fantasy, visible as a denial of diversity and change.

Affirmative

Viewing capitalism as monolithic and totalizing destroys any realistic social change.

Gibson-Graham 96 (Katharine, human geography@ Australian National University, Julie, geography@U of Massachusetts, The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It), p. 1-3)\

Understanding capitalism has always been a project of the left, especially within the Marxian tradition. There, where knowledges of “capitalism” arguably originated, theory is accorded an explicit social role. From Marx to Lenin to the neo-Marxists of the post-World War II period, theorists have understood their work as contributing — whether proximately or distantly — to anticapitalist projects of political action. In this sense economic theory has related to politics as a subordinate and a servant: we understand the world in order to change it. Given the avowed servitude of left theory to left political action it is ironic (though not surprising) that understandings and images of capitalism can quite readily be viewed as contributing to a crisis in left politics. Indeed, and this is the argument we wish to make in this book, the project of understanding the beast has itself produced a beast, or even a bestiary; and the process of producing knowledge in service to politics has estranged rather than united understanding and action. Bringing these together again, or allowing them to touch in different ways, is one of our motivating aspirations. “Capitalism” occupies a special and privileged place in the language of social representation. References to “capitalist society” are a common¬place of left and even mainstream social description, as are references — to the market, to the global economy, to postindustrial society — in which an unnamed capitalism is implicitly invoked as the defining and unifying moment of a complex economic and social formation. Just as the economic system in eastern Europe used confidently to be described as communist or socialist, so a general confidence in economic classification characterizes representations of an increasingly capitalist world system. But what might be seen as the grounds of this confidence, if we put aside notions of “reality” as the authentic origin of its representations? Why might it seem problematic to say that the United States is a Christian nation, or a heterosexual one, despite the widespread belief that Christianity and heterosexuality are dominant or majority practices in their respective domains, while at the same time it seems legitimate and indeed “accurate” to say that the US is a capitalist country?1 What is it about the former expressions, and their critical history, that makes them visible as “regulatory fictions,”2 ways of erasing or obscuring difference, while the latter is seen as accurate representation? Why, moreover, have embracing and holistic expressions for social struc¬ture like patriarchy fallen into relative disuse among feminist theorists (see Pringle 1995; Barrett and Phillips 1992) while similar concep¬tions of capitalism as a system or “structure of power” are still preva¬lent and resilient? These sorts of questions, by virtue of their scarcity and scant claims to legitimacy, have provided us a motive for this book.3 The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It) problematizes “capitalism”. as an economic and social descriptor.4 Scrutinizing what might be seen as throwaway uses of the term — passing references, for example, to the capitalist system or to global capitalism — as well as systematic and deliberate attempts to represent capitalism as a central and organizing feature of modern social experience, the book selectively traces the discursive origins of a widespread understanding: that capitalism is the hegemonic. or even the only, present form of economy and that it will continue to be so in the proximate future. It follows from this prevalent though not ubiquitous view that noncapitalist economic sites, if they exist at all, must inhabit the social margins; and, as a corollary, that deliberate attempts to develop noncapitalist economic practices and institutions must take place in the social interstices, in the realm of experiment, or in a visionary space of revolutionary social replacement. Representations of capitalism are a potent constituent of the anticapi¬talist imagination, providing images of what is to be resisted and changed as well as intimations of the strategies, techniques, and possibilities of changing it. For this reason, depictions of “capitalist hegemony” deserve a particularly skeptical reading. For in the vicinity of these representations, the very idea of a noncapitalist economy takes the shape of an unlikelihood or even an impossibility. It becomes difficult to entertain a vision of the prevalence and vitality of noncapitalist economic forms, or of daily or partial replacements of capitalism by noncapitalist economic practices, or of capitalist retreats and reversals. In this sense, “capitalist hegemony” operates not only as a constituent of, but also as a brake upon, the anticapitalist imagination.5 What difference might it make to release that brake and allow an anticapitalist economic imaginary to develop unrestricted?6 If we were to dissolve the image that looms in the economic foreground, what shadowy economic forms might come forward? In these questions we can identify the broad outlines of our project: to discover or create a world of economic difference, and to populate that world with exotic creatures that become, upon inspection, quite local and familiar (not to mention familiar beings that are not what they seem).

Affirmative

The best way to solve capitalism is to let local action coexist with global actions like the plan – the alternative alone can never solve.

Gibson-Graham 2 (Katharine, human geography@ Australian National University, Julie, geography@U of Massachusetts, http://www.communityeconomies.org/papers/rethink/rethinkp3.rtf, accessed: 30 June 2011, JT)

Finally, what can we say about an economic politics outside the binary frame? In the face of the programs and plans of anti-globalization theorists and political analysts, our micropolitical experiments can easily be dismissed. Most analysts, like Hardt and Negri, offer a vision of an appropriate political response to globalization that is very distant from the one we are pursuing: Imperial corruption is already undermined by the productivity of bodies, by cooperation, and by the multitude’s designs on productivity. The only event that we are still awaiting is the construction, or rather the insurgence, of a powerful organization. The genetic chain is formed and established in ontology, the scaffolding is continuously constructed and renewed by the new cooperative productivity, and thus we await only the maturation of the political development of the posse. We do not have any models to offer this event. Only the multitude through its practical experimentation will offer models and determine when and how the possible becomes real. (2000: 411) We are no longer capable of waiting for the multitude to construct a powerful organization (Gibson-Graham, 1996). Instead, we continue to be inspired by feminism as a global force, one that started small and personal and largely stayed that way, that worked on cultivating new ways of being, that created new languages, discourses and representations, that built organizations, and that quickly (albeit unevenly) encompassed the globe. Globalization appears to call for one form of politics—mobilization and resistance on the global scale. But we believe there are other ways of practicing transformative politics—involving an opening to the local as a place of political creativity and innovation. To advocate local enactments is in no way to suggest that other avenues should close down. We would hope for the acceptance of multiple powers and forms of politics, with an eye to increasing freedoms and not limiting options. Rather than equivocating, with paradoxical certainty, about when and how a challenge to globalization will arise (the Hardt and Negri position), we have engaged in a here and now political experiment—working on ourselves and in our backyards.29 This is not because we think that we have found the only way forward, but because we have become unable to wait for an effective politics to be convened on some future terrain. The form of politics we are pursuing is not transmitted via a mass organization, but through a language and a set of practices. A language can become universal without being universalist. It can share the space of power with other languages, without having to eradicate or “overthrow” them.30 Academic, NGO, and internet networks can become part of a system of transmission, translation, amplification. In our (admittedly hopeful) vision, the language of the diverse economy and accompanying practices of non-capitalist development may have global purchase one day.

JAYHAWK DEBATe institute	1

magallon/cooper	CAPITALISM K

Alternative Solves – Modernist Sexuality

user

2012-06-29

Luis Magallon

whitman college