Dirty Birdy

1NC

A: The Argument:
The Affirmatives call for state action by government in the
resolution directly reinforces state power, increasing the legitimacy
of State violence.
Martin 1990, associate professor at the University of Wollongong,
Australia, Brian, Uprooting War
What should be done to help transform the state system in the direction of self-reliance and self-management? The problem can seem overwhelming.

What difference can the actions of an individual or small group make? Actually
quite a lot. The state system is strong because the actions of
many people and groups support it. Most social activists see state intervention as a solution, often the
solution to social problems. What can be done about poverty? More state welfare. What about racial discrimination? Laws and enforcement to stop it.
What about environmental degradation? State regulation What about sexual discrimination? Anti-discrimination legislation. What about corporate
irresponsibility or excess profit? Added government controls and taxation, or nationalization. What about unemployment? State regulation of the
economy: investment incentives, job creation schemes, tariffs What about crime? More police, more prisons, more counselors What about enemy
attack? More military spending What about too much military spending? Convince or pressure the government to cut back The obvious point is the
most social activists look constantly to the state for solutions to social problems. This point bears laboring, because the orientation of most social
action groups tends to reinforce state power. This applies to most antiwar action too. Many of the goals and methods of peace movements have been
oriented around action by the state, such as appealing to state elites and advocating neutralism and unilateralism. Indeed, peace movements spend
a lot of effort debate which demand to make on the state: nuclear freeze, unilateral or multilateral disarmament nuclear-free zones, or removal of
military bases. By appealing to the state, activists indirectly strengthen the roots of many social problems the problem of war in particular. To help

This means
ending the incessant appeals for state intervention, and
promoting solutions to social problems which strengthen local
self-reliance and initiative. What can be done about poverty? Promote worker and community control over
transform the state system action groups need to develop strategies which, at a minimum, do mot reinforce state power.

economic resources, and local self-reliance in skills and resources What about racial discrimination? Promote discussion, interaction and nonviolent
action at a grassroots level. What about sexual discrimination? Build grassroots campaigns against rape and the gender division of labour, and mount
challenges to hierarchical structures which help sustain patriarchy What about corporate irresponsibility or excess profits? Promote worker and
community control over production. What about unemployment? Promote community control of community resources for equitable distribution of
work and the economic product, and develop worker cooperatives as an alternative to hobs as gifts of employers. What about crime? Work against
unequal power and privilege and for meaningful ways of living to undercut the motivation for crime, and promote local community solidarity as a
defense against crime. What about enemy attack? Social Defense What about too much military spending? Build local alternatives to the state, use
these alternatives to withdraw support from the state and undermine the economic foundation of military spending These grassroots, self-managing

Detailed grassroots
strategies in most cases have not been developed, partly because
so little attention has been devoted to them compared to the strategies relying on state
solutions to social problems are in many cases no more than suggestive directions.

intervention. But the direction should be clear in developing strategies to address problems, aim at building local self-reliance and withdrawing
support from the state rather than appealing for state intervention and thereby reinforcing state power.

B. The Links

First, aff calls for state action constructs social

activism in such a way that condemns mechanisms
for protest to comply with state structures,
destroying any hope for powerful social change
Bookchin, 1998, Murray, Left Green Perspectives, Number 38
In the United States, as in other Western countries today, there is no lack of social-democratic organizations and environmental groups that concern
themselves with social and environmental problemseven if it means little more than lobbying powerful officials. Despite their tendency to
compromise on key issues, these groups are visible and vocal. Inasmuch as they work within the framework of the state, they sometimes find places
where the system bends to the needs of the poor and the vulnerable. The widely celebrated "realism" of these groups, their lesser-evil politics, and
their attempts to work amelioratively within the system sometimes lead to palliatives that seem to improve the lives of those who need help. But the
state rarely bends to popular demands for changes that are inimicable to the basic interests of the bourgeoisie. Despite the opposition of many labor
unions and environmentalists as well as large sectors of the population, for example, the North American Treaty Organization (NAFTA) was passed by
the Congress and signed by Clinton. Capitalbig Capitalwanted NAFTA, and that was that! Doubtless there are states and states. Historically, there
have been slave-owning states, feudal states, monarchical states, republican states, and totalitarian states. It would be naive to suppose that they

Yet even the most rhetorically "free" and

constitutionally constrained republics in the so-called First World
which we euphemistically call "democracies"are class
institutions. They are structured by their traditions, constitutions, laws, bureaucratic and judicial institutions, police, and armies to
are all alike just because they are states.

assure that the property, profit-making, competition, capital accumulation, and the economic authority of the bourgeoisie and other privileged strata
are protected. This relationship is fundamental to the modern state. The question of the state has been an issue of profound importance for
anticapitalist revolutionaries, including social anarchists, throughout in the history of socialism. Marxists are at least consistent when they engage in
parliamentarism, since Marx left us with no doubt that he thought the state was necessary, even after a proletarian revolution, in order to establish

he even declared that it was possible to use the

bourgeois parliamentary system to legislate socialism into
existence in Britain, America, and possibly the Netherlandsto which Engels later added France. When the people do not
retain political power for themselves, that power is claimed by the state conversely, whatever power the
state does not have must be claimed by the masses. Modern
political parties are either states in power or, when out of power,
states waiting to take power. In order to function as statist organizations, the very exigencies of state power
socialism, and in 1872

oblige them to replicate the state to one degree or another. They must, if they are to gain power, constitute themselves as top-down extensions of
the state, just as capitalist enterprises must be organized to make profit at the public's expense, their claims to be performing a beneficent "public
service" to the contrary notwithstanding. Indeed, the more parties and enterprises and even states cover themselves with a libertarian patina, the
more insidiously they besmirch the very public trust they profess to hold most sacred. The early claims of the German Greens to be a "nonparty
party" reflected a tension that could not continue to exist indefinitely once the Greens were elected to the Bundestag. Whatever may have been the
best intentions of their spokespersons, participation in the state of necessity reinforced every party-oriented tendency in their organization at the

This is
the product not of any ill will on the part of individual Greens but
rather of the inexorable imperatives of working within the state
rather than against it. Invariably, it is the state that shapes the activities and structures of those who propose to use it
expense of their "nonparty" claims. Today, far from being a challenge to the social order in Germany, the Greens are one of its props

against itself, not the reverse. Social anarchists, in contrast to Marxists, regard the state as such as a great institutional impediment to the
achievement of libertarian socialism or communism. In bourgeois republics, the practical demand of social anarchists to desist from participating in
national elections reflects their commitment to delegitimate the state, to divest it of its mystique as an indispensable agency for "public order" and
the administration of social life. What is at issue in social anarchist abstention from these parliamentary rituals is their attempt to expose the
authoritarian basis of the state, to dissolve its legitimacy as a "natural" source of order, and to challenge its claims to be a supraclass agency and to
be the only competent institutional source of poweras distinguished from the incompetence of the masses in managing public affairs. This
responsibility of social anarchism to demystify capitalism, the nation-state, and their interconnectionindeed to challenge their legitimacy as a priori

To be relevant to people generally,

it must be embodied in a practice that is publicly visible, one that
can mutate the need for reforms of the existing system (which may be
allowed) into the need for a revolutionary transformation of society
"natural" phenomenais not simply a matter of theoretical elucidation.

(which the system must resist).

The affirmative's advocacy of what the United States federal

government should do bolsters the idea of the individual as
powerless and obscures each individual's responsibility to end
violence.
Kappeler, Processor at Al-Akhawayn University, Susanne, The Will to
Violence, 1995
'We are the war' does not mean that the responsibility for a war is shared collectively and diffusely by an entire society- which would be equivalent to
exonerating warlords and pelicans and profiteers or, as Ulrich Best says, upholding the notion of 'collective irresponsibility', where people are no longer
held responsible for their actions, and where the conception of universal responsibility becomes the equivalent of a universal acquittal. On the contrary,

Decisions to
unleash a war are indeed taken at particular levels of power by
those in a position to make them and to command such collective
action. We need to hold them clearly responsible for their decision and actions without lessening theirs by any collective 'assumption' of
the object is precisely to analyze the specific and differential responsibility of everyone in their diverse situations.

responsibility. Yet our habit of focusing on the stage where the maker dramas of power take the place, tends to obscure our sight in relation to our sphere
of competence, out our own power and our own responsibility, leading to the well-known illusion of our apparent 'powerlessness' and its accompanying

Single citizens- even more so those of other

nations- have come to feel secure in their obvious non-responsibility
phenomenon, our so-called political disillusionment.

for such large-scale political events as, say, the wars in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina or Somalia- since the decisions for such events are always made
elsewhere. Yet our insight that indeed we are responsible for the decisions of a Serbian general or a Croatian president tends to mislead us in for thinking
that therefore we have no responsibility at all, not even for forming out own judgment, and this into underrating the responsibility we do have within our
own sphere of action. In particular, it seems to absolve us from having to try to see any relation between our own actions and those events, or to
recognize the connections between those political decisions and our own personal decisions. It not only shows that we participate in what Beck calls
'organized irresponsibility', upholding the apparent lack of connection between bureaucratically, institutionally, nationally and also individually organized

It also proves the phenomenal and unquestioned alliance

of our personal thinking with the thinking of the major
powermongers. For we tend to think that we cannot 'do' anything, say, about war, because we deem ourselves to be in the wrong
separate competences.

situation; because we are not where the major decisions are made. Which is why many of those not yet entirely disillusioned with politics tend to engage
in a form of mental deputy politics, in the style of 'what would I do if I were the general, the prime minister, the president, the foreign minister or the
minister of defense?' Since we seem to regard their mega spheres of action as the only worthwhile and truly effective ones, and since our political analysts
tend to dwell there first of all, any question of what I would do if I were indeed myself tends to peter out/in the comparative insignificance of having what
is perceived as 'virtually no possibilities': what I could do seems petty and futile. for my own action I obviously desire the range of a general, a prime
minister, or a General Secretary of the UN- finding expression in ever more prevalent formulations like 'I want to stop this war', 'I want military
intervention', 'I want to stop this backlash', or "I want a moral revolution." 'We are this war', however, even if we do not command the troops to participate
in so-called peace talks, namely as Drakulic says, in our 'non-comprehension': our willed refusal to feel responsible for our own thinking and for working
out our own understanding, preferring innocently to drive along the ideological current of prefabricated arguments or less than innocently/ taking
advantage of the advents these offer. And we 'are' the war in our 'unconscious cruelty towards you', our tolerance of the 'fact that you have a yellow form
for refugees and I don't'- our readiness, in other words, to build identities, one for ourselves and one for refugees, one of our own and one for the 'others',

We share in the responsibility for this war and its violence in the
way we let them grow inside us, that is, in the way we shape 'our
felines,' our relationships, our values' according to the structures and the values of war and violence.

Second, demands for a change in state policy are

an example of a State-centered conception of
politics. This fails to achieve its desired ends while
destroying alternate mechanisms for change.
Magnusson 1990, Professor at the University of Victory, Canada, Contending
Sovereignties: Redefining Political Community, Ed. Walker and Mendlovitz
Authur Bentleys famous book, The Process of Government (1908), seemed to mark a shift from state-centered to society-centered theories of politics.
The shift has been so well publicized that latter-day political scientists can announce with some pride that they are bringing the state back in. But the
supposed shift is really only a move from one advantage point to another. The object of study remains the same: societies are constituted by states
and politics is defined by the process of government the activity internal to states. Groups are deemed to be political in so far as they address
themselves to the process of government ie. In so far as they seek to influence government policy to secure representation within the state, or, at the
extreme, to take over the government itself. If government is the output, politics is the input that connects civil society to the state. It afford space
both for parties that seek to control the state and for pressure groups that want to influence it. This state centric conception of politics is the ruling
idea, not only in everyday life, but also in the scholarly analysis of political process. It has been criticized for neglecting political forms and processes
that occur outside of the input-output relationship between the state and civil society. When theses other forms of politics, which are not centered
upon the state, have been considered, they have been conceived analogously as activities related to governing processes in the firm, the family, the
economy, and the society at large. This has resulted in an extension of the conventional idea of politics, but rarely in a critical examination of the
concept as it is applied within, its home domain. Marxist theory comes close to such a critique, because it identifies and attacks as reification the very
division between state and civil society. However, the critique often slides into a reification of state-centered class struggle as the core of politics. The
effect is to reconstitute a state centric conception politics in a different theoretical domain. The theoretical impoverishment that results from a statecentric conception of politics is illustrated by the conventional treatment of social movements. On the one hand, everyone knows that social
movements are important politically. On the other hand, no one is sure how to fit them into state-centric political categories. Clearly, a movement is
neither a pressure group nor a political party. Nevertheless, parties and pressure groups are often spawned by movements, and just as frequently

. For the state, the institutionalization of a

movement as a pressure group or party is often essential for
containing and dealing with the threat it represents. The
enclosure of a movement within an established political space
allows for regularization of the relations between the state and
the group concerned. This regularization may have the effect of stilling the social movement. For the state, this return to
attempt to speak authoritatively for them

calm is usually welcome. For those involved in the social movement, the party or the group remains as institutional dotrutius from their efforts. The
interest or concerns embodied in the original movement are given a form appropriate to the smooth functioning of the state. From the vantage point
of the state (which is the normal vantage point of political analysis), the institutionalization of social movements is simply a matter of regularizing
their political form. In this sense, social movements become political actors only when they are institutionalized. Before that, they appear simply as
prepolitical disturbances in civil society. This suggests that the collective activities of ordinary people, in working out new understandings of

the creative social

activity in which ordinary people are most likely to be engaged
appears beyond or outside politics. In the political sphere prope r
(as in the governmental sphere) the important activities demand expertise, and
afford opportunities for creative action only to the elite. The people are just the chorus and
themselves and bringing those understandings into the world, are themselves prepolitical. Thus,

audience-and the beast without. Such prepolitical, merely social creatures are best confined to the harmless dramas of local politics-or to Dallas
Such an account is a distortion of political reality. It seems natural only because of our acceptance of state-centeric conceptions of politics. If we begin
with popular political activity, rather than from the enclosure imposed upon it another dimension of reality emerges. Politics might be defined as
purposive social action directed at the conditions of social existence. From this perspective, social movements are the politics of the people- and
government is the politics of the state. Parties and pressure groups are the forms imposed on popular politics under state hegemony. For the most
part, they are forms that quell social movements and hence still the politics of the people. The fact that movements can and do burst the enclosures
of the state is evidence not of their prepolitical but of their political character: their capacity to found or create new forms of political community,
political identity, and political action.

C. Impact- Reliance on state

structures for social policy will result
in extinction. Extinction outweighs
everything because in the face of it
everything becomes a moot point, no
matter the philosophy or action.
Katsiaficas 1997, Professor at SUNY, The subversion of Politics, George
Making ecologically responsible decisions already calls for rethinking the political power of nation-states and enlarging the democratic control of

. The entire species and all life is today at the mercy of those
who make decisions about high technology. Radioactive fallout from Chernobyl was measured in milk
technology

in North America less than a month after the catastrophe. Nonetheless, whether a nuclear power plant should be built is an issue that the established
system answers through national bureaucracies governed by scientific experts, faceless government employees, and professional politicians who make
decisions that will affect life on this planet for seventy generations. No society has democratically determined whether nuclear waste should be produced,
even though it will remain carcinogenic and toxic beyond comparison for tens of thousands of years-more time than since the great pyramids of Egypt
were built. The average nuclear power plant has a life of less than fifty years, yet for such transitory generation of electricity, we produce toxic
repositories, each of which will need to be encased (or somehow dealt with) for thousands of years. Given the insatiable need for energy in contemporary

The systems reliance on nuclear energy rather than

on solar, wind, and other nonpolluting sources is conditioned by the
need to provide big governments and large corporations with
massive projects for the expansion of their powers and the
realization of profits. Solar and wind energy generation is far more efficient than is popularly understood and provides more jobs
society, this is no trivial problem

than nuclear fission. The development of solar and wind energy would generate increased job opportunities from many small investments (rather than one
huge one) and profits would be realized by handyman producers, not big capital-whose essential nature requires massive projects. Nuclear power, in turn,
demands militarism of society for the security of the installations. Because nuclear weapons can obliterate a nation in a matter of minutes, militaries must
be on constant alert, and immense resources must be devoted to them. A more symbolic relationship between large corporations and big governments
could not be imagined, nor could a better means to block the possibility of substantive autonomy. Our species power have created the potential to
destroy the planet at the push of a button, to put holes in the ozone layer, to create and unleash genetically engineered beings, to melt the polar ice caps,
or to pollute huge areas (like that around Chernobyl) so badly that they have to be evacuated. For hundreds of years. Tragically, at the same historical
moment that the human species has been endowed with powers far beyond any possessed in the past, obsolete decision-making processes are
increasingly confined to corporate boardrooms and the inner offices of nonelected bureaucrats. Even it elected representatives are part of the formulation
of policy, the outcome is often no different. The unreasonableness of the existing system, its undernocratic nature as discussed above in relation to the
issue of nuclear power, can be similarly understood in relations to a number of weighty social decisions, such as the choice to use atomic bombs at the
end of World War II, to build the interstate highway system in the United States, create suburbs and abandon the inner cities in the 1950, to fight a Cold
War and the Vietnam War, and to maintain astronomical expenditures for national militaries at the end of the Cold War. The future effects of the existing
systems unreasonable its response to its own crisis tendencies, are already visible in plans to invest more resources in capital-intensive programs and
existing industry-notably automobiles. Over the next two decades, the European Community plans to spend over 1 trillion on more than seven thousands
miles of new highways, seriously threatening the scant remaining green spaces on the continent, including the last habitat for bears in France.
Infrastructural expenditures designed to aid transnational corporations have already been made for massive tunnels in the Pyrenees and the Alps, the
Oresund bridge connecting Denmark and Sweden, and the tunnel between France and Britain. Such squandering of resources is not simply a European
Problem. Canada plans to build a mammoth bridge to Prince Edward Island, and despite the end of the Cold War, the United States spends more on its

Each of these decisions was made in its own time

by nonelected persons in conjunction with professional politicians
military than all other nations combined

whose differences from their electoral alternatives were seldom greater than those between Coke and Pepsi. Left to direct-democratic forums of local
citizens, probably none of these decisions would have been made with respect to nuclear power, housing policies, abortion rights, and disarmament,
autonomous movements have clearly done more to enact what is now recognized as the popular will than did initiatives from within the existing political
system. At a minimum, militant protest movements, such as those against segregation, the Vietnam War, and nuclear power, revealed the lack of
consensus on specific policies and provided a necessary counterbalance, compelling even the most intransigent politicians to reconsider their positions. In
a larger context, the type of subversive social movements portrayed in this book probably constitute more reasonable vehicles for making significant
social decisions than corporate profitability, bureaucratic sanction, or votes by the political systems elected representatives. What I call civil Luddism can

Although
greater freedom and prosperity are both necessary and possible,
their realization seems remote. Instead of real autonomy in which
regions could plan their future as part of humanitys creative
powers, we have false autonomy offered us in choices among various consumer products, politicians, and individual careers. In the short run,
sometimes enact greater forms of democratic control than voting once every four years or paying dues to the union.

several factors appear to favor a continuing regeneration of autonomous movements. First, job opportunities and decent housing continue to be denied to
a wide cross section of people. The existence of hundreds of thousands of unemployed youth in Europe provides a base from which wave after wave of
new activity might emerge. Second, the existing systems top-heavy impetus preconditions its continuing reliance on massive capital projects. Now that

construction of nuclear power plants has virtually come to an end, other projects must be found to satisfy the needs of large capital. With any number of
boondoggles looming on the horizon, it appears that the existing system will continue to provide more than sufficient reasons for massive opposition to its

. The unreasonable character of large capital is

exemplified in Royal Dutch Shell. Yesterday it stubbornly clung to
investments in apartheid. More recently, it took international protests to persuade Shell not to discard one of its
destructive imperatives

mammoth oil platforms by sinking it in the Atlantic Ocean. Shells shadow also was cast over the execution of Nigerian playwright Ken Saro-Wiwa, whose
activism exposed the nefarious tip of Shells African activities. As suggested by this books title the goal of autonomous social movements is the
subversion of politics: the decolonization of everyday life and civil society, not the conquest of state power. Based on politics of the first person and a
desire to create direct democracy, these movements oppose me false universality of the control center under whose guise behemoth governments and
corporations seek to impose their wills. The supervision of politics would mean more democracy-more than citizens of Athens or Florence ever imagined,
more than envisioned and enshrined by the American Revolution, and qualitatively more than ever before possible. If Immanuel Wallerstein is once again
rights (as he was with respect to the existence of one world system encompassing the Soviet Union) as the present world system crashes down amidst us
in the next 50 years, we must have a substantive alternative to offer that is a collective creation. Autonomy might be that collective creation. Under such
circumstances, it may not be a choice for more democracy but rather a necessary form for the survival of the species and all life.

D. Alternative- Reject the

affirmative's demand of
governments being the actor.
Instead, vote negative to endorse a
system of non-cooperation with the
state. The goal of this noncooperation will be expose the
problems of the state.

Rejecting the demands of the affirmative opens of

new political space for alternatives to statecentered activism.
Walker 98, professor at the University of Victoria, One World, Many Worlds:
Struggles for a just World Peace, Ed. RBJ, 1988
I do not claim in this book to give a conclusive insight into the major
problems of age. Nor do I have any straightforward answers to the perennial
question: "What is to be done?" Indeed, I argue that the answers to this question formulated as blueprints for the future, are inherently
undesirable. A just world peace must grow out of the ongoing practices of people everywhere, not remolded by those who claim to have a god's-eye view
of what is going on. It is sometimes important to resist the inevitable demand for hard-nosed, concrete solutions to particular problems. Credibility in
contemporary political debate too often depends on a willingness to present policy options that might be carried out or existing governments and
institutions. It is not that policy options are unavailable. On the contrary, whether about more-sensible arms control procedures, removing the burden of
international debt, restructuring international trade or commodity pricing arrangements, and so on, policies that would undoubtedly improve the lot of

. Although many such

proposals deserve widespread support, the transformations necessary for a
just world peace cannot come from government policies alone, no matter
how enlightened these governments may be. Under pressure circumstances
the question "What is to be done?" invites a degree of arrogance that is all
too visible in the behavior of the dominant political forces of our time. It is an arrogance that is
millions of people are regularly aired in reports, international gatherings, and the more-serious news media

inconsistent with the kind of empirical evidence we have before us. This evidence requires a willingness to face up to the uncertainties of the age, not with
the demand for instant solutions, but with a more modest openness to the potentials inherent in what is already going on. The most pressing questions of
the age call not only for concrete policy options to be offered in existing elites and institutions but also, and more crucially, for a serious rethinking of the
ways in which is it possible for human beings to live together? The call for a just world peace must be also a call for the reconstruction of political life? In
this book I suggest that important insights into this deeper process are emerging from practices that are now under way. These insights make it possible to
formulate responses to questions about what must be done without capitulating to the illusion- so our future lies in the hands of existing elites alone. I do
not presume to tell movements what they should be doing. Nor do I presume to speak on their behalf. I would, rather, affirm the importance of critical
social movements at this historical juncture. Critical social movements may be more or less invisible to those trained in the conventional categories of

it is
more plausible to understand them as a part of a transformative
assault on our inherited notions of authority, legitimacy, and power.
they can be understood as part of a broad process of social
invention that carries the possibility of reconstructing the conditions for a decent life from the bottom up, without waiting for elites to become
social analysis or mesmerized by the dominant mass maid. They may appear to be only marginal and relatively powerless actors. I argue that

enlightened or replaced by still more elites. Critical social movements are important not because they have the immediate capacity to induce existing
elites to pursue more enlightened policies, but because they participate in a more far-reaching reinvention of political life.

And non-cooperation challenges the state's

legitimacy and is critical to social change.
Bookchin 98, Murray, Left Green Perspectives, Number 38, http://lpg.socialecology.org/, 1998
Without in any way ignoring the elementary insults that the present society inflicts on the poor and underprivileged, libertarian
municipalism raises the issue of a popular, reclamation of power by
the community from the state and the corporations. Most leftists
are so committed to exercising their infinitesimal influence through
statist institutions that social anarchists are uniquely positioned to
redefine a practice politics that is consistent with their highest appeals. Piety alone can emend power- an opposition to the state. They alone can try to
create confederal organizations at the local and regional levels that have political tangibility and that constitute a sphere for a public debate on all the
uses that concern community members. The "commune," or in more contemporary language, the municipality, has always been the building block of a
social anarchist vision of a libertarian society. Not only has the municipality antedated the state historically it has often been the antithesis of the state in
struggles between towns and feudal lords, absolutist monarchies, and centralistic institutions created by elitist revolutionaries such as the Jacobins and
their heirs, the Bolsheviks. The tension between the municipality and the state is a longstanding historical one, and although it is more recent, the tension
between the confederation and the modern nation-state is no less compelling. What I am suggesting is that a new libertarian politics to be formulated and
put into practice that calls for a restoration of political power to people in their municipalities in opposition to the state. The practice of my version of
social anarchism involves not only radical participation in protests, as I have described them, but the building of a movement that aims to create this kind
of face-to-face democracy. Social anarchists, I submit, should raise the demand for the empowerment of citizens in towns and cities in the form of directly
democratic assemblies, rewrite their city charters (where they have them) to illegally empower these assemblies with the authority to make far-reaching
decisions about their immediate concerns, and-yes!- even run candidates for local town and city councils with view toward creating or legally empowering
citizen's assemblies with the structure authority to regulate the municipality's affairs. I do not expect for a single moment that these activities will be
recognized by existing city governments, many of which have functions that are distinctly statist or that rely on state support. Nor do I believe that that

assemblies will be more than minority among the

citizens who participate in them. But a sphere of potential political
power, discussion, and education will have been created in which
over tome and with much effort, a counter power could develop in
opposition to the state and, with enough support in the economic realm, the corporations. This dual power, once it gained the support of a
social anarchists who initiate such

large number of people, could ultimately constitute a force to confront the state and the capitalist system and replace them with a libertarian communist
society.

Top Shelf

2NC Overview
The 2AC mishandles our criticism- our claim is NOT that global action is bad but
rather the affirmative's strategy of state centered activism is flawed. Even though
the affirmative knows their demand for state action is hopeless they still choose
to engage the state. this creates a government centered conception of politics
that legitimizes state-sponsored violence and precludes positive environmental
change.
We'll win two impacts1. The criticism turns the case- two high school students have absolutely no
chance of sparking government action, but do have the ability to change the
world around them. The affirmative assumptions the politics is what our
government debates about, gives up our agency preventing us from improving
the communities we live in.
2. It makes Extinction Inevitable- Our Katsiaficas evidence indicates the
affirmative's narrow definition of political action legitimizes state sponsored
killing, because it creates an arbitrary distinction between citizens and
policymakers- this allows the elites to further their interests at the cost of the
rest of civilization.
Fortunately the outcome is no preordained. Our alternative is to reject the aff's
futile demand to redefine our nation of politics to one that focuses on politics acts
normal citizens carry out. This allows us to do things like boycott companies that
exploit natural marine resources and educate our community about the
affirmative harms, meaning voting negative is your best shot at solving the case.

2NC Framework
Since our criticism impact turns the affirmative assumption that judge should play
the role of a policy maker, their failure to defend their framework damns them.
The judge's duty as a critical intellectual is to choose a focus point for activism.
This means that questions about the desirability of plan's implantation take a
backseat to concerns about the way it's framed. This view of intellectual
responsibility is not only best for education, giving us all the knowledge we can
use in day-to-day operations, but it also allows us to criticize state-centered
politics.

2NC Link Block

We'll win several links1. The Magnusson evidence is specific to the way the aft frames their project- it
says that any reform based upon state-centered activism strengthens the ability
of the state to deflect criticism from the movements.

2. The Dirty Birdy- The affirmative's advocacy of what the

United States federal government should do bolsters the idea
of the individual as powerless and obscures each individual's
responsibility to end violence.
Kappeler, Processor at Al-Akhawayn University, Susanne, The Will to
Violence, 1995
'We are the war' does not mean that the responsibility for a war is shared collectively and diffusely by an entire society- which would be equivalent to
exonerating warlords and pelicans and profiteers or, as Ulrich Best says, upholding the notion of 'collective irresponsibility', where people are no longer
held responsible for their actions, and where the conception of universal responsibility becomes the equivalent of a universal acquittal. On the contrary,

Decisions to
unleash a war are indeed taken at particular levels of power by
those in a position to make them and to command such collective
action. We need to hold them clearly responsible for their decision and actions without lessening theirs by any collective 'assumption' of
the object is precisely to analyze the specific and differential responsibility of everyone in their diverse situations.

responsibility. Yet our habit of focusing on the stage where the maker dramas of power take the place, tends to obscure our sight in relation to our sphere
of competence, out our own power and our own responsibility, leading to the well-known illusion of our apparent 'powerlessness' and its accompanying

Single citizens- even more so those of other

nations- have come to feel secure in their obvious non-responsibility
phenomenon, our so-called political disillusionment.

for such large-scale political events as, say, the wars in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina or Somalia- since the decisions for such events are always made
elsewhere. Yet our insight that indeed we are responsible for the decisions of a Serbian general or a Croatian president tends to mislead us in for thinking
that therefore we have no responsibility at all, not even for forming out own judgment, and this into underrating the responsibility we do have within our
own sphere of action. In particular, it seems to absolve us from having to try to see any relation between our own actions and those events, or to
recognize the connections between those political decisions and our own personal decisions. It not only shows that we participate in what Beck calls
'organized irresponsibility', upholding the apparent lack of connection between bureaucratically, institutionally, nationally and also individually organized

It also proves the phenomenal and unquestioned alliance

of our personal thinking with the thinking of the major
powermongers. For we tend to think that we cannot 'do' anything, say, about war, because we deem ourselves to be in the wrong
separate competences.

situation; because we are not where the major decisions are made. Which is why many of those not yet entirely disillusioned with politics tend to engage
in a form of mental deputy politics, in the style of 'what would I do if I were the general, the prime minister, the president, the foreign minister or the
minister of defense?' Since we seem to regard their mega spheres of action as the only worthwhile and truly effective ones, and since our political analysts
tend to dwell there first of all, any question of what I would do if I were indeed myself tends to peter out/in the comparative insignificance of having what
is perceived as 'virtually no possibilities': what I could do seems petty and futile. for my own action I obviously desire the range of a general, a prime
minister, or a General Secretary of the UN- finding expression in ever more prevalent formulations like 'I want to stop this war', 'I want military
intervention', 'I want to stop this backlash', or "I want a moral revolution." 'We are this war', however, even if we do not command the troops to participate
in so-called peace talks, namely as Drakulic says, in our 'non-comprehension': our willed refusal to feel responsible for our own thinking and for working
out our own understanding, preferring innocently to drive along the ideological current of prefabricated arguments or less than innocently/ taking
advantage of the advents these offer. And we 'are' the war in our 'unconscious cruelty towards you', our tolerance of the 'fact that you have a yellow form
for refugees and I don't'- our readiness, in other words, to build identities, one for ourselves and one for refugees, one of our own and one for the 'others',

We share in the responsibility for this war and its violence in the
way we let them grow inside us, that is, in the way we shape 'our
felines,' our relationships, our values' according to the structures and the values of war and violence.

3. The Bookchin evidence is the icing on the cake- it says that merely looking to
the state as a way to achieve social change forces movements to reform into
state- like institutions because they believe it's the only way to be legitimate
political actors- destroying any hope for change.
4. Demands upon the state increase its legitimacy- The Martin evidence says that
the demands for state recourse reinforce the idea that the only legitimate policies
are those implemented by the state.

Links

Policy Affirmative Link

The Affirmative's demand for a policy is a critical mechanism
by which the power and legitimacy of the state is reinforced.
Walker and Mendlovitz- 90 (R.B.J., Professor @ University of Victoria
(Cana), Saul H, Professor @ Rutgers Law School, contending sovereignties:
Redefining political Community, EDS, Walker and Mendlovitz).
It is often tempting to minimize the significance of these questions, either in
the name of immediate policy relevance or of some empirically conceived
social science. On the one hand, a sense of fluidity and transition invites
questions about what ought to be done. Many things undoubtedly do need to
be done, yet demands for policy often become a convenient way of
reinforcing the power and legitimacy of existing authorities, not of raising
fundamental questions about power and legitimate authority. What is to be
done by whole and for whom? What might it mean to engage in
policymaking on behalf of "humanity"? Or, less grandiosely but perhaps more
urgently, what might it mean to engage in policymaking on behalf of the
world's poorest people? There are certainly many policy proposals that seek
to respond to "the global problematic" or to global disparities of wealthier
and poverty. Some are even mildly encouraging. Yet even ardent supporters
of forms and interstate collaboration such as the United Nations or the Group
of Seen will admit, even insist, that there remains a large disjunction
between collaborate the policies and vague intimation of global polity. Many
analysts argue that further interstate cooperation is all we can hope for, and
that the principle of state sovereignty does offer a sufficient account of the
political practices capable of generating appropriate policy initiatives. This is,
after all, a point of view that has succeeded in appropriating the title of
political realism to itself. Nevertheless, many of those who have been called
realists have also voiced strong warnings never to expect things to remain
the same. Policymaking is not a synonym for politics, and nor amount of
supposedly realist reification can make it so. On the other hand, questions
about the nature of political life and the contours of political community raise
matters that have long been of concern to students of political theory. Yet
political theory's for some time been in at least partial eclipse because of the
overwhelming influence of socioscientific forms of social and political
analysis. In the Ango--American world especially, sharp distinctions have
been made between the scientific and the normative and between empirical
explanation and hermeneutic interpretation. Moreover, much of the energy
of political theory has been directed toward maintaining a critical stance
toward concepts and assumptions- about knowledge and modernity,
community and democracy, equality and subjectivity- that social science has
preferred to render unproblematic. Understandably preoccupied with
reproblematizing the character of political life within states, political theorists
have rarely broached with much confidence the transformative implications
of interdependence or world politics. Thus, even if the demands of public

policy or social science are tempting, it is difficult to avoid the sense that
rather more is at stake in contemporary discussions of state sovereignty.
Behind the call for more effective policy lies a significance degree or
uncertainty about the character and even the location of political life. Our
understanding or power and legitimate authority is contentious. The
increasingly global reach of the processes that affect people's lives is
increasingly understood to require sustained rethinking of who "we" are and
of how "we" might now relate to each other. The extent to which the recent
literature of interdependence and world politics has been drawn, for
example, to reinvigorate discussions of justice or ethics reflects the degree to
which positivistic distinctions between political science and political theory,
and statist distinctions between political theory and international relations,
have been subject to increasingly vigorous challenge.

State Policy Link

The Affirmatives call for a change in state policy functions to legitimize the
system that caused the affirmative harms in the first place - it is best to act to
challenge the state system by recognizing the here and now as a political space
WALER-88 [R.B.J., PROFESSOR @ UNIVERSITY OF VICTORIA, CANADA, ONE WORLD, MANY
WORLDS: STRUGGLES FOR A JUST WORLD PEACE]
Whether rethinking security, development, or democracy, there is a similar pattern.
Problems are posed as questions of policy. Mainstream political forces attempt to answer
these questions of policy, and they do so on the presumption that existing institutions and
authorities are sufficient both to formulate answers and to put them into effect. Critical
social movements however are driven to move from specific problems to the demand for
structural transformation. And they move from received images of the way structural
transformation is to be attained-the images of political revolutions as the taking of state
power. The posting of grand utopian schemes o brought down to earth-to a rethinking of the
possible character of social and political transformation itself. To protest about bombs and
poverty, violence and brutality, militarization and maldevelopment, is to confront e need to
rethink the way people live together and act toward each other. The practices of critical
social movements are necessarily depicted not only to attempts to bring about better
policies, of the kind usually perceived by politicians and leaders of state, but toward a
rethinking of political life in general. Thinking about peace and justice in terms of policy
prescriptions is both much easier and more difficult than thinking about emerging
conceptions of what it means to act politically. It is easier because at least it is possible to
point to existing actors that have a real and immediate capacity to effect change. The most
outrageous thing about the current drift toward One World or Two World is not that it is
occurring but that the capacity to stop this drift already exists in the modern world neither
starvation nor militarization are inevitable. If certain states acted more responsibly, we
might say, the dangers of nuclear extermination would not be so alarming. If the world
economy were to be organized less in order to maximize profits than to provide even a more
equitable distribution of resources and the satisfaction of basic humans needs for everyone,
then the blood-curdling poverty of so many people would not be so extreme. The removal of
the international delx burden is not beyond the capacity of existing institutions.
Conservative arms controllers and radical peace activist are not always very far apart in
making plausible suggestions about how to defuse the most destabilizing weapons systems.
Technologies are available, at a price, that would reduce the most harmful environmental
hazards. It is not difficult to think of sensible procedures that would manage some of the
most pressing problems on the global agenda. There are undoubtedly many people.
Including many who are active in social movements, who would be happy enough to see
some particularly noxious symptoms brought under control. This is certainly understandable.
But the real force if the message coming from so many movements is that the control of the
symptoms cannot be enough. Indeed, movements recognize that attempts to treat
symptoms alone have often turned into one more legitimization of the underlying process
that create problems in the first place. The unhappy experience of so many foreign-aid
programs is perhaps indicative in this respect. The perspectives on a just world peace
emerging from critical social movements do not lead to a primary concern with policy
prescriptions of this kind, although they do offer criteria on which prescriptions ought to be
judged. They lead instead to a concern with more fundamental change. The pursuit of a just
world peace is inseparable from struggles to if new ways of acting politically in an era of
profound transformations. The significance of critical social movements is not to be assessed
only by their overt power to bring about change by themselves or by the credibility of their
specific policy recommendations. It lies in their capacity to recognized, interpret, and
symbolize patterns of contemporary transformations and to find new ways of being and
acting that enhance the capacity of people to exercise control over the processes that affect

their lives. It lies in their ability to articulate ways of being together that enhance the
possibilities of justice and undermine the need for violence. It lies in their ability to act in
specific circumstances while becoming more and more aware that to act in specific
circumstances is to engage with processes that affect people everywhere. Acting in
particular situations, critical social movements are able to generate new ways of thinking
about what it means to express solidarity with others to share a common destiny as human
beings. Their practices express new ways of knowing how to be both singular and many.
From this perspective, it is clear that a just world peace cannot be a singular condition,
something that can be specified in a way that is applicable to all societies at all times. A just
world peace many be a universal aspiration. But no one can claim a monopoly on what it
may come to be. Nor is it a static condition, an architectural procedure. It is an ongoing
process, a continuous struggle. It is possible to act in a world of peace and justice not is
some distant future-but here, and now.

Critical social movements can challenge the power of the state

WALKER- 88 [R.B.J., PROFESSOR @ UNIVERSITY OF VICTORIA, CANADA, ONE WORLD, MANY
WORLDS: STRUGGLES FOR A JUST WORLD PEACE]
All human action occurs under constraints. To adapt a formulation of Marx, people make
history, though not under conditions of their own choosing. We know that these constraints
are changing, are continually being reconstructed. People must necessarily change the ways
they make history. They have to change their understanding of what it means to make
history. All three of these themes- of structural transformation, of new responses to new
determinations, and an emerging intuition of the need to rethink the most basic categories
through which we make sense of what is going on and what is possible- are present in the
practices of critical social movements.
We live in an age that does seem to be in the midst of epochal transformations. The global
structures that constrain what is possible are both very large and very powerful. He
immediate problems before us are very dangerous. But to take critical social movements
seriously is to celebrate a contradiction that it only apparent. It is to claim that such
movements offer a fairly good account of changing structural conditions and of some of the
political practices that are appropriate under those conditions. Movements suggest that
what counts now is less the existing rigidities of power than the possibility of empowering
people in their everyday lives. The struggle for peoples security, for empowering
development, and for deepening democracy cannot be measured in the same currency as
either guns or butter, swords or ploughshares.
This is an age of contradictory possibilities. In the face of scenarios of No World and Two
Worlds, existing authorities can achieve a great deal. They can agree about arms control,
initiate nuclear freeze, construct a better law of the sea, eliminate the gross abuse of
humans rights, end apartheid. Yet such achievements, while urgent still only amount o a
holding operation. They ignore the first principle of political life: everything changes.
This is a time of both immediate struggles and long-term transitions. In an era in which
political life has become increasingly concerned with short term government politics, critical
social movements understand that to act in the preset is to act in the future. They also
understand that although conditions are uneven in different societies, the development of
new connections means that the need for new forms of political life everywhere cannot be
avoided.
Prevailing images of power and revolution depend upon the image of a center to be taken
and held. Unity and the common front, the sovereign system and the political party: These

constitute paradigms of strength. But critical social movements have begun to show that
this image is deeply illusory. Movements may be fragile, but they have been able to cut off
the roots of excessive state power. They have been able to generate empowering projects,
meanings, and practices for people who had seemed helpless.

Policy Agenda Link

Policy agenda not needed their idea of a proper
WALER-88 [R.B.J., PROFESSOR @ UNIVERSITY OF VICTORIA, CANADA, ONE WORLD, MANY
WORLDS: STRUGGLES FOR A JUST WORLD PEACE]
These possibilities may not add up to a resounding manifesto addressed to the waiting
masses, nor to a policy agenda addressed to those closest to state power, nor even to a
glorious utopian scheme addressed to the nascent visionary in all of us- some may judge
this a sign of weakness. But it is increasingly apparent that such images of the relationship
between political analysis ad political practice are deeply at odds with the understanding of
politics that are emerging from critical social movements themselves. These new
understandings are important. What seems inevitable turns out to be merely contingent.
What seems strong and unapproachable is, in fact, quite brittle. People discover that they
are not powerless in the face of daunting problems but are capable of making enormous
advances in the immediate situation in which they live, work, love, and play. Taken together,
these six possibilities amount to different ways of trying to make space for movements. They
reflect a willingness to listen, to interpret what is heard, and to recommend-tentatively-on
the basis of the interpretation. They suggest ways in which ordinary people can participate
in the process of working toward a just world peace in their own everyday lives. They give us
an emerging sense of coherence to the forces now struggling for expression. They lead to
different ways of asking questions about what can ad ought to be done. In short, this book
participates in an ongoing politics of interpretation. It gowns out of a recognition that the
categories and languages in which it is now possible to speak about global problems and
political practices incorporate historical specific interests. Although there is not shortage of
information about the state of the modern world, it is exceptionally difficult to turn this
information into liberating human practices. Information is created largely by elites and for
elites. Dominant forms of knowledge and information presume some things are important
whereas others are less so. Knowledge and power and intimately associated. Emerging
social and political forces have always has to challenge prevailing categories and
interpretations. Such challenges have become specially important in the modern world.
Dominant categories are constantly reinforced, not only through overt propaganda and the
mass media, but also through pervasive myths about science and progress and
sophisticated claims to expertise and legitimacy. It is extremely difficult for emerging social
and political forces to put what they are doing into any clear perspective or to see
themselves as participating in anything of wider significance. My concern, therefore, is to
sketch an interpretation of processes that seem most important from the perspectives of
critical social movements. I seek to affirm that what people are doing, often in extreme
difficulty and with little clear understanding of how what they are dong resonates with that is
gong on elsewhere, constitutes source of considerable hope in the modern world. This is not
to say that states, or elites, or political parties, or other more-established political actors are
not also doing interesting and hopeful things. But their interpretations of contemporary
trajectories are already deeply instilled in us all. There are other voices to be heard. These
voices are nurtured in uncertainty and danger. But they aspire to an openness and vision
that is blocked by the dominant forces of our time. To engage in struggles for a just world
peace in the late twentieth century is to understand that these voices are coming more and
more insistent, more and more aware of how to break through the routines and dogmas that
keep us as we are.

Link Turn Shield

They'll never be able to win any kind of link offensea. History is on our side- tons of demands have been made and none of them have
ever been able to dismantle or delegitimize the state.
b. Our alternative sucks up all their offense- It is the step farthest away from
state-centered politics, there plan will never be able to do more.
c. You can't use the current system to dismantle itself- only our alternative can
solve.

Alternative Solvency

Role of Ballot
Use your ballot to re-orient politics away from the state and towards the
community
BOOKCHIN, 1989 [ Murray, Left Green Perspectives, Number 18, Nov., http://lpg.socialecology.org/,]
There is now a great need to give thus consciousness palpable form and reality. If the 1960s
gave rise to a counterculture to resist to prevailing culture, the closing years of the century
have created the need for popular counter-institutions to countervail the centralized state.
The specific form that such institutions could take may vary according to the traditions,
values, concerns, and culture of a given area. But certain basic theoretical premises must be
clarified if one is to advance the need for new institutions and, more broadly, for a new
radical politics. The need once again is to define politics-indeed, to give it a broader
meaning than it had had in the past-becomes a practical imperative. The ability and
willingness of radicals to meet this need may well determined the future of movements like
the Greens and the very possibility of radicalism to exist as a coherent force for basic social
change. The major institutional arenas-the social, the political, and the statistician- were
once clearly distinguishable from each other. The social arena could be clearly demarcated
from the political, and the political, in turn, from the state. But in our present, historically
included world, these have been blurred and mystified. Politics has been absorbed by the
state, just as society has increasingly been absorbed by the economy today. If new, truly
radical movements to deal with ecological breakdown are to emerge and if an ecologically
oriented society is to end attempts to dominate nature as well as people, thus process must
be arrested and reversed. It easy to think of society, politics, and the state ahistorically, as if
they had always exited as we find them today. But the fact is that each one of these has had
a complex development, one that should be understood if we are to gain a clear sense of
their importance in social theory and practice. Much of what we today call politics, for one, is
really statecraft structured around staffing the state apparatus with parliamentarians,
judges, bureaucrats, police, the military, and the like, a phenomenon often replicated from
the summits of the state to the smallest of communities. Bu the term politics, Greek
etymologically, once referred to a public arena peopled by conscious citizens who felt
component to directly manage their own communities, or poleis.

Vote negative to exercise your political space as an act of non-cooperation with

the state
KOTHARI-87 [Director of Peace and Global Transformations @ UN University, consulting
editor of alternatives, Towards a Just World Peace, eds. Walker and Mendlovitz]
It is necessary to understand the nature of this challenge. It is, in many ways, new and even
unintended in the sense of a well thought-out grand design. It is composed of a series of
obvious and inevitable strands, of struggles against existing hegemonics, organized
resistance, mainstream protest, and of civil liberties and democratic rights. But the
challenge is much more that all this. It is an effort to redefine the scope and the range of
politics. It is an effort to open up new spaces in both the arena of the State and several other
spheres of civil society outside that arena. And it is based on new spurts in consciousnessbeyond economize, beyond restraining definitions of the political process, beyond the facile
(and false) dichotomy of the State versus the Market, beyond both dehumanizing religiosity
and dehumanizing modernity. It is discovering new indigenous roots and sustenance and
strength based not so much on either the fractured Old or a mediocre and insipid New as on
genuine possibilities of alternatives that can actually work. In thus process of
conscientization and actual struggle as well as of the search for new alternatives there has

emerged a while new class of people known as activists. They have essentially come from
the conscious, enlightened and troubled streams of the middle class, and are enraged in a
wide range of activities, from Sarvodaya style constructive work and NGO0 type
development projects to more struggle-oriented political work; but they essentially settle in
the latter mode of intervention. From this convergence of a conscious and restless people
and a conscientiousness and equally restless class of volunteer politicians (to be
distinguished from professional party politicians), the new grass-roots movements are taking
shape. It is a convergence that is making it possible to conceive the knitting of the
thousands of micro struggles and experiments into some kinds of a macro perspective. The
convergence of new grass roots politics and new grass roots thinking is leading to definitions
of the scope and range of politicians. Around these redefinitions new social mediums are
emerging. The environment, the rights and the role of women, health, food and nutrition,
education, shelter and housing, dispensation of justice, communications and dissemination
of information, culture, and lifestyles, the achievement of peace and disbarment-none of
these was considered the subject matter of politics, at any rate not for the domestic politics
or for mass politics in which the ordinary people involved. All this has now changed. Ecology
cannot any longer be left to the experts in ecology or in economic development, not even to
the parents of environment though the establishments of such departs is itself a new
development it is a concession to popular political pressure. Not an ecological considerations
be left to be sorted out in the future on the presumption that if technology-based
development erodes the environment in the short run, thus can be remedied by more
technology in the long run. Ecology, the people say, must be preserved here and now; it
cannot be left to the good intentions and pious declarations of governments. It must become
a part of the peoples own concern, an organized concern at that, including agitations and
movements to restrain the State and corporate interest from the running amok and ruining
the life chances of both the present, and even more so of the future generations, and indeed
of non-human species and plants as well. Concern for nature ad reversing the rapacious
approach of modern science to favor nature is becoming part of a political movement, both
worldwide and within individual societies.

Spillover
Minor disturbances create cracks in the system- voting negative is the path for
emancipation
SHANTZ, 1998 [Jeffrey Arnold, professor @ Carleton University in Ottawa, Summer, Volume
1, Number 2, Post Identity, http://liberalarts.udmercy.edu/pi/Issue12.htm]
Active Resistance encourages a critical recoceptionulization of politics as currently
constituted. It offers a glimpse of politics which refuse containment by any of the containers
of territoriality, not just the state. Thus, it may further challenge the meanings of territory
and sovereignty in the current context. Such manifestation may open spaces for a
(re)constitution of politics by destabilizing tendencies toward enclosure of any totalizing
discourse, be it one of state, class, or identity. Just as global transformations de-stabilize
state-as container metaphors, reformulations of identity and community as in Active
Resistance de-stabilize identity as compotator notions. Political spaces are crated in
defiance of political containers. Marginal struggles open spaces of experimentation in lived
experiences. Through the construction of futures in the present they nurture possibilities
which cannot be contained within conventional, territorial notions of politics. The emergence
of subterranean radicalism, which receive scant attention even within critical works, open
cracks in the ground of the political. Interests and groups defined as marginal because they
have become disturbances in the system of social integrayon and precisely the struggles
which many be the most significant from the point of view of historical emancipation from
social hierarchy and domination [emphasis in original (Abramowitz 1110. Active Resistance
asks us why we should assume that a global colic society will be any better than the civil
society that brought poverty, homelessness, racism, and ecological annihilation in the first
place.

Small acts of resistance can lead to large - scale movementsRosa Parks is our
example
MARTIN, 1990 [Brian, associate professor at the University of Wollongong, Australia,
Uprooting War]
In most situations where injustice has occurred or some sort of systematic oppression exits,
there are a small number of people or groups who express opposition. These people and
their actions provide potential sparks to ignite social movements. In many cases these
sparks of opposition are quickly extinguished. Other times only a small action is needed to
ignite a social movement. A classic example is the refusal by Rosa Parks in 1955 to give up
her seat one bus for a white person. This sparked the beginning of the bus boycott in
Montgomery, Alabama, which in turned played a role in the expansion of the modern back
civil rights movement in the United States. The small act of questioning or resistance may
be all that is required: calling a meeting, writing a letter, making a speech, or refusing to
obey an order.

Voting negative snowballs every struggle could be used as a spring board for a
revolution
BOOKCHIN, AND BIEHL, 1991 [Murray and Janet, Left Green Perspectives, Number 23,
June., http://lpg.social-ecology.org/ ,]
We believe that the Left Greens minimum program should center on issues like control of
growth, creating a decentralized, confederal participatory democracy (which the
nation0state and its bureaucracy certainly do not want), and ecological issues that can be
dealt with on a local level. The proposed program is surprisingly lacking in even a basic
ecological outlook, let alone a prominent one. Left Green groups will surely want to provide
guidance to their communities in struggles for the preservation of wetlands, forests, lakes,
good agricultural land, and particularly the activation of citizens in municipal and regional
public life. With all the fervor they have, Left Greens should cite the many patent injustices
even ones that are unjust by bourgeois standardsas examples of capitalisms abuses. They
should view all such struggles as descriptive jumping off points for elucidating the radical
views of the Left. Greens and the need for basic changes in the social orderchanges that
are incompatible with the existence of capitalism and that stand in flat contradiction to the
present social order. Even their seemingly reformist demands should generate the greatest
degree of radicalization possible and represent utopist alternatives to the irrationality of the
economy and the overwhelming tendency of capitalism to despoil the natural world and
commodity human beings. In this way, the Left Greens positionbased overwhelmingly on
ecological preservation on opposition to growth, and on the expansion of democratic rights
can give a revolutionary thrust to what initially may seem like reforms

Critical Works Best Form of Resistance

Critical social movements are best - they challenge the state structure and its
legitimacy, providing a path for social transformation
RUIZ- 90 [PROFESSOR @ HOFSTRA UNIVERSITY, CONTENDING SOVEREIGNITIES:
REDEFINING POLITICAL COMMUNITY, EDS. WALKER AND MENDOLOVITZ]
Nevertheless, states and revolutionary movements do not monopolize contemporary social
and political practice, especially in the Third World. The emergence of ant systemic
movements in India, the global feminist movement, the peace movement in Western
Europe, the popular movement in Chile that repudiated Augusto Pinochet, and converging
human rights movements all over the world- are testimony not only to the changing
contours of social and political life, but intimations of a different, qualitatively new politics.
Perhaps it is means that the theory and practice of state sovereignty is most profoundly
challenged. In an earlier work, I argued that critical social movements are the enactment of
a drama of liberation and transformation toward a future of freedom and justice. What is
decisive in thus drama is the priority of liberation and transformation that is implied in the
practices of these movements. Into is important to recognize, as Adre Hunder Frank and
Marta Fuentes have, the difference between social movements in the West and in the South.
The latter tend to be largely popular and working class, the former mostly middle class.
What is often ignored, however it that the vitality of critical social movements deepens, to
some degree, on the linkages that are made between them and revolutionary movements,
indeed the conjoin of critical socially movements and the revolutionary project of justice and
liberation is going birth to what Sharon Welch calls communities of resistance and solidarity.
While both critical social movements and revolutionary movements address common
concerns, they operate within the plurality of social and political spaces in many instances;
they provide mutual criticism in the spirit of critical solidarity. Here the chalked of critical
social movement is the fundamental, particularly in the context of the dominant statist
tradition of modern politics. For these movements not only articulate a different
understanding of political and ideological space, they keep these spaces open for
transformation This is crucial, since that state system, particularly in the post-World War II
ear, has tend toward greater authoritarianism and centralization, contracting political space,
and depoliticizing the masses. The space of action of the new social movements, Claus
Offe has argued, is a space of non-institutional politics which is not provided for in the
doctrines and practices of liberal democracy and the welfare state. Whereas the
neoconservative project seeks to restore the nonpolitical, non-contingent, and uncontestable
foundations of civil society (such as property, the market, the work ethic, the family, and
scientific truth) in order to safeguard a more restricted-and therefore more solid-sphere of
state authoritythe politics of new social movements, by contrast, seeks to politicize the
institutions of civil society in way that are not constrained by the channels of representative
bureaucratic political institutions, and thereby reconstitute a civil society that is no longer
dependent upon even more regulation, control and intervention. Because of their marginal
relationship to the doctrines and practice of liberal democracy and the welfare state, critical
social movements, particularly those that are not only class conscious but are also class
aware offer the possibility of a much broader movement of resistance to domination.
Because of their multi-faced forms of political practice, they are able to refuse the modernist
temptation to theorize or to reduce the responsibility for change to an elite vanguard or
managerial class. They remind us that politics cannot be reduced to economics. For as long
as they uphold the priority of justice and equality, reuse the illusion of non-ideological
politics, and remain in solidarity with authentic revolutionary movements, critical social
movements offer the possibility of a more radical democratic and participatory politics that
can avoid the pitfalls of modern political strategies. Such movements also pose challenges
to the modernist epistemological

2NC Impacts

Value to Life
The result is the total disempowerment of the individual - we will always be stuck
with the status quo
BOOKCHIN, AND BIEHL 1991 [Murray and Janet, Left Green Perspectives, Number 23,
June., http://lpg.social-ecology.org/,]
And it must be a political program. Politics play a far greater role in the ecological and
economic facts of life than could have been anticipated in earlier periods , given the
increasingly pervasive role of the state in social life today. We live in an era of increasing
state capitalism, despite attempts in Eastern countries to create a market economy. In the
West, where capitalism has followed a normal or classical development, the market, public
life, and even private life are increasingly controlled by the state indeed in great measure
enveloped by it including its enormous powers of surveillance. In the interplay between the
commodification of life and the states control of even intimate aspects of life by
bureaucracies, the overall effect is to totally disempower the individual who as a commodity
and an object of state manipulation and surveillance seems to exercise no control over his or
her life. The need to lift bureaucratic controls and state supremacy from public life has
given a priority to politics that exceeds anything we have seen in the recent past . The
proposed programs economistic bias should be significantly shifted towards an ethical,
ecological, democratic, and political orientation. In dealing with the economy, it should
make the immediate, minimal demand that the factory system and the capitalist
marketplace be increasingly taken over by the municipality and popular citizen assemblies,
with alternative technologies, new forms of confederal municipal management of the
economy, a peoples bank to finance municipally controlled enterprise, and sharp limits to
growth. The image of a moral economy should be spelled out in visionary political as well as
ethical terms that describe a rational and ecological future based on empowered citizens,
rather than in terms of the market economy, to whose abuses this program offers only
surprisingly modest correctives.

State = Extinction
Maintenance of state power and sovereignty results in extinction
FALK 90 [PROFESSOR @ PRINCETON UNIVERSITY, CONTENDING SOVEREIGNITIES:
REDEFINING POLITICAL COMMUNITY, EDS. WALER AND MENDOLVITZ]
Hypotheses about a coming global civilization are often put forwardpartly descriptively
and partly normativelyas an overlay upon this debate about the role, viability, patterning,
and variety of sovereign states. The contention goes beyond either liberal formulations of
interdependence or Marxist formulations of global class structure and international division
of labor. In effect, a global ethos is emerging that suggests a shared destiny for the human
species and a fundamental unity across space and through time, built around the bioethical
impulse of all human groups to survive and flourish. Such an ethos has implications for the
assessment of problems, the provision of solutions, and the overall orientation of action and
actors. For most people and leaders, this shared sense of destiny does not displace a
persisting primary attachment to the state as a vehicle for aspiration and as an absolute,
unconditional bastion of security. As the imagery of nuclear winter dramatizes, leaders of
nuclear powers seem prepared to threaten the overall survival of civilization and even risk
partial or total extinction, if such a threat seems necessary to uphold the sovereign identity
of a particular state, or even, more narrowly, the persistence of a particular regime or
governing elite. The logic of war in the nuclear age devours the self that is the object of
protection and holds hostage the entire human raceindeed, the life process as a whole.
From a religious perspective, it is a blasphemy to creation, the sacred work of divinity, to
contemplate as a deliberate and discretionary undertaking by human agency the destruction
of the world; nuclearism is indefensible in both the most fundamental philosophical sense
and in its practical relationship to human well-being.
There is thus at the base of or inquiry a powerful set of paradoxical forces at work: even as
the territorial state becomes more vulnerable to what takes place beyond sovereign reach, it
acquires a capability that generates many varieties of extraterritorial harm as side-effects of
normality. Such a loss of territorial moorings exposes the problem of political organization
of international life from the perspective of state sovereignty.
Reliance on traditional state based politics results in extinction we need to
recognize that state based political action is bankrupt
WALKER- 88 (R.B.J., PROFESSOR @ UNIVERSITY OF VICTORIA, CANADA, ONE WORLD, MANY
WORLD: STRUGGLES FOR A JUST WORLD PEACE]
Concerns about the management of the existing order merge with concerns about the
consequences of new forces remarking the world in unforeseen ways. It is in this context
that new technologies are invoked most insistently. Whether as weapons or as
communications satellites and microchips, many new technologies have the capacity to
fundamentally alter the nature of human interaction. With the increasingly capital-intensive
nature or modern production processes and the global flexibility of capital flows, economic
life is being transformed more rapidly than most economists, let alone ordinary people, can
properly comprehend. With the manipulation of genetic codes, people have the capacity to
intervene in their own biological evolution. With new weapons-- nuclear, biological, and
chemicalas well as more effective means of delivery, people have the capacity to put an
end to evolution once and for all.
These new technologies express very complex social forces. They are especially significant
for the way they enter into structures and processes that are organized on a global basis
rather than within a territorial state. It is not possible to make much sense of the processes
that now bring war, poverty, repression, environmental decay, rapid population growth, and
so on, without a grasp of how they are structured globally. These processes certainly create

problems of manageability for existing political structures. But more significant, it is not at
all clear just how far these processes that are compatible with existing political practices and
jurisdictions. In a world in which political life is dominated by the state, yet many of the of
the most important forces that affect peoples lives are often effectively beyond state control
problems of management can seem less important than the need for new categories of
political analysis, new forms of social community, new forms of human solidarity and group
identity.
Problems of management and the emergence of new forces converge to create a
widespread sense of the bankruptcy of prevailing ideas about what is to be done. The
extraordinary appeal of fundamentalisms of one kind or another is particularly telling in this
context. Change brings uncertainty, and uncertainty invites a leap into the known or, at
least, what is assumed to be knowna religious text, a romanticized dream of an earlier and
simpler age, a source of authority that can justify the assertion of order, not to mention the
iron fist. The specific character and causes of fundamentalism undoubtedly vary from
society to society, but its presence across different societies is striking. It is paralleled by
widespread skepticism about the great ideologies that arose in nineteenth-century Europe
and have subsequently informed political life almost everywhere. There is even widespread
skepticism about the value of any imaginative or utopian aspirations for the future.

Government Politics = Hitler and Bush

Leaving politics to the state leaves society in the hands of Hitlers and Bushes the government will always try to crackdown on dissent in order to maintain their
power
KATSIAFICAS- 97 [GEORGE, professor @ SUNY, The Subversion of Politics]
The difficulties that the media have in discussing the Autonomen are matched by the
incapacity of some political analysts to comprehend the reasons for or meaning of
autonomous movements. Many Americans find it incomprehensible when German young
people portray the new world order as nothing more than a more efficient and seemingly
democratic version of Hitlers thousand-year Reich. It is taken for granted that Germans
want national unity and that they are loyal and obedient citizens. Nothing could be further
from the truth with regard to the Autonomen: they prefer regional autonomy to national
unity and would rather live as human beings in a world community than as citizens of the
German state. Americans with the interest and ability to write about postwar European
politics ignored extraparliamentary movements in part because of their conception of
politics as electoral. Parliamentary campaigns are of more interest than demonstrations
because the former deal with power, whereas the latter often revolve around marginalized
youth. The U.S. mass media, relying as they do on foreign celebrities and government
officials for much of their information, made guerrilla actions into spectacles, turned them
into Hollywood movies, CNN sound bites, and front-page headlines, simply because events
such as the kidnapping of a U.S. general or the murders of wealthy bankers make good copy,
whereas social movements composed of homeless young people taking over abandoned
buildings and fixing them up apparently do not.
Governments expend tremendous energy denying popular movements legitimacy rather
than heeding their emergence as a sign of an outdated social order in need of
transformation. In Europe, the states strategy has been simultaneously to criminalize and
co-opt extra parliamentary movements, and to some extent, this strategy has paid
dividends in the form of the semblance of stability. But as I rediscovered during each of my
trips to Europe, the Autonomen were far from neutralized, and in Germany at least, new
generations of activists have taken over from previous ones. Social movements are a
window through which we can glimpse the essential nature of society. My experiences in the
New Left taught me this. The civil rights movement illuminated racist aspects of U.S. society
that no one wanted to look at; the antiwar movement and counterculture revealed the
imperial arrogance of power and the ways it constrained our freedom; the feminist and gay
movements showed hot much our everyday lives are conditioned by unconscious structures
of power and brought these structures into question. Like the earlier workers movement,
these movements posed an alternative path for society to take. Although they failed to
change society as much as they hoped, they nonetheless altered prevailing customs and
institutions. No one would be more surprised than I if the Autonomen were able to help
radically transform Germany in the next decade or two. No matter what their future may be,
however, their history provides us with sometimes startling insights into German culture and
politics.

Global Domination Must Read

Failure to criticize the state at the micro level results in global domination
Kulnyett, 97 (Polity, XXX)
Participation as resistance compels us to expand the category of political participation.
Whereas traditional studies of participation delimit political participation from other social
activities, once participation is defined as resistance this distinction is no longer tenable.
Bonnie Honig suggests that performative action is an event, an agonistic disruption of the
ordinary sequence of things, a site of resistance of the irresistible, a challenge to the
normalizing rules that seek to constitute, govern, and control various behaviors. And, [thus]
we might be in a position to identify sites of political action in a much broader array of
constations, ranging from the self-evident truths of God, nature, technology and capital to
those of identity, of gender, race, and ethnicity. We might then be in a position to act- in the
private realm. A performative concept of participation as resistance explodes the distinction
between public and private, between the political and the apolitical. As Foucault explains,
what was formerly considered apolitical, or social rather than political, is revealed as the
foundation of technologies of state control. Contests over identity and everyday social life
are not merely additions to the realm of the political, but actually create the very character
of those things traditionally considered political. The state itself is superstructural in
relation to whole series of power networks that invest the body, sexuality, the family,
kinship, knowledge, technology and so forth. Thus it is contestations at the micro-level over
the intricacies of everyday life, that provide the raw material for global domination and the
key to disrupting global strategies of domination. Therefore, the location of political
participation extends way beyond the formal apparatus of government, or the formal
organization of the workplace, to the intimacy of daily actions and iterations.

Extinction Inevitable
Violence is increasing and extinction is inevitable we need to create alternative
spaces for political action
WALKER- 88 [R.B.J., PROFESSOR @UNIVERSITY OF VICTORIA, CANADA, ONE WORLD, MANY
WORLDS: STRUGGLES FOR A JUST WORLD PEACE]
On the one hand, there are forecasts of general global catastrophe. In its most popular for,
this No World scenario stresses the likelihood of a general nuclear war. Variations on the
theme point to fundamental social forces that, whether through a reliance on ecologically
destructive practices or through the encouragement of militarization and institutionalized
violence, threaten to bring about a general civilizational collapse. On the other hand, there
are forecasts of an intensification of insecurity for some people in particular. This can be
called the Two Worlds scenario. It predicts solutions to the problems of our agebut only
for some people. It comes with a widely advertised tale of progress and an unadvertised tale
of woe. This scenario promises greater international order through better management of
the states system: but order is then interpreted by the dominant powers and has little to
do with changing the underlying social, economic, political, and cultural processes that are
leafing to a greater resort to military force. In this sense, order is not the same as peace, still
less as justice. It simply implies a different kind of violence. It promises economic recovery
and technological miracles; but only for those who are able to participate in the world
economynot for the redundant, the unemployed, the marginalized; and especially not for
those premodern indigenous peoples who seem to be most profound causalities of new
technologies. Economic recovery is not the same as better economic technologies. Economic
recovery is not the same as better times ahead for all; it implies the emergence of two
worlds on one planet. It promises better management of environmental resources, but not
beyond limits prescribed by profitability. Those who depend on a close symbiosis with their
environment will still be vulnerable to the conflict between profit and conservation, and the
broader pleas for a greater ecological sensitivity will be unheard. It promises a reduction in
the abuse of human rights, but only as defined in the narrowest terms. In any case, it also
implies the elaboration of new forms of social injustice, as with the extension of the category
of terrorist to cover the protests of the excluded. It promises a happier, more meaningful
existence for all, but only through the commodification of desire. This scenario has a less
dramatic edge than the first, but is perhaps more plausible. There is no doubt that it is
possible to read a number of current trends as signs apply generally rather than to particular
groups. Each of these two scenarios comes in stronger and weaker versions. The Two World
scenario may appear as an account of intensifying inequalities between people and of the
disappearing middle class; or it may appear as an account of the way in which some
people are effectively becoming dispensable. The archetype of inequality is the relationship
between master and slave. But at least the master needed the slave. Now, in some parts of
the world, increasing numbers of people seem to be irrelevant to the societies in which they
live. Botshabelo, for example, is the second largest black settlement in South Africa after
Soweto, with a population of half a million people largely forced off the land by the
mechanization of agriculture, but it doesnt even appear on the tour maps. Like the
underside of cities, like the unemployed, like whole regions, indeed, in the case of Africa, like
whole continents, the marginalized and vulnerable are becoming invisible, superfluous,
dispensable. The specific case of South African apartheid, like the plight of the Palestinians,
has become a generalized symbol of the world in which we all live. Similarly, the No World
scenario may appear as the obliteration of life on earth or just the disappearance of life as
recognizable human. Thus, in addition to predictions of nuclear war or ecological collapse,
some analyses portray a generalized drift toward authoritarian forms of politics everywhere,
as states struggle to maintain control of the uncontrollable. Analysts point to the further
reduction of human existence to instrumental means turned into ends to processes of
cultural homogenization, and to the channeling of fundamental economic and political

conflicts into ethnic and racial violence. They stress how we all increasingly feel the pressure
of insecurities that used to be felt mainly by specific classes and groups: the extension of
instrumental rationality; the authoritarian state; the dispersed nature of power so that
powerlessness cannot be attributed to any fundamental casual mechanism; the tendency for
social or economic conflicts to shift onto new dimensions of privilege and deprivation
creating vulnerabilities in new social sectors with great rapidity. Political manipulation enters
ever more insidiously into the general production of cultural meaning through new
technologies, especially those of the mass media, medicine, psychiatry , and so on. These
may be only scenarios, but they are by no means easily dismissed. They capture the worries
of many scholarly analysts and political activists. And they certainly seem to capture the
empirical dynamics of the modern world more accurately than the simplistic spatial
distinctions between East and West, North and South. They recognize , for example, that the
south exists in the north as well as the other way around. It is particularly troubling that the
conventional political imagination is limited largely to the terrain defined by these two
scenarios. The No World scenario has become the broad context in which major problems
are specified. It lurks in the background, informing the rhetoric of even the most hardened
politician. The Two World scenario, on the other hand, has come to infuse the formulation of
solutions. Mainstream politics claims that major improvements can be made or that a certain
degree of sanity can be restored to major global structures. But the unwritten context of
such claims is a tacit and cynical acceptance that such solutions are available only to some
and not to others, trickle-down theories notwithstanding. In fact, the choice between No
World and Two Worlds is, for the overwhelming majority of humanity, no choice at all.

ATs

AT: We Challenge the State

Our links come before their turn
1. The plan is never actually passedOut Bookchin and Magnusson evidence are
pretty specific when they say that elites never listen to demandsthis means that
there is no plan passed that can challenge the state
2. Our link evidence describes what happens as a result of this challenge the
affirmative claims to participate init says that when you challenge the state
by advocating it should change something, it only legitimizes the states power
The affirmatives attempt to criticize the state by placing a demand upon it
legitimizes state violence
Navar, Professor at the University of Warwicks School of Law, Jayan, Transnational Law and
Contemporary Problems, Fall, 1999 p623-625
The mutuality of professional sensibilities between the criticized and the critic brings
with it a considerable degree of closure. Primary among the consequences of this familiarity
and, therefore, similarity between the professional location of both, is that emancipatory
imagination is contained within the same aspirational languages that are commonly
understood. Through this closure of language and, therefore, imagination, emancipation
itself becomes absorbed into an enclosed conceptual space for articulation. The standpoint
of the same rhetorical devices of civilizational projections become the tools for entitlement
claims. Put differently, what we might see as direction for emancipation is itself ordered by
our own conceptual frameworks that we derive from ourselves as subjects and objects of
ordering. Thus, just as the aspirations of most anti-colonial elite leaderships were infused
with the colonizers visions of human progressthe languages of statehood, of
modernization, of institution building, and the likeso too now the languages of the elites
of civil society reflect the terrain as demarcated by contemporary world-orderists.
Development, democracy, human rights, NGO networks, even education and law are
all contemporary slogans that are repeated in the hope of a progressive civilizational
movement towards human emancipation. And increasingly, these transnational, even
global, languages of human emancipation are formulated and articulated within
professional sites of resistance and activism that stand as mirrors of ordering institutions; for
the government committee there are the NGO forums, for the ministerial conference three is
the alternative conference of civil society delegates, for the business/corporate coalition
with government there are the similar NGO partnerships. The play of critique and
legitimization, of compromise and co-operation, of review and reformulation, is thereby
enabled, taking on a momentum and a rationale of its own, becoming an activity of grand
proportions where the activity itself becomes a reason for, and object of perpetuation. To be
outside of these circles of communication is deemed to be without voice, which is for the
critic an unacceptable silencing. To be inside these circles, however, entails a constant
torment of co-option, betrayal and appropriation of voice. The power of world ordering to
self-sustain. I suggest, lies precisely in this, its ability to order the voices of dissent. From this
perspective, the fact of dissent or critique is not, in itself, the significant indicator of
resistance that we might consider it to be. The point, I argue, is not that dissent is
registered, but rather how, where and in what form that dissent is expressed. Voices of
dissent that are absorbed into the channels of voicing as provided by the structures of
order , in my view, have themselves been ordered. Rather than providing energies for
information, they are drained of them, sustaining instead the orders against which they
purport to stand. In the struggle to find a voice we, therefore, comply with the orders of
voicing: the best of times being when our voice is heard tolerated, sometimes even
congratulated and rewarded, the worst of times being when it is appropriated and
transformed into further legitimizations of violence, and most commonly, when it is simply

ignored. To sustain us, therefore, self-referential communities of voice are founded,

established, and propagated, quoting back and forth the same voices, repetition being
equated with significance and impact. While we keep busy being heard, achieving lots by
way of giving volume to (our) voice, little is changed in the ordering of worlds. How much of
the continuing violence within the misorderings of the world has followed from this
experience?

AT: We Constrain the State

1. Although the plan may be a constraint on the state- the affirmative asks that
the state enforces this constraint upon themselves, this is a proactive policy and
our link evidence says that this legitimizes the state.
2. This link turn is dependent on plan passageif the plan doesnt pass than there
is nothing to constrain the state which means if we win the fiat debate then this
becomes irrelevant.
3. Our alternative is the only way to truly challenge state powerusing the state
to challenge itself guarantees failure.
Walker, Professor at the University of Victoria, Contending Sovereignties: Redefining Political
Community, Ed. Walker and Mendlovitz, 1990
The discussion so far has drawn attention to a persistent way of speaking about state
sovereignty. The rhythms of the conversation can be heard in the writings of academic
analysts, the clichs of policymakers, and the most characteristic forms of popular debate.
According to this way of speaking, state sovereignty appears to be something that is ever
present or about to disappear.
This discursive ritual of presence and absence, I have suggested, can be understood in the
context of a particular resolution of questions about the character and location of political
community as these were articulated in early-modern Europe. These questions were
answered through a specific account of the relationship between universal and particular
mediated at the level of the state. Contemporary research on and speculation about the
principle of state sovereignty occurs largely-- though not exclusivelywithin discursive
horizons that can be traced back to this historically specific resolution.
Important destabilizations of this resolution are also visible in the contemporary debate,
especially among those who have been concerned with the historicity of both the state and
state system. However, even these destabilizations have failed to upset the overall
equilibrium of our understanding of political life. They are kept in check by the more or less
successful claims of state formalized by the principle of state sovereignty, to monopolize
both the theory and practice of political community. A more radical destabilization of the
prevailing political categories is resisted finally on the ground that there is no other
resolution of the relationship between universality and particularity that has any substantial
political plausibility in the modern world, despite the accumulating evidence of global
processes and universal dangers. The particular form and functions of the state may change.
The patterns of cooperation between states may also change. But when it comes to the
suggestion that global processes or universal dangers imply a fundamental transformation
of political community, the conventions of established discourse take on a renewed vitality.

AT: We Constrain the State

It is important to listen carefully to the rhythms and cadences of the established
rituals of speech in this context, because ways of speaking about state
sovereignty reproduce certain assumptions and resolutions of philosophical and
political questions that are constitutive of the principle of state sovereignty itself.
To speak about state sovereignty is to engage in forms of political practice, to
become caught up in immensely powerful forms of political action that appear to
be mere abstractions or ideologies. Perhaps the most telling indicator of just
what is at stake is that the principle of state sovereigntywhose meaning,
however we define it, can be understood as a consequence of massive
transformations in social, cultural, economic, and political practicehas become a
seemingly innocuous, even boring political concept, of interest primarily to
international lawyers and constitutional experts. Any attempt to come to terms
with the principles of state sovereignty seems to become a tiresome interrogation
of the obvious. But why, exactly, does it seem so obvious?

AT: Zizek/Demands Good

Our links swamp their argument
1. Specificity- This card doesnt say placing demands on the state is good, it just
says demands in general are goodthis is an important distinctiondemands may
be good in general but when directed at the state it is just state-centered
activism that legitimizes the state
2. Empirically disprovenNumerous demands are placed on the state every day
and it rarely responds- this should have caused the delegitimization their
evidence talks about
3. Zizek misunderstands the way media and government interact in the West
their evidences characterization of the publics perception of the legitimacy of
the state doesnt take into account the ways the modern western state is propped
up by media
And,
Our alternative is the best way to delegitimize the state- both the Walker and
Bookchin evidence says the best way is to recognize that the state is not the only
place for politics to take place- only our alternative creates a space for alternative
politics to challenge the state
You cant use the state against the state- its best to oppose the entire system
Bookchin, Murray, Left Green Perspectives, Number 38, http://lpg.social-ecology.org/, 1998
Whatever mystique surrounds the role of the state in maintaining public order and
adjusting social dislocationsincluding the growing abuses produced by modern capitalism
the commitment of state institutions is to the advancement of corporate (read: class)
interests. The modern state remains the indispensable means by which corporations can
expand and assert their power At a time when much is made of the global-ization of
capitalism, it is tempting for leftists to focus primarily on corporate power and, instead of
opposing the state, to look to it as a means to restrain rapacious global corporations. To do
so is to overlook a basic fact about the state: that it serves the interests of wealth and
property. That corporations are authoritarian institutions does not justify strengthening the
state to oppose them. Corporations have always been authoritarian. Some two centuries
ago, during the Industrial Revolution, individual factory owners made decisionsoften as
arrogantly as a modern CEOthat profoundly affected the lives of hundreds of people.
Having been on union, negotiating committees myself and observed the predatory behavior
of managers and capitalists, it surprises me that leftists today can be surprised by the
authoritarian relations that exist in factories and corporations. In as much as capitalists
enterprises constitute the most basic elements in the capitalist scheme, it is nave to
assume that the statist institutions that exist to serve them can be deployed to significantly
control them, still less challenge them. The drift of present0day leftists into statist politics
with the intention of restricting the power of capital is vitiated by a basic contradiction: the
very state machine that they suppose can control the bourgeois forces of production and
expansion is precisely the machine that capital has in great part created to extend its control
over social life. We can no more countervail and confront the state by entering into it than
we can countervail and confront the corporations by entering into them. A counterpower has
to be established against both the state and capitalism. It must draw on a variety of forces,
some of them quite traditional but readapted to present exigencies, to oppose the entire
system of what can properly be called state capitalism. This counterpower can be created

only out the great masses of people who feel neglected and denied economically and
politically, and alienated and oppressed by statist institutions. At this level of social
sensibility, the classical lines of proletariat and petty bourgeoisie are waning in importance.
The industrial worker who, like the professional, may at any time be phased out of his or her
occupation by a new technological advance; the retailer whose existence is being
threatened by huge corporate chains; the educator who is being supplanted by electronic
means of instructionsuch instances are almost unending in numberare faced with the
loss of a place in the existing society. From this increasingly socially undefined mass, united
by residence and facing the problems of a deteriorating community infrastructure, pollution,
insufficient child care, overwork, proliferating malls, and the destruction of city centers, the
problems of capitalism are being pooled into a fund that is no longer definable exclusively
along traditional class lines. At the same time, at least in the United States, inequalities of
income and wealth are wider than they have ever been in history. Most ordinary people
understand that there are those who have and those who have not; those who are
obscenely wealthy, and those whose income, educational opportunities, access to health
care, and social mobility are dwindling at a terrifying pace.
Metaphoric condensation cuts both ways- they have no arguments to prove why
the aff would be perceived as a critique of state violence any more than it would
be perceived as an endorsement of the necessity of state-centered politics.

Demands Fail

2NC Demands Fail

1. Extend the Bookchin and Magnusson evidence- the state never bends, it
empirically ignores any demands made upon it
2. Turn- Bureaucracy
Movements must be distinct from the state or it leads to bureaucratization
Martin, Associate professor at the University of Wollongong, Australia, Uprooting War, Brian,
1990
Another big problem is maintaining self-managing features in the face of pressures for
bureaucratization: cooption in the bureaucratic system. Consider for example a consumer
movement (though the process applies also to political parties, trade unions, peace groups
and sundry others). In the early stages there are many small independent grassroots
initiatives. To coordinate these a national body is set up, As more people join the movement,
several full-time staff are hired to handle the national administration. The government,
media and other influential groups take notice of the movement, and consult the movement
leaders and staff. Perhaps government funds are provided, or employers agree to administer
a salary deduction scheme to fund the movement. Pressures mount to increase the paid
staff and to formalize the administration. The national office, because of its dependence on
funding or its contacts with national elites, supports a more moderate line on consumer
issues than most of its constituents. The process of bureaucratization has begun. Is this
process inevitable, as social theorist Robert Michels and his iron law of oligarchy claims?
No: some groups largely avoid the process, such as Friends of the Earth in Australia. But the
pressures in this direction are strong, especially the pressures arising from the bureaucratic
organizations of the state, including political parties. To work through the state
bureaucracies or the major political parties, it is often more effective in the short term to
adopt a similar bureaucratic form. To challenge the fundamental interests of the state
bureaucracies is another matter. Without a firm commitment to a grassroots strategy for
challenging structures, it is all too easy to fall into the process of bureaucratization.
Attempts to work through bureaucracy fail
Martin, Associate professor at the University of Wollongong, Australia, Uprooting War, Brian,
1990
For most social action groups, including gay activists, feminists, antiracists, education
activists, environmentalists and antiwar activists, bureaucracy as the dominant form of
social organization has not been a focus of attention.
Bureaucracy is often not seen at all: it is accepted as part of the social and political
landscape. As a result, there have been few campaigns aimed at transforming large-scale
bureaucracies.
Action groups that focus on challenging social problems often work through bureaucracy,
sometimes eagerly and sometimes grudgingly. Their aim is to change bureaucratic policies,
not bureaucratic structures. Groups fighting for the rights of women, gays and oppressed
minorities aim to overturn discriminatory policies and to obtain fair hiring and promotion
practices and representation within bureaucracies. Environmentalists seek to stop particular
freeways or chemical factories, not to reconstitute the basic nature of social decisionmaking. Experienced activists pass on their knowledge of how to use the state
bureaucracies: who are the sympathetic bureaucrats, how to lobby effectively, how to apply
mass pressure to influence policy at key moments.
All of this can be quite useful and often effective, and should not be rejected. But working
through bureaucracy on the inside or demanding policy changes from the outside does little
to transform bureaucracy itself. In fact, working through bureaucracy can reinforce the

legitimacy and sway of bureaucracy y itself. In addition campaigns oriented towards working
through bureaucratic or applying pressure for change at the top ten to become
bureaucratized themselves.
3. Their argument is ridiculous- tons of demands have been placed upon the state
and barely any of them have even been considered by the state- they cant really
expect that the government is actually going to pass their plan.
4. The government will ignore their demands, and even if they dont. the
governments action will just be symbolic.
Martin, Associate professor at the University of Wollongong, Australia, Uprooting War, Brian,
1990
Assume that these obstacles are overcome and that public outcry over war preparations
reaches deafening levels. This occasionally happens, as in the 1980s. What next? Does this
influence policy-making elites? There are several ways in which elites can act to dampen
vocal public concern over way. One way is simply by doing nothing by carrying on as usual.
This is the standard procedure. Surges of public concern based on outrage are easily
becalmed. Unless the solid core of committed people in a social movement is quite
substantial, well motivated and ready for long term struggle, business-as-usual policies by
government will outlast the periodic waves of public concern . Another way in which cities
dampen social movements is by entering government-t-government negotiations .
Negotiations give the appearance of government concern and action, and a focus on them
can drain social concern. Prior to the 1982 United Nations Second Special Session on
Disarmament, many antiwar groups around the world put enormous effort into focusing
attention and citizen concern on the conference, which turned out to be a dismal failure. In
terms of demobilizing public concern, even more effective than negotiating failures are
minor negotiating successes. The treaty in 1963 which banned tests of nuclear weapons in
the atmosphere was a major contributing factor to the decline of public concern over nuclear
war which had been heightened since the late 1950s by antiwar activists . The treaty had
little impact on the ongoing nuclear arms race, since the nuclear weapons establishments
had made ample preparations to continue and indeed expand nuclear testing programmes
underground. Similarly, the 1987 treaty to ban land-based intermediate-range nuclear forces
from Europe was both a resource to peace movement pressure and a factor in reducing
popular concern about nuclear war. Meanwhile, nuclear and conventional weapons continue
to be modernized, and land-based missiles removed from European countries are being
replaced by sea-based missiles.
5. Their resistance is crap - their approach to social change relies on lobbying the
government to change their policy, which fails to do anything - it is best to act in
the here and now to resist the power of the state
FALK-87 [Richard, Professor of International Law @ Princeton, Towards a Just World Peace,
eds. Walker and Mendlovitz]
Direct resistance activities by civil society are of greatest interest for our purposes. The
conventional expressions of resistance are those undertaken within the framework of a legal
action, and amount to appeals to the authorities. In the United States, lobbying Congress or
an authorized demonstration are illustrative. Moer interesting and significant are those
initiatives that pose the challenge in more serious terms, defy the authority of the state to
varying degrees, and act out of the reoriented consciousness of the citizen/pilgrim.
Resistance here is thus a symbolic surrogate in a time of danger for the real commitment to
a transformed societal order. The occupation by English women of the area around the
cruise missile base at Greenham Common is an excellent illustration. Their resistance
activity was also an expression of radical feminism, exemplified by the way decisions were

taken within the group and their commitment, seen in the daily round of their encampment,
to an entirely different conception of authority and power.
A similar resistance consciousness has been mobilized by the small community in Bangor,
Washington State, that calls itself Ground Zero. Their particular project is to blockade a
naval base on the Pacific coast and to obstruct the train tracks that carry nuclear warheads
as a way of opposing the Trident submarine, which the group castigates as a first-strike
weapon. These activists have gone to jail repeatedly and have altered the outlook of
important symbolic figures, such as the Archbishop of Seattle, a county prosecutor, and
several workers at the base. Their outlook is as kind of amalgam of early Christianity and
Gandhism. As with the Greenham women, these militants are citizen/pilgrims at work in their
lives and activities in building the normative foundation for what amounts to a new
civilization. Their specific acts of resistance are directed against particularly objectionable
encroachments upon civil society by the militarized state, but their concern is to reinvent
politics. They lack any confidence in representative democracy, political parties, and
elections. Their initiatives are assertions of freedom at the grass-roots level, and center upon
using the tactics of non-violent defiance and love to expose the illegitimacy of the violent
state. The Ground Zero ethos seeks, above all, to enact in political settings the transforming
power of love.
There are substantive settings, of course, where normative initiatives are being undertaken.
An initiative of particular interest in the United States is the so-called sanctuary movement
organized by a series of churches in the southwest to provide sanctuary for illegal aliens,
especially from El Salvador, who would face persecution and often execution if returned to
their country. Here, the religious concern with protection of the weak has led these churches
to defy the state and its cruel politics by offering individuals and alternative haven secure
against deportation.

2NR DEMANDS FAIL

Using the state as a mechanism for change guarantees failure
Martin, 1990
[Brian, associate professor at the University of Wollongong, Australia,
Uprooting War]
When I refer to war, I refer to modern war: the organized violence of professional military
forces on behalf of states. War is not a timeless and unchanging category: it reflects
historical and social conditions, such as the prevailing forms of technology and the gender
division of labour. In addressing the modern war system it is necessary to concentrate on the
contemporary social structures most implicated in it. Most antiwar campaigns have not
focused on changing social structures. The state system, for example, is usually seen as an
inevitable part of the social and political landscape, rather than being addressed as a
dangerous structure in need of replacement.
Overcoming the power of elites is key critical for social movement success
MARTIN, 1990 [Brian, associate professor at the University of Wollongong, Australia,
Uprooting War]
Sparking a social movement does not automatically provide a strategy for the movement,
not even a clear set of goals. The problem of mobilizing against the roots of war is more than
the problem of stimulating people to become concerned about an issue. The most difficult
problem is to create possible avenues for involvement and action which are both attractive
and effective. Consider the situation of isolated individuals or small groups who are
committed to trying to tackle the roots of war. They have thought out their goals and
methods, and have a tentative strategy, for example promoting social defence , peace
conversion or self-management. The question of mobilization then is how should actions or
campaigns be designed to stimulate greater commitment and participation towards the
goals of the activists? In the usual situation, much more than a spark is needed to launch a
social movement. A patient proves of developing goals, strategies and participation is
required. I have assumed that the groups are small and weak. If they are large and strong,
mobilization is not such a problem, though other difficult problems are likely to exist. At the
cuttent time, it should be realized that structure-challenging movements are weak. Some
social movements, such as the peace movement in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and in
the 1980s, can boast a high level of participation and public sympathy. But only a small
fraction of activities even at these times systematically challenge the underpinnings of war.
Furthermore, even large and apparently strong social movement s and cultures may be
vulnerable to attack by opposition forces. The European socialist and antiwar movement was
smashed after the outbreak of World War One, and the bulk of left political activism and
culture in the Untied States succumbed to cold war suppression in the late 1940s and the
1950s. Social activists should not mislead themselves that they are in a powerful position.
Almost always they are not. On the other hand, the position of social activists is potentially
powerful; since the bulk of the population is often opposed in a general way to war, political
repression, poverty and injustice. The problem is that elite groups are often more successful
in mobilizing populations for their own ends , for example to support wars to defend
freedom or our way of life. Elite groups have the powerful advantage of coercive
measures and influence over dominant communication channels . Furthermore, elites benefit
from a favourable set of structures such as the day-to-day framework of job, transport,
goods and services, and privatized home life. To be successful in mobilizing people, social
activists must overcome this formidable array of barriers, and overcome the mobilizing
power of elites.

AT: But Our Performance

The affirmatives performance resembles that of the peace movements in the 80S
the focus is on expressing personal views without any mechanism for
widespread social change
MARTAIN, 1990 [Brian, associate professor at the university of Wollongong, Australia,
Uprooting War]
Bob Overy has written a thought-provoking essay entitled How Effective are Peace
Movements? He makes the point that many activities undertaken by peace movements,
including writing letters, holding public meetings and demonstrations, and undertaking civil
disobedience, may serve more to help the particpants express their personal values and
show that they are taking a stand than the activities do to effectively deal with the problem
of war. Peace movements can become moral crusades testifying to good intentions but
achieving little beyond that. As John Zube wrote in a letter to me, the expression of mere
wishes will not suffice. It is like fire fighters who, jacking water, pumps and hoses, organize
themselves to chant, H20! H20! It is a strength of nonviolent action that participants can
puicily testify to and internally strengthen their personal commitment against war. In
addition, participants can gain a clearer picture of the driving forces behind war, for example
in being exposed to the repressive force of the state. But it is a potential weakness of
nonviolent action that participants may gloss over questions of effectiveness in the course of
undertaking a personally satisfuing stand against war.
>
Prescribing specific avenues for social change is key simple laying out idea or
goals ultimately relies on traditional structures which fail
MARTAIN, 1990 [Brian, associate professor at the university of Wollongong, Australia,
Uprooting War]
It is a common view among those who support fundamental social change from the
grassroots that such change cannot or should not be planned in any detail, but rather should
be left to those who are creating the change. For example, Kirkpatrick Sale in his mammoth
book Human Scale gives endless examples of hazardous of bigness and centralization in
every realm of society arid nature. But he refuses to give any suggestions about how to get
from present society to society on a human scale, arguing that this world pre-emt the actual
change. I disagree with this stance. Without detailed ideas of methods and alternatives ,
most people will rely on the models with which they are most familiar , such as existing largescale bureaucracies, decisions by elites and advice from experts. Presenting ideas for how
social change might be achieved does not necessarily pre-emt local initatives. The result
instead can be to stimulate local iticative and foster widespread discussion of strategy and
action. After all, ideas do not cause social change. Rather, social change is caused by people
who can choose to use ideas, adapt them or reject them, and take action.
>
46

Cooptation
Cooptation destroys the movement
BOOKCHIN, 1989 [Murray, Left Green Perspectives, Number 19, Nov., http://lpg.socialecology.org/,]
The Green movement, in general, is remarkably well positioned to become the arena for
working out such a perspective and putting it into action. Inadequacies, failures, and retreats
like those of die Grunen do not absolve radical social theorists from the responsibility of
trying to educate this movement and give it the theoretical sense of direction it needs. The
Greens have not frozen into hopeless rigidity, even in West Germany and France, despite the
enormous compromises that have already alienated the radicals in these countries from
their respective Green parties What is important is that the ecological crisis itself is not likely
to permit a broad environmental movement to solidify to the point that it could exclude
articulate radical tendencies. To foster such radical tendencies, to strengthen them
theoretically and to articulate a coherent radical ecology outlook is a major responsibility of
authentic radicals. In an era of sweeping embourgeoisement, what ultimately destroys every
movement is not only the commodification of everyday life but its own lack of the necessary
consciousness to resist commodification and its vast powers of cooptation.

AT: Our Politics Works

The Aff vision fails The state wont change because of their demand
WALKER, 88 [R.B.J., PROFESSOR AT UNIVERSITY OF VICTORIA , CANADA, ONE WORLD
MANY WORLDS: STRUGGLES FOR A JUST WORLD PEACE]
It has become fashionable, even among critical social movements, to be skeptical about
posing visions of the future. It is not difficult to understand why. Crusading visions have often
promised deliverance from earthly travail. Some have masked exploitation and pacification,
a tendency that led Marx to refer to religion as the opium of the people. Some have
sketched grand utopias without paying much, if any, attention to the possible connections
between the vision and the concrete human practices that could bring it into being. This
tendency has been particularly visible both in schemes for world government and in claims
that a purer inner life by a sufficient number of people can automatically bring about social
and political transformation. These are both ways in which the necessary for social
transformation may be avoided. They involve demands for change that leave the world as it
is. Other grand visions of the future have been linked to promises made by particular groups
to effect change after gaining power, promises that have been broken either by the nature of
the struggle for power itself or by the nature of the power that is attained. Too many
revolutions have been swallowed by all-powered states. Other revolutions have succeeded in
taking state power only to discover that the state is relatively weak in relation to other
external forces.

Externalization

AT: Says USFG Action Bad

1.
Irrelevant the reason Bopertz claims environmental law is disasterous is
because it causes people to rely on the elites to solve the environmental
nightmare. Our argument is that whether or not we rely on the government is not
determined by whether the government is not determined by whether the
government acts but is rather determined by our conception of politics thats
the very thing we criticize.
2. Bopertzs argument is NOT that federal government action is bad he simply
criticizes a state centered focus
Bopertz, 1996 (http://list.uvm.edu.cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind9609&L=edebate&P=R32276)
I do NOT believe that all the affirmative environmental regulation is suspect either because
it diverts attention from the real problems or because it alleviates personal responsibility for
these problems. Certainly some environmental laws have these effects (and I discuss some
specific examples as well as the general scapegoating phenomenon in my article). But this
does not mean that ALL environmental law exhibits these tendencies. My thoughts about the
efficiency of any environmental law depends on the nature of the problem in question and
on the how law responds to that problem.

Turns Solvency
The affirmatives conception of politics lies at the heart of the environmental
crisis a state centered strategy to combat ills externalizes our deep-seated
environmental guilt which allows for individuals to keep on driving their SUVs,
eating their Big Macs, and jacking the environment in their day-to-day lives
Bopertz, Professor of Law at the University of Nebraska, 1995 (Bradley C, 73 Tex. L. Rev.
711)
[*715] In contrast to other areas of social reform, however, environmental law presents some unique problems. While the causes of
crime, poverty, and other social problems can, without too much intellectual turmoil, be attributed too individual behavior,
environmental degradation appears to implicate all of us. Pollution can strike observers as the integral by-product of the relatively
comfortable lifestyle enjoyed by a majority of Americans in the late twentieth century. Yet, with images of smokestacks, dying lakes,
and oil-drenched otters constantly intruding on the public consciousness, we are forced to live out Pogos dilemma :

We have met the enemy, and he is us. Because the deep-seated causes of pollution tend to
implicate us all, we feel the desire for psychological guilt release or redemption with special
force. Thus, laws that externalize blame to outside forces allow us to preserve a way of life to
which we have grown accustomed and one that we are reluctant to change the very way of life that
generates pollution in the first place. Environmental laws help us escape this psychological dilemma. They
establish clear lines between the perpetrators and the victims, maintaining our position
safety on the side of the innocent by treating pollution not as a natural, expected outcome
of industrialization, but instead as an aberration from a norm of cleanliness. Environmental laws and the social patterns they
reflect raise troubling questions. If we reduce the purpose of environmental law to merely stopping end-point pollution, we inevitably

With pollution being taken care of by the

government, only the most guilt-sensitive will take action to change their own behavior,
discourage scrutiny of our basic habits and ways of life.

and
only the most fervently committed will press for deeper changes in our systems of production and waste disposal. Unfortunately,

these ardent few occupy a marginalized position in mainstream America, and as the process
of environmental lawmaking marches onward identifying and punishing its scapegoats
the underlying causes of pollution are rarely mentioned, let alone acted upon . Thus,
environmental legislation presents a striking example of how the law can legitimize an existing state of affairs while simultaneously
creating the appearance of reforming it. -ContinuesAs to the first premise, knowledge of environmental problems, unlike other issues
of exigent social import (e.g., crime, health care), has the unique capacity to bring the observer within the circle of the blame
worthy. Knowledge of other social problems may produce anxiety, fear, and anger, but the causes of these problems are rarely
thought to implicate the observer personally. By contrast a feeling of personal involvement in the environmental problems can be

particularly as we learn about these problems through the starkly moralistic , good-versusreports of oils spills, burning tire piles, and the environmental
culpability of automobile emissions appear in the news with regularity, yet we continue to
drive our cars as before, contributing our part to the overall problem. Because ones own
share of the responsibility is small, a change in personal behavior is unlikely . Yet knowledge
of ones personal involvement in the larger problem can, in many people, produce feelings of
guilty. Advertisements for environmentally benign products and slogans like think globally, act locally reinforce this sense of
difficult for many people to avoid,

evil narratives of the media. For example,

personal responsibility. Individualizing blame has been a central spec of environmentalism from the beginning. As Senator Muskie

said in 1970: It

is easy to blame pollution only on the large economic interests, but pollution is
a by-product of our consumption-oriented society. Each of us must bear his share of the
blame. By way of illustration, suppose a version of the garbage crisis story plays on the evening news. Even if the story
involves other peoples [*746] garbage (recall the travails of the garbage barge), the observer may find it difficult to escape the
central message that gives the story its emotive power we all create waste, and as a nation we do so in prodigious quantities. The
irrefutable fact of personal waste production (we all take ou the garbage and flush) situates the observer among the perpetrators of
the problem and not just among its victims. The feelings of guilt thereby created may exist at low frequencies, but the exist
nonetheless. Witness the booming popularity of recycling programs. By taking part in these programs, one does the environmentally
right thing regardless of the particular programs ultimate effectiveness. Participation in recycling activities may be motavaited as
much by the desire to ease a troubled conscience as by an individual commitment to abstract principles of waste reduction. In
addition, sixty percent of Americans identify themselves as, environmentalists, and the other thirty percent lean in that direction.
At various times, polls indicate that people rank environmental issues at or near the top of the list of problems facing the country.
Yet conforming ones personal behavior to an espoused concern for environmental quality takes the kind of energy, time, and
diligence that few people can constantly muster. Alternatives to this guilt-producing predicament hold little appeal. They include:

cynically denying either that environmental problems exist or that personal action matters; engaging
in various forms of Ludditism; or resigning oneself to some degree of personal hypocrisy.
Environmental guilt endemic on some people, negligible or absent in others seems an inevitable
consequence of enjoying the benefits of life in an industrialized nation tat simultaneously has an
insatiable appetite for crisis-driven environmental journalism. Questions of guilt lead to matters of

atonement. The real question, one author writes, is not how one gets into guilt, but how
one gets out of [*747] it. According to psychologists, theologians, and the voice of common

experience, feelings of guilt engender a desire for forgiveness. This desire for absolution lies at he core
of many religions. Rituals of guilty redemption however counterfeit they might appear to
nonbelievers are vital to the devout. But in a religiously heterogeneous society like the United States,
there csn be little hope for consensus about which religious ceremonies carry through the true powers
of redemption What we do share, however, is a common faith in the power of law. One might argue
that the legalistic character of American society fills the vacuum created by the lack of common
religious values. Law thus becomes our secular religion, having its own sacred texts and its

own priesthood whether they wear robes of judicial power, fill the seats of Congress, or
occupy the Presidency. [*748] Without commonly accepted religious ceremonies to expiate guilt,
Americans turn instead to the sanctifying rituals of lawmaking The ritualistic elements of

legislative action are difficult to dismiss. In environmental law, we have our own sacred clerics,
scapegoats, and rites of redemption, even though they inhabit the seemingly a sectarian world of law
and politics. Indeed, the inherent spiritualism associated with nature provides a special religiosity to
environmental lawmaking, as twenty-five years of incantatory rhetoric from the mouths of our leaders
ample prove. Unfortunately, when society retrofits the simple calculus of blame, sacrifice, and
redemption to resolve complex social problems, it leaves a legacy of legislative overbuilding and
conceptual chaos precisely the condition of environmental law today. The enactment of
environmental laws also includes a less virtuous tendency to return with one hand what is taken away
by the other. We wish to exorcise our demons, but still retain the pleasures of their company. A law

that strikes at the external manifestations of an environmental problem satisfies the

common desire for identifying and banishing the guilty. On a personal level, however, no one
wants her own habits exposed to the same harsh light. By acting with righteous vehemence
against the visible end-products of pollution, we avoid asking harder questions about global
resource allocation and the sustainability of existing industrial, agricultural, and personal
patterns of behavior. Enactment of environmental laws not only releases us from guilt or state of

being part of the problem but also enable us to avoid scrutinizing deeper patterns that implicate
our personal habits and appetites. Few would like to admit that these habits, and not simple the

immediate targets of environmental law, create the very problems the law appears to
address. In this manner, laws aimed at curtailing pollution can ultimately create barriers to
lasting reform by legitimizing the more deeply rooted causes of pollution that the very
process of lawmaking has exonerated from blame. Except for the environmental scapegoats
duly shaped and punished the rest of society is liberated, free to pursue its old ways without
fear of reprisal.

AT: We Cause a Movement

1.
Our link evidence begs to differ Demands upon the state deflect criticism
from movements and are a use of state-centered politics which discourages
movements by showing them the only way to achieve change is through the state.
2. Their movements is worthless it will be coopted by the state, vote negative to
give their movement a chance.
Bookchin, Murray, Left Green Perspectives, Number 38, http:// lpg.social-ecology.org/, 1989
This municipal life cannot be ignored in radical practice and must even be recreated where it has been
undermined by the modern state. A new politics, rooted in towns, neighborhoods, cities, and regions,
forms the only visible alternative to the anemic parliamentarism that is percolating through various
Green parties and similar social movements in short, their recourse to sheer and corruptive statecraft
in which the larger bourgeois parties can always be expected to outmaneuver them and absorb them
into coalitions. The duration of strictly single-issue movements , too, is limited to the problems they are
opposing. Militant action around such issues should not be confused with the long-range radicalism
that is needed to change conciseness and ultimately society itself. Such movements flare up and pass
away, even when they are successful. They lack the institutional underpinnings that are so necessary
to create lasting movements for social change and the arena in which they can be permanent
presence in political conflict. Hence the enormous need for genuinely political grassroots movement,
united confederally, that are anchored in abiding ad democratic institutions that can be evolved into
truly libertarian ones. Life would indeed be marvelous, if not miraculous, if we were born with all the
training, literacy, skills, and mental equipment we need to practice a profession of vocation. Alas, we
must go through the toil of acquiring the abilities, a toil that requires struggle, confrontation,
education, and development. It is very unlikely that a radical municipalist, too, is meaningful at all
merely as an easy means for institutional change. It must be fought for if it is to be cherished, just as
the fight for a free society must itself be as liberating and self-transforming as the existence of a free
society. The municipality is a potential time-bomb. To create local networks and try to transform
municipal institutions that replicate the state is to pick up a historic challenge a truly political one
that has existed for centuries. New social movements are foundering today for want of a political
perspective that will bring them into the public arena, hence the ease with which they slip into
parliarnentarism. Historically, libertarian theory has always focused on the free municipality that was
to provide the cellular tissue for a new society. To ignore the potential of this free municipality because
it is not yet free is to bypass a slumbering domain of politics that could give lived meaning to the great
libertarian demand: a commune of communes. For in these municipal institutions and the changes that
we can make in their structure turning them more and more into a new public sphere lies the
abiding institutional basis for a grassroots dual power. A grassroots concept of citizenship, and
municipalized economic systems that can be counterposed to the growing power and economic
system that can be counterposed to the growing power of centralized nation-state and centralized
economic corporations.

3. The plan calling for government action is incompatible with movement

strategies
Vaid, Virtual Equalit, Urvashi, 1995 p. 146-7
While this understanding of the federal legislative process has proved accurate, at least
three tensions expose the limits of the legislative strategy. For one, the process of passing
legislation differs markedly from the process of building a social change movement. Indeed,
the two are-antithetical. The former requires a fairly obsessive and insularfocus on 535
members of Congress, on several hundred staff members, and on the media and opinionshaping elite that determines the meaning, and on the media of whatever legislative
measure one is pushing. Legislative enactment requires enormous discretion, secretiveness,
the shrewdness to play off one political player against another player, the ability to

compromise and horse-trade on particulars. The building of a movement requires the

involvement of large, numbers of people in a political process from which they feel
estranged. It calls for the motivation requires of the electorate openness and cander, and
the dernvstification of insider language into colloquial and commonsense phrases. It works
best when ordinary people have an easy way to get involved and when they believe that
their leaders stand for principles that will-not be compromised away. A second tension in the
legislative strategy is the nature of winning. itself What does it mean to win or lose?
Lobbyists and lawmakers are intently focused on the passage of a piece of legislation, seen
as the ultimate win. This limited goal leads them to enter the legislative process ready to
bargain and compromise. Thus, rarely does one win what one actually starts out seeking.
Many times, in fact, the final bill differs significantly from the measure originally proposed. In
Washington, the appearance of victory is more important that the actual language enacted.
Finally, legislative strategies are more vulnerable than any other kind of activism to
becoming insular, self-referential, and separated from the interests of the broader
community. There is something inherently limiting in the legislative strategy; it requires a
kind of conformity to the status quo that neither political organizing, public education, legal
argument, nor cultural work demands. To pass a piece of legislation, one has to focus on the
needs and self-interest of a handful of lawmakers. They, not the constituents, are the focal
point of the effort, and they dictate the terms and outcome. So, in preparing for the passage
of the Americans with Disabilities Act, the political strategist for the bill, a brilliant activist
named Pat Wright, who heads up the Disability Rights Defense and Education Fund, analyzed
each member of Congress to determine what each would need in order to support the bill.
Her analysis guided everything from the drafting of measures, to the bargaining of favors,
to the lobbying deals that were negotiated.

AT: We Must Spread the Word

1. This doesnt answer our argument

a. More knowledge wont make the state listen it just means that more people
know about the problem, so more people will make demands on the state, but the
state still wont do anything about it.
b. Demands destroy social movements it shows that the state is the only way to
fix problems which discourages movements from getting away from statecentered activism AND it legitimizes the state so it can deflect criticism from
movements.
c. Even if they have evidence that says demands can work, its not specific to
demands on the state, the state doesnt listen to anyone.
2. The alternative solves this best- rejecting the aff is the best way for local
communities to mobilize and take action that will spark the movement that the
HAUSS evidence it talking about.
3. Extend the walker evidence the problem is not one of spreading the word
there have been tons of proposals before, we just need a new conception of what
politics is to make these movements successful.
4. Claims that we need more information only act as a delay mechanism the
alternative solves best.
Walker, Professor at the University of Victoria, One World, Many Worlds: Struggles for a Just World
Peace, Ed. RBJ, 1998
The world is not short of information about the perils of age. The experience of social movements in
this respect merely echoes the warnings of volume upon volume of data, statistical projections,
computer models, and sophisticated theoretical speculation. We are overloaded with information.
Similarly, in stressing the need to interpret such warnings in the context of an understanding of the
increasingly interconnected nature of the modern world, movements are also corroborating the
commonplace conclusions of scholarly observers everywhere . There may be squabbles over details,
but the overall picture is well known despite the lack of theoretical clarity about how the
interconnected character of the modern world ought to be specified. What movements add to the
better-known analysis of overall trends issued by international organizations, state bureaucracies,
universities, and research institutions, in academic jargon and populist prose is a sense of what it
means to live at the intersection. Governments know but they postpone action if possible. Movements
know and are forced to act. Governments know but believe old prescriptions will still work. Movements
know, and they are also more likely to recognize an outdated prescription when they see one.

AT: Must Use the State

1. Our link evidence is a straight turn to this it says that only using the state
legitimizes it and makes extinction inevitable.
2. You have no solvency evidence our evidence indicates that demands fail to
change state policies they have no answer to this.
3. Local resistance is more effective our Walker evidence indicates that
community based activism and state resistance creates better mechanisms for
social change and is more likely to lead to changes than state policies.
4. This is our link the aff perpetuates the myth that we must act via the state
this discourse creates the impression of social powerlessness, increasing the
power of the state.
Bookchin 92 [The Ecology of Freedom: The Emergence and Dissolution of

Hierarchy , Murray 1982]

As I have argued for years, the State is not merely a constellation of bureaucratic and
coercive institutions, it is also a state of mind, an instilled mentality for ordering reality.
Accordingly, the State has a long history not only institutionally but
psychologically. Apart from dramatic invasions in which conquering peoples either
completely subdue or virtually annihilate the conquered, the State evolves in
gradations, often coming to rest during its overall historical development in such highly
incomplete or hybridized forms that its boundaries are almost impossible to fix in strictly
political terms. Its capacity to rule by brute force has always been limited. The myth of a
purely coercive, omnipresent State is a fiction that has served the state machinery all too
well by creating a sense of awe and powerlessness in the oppressed that ends in social
quietism. Without a high degree of cooperation from even the most victimized classes of
society as chattel slaves and serfs, its authority would eventually dissipate. Awe and apathy
in the face of State power are the products of social conditioning that renders this very
power possible. Hence, neither spontaneous or immanent explanations of the States

origins, economic accounts of its emergence or the theories based on conquest

(short of conquests that yield near-extermination) explain how societies could have
leaped from a stateless condition to a State and how political society could have
exploded upon the world.

AT: Perm do Both

1. Still links our evidence says that any demands upon the state legitimize state
violence and crush local activism.
2. The permutation severs you cant make a demand upon the state and refuse
to cooperate with the state and reject the demand, that makes no sense
severance destroys negative ground and is a voting issue.
3. Theres no net benefit to the permutation our evidence says that demands on
the state fail to accomplish anything which means theres only a risk the
alternative solves best by itself.
4. The permutation still reinforces state legitimacy and power we need to work
from bottom up.
Magnusson 90 [Professor at University of Victoria (Canada), Contending

Sovereignties: Redefining Political Community, EDS. Walker and Mendlovitz]

One feature of theorizing movement democracy rather than state democracy should be
evident. Traditional questions about authority relations, representation, and accountability
fade into the background. They do not disappear altogether thay are relevant for any
formal organization but they have dubious relevance to an inchoate movement. If,
as suggested, movement politics is the politics of the people the very core of democratic
politics this has profound implications for political theory. It suggests that the key
considerations of democratic theory ought not to be the traditional matters of state, but the
relations within and between social movements . Indeed, it suggests that, insofar as political
theory has become the theory of the state, it serves as legitimating ideology that obscures
the very possibility of politics of, by, and for the people. The effects of this are particularly
evident in the United States, where the main principles of the conventional liberal
democratic theory of the state are reified as constitutional law . Unfortunately, it is not

much of an exaggeration to describe U.S. political theory as a series of footnotes to

the Constitution. Although theorists elsewhere lack such a touchstone, the
phenomenon of the state still largely determines their expectations of political theory . Good
theory, is supposed to offer a critique of the modern state and specifications for changing it.
What it says about movements is mere sociology. Obviously, to shift from the state to

movements, and to ignore the former as an object of theorizing would be wring. It

would be equally wrong to assume that states and movements are unrelated to one
another. Nevertheless, working through the main questions of political theory from the
bottom up from the vantage point of the politics movement is extremely important
because this aspect of politics has been so much ignored and so thoroughly misconstrued .

The misconstructions are especially apparent with respect to the political

community. The word community conjures an image of people in their everyday
lives. But the concept of political community, as used in political theory, is one of enclosure.
Since the actual political activity of ordinary people is so amorphous, it cannot even be
conceptualized in terms of an enclosure. Inevitably the political communities imagined but
theorists are reifications of political space that obscure the actual and potential communities
that people develop in the course of their political activities. Thus we have theories of
political community that are just theories of the state disguised.

5. Understanding that the state should not be called upon for recourse is
an essential element of success to resistance.
Bookchin, 1998 [Murray, Left Green Perspectives, Number 38, April, http://lpg.socailecology.org/,]
Didactic as my presentation may seem, I contend that to abandon any of these
principles is to abandon the defining features of social anarchism, or of any
revolutionary libertarian left. To be sure, it is not easy to advance such ideas today.
Former leftists who have themselves surrendered some of these principles in order
to accommodate themselves to the existing society incessantly sneer at
revolutionary leftists who still maintain them, accusing them of being dogmatic,
dismissing the coherence they prize as totalitarian, and impugning their resolute
social commitment as sectarian. Moreover, in a time when social and political ideas
are being blurred beyond recognition, principled leftists are advised repeatedly to relinquish
their militancy and presumably succumb to the mindless incoherence and pluralism that is
commonly hallowed in the name of diversity. Most of all, they are subjected to pressures to
renounce the Left and blend in with the accommodation that is prevalent today , as so
many of their former comrades have done. Despite these personal and cultural
pressures, social anarchists, I believe, must not allow their views and activities to be
fragmented and thrown into the postmodern scrap heap of unrepentantly contradictory
ideologies, any more than they should embrace the bourgeoisie in a love festival of class
collaboration. In such times it is all the more imperative that a socially oriented,
revolutionary libertarian Left firmly maintain its own integrity and ideals . If those ideals are
to be maintained, there are lines that social anarchists cannot cross and still remain social
anarchists. This assertion, let me emphasize, is not an expression of intolerance. It is

an appeal to preserve specificity, clarity, and self-definition against an

overwhelming cultural decadence that blurs serious distinctions in the intimidating
the name of a specious diversity, harmony, and compromise, as a result of
which the clarification of important political differences becomes impossible to
achieve. Not am I trying to cast the issues that social anarchists face or the practice
they should follow in needlessly harsh either-or terms. When a corporation or state takes
action to worsen working conditions, reduce wages, or deny poor and vulnerable people the
elementary amenities of life, social anarchists should raise their voices in protest and join in
actions to prevent such measures from being executed. In short, they should fight
exploitation and injustice on every front and become part of a variety of struggles for
eliminating economic, social, and ecological abuses wherever they occur, at home or
abroad. Social anarchists are no less humane in response to human suffering and no less
outraged by social afflictions than the best-intentioned reformists . But their actions should
not be limited merely to advancing the remedial measures which the bourgeoisie can usually
adopt if it chooses to, with little loss to itself. Indeed, the bourgeois society is sometimes
more than willing to ameliorate social afflictions within its own framework, all the better to
conceal broader social problems or to neutralize the danger of wider social unrest. There is a
major difference, in my view, between the way social democrats, liberals, and other wellmeaning people engage in everyday struggles and the way social anarchists and their
revolutionary leftists do. Social anarchists do not divorce their ideals from their practice.
They bring to these struggles a dimension that is usually lacking among reformists, they
work to spread popular awareness of the roots of the social affliction patently educating,
mobilizing, and building a movement that shows the connections between the abuses that
exist in modern society and the broader social order from which they stem. They are
profoundly concerned with showing people the sources of their afflictions and how to
consciously act to remove them completely by seeking to fundamentally change society .
Disseminating this understanding which in the past went under the name of class

consciousness (an expression that is still very relevant today) or, more broadly,
social consciousness, is one of the major functions of a revolutionary organization or

movement. Unless social anarchists take the occasion of a protest to point to the broad of
social issues involved, unless they place their opposition in this context and use it to
advance the transition to a rational social order like libertarian communism, their opposition
is adventitious piecemeal, and essentially reformist. In the course of demonstrating how
specific social abuses can be traced to capitalism as such, social anarchist practice, in my
view, must increasingly make apparent that, if those abuses are to be fully remedied it is
society as a whole that must be changes. Whether a given reform is attained or not the
issue that generates the need for if must be expanded, cast in ever broader social terms,
and linked with less obvious but related social abuses until a whole emerges front apparently
disconnected parts and challenges the validity of the existing social order. On the other
hand, to ask that social abuses be addressed merely by reforms and that they be resolved
by the state is to deepen the mystification, to abet the legitimation, and to gloss the
ideological patina so indispensible for the existence of the entire system . From 1848 to
1997, this reformist practice, whatever ideals it claims for itself, has been the most
pronounced flaw of movements for change. Indeed, struggles conducted within the

framework of the existing system while they may yield many palliative reforms
ultimately perpetuate the mystification that capitalism can deliver the goods (as Marcuse
put it) and that the state can rise above the conflict of contending interests to serve the
public good.

6. And even if they win the permutation it doesnt matter they messed
up the text of the permutation which is do both that means it includes
all of our alternative which is to vote negative so we win anyway.
Local activists must reject global visions any global activism destroys the
governments effectiveness
Esteva and Prakash 97 [The Postdevelop Reader]
Local initiatives, no matter how wisely conceived, seem prima facie too small to
counteract the global forces now daily invading our lives and environments . The whole
history of economic development, in its colonialist, socialist, or capitalist forms, is a history
of violent interventions by powerful forces persuading small communities to surrender with
the use of weapons, economic lures and education. Countless such cases give ample proof
that local peoples often need outside allies to create a critical mass of political opposition
capable of stopping those forces. But the solidarity of coalition and alliances does not call for
thinking globally. In fact what is needed exactly the opposite; people thinking and acting
locally, while forging solidarity with other local forces that share this opposition to the global
thinking and global forces threatening local spaces. Fir its strength, the struggle against
Goliath enemies demands that there be no deviation from local inspiration and firmly rooted
local thought. When local movements or initiatives lose the ground under their feet, moving
their struggle into the enemys territory global arenas constructed by global thinking they
become minor players in the global game, doomed to lose their battles. The Earth Summit is
perhaps the best contemporary illustration of this sequence. Motivated by global thinking,
thousands of local groups flew across the world to Rio de Janeiro only to see their valuable
initiatives transmogrified into nothing more than a footnote to the global agreements
conceived ad now being implemented by the big and the powerful. Prescient of this failure of
thinking big/global, Berry predicted that the global environmental movement, by following
the grain highways taken by the peace and civil rights movements, would lose its vitality
and strength, uprooted from its natural ground; the concrete spaces of real men and women
who think and act locally.

The main problem with both the affirmative advocacy and their perm is that it
demands enclosure, I.E. See this act of local advocacy as a fundamental challenge
to state policy or existence, yet, this advocacy closes of numerous alternative and
more productive avenues for social change
Magnusson 90 [Professor at University of Victoria (Canada) Contending

Sovereignties: Redefining Political Community, EDS. Walker and Mendelovitz]

The key assumption is that political community requires enclosure that politics proper is
impossible without a protected space where ideals can be realized and interests ideally
adjudicated. This protected space has been the subject of political theory, as reified in the
tradition. This protected space has been the subject of political theory as reified in the
tradition. This is the space of liberty, equality, and fraternity; of democracy; of order

and moderation; of conservatism, and radicalism; of liberalism and socialism; even

of revolution. On its borders are the unfortunate necessities of Machiavellian and Hegelian
theory: war and diplomacy. The latter normally are acknowledged only to be ignored or
dissolved in imaginings about a world-state. Serious thought about the relation between
what is contained in and what is excluded from the political enclosures is extremely rare,
and is usually distorted by the assumption that political community and the values
associated with it depend on enclosure. That there might e forms of political

community resist enclosure or are stifled by it is barely considered. How these forms
might sustain or extend common political ideals in not a serious subject. Thus, the
theory of democracy is, for the most part, just an aspect of the theory of the state.
It offers an ideal of state organization, and specifies the conditions for realizing it.
What democracy means as a condition for international relations rather than as a
condition for making foreign policy- is not considered; neither are the conditions for
democratizing emergent transnational communities, such as those of feminists,
environmentalists, or pacifists. Localities seem to get more consideration, but this is
deceptive, for local democracy is usually regarded as an aspect of national
democracy. The question raised generally is, How can local institutions contribute
to the democratization of the state as such?? And the answer generally is, by
providing for citizen participation, for an appropriate geographical division of
powers, and so on. To the extent that local democracy is considered on its own terms, it is
usually within the theory of public administration. State-centered accounts treat the
municipality as a mini-state, and apply to it the democratic prescriptions e.g.,
representative institutions that have been developed for the nation-state . Market-

centered theories, such as those about public choice, subordinate democracy to the
satisfaction of consumer preferences. In either case, little remains of local democracy
as a distinctive political ideal. Like most other political ideals, democracy has been
conceived as an aspect of political enclosure . Thus, the irrationality of enclosing the locality
has been taken as a sign of the necessary imperfection of local democracy . The locality, it is
thought, can only be democratic as a part of the state for it is too small to survive on its
own. Its democracy, therefore, is only partial: one aspect of democracy within the
state. This was of thinking about the locality nearly disposes of its more pressing claims.
The venue for everyday life, everyday politics, and everyday democracy fades as an object
of political theory, in favor of the state that stands over/against it. Thus, the idea of

democracy as an aspect of everyday life also fades, along with the political
communities that could sustain or extend it. The latter are unintelligible as aspects
of the state, and hence are beyond the ken of political theory as normally
conceived. Bringing them back in has radical implications for political theory.

Focusing on a global narrative of the world blinds us to the violence of our own
relationships and disempowers activism this is not a question about the merits
of the <insert treaty> - rather the cause of world violence our local relationships
Navar 1999 [Jayan Navar, University of Warwick school of Law, Fall 1999, Orders of
Inhumanity Transnational Law & Contemporary Problems, page 629-630]
We are today bombarded by images of our one world. We speak of the world as
shrinking into a global village. We are not all fooled by the implicit benign-ness of this
image of time-space contracted so we also speak of global pillage. This astuteness of
our perceptions, however, does not prevent us from our delusions of the global; the image
of the global world persists even for many activists amongst us who struggle to change
the world. This is recent delusion. It is a delusion which anesthetizes us from the only world
which we can ever locate ourselves in and know the world of I in relationships. The I
is seldom present in emancipatory projects to change the world. This is because the
relational I world and the global world are negations of one another , the former negates
the concept of the latter whilst the latter negates the life of the former. And concepts are
more amenable to scrutiny then life. The advance in technologies of image-ing enables a
distanciation of scrutiny, from the I world of relationships to the global world of
abstractions. As we become fixated with the distant, as we consume the images of world as
other than here and now, as we project ourselves through technological tune-space into
world apart from our here and now, as we become global we are relieved of the gravity of
our present. We, thus, cease the activism of self (being) and take on the mantle of the
activist (doing). This is a significant displacement. That there is suffering all over the world
has indeed been made more visible by the technologies of image-ing. Yet for all its
consequent fostering of networks, images of global suffering have also served to
disempower. By this, we mean not merely that we are filled with the sense that the forces
against which the struggle from emancipations from injustice and exploitation are waged are
pervasive and, therefore, often impenetrable, but, more importantly, that it diverts our gaze
away from the only true power that is in our disposal the power of self-change in our
relationships of solidarities. The world as we perceive it today, did not exist in times past.
It does not exist today. There is not such thing as the global one world. The world can only
exist in the locations and experiences revealed through and in human relationships. It is
often that we think that to change the world it is necessary to change the way power is
exercised in the world; so we go about the business of exposing and denouncing the many
power configurations that dominate. Power indeed does lie at the core of human misery, yet
we blind ourselves if we regard this power as the power out there. Power, when all the
complex networks of its reach and untangled, is personal; power does not exist out there, it
only exists in relationships.. To say the word, power, is to describe relationship, to
acknowledge power, is to acknowledge our subservience in that relationship. There can exist
no power if the subservient relationship is refused then power can only achieve its
ambitions through its naked form, as violence. Changing the world therefore is a misnomer
for in truth it is relationships that are to be changed. And the only relationship that we can
change for sure are our own. And the constant in our relationships is ourselves the I of all
of us. And so, to change our relationships, we must change the I that is each of us.
Transformations of structures will soon fallout. This is, perhaps, the beginning of all
emancipations. This is, perhaps, the essential message of Mahatmas.

CSM success requires us to abandon the idea that state based political
action should be the focus of our activism
Walker 88 [R.B.J., Professor at University of Victoria (Canada) One World, Many
Worlds: Struggles For A Just World Peace]
Rather, the modern world is characterized not only by global structures and
cosmopolitan cultural forms but also by a bewildering array of political movements
and stirrings. Some are familiar the revolutionary movements, the pressure

groups, the political parties but many are not. And the stress on the way movements
respond to connections makes it possible to specify two important distinctions between
critical social movements and movements of a more familiar character. These two
distinctions underlie the way critical social movements respond to the imaginative horizons
of our age. First, conventional forms of political life are concerned ultimately with the
question of state power. For all their other differences, the claim that it is necessary to
capture state power unites revolutionary mas movements with moderate parties employing
electoral strategies. Yet, so many of the stirrings now visible around the world are less
concerned with taking state power than with challenging more basic principles of everyday
life. Womens movements are exemplary in this respect. Judged conventionally, these
stirrings may not even appear to be political at all, precisely because they do not have state
power as their primary goal. They may not even last very long or achieve any coherent
institutional form. The way some movements respond to connections is crucial precisely
because many of these connections challenge the presumption that states must be treated
as the center of political power. Rather, such movements show that in a world of
connections, power is decentered, a matter of global relationships and local practice. They
show that the patterns of inclusion and exclusion that are reproduced in the state in so many
cultural processes must be and are being challenged, both by large structural forces and but
seemingly disparate social movements. An openness to connections is, in short, openness to
the way power is being reconstructed in the modern world.
Must abandon state system all governments care about is the maintenance of their regime
reform from within is impossible
Falk 87 [Richard, Professor of International Law at Princeton, Towards a Just World Peace,
eds. Walker and Mendelovitz]
At the same time, all states are caught up in the lethal drift of nuclearism and militarism, as
well as the less spectacular, but not necessarily less serious, hazards of ecological
deterioration. Governments are the expressions of the state mechanism, which is caught up
within a web of special interests (within and without bureaucracy) and which subscribes to
an obsolete canon of realist precepts that place regime-security on a pedestal of such
great height that the well-being, and even the survival of domestic society is mindlessly
jeopardized. Nothing takes precedents over the survival of the regime, even in its most
bizarre expression of a remnant of the ruling group locked away in some remote
underground vault. The social substance of the human experience is offered as a sacrifice
to the avenging gods of technological prowess. The earlier republican notion of government
as a conditional and limited delegation of societal powers has been completely submerged
by these modern security arrangements. Besides, for most states, really for all except the
superpowers, there is no way to opt out of the larger orbit of geopolitical disaster, and the
actuality of sovereign rights depends on overlooking their subordination to the whim and
wisdom of whoever is presiding in Moscow and Washington, and to a degree, in other states
possessing nuclear weapons. The two giants are themselves locked in a perpetual death
embrace. They lack any prospect of defending their territories against annihilation, and no
amount of investment in defensive military technologies can alter this stark truth. At most,
it reshuffles the tactics of the offensive use of nuclear weapons. Therefore, it would seem
likely that direct efforts to achieve global reform will not be forthcoming in the years ahead
from state leaders and if attempted, will be trivial and unrelated to the real challenges of
international life. Further, that the state as now constituted is very unlikely to achieve great
normative gains for very many of the peoples of the world, although there will be a diversity
of balance sheets enumerating gains and losses. The relevant point here is that we cannot
at present, view the reigning ideologies as liberating challenge to the established authority
structure. Indeed, as has been argued, the political competition now taking place in most
countries does not include a serious option of liberalism, even if the rhetoric of liberalism is
relied upon. The most likely result of successful revolution is a reproduction, on occasion
even in a less restrained form, of the failures associated with the old regime, especially win

the broad domain of human rights. The torments of the new political prisoners in Iran is
emblematic: one day in Khomeinis jails is like ten years in the jails of the Shah!
Permutation fails it adds monumental credibility to the perceived necessity of
the state
BOOKCHIN, 1998 [Murray, Left Green Perspectives, /number 38, April, http://lpg.socialecology.org]
The practice that /I am suggesting is consistent with the social anarchist ideal of the
commune of communes. Indeed, I find it difficult to conceive of any other public practice
that potentially challenges the state machinery and capitalist system in a libertarian fashion.
After many decades in labor unions and direct-action organizations such as the civil rights
movement, the Clamshell Alliance ( a mass antinuclear organization), and the New Left, and
as a participant in the formation of the American Greens ( before they decided to engage in
national politics), I share the social anarchist conviction that parliamentary politics in
inherently corruptive. To confine anti-statism to the real of ideals without seeing its
immediate relevance to practice risks making a mockery of both ideals and practice.
Choosing a reformist parliamentarism and a statist form of political activity , including
participation in parties, amounts to saying the capitalism and the state are here to stay, and
that we are essentially compelled to submit ourselves to authoritarian institutions- allowing
for a modicum of room to maneuver within limitations that are tolerable to the modern
bourgeois social order. A practice that is in accordance with social anarchist ideals is the only
way of making giving our ideals relevance to people who are unfamiliar with them. Ideals
easily turn into daydreams-or worse- when they stand in flat contradiction to the realities of
ones practice. By separating ideals from practice, crusading movements with erstwhile high
ideals, like Christianity and even various socialisms, have historically wrought enormous
social harm: Without a practice that can embody our ideals, those ideals easily become
mere creatures of the imagination and can be adopted or cast off at willor, worse, be used
to add spice to commonplace political behavior that has nothing in common with social
anarchism.

Perm Answer
-Must abandon state system all governments care about is the maintenance of
their regime reform from within is impossible
Falk 87 [Richard, Professor of International Law @ Princeton, Towards a Just World Peace,
eds. Walker and Mendlovitz]
At the same time all states are caught up in the lethal drift of nuclearism and militarism, as
well as in the less spectacular, but not necessarily less serious, hazards of ecological
deterioration. Governments are the expressions of the state mechanism, which is caught up
within a web of special interests (within and without the bureaucracy) and which subscribes
to an obsolete canon of realist precepts that place regime-security on a pedestal of such
great height that well-being and even the survival of domestic society is mindlessly
jeopardized. Nothing takes precedence over the survival of the regime, even in its most
bizarre expression of a remnant of the ruling group locked away in some remote
underground vault. The societal substance of the human experience is offered as a
sacrifice to the avenging gods of technological prowess. The earlier republican notion of
government as a conditional limited delegation of societal powers has been completely
submerged by these modern security agreements. Besides, for most states, really for all
except the superpowers, there is no way to opt out of the larger geopolitical disaster, and
the actuality of sovereign rights depends on overlooking their subordination to the whim an
wisdom of whoever is presiding in Moscow and Washington, and to a degree, in the other
states possessing nuclear weapons. The two giants are themselves locked in a perpetual
death embrace. They lack any prospect of defending their territories against annihilation,
and no amount of investment in defensive military technologies can alter this stark reality.
At most, it reshuffles the tactics if the offensive use of nuclear weapons.
Therefore, it would seem likely that direct efforts to achieve global reform will not be
forthcoming in the years ahead from state leader and if attempted, will be trivial and
unrelated to the real challenges of international life. Further, that the state as now
constitutes is very unlikely to achieve great normative gains for very many of the peoples of
the world, although there will be a diversity of balance sheets enumerating gains and losses.
The relevant point here is that we cannot, at the present, view the reigning ideologies as
capable of either governing effectively and humanely or as providing a liberating challenge
to the established authority structure. Indeed, as has been argued, the political competition
now taking place in most countries, does not include a serious option of liberation, even if
the rhetoric of liberation is relied upon. The most likely result of successful revolution is a
reproduction, on occasion even in a less restrained form, of the failures associated with the
old regime, especially in the broad domain of human rights. The torments of the new
political prisoners in Iran is emblematic: One day in Khomeinis jails is like ten years in the
hails of the Shah!

AT Perm
Permutation fails it adds monumental credibility to the perceived necessity of
the state
Bookchin, 1998 [Murray, Left Green Perspecitves, Number 38, April, http://lpg.socialecology.org/]
The practice that I am suggesting is consistent with the social anarchist ideal of the
commune of communes. Indeed, I find it difficult to conceive of any other public practice
that potentially challenges the state machinery and capitalist system in a libertarian fashion.
After many decades in labor unions and direct-action organizations such as the civil rights
movement, the Clamshell Alliance (a mass antinuclear organization), and the New Left, and
as a participant in the formation of the American Greens (before they decided to engage in
national politics), I share the social anarchist conviction that parliamentary politics is
inherently corruptive.
To confine antistatism to the realm of ideals without seeing its immediate relevance to
practice risks making a mockery of both ideals and practice. Choosing a reformist
parliamentarism and a statism form of political activity, including participation in parties,
amounts to saying the capitalism and the state are here to stay, and that we are essentially
compelled to submit ourselves to authoritarian institution s allowing for a modicum of room
to maneuver within limitations that are tolerable to the modern bourgeois social order.
A practice that is in accordance with social anarchist ideals is the only way of making giving
our ideals relevance to people who are unfamiliar with them. Ideals easily turn into
daydreams or worse when they stand in flat contradiction to the realities of ones
practice. By separating ideals form practice, crusading movements with erstwhile high
ideals, like Christianity and even various socialisms, have historically wrought enormous
social harm. Without a practice that can embody our ideals, those ideals easily become mere
creatures of the imagination and can be adopted or cast off at will or, worse, be used to
add spice to the commonplace of political behavior that has nothing in common with social
anarchism.

The perm presents a reform in the name of the revolution this destroys all hope
for change
Bookchin, and Biehl, 1991 [Murray and Janet, Left Green Perspecitves, Number 23, June,
http://lpg.social-ecology.org/]
But Left Greens cannot in all honesty and morality profess to offer remedies for those abuses
without fundamental social change. They should eschew programmatic remedies within the
capitalism system and avoid carefully formulated, pragmatic, almost fiscally sound, fiduciary
solutions. They should not bend basic Left Green notions out of shape and recognition so
that they will seem practical in the modern political arena. Neither Left Greens nor any
other leftists can hope to provide rational answers, we mist emphasize again and again, to
the problems created by and irrationals society without becoming liberal social engineers,
making social irrationality more palatable, and its persistence ever more assured. The Left
Greens should be uncompromising in their spirit of opposition and bitterly critical of
attempts by the establishment, particularly conventional parties, to dilute their demands to
a pint where they become in fact barebone reforms. We know of no ther way to countervail
the cooptive powers of capitalism but to oppose to it the most demanding ecological
positions in our movement.
We would like to remind readers of the sorry history of what happens when a reformist
program is presented in the name of revolution. Norman Thomas, the putative heir to

Eugene V. Debs and the Socialist partys perennial candidate for U.S. president in the 1930s,
moaned shortly before his death at a public meeting in the 19602 that the reason why the
Socialist parting in the United States has dwindled from a mass organization into virtual
nonexistence was that its proposals had been taken over by the New Deal. Few remarks sum
up more pathetically the failure of what had been an avowedly revolutionary movement
earlier in this century. In the years that lie ahead, the Left Greens may virtually become a
mass Green movement, but if they do so, by abdicating their basic ideals, they will be no
better than the German Greens, or for that matter the German Social Democratic party, who
are now virtually indistinguishable from each other.

-The permutation still places the here and now is a subordinate position to the
state
Magnusson 90 [Professor @ University of Victoria (Canada), Contending Sovereignties:
Redefining Political Community, eds. Walker and Mendlovitz]
The assumed connection between enclosure and political community has led theorists to
conceptualize localities as municipalities and movements as parties of pressure groups,
These ate the forms in which it is assumed, localities and movements become significant
politically. But ironically, they are also the forms in which localities and movements become
significant politically, since they are forms subordinate to the state. This rendering into
insignificance is, of course, a matter of political practice and not simply of theory, but that
practice, which is the one associated with the state, is not the only one we have to
understand. Live Aid, Greenpeace, and European Nuclear Disarmament, for example, are
organizations produced by movements that defy the normal political containers, act in
political space if their own invention, and exercise political power. The exact importance of
these organizations is difficult to assess, but their presence is a sign of politics uncontained
by the enclosures of the state and neglected by state-centric political theory. In movements
and organizations such as these can locate popular politics in its global dimension.

-Process of change is more important that the goals means must be compatible
with the ends
Walker 88 [R.B.J. Professor @ University of Victoria, Canada, One World, Many Worlds:
Struggles for a Just World Peace]
With explorations of new spaces for political action come reconceptualizations of the nature
of political practice. The practices of critical movements redefine the meaning of social
action itself. They present both concrete and symbolic challenges to dominant structures . In
many respects, the way critical social movements act is as important as the goals they
pursue. Much of modern life is characterized by a separation of ends and means allowing
means to turn disconcertingly into ends. Aware of this, critical social movements have
become highly conscious of the way means and ends are dialectically related. These
movements understand that the processes through which changes occur set limits to the
kinds of transformations that are possible.

-The permutation is the states attempt to contain protest

Shantz, 1998 [Jeffrey Arnold, Professor @Carleton University in Ottawa, Summer, Volume 1,
Number 2, Post Indentity, http://liberalarts.udmercy.edu/pi/Issue12.htm]

Active Resistance highlights Kevin Hetheringtons assertions regarding the significance of

the spatial dimension of conflict. According to Hetheringtion, the use of space is
fundamentally a conflict between control through surveillance and the establishment of new
lifestyles in the public view (96). In Chicago the spatial dimension of conflict was given
unambigiguous symbolic form. The Democratic National Committee attempted to conatin
protests by establishing large fenced-off spaces in the areas well removed from entrances to
the convention which were the official free speech zones/ for demonstrations (Subways
11). These protest pits, as they were called, gave a literal form to the politics of
containment.
While other protesters agreed to prostest within the official protest pits the Active
Resistance participants refused, taking their demonstrations to the streets and challenging
the states regulation of protest (Subways 11). As part of their expression of cultural
resistance, Active Resistance organized a march of over 1000 people. The march was
spirited and included a rather elaborate desecration of consumerism involving a thirty-foot
tall tower of corporate greed pulling strings attached to puppets of Bill Clinton and Bob
Dole. In a rather significant wielding of cultural symbolism the tower was pulled by costume
characters wearing signs identifying them as voters, workers, taxpayers and
consumers. To enhance the message, bringing up the rear in chains were the present-day
casualties: immigrants, minorities, and single moms. In a gleeful finale, toward the
end of the march, the tower was stormed and destroyed by its victims, leaving a triumphant
red first and the panels showing scenes from a new co-operative society. The march was
surrounded by police, and over a dozen people we arrested.
Active Resistance was also largely responsible for the staging of a Festival of the
Oppressed. This expression of symbolic politics consisted of a mix of performance art and
street protest in which several hundred people paraded through the streets bearing papier
mache and wooden puppet art. People wore police badges and pigs head masks. There was
also an enormous skeletal figure of the Pope. A mockey of the corporate advertisement
figure Joe Camel appeared, mouth stuffed with cigarettes whil epushing smokes on
bystanders. As a statement of displeasure with the corporate media reporters were on the
scene carrying cameras labeled Emprty TV (MTV) and See BS (CBS).
Dont Perm Either
The permutation fails the government will use social defense through the
framework of the state, administering top-down participation, inevitably demobilizing commitment and activism
Martin, 1993 [Brian, Professor @ the University of Wollongong, Australia, Social Defense,
Social Change]
If governments brought in social defence as a reform, it would almost certainly be done in
those ways most compatible with existing institutions. What would this mean for social
defence? First, Social defence would be seen as a contribution to national defence,
supporting the interest of a particular state within the existing framework of competing
states. Sharp does not deal with social defence except as national defence.
Second, social defence would be administered from the top. Although popular participation
is intrinsic to the operation of social defence, participation in it or manipulated and
controlled from above. Elite-sponsored social defence could well be organized and run by a
professional corps of experts and leaders, with the populace participating in accordance with
the plans and directions of the professionals. This sort of social defence would be relatively
undemocratic. It is even possible to imagine conscription for social defence service, which
would be a travesty of nonviolent action.
Third, elite-sponsored social defence would be integrated with other methods of defence,
including the continuation of military defence. Instead of becoming a replacement for

military defence, social defence would become a supplement. Sharp sees this as the most
likely path for introduction of social defence (although he gives many examples of the
dangers of mixing violent and nonviolent resistance). This would pre-empt more radical
initiatives for popularity organized social defence. In terms of infrastructure
communications, transport, factory production social defence would depend on the
existing facilities which are geared to control by elites.
Social defence which is organised by professionals for national defence as a supplement to
military defence could actually serve to contain popular action for social change . The
military establishedment, through its influence over social defence plans and knowledge of
avenues for popular action, might find itself more able to control the populace. Since the
elite-sponsored social defence would be oriented towards external enemies, it would be
harder to use against domestic repression. Because of the top-down control, it would be
relatively easy for elites to reduce overall commitment to social defence. Finally, elite
sponsorship, by giving the appearance that social defence is being officially promoted,
would reduce.

A2 Krishna
5. No internal link-just because the political left and the academic left arent
working together doesnt mean that a facist will be able to take over the
government.
6. Their impacts are inevitable- youre either going to vote affirmative or vote
negative which means youll always split the coalition.
7. Even if they win this argument, state-centered politics make extinction
inevitable which outweighs their impacts

The affirmatives call for a coalition leads to intimidation and the

suppression of dissent-The result is immobilization.
Bookchin, 1989 (Murray, Left Green Perspectives, Number 18, Nov.,
http://lpg.social-ecology.org/,)
independent, critical thinking by individuals. It lionizes group wisdom without
acknowledging that the conscientious and principled opposition of a few who have the
courage to stand up to a group decision is to be particularly valued. Indeed, that very
independent thinking and that very courage should be cultivated, not discouraged, in an era
when conflict is seen as a form of violence and argument is seen as divisiveness.
The history of the Green Movement in the United States reveals that the use of consensus in
large groups has too often been immobilizing. Consensus has given minorities the right to
veto decisions made by the majority of a group. As a result, many Green meetings have
been stymied by the fact that a few members oppose a decision with which the majority
agree. Nor is consensus necessarily in accordance with the ideal of radical, participatory
democracy. For under consensus, once a group has taken a decision, all are in theory to
participate in the execution of that decision. This means that under consensus, minorities
are often deprived of the legitimate right to dissentand they are deprived of the
institutional structures that allow them that right to dissent. Historically under the consensus
process, dissenting minorities have sometimes been subjected to intimidation by informal

elites! When the right to dissent is denied, the suppression of the principled opposition of a
minority may be the result.
Consensus, however grand its ideal, in reality often makes possible the tyranny of powerful
informal cliques, even if a clique and its tyranny are unacknowledged by other members of
the group. The history of alternative social movements, notably the Clamshell Alliance,
demonstrates that consensus can become a catchword for the intimidation of those who
disagree.When dissent is denied, the achievement of consensus become emptysimply an
exercise in ritual bonding (as Howard Hawkins has put it) perpetrated by the majority. In
these cases, consensus represents a commitment to the unity of the group itself instead of a
commitment to an understanding of the truth of a particular issue. Disagreement is not a
form of warfare, nor a form of violence. Argumentation is not a form of oppression. Truth and
clarity reside in the interests of the oppressed, not in the interest of those in power.
Attempts to stymie discussion only support the ruling order.

A2 Utopian Alternative
Our alternative isnt utopian- Its very possible that
movements can protest status quo policies, theres nothing
utopian about that
It doesnt matter if its utopian, it has solvency evidence
which makes it predictable and proves theres literature on
the alternative
We need to imagine the world in certain ways to create social
change.
Harvey, Professor at John Hopkins, Spaces of Hope, David,
2000 p. 237-238
Yet the architect can (indeed must) desire, think and dream of difference.
And in addition to the speculative imagination which he or she necessarily
deploys, she or he has available some special resources for critique;
resources from which to generate alternative visions as to what might be
possible. One such resource lies in the tradition of utopian thinking. Where
we learn it from may then become just as, if not more, important as wjat
we can see from where we see it from.
Utopian schemas of spatial form typically open up the construction of the
political person to critique. They do so by imagining entirely different
systems of property rights, living and working arrangements, all manifest
as entirely different spatial forms and temporal rhythms. This proposed reorganization (including its social relations, forms of reproductive work, its
technologies, its forms of social provision) makes possible a radically
different consciousness (of social relations, gender relations, of the relation
to nature, as the case may be) together with the expression of different
rights, duties, and obligations founded upon collective ways of living.
Postulating such alternatives allows us to conduct a thought experiment ;
in which we imagine how it is to be (and think) in a different situation. It
says that by changing our situatedness (materially or mentally) we can
change our vision of the world. But it also tells us how hard the practical
work will be to get from where we are to some other situation like that.
The chicken-and-egg problem of how to change ourselves through change
of our world must be set slowly but persistently in motion. But if it is now
understood as a project to alter the forces that construct the political
person, my political person, I, as a political person, can change my politics
by changing my positionality and shifting my spatiotemporal horizon. I
can also change my politics in response to changes in the world out there.
None of this can occur through some radical revolutionary break (though
traumatic events and social breakdowns have often opened a path to
radically different conceptions). The perspective of a long revolution is
necessary:
But to construct that revolution some sort of collectivization of the impulse
and desire for change is necessary. No one can go it very far alone. But
positioned as an insurgent architect, armed with a variety of resources and
desires, some derived directly from the utopian tradition, I can aspire to be

a subversive agent, a fifth columnist inside of the sytem, with one foot
firmly planted in some alternative camp.

Fiat 2nc
This is where it becomes problematic for the affirmative-this is the exact
thing our critique is talking about. When we decide to use state-centered
politics such as pretending to be the government, assuming that demands
we place on the actually happen, it only legitimizes the state. Our Katsiaficas
evidence says this makes extinction inevitable. So basically, we have an
extinction disad to their framework-which outweighs any kind of fairness or
education
And the way their framework portrays politics assumes that politics and
every day life are distinct-this only strengthens the state.
Walker, Professor at the University of Victoria, One World, Many Worlds:
Struggles for Just World Peace, RBJ, 1988

A2 Fiat key to ground

You must defend your arbitrary construction- Defending the structure
by which you debate as a good thing is a prerequisite to decisions of
fairness-fairness is only good if used for good things-its not an end in
itself
Our framework doesnt preclude debates based on fiat-the aff can
engage in these debates at a mere policy level-they just to able to
prove its good when challenged
Our framework is critical to negative fairness-sometimes we need to be
able to challenge assumption of the affirmative and the only way to do
that is to ignore fiat and plan passage.
This doesnt kill ground-they just need to read some piece of evidence
saying what they do is productive to get some kind of advantages
The state is neither inevitable nor needed for political and social
activism
Magnusson-90 (Professor @ University of Victoria (Canada), Contending
Sovereignties: Redefining political community, Eds Walker and Mendlovitz)
Of course, there is an argument for enlarging the scale of political
community to ensure self-sufficiency, in economic, military, or cultural terms.
Certainly, the modern locality, caught in a web of wider social relations, is
not sufficient unto itself, even for the most parochial of its inhabitants. In this
light, the state can be presented as the inevitable modern enclosure for
politics. Hence, Ernest Gellner:
The agrarian phase of human history is the period during which, so to
speak, the very existence of the state is an option. Moreover, the form of the
state is highly variable. During the hunting-gathering stage, the option was
not available.
By contrast, in the post-agrarian, industrial age there is, once again, no
option; but now the presence, not the absence of the state is inescapable.
Gellner explains this ultimately in terms of the educational requirements of
industrial society: localities are not big enough to have their own graduate
schools, so they must be contained within states. This is a variant of the
familiar claim that we have no alternatives to the state today, because only
states are large enough to perform such functions as providing for security,
managing the economy, or offering the full range of modern social services.
Theorists seem to consider it unnecessary actually to the explore the
smaller-scale options for achieving these state goals: the mere assertion of
the states necessity is enough to set the audience nodding in approval. Why
are we satisfied with such banalities? Why do we accept claims about the
inevitability of the state, which, if posed in relation to capitalism or
patriarchy, would be set aside in embarrassed silence? Why is the debate

about the sources of the states inevitability rather than about the supposed
fact of inevitability? The assumption of inevitability in contemporary
discourse of the state seems curious when we consider the mounting
evidence about the insufficiency of states as political communities. This is
not just a matter of being too large for politics in Aristotles sense. It is also a
matter of being too small to enclose the most pressing political problems:
the control military violence; the management of the economy; redistribution
of resources; protection of the biosphere. These are transnational if not
global problems, demanding transnational if not global solutions. The states
capacity to act in these matters diminished between 1970 and 1990, and
this spawned a variety of adhock arrangements. The claim that the state
provides the inevitably necessary framework for dealing with the modern
world seems therefore unwarranted, even a bit bizarre.

A2 Fiat/Should Takes Out the Link

All of our links still apply- Fiat IS our link- The affirmatives assumption
that we should use state-centered activism is what our Magnusson
evidence is talking about when it explains how state legitimacy is
achieved
You must defend your framework before you can use it Its not inevitable-debaters dont need to focus their activism
around the state, its just an artificial construct that the
activity propogates
Instead we should be accountable not just for what we say but
we should also be accountable for the strategy by which you
deploy that content-if we win this is the best framework then
this argument goes away

Their in a double bind- either the focus on state action and that
reinforces the dominant structures or the use their debates as mere
points of rally which fails to pursue a program for social change
Martin, 1990 (Brian, associate professor at the University of Wollongong,
Australia, Uprooting War)
The basic problem in grassroots mobilization is how to develop a continuing
political practice which remains democratic and participatory and which also
works to overturn structures. The standard activist approach, which involves
lurching from rally to rally or to some other action with periods of inertia
between, is inadequate because it pursues no programme, usually involves a
political practice oriented to lobbying, elections and elite power struggles
which reinforce rather than challenge dominant structures. The gap between
these two approaches needs filling, but many questions and action and
organization remain to be answered.

AT: Vague Alternatives

We read a text to our alternative- you can check our 1nc and its obvious what our
alternative does and well never change it
We have specific solvency evidence for our alternative which always means it
predictable
Cross-X-Checks- if there were any questions about what the alternative did you
couldve asked in cross-x
Begs the question what is an appropriate text- Our Walker evidence indicts the
idea that we need policy proposals to be framed in certain kinds of ways, it only
legitimizes that state which makes extinction inevitable

AT: Performative Contradiction

No Contradiction- the critique on a different level than the rest of our argumentsyou need to prove that we should use state-centered activism, then the debate
opens up to the rest of the arguments, this is a gateway
Performative Contradiction increase education- teams have to think quickly and
understand how arguments interact rather than just reading blocks
Key to negative ground- we need to be able to test the affirmative in multiple
ways to level the playing field, they already got to speak first and last and win
most of the rounds
Infinitely Regressive- Justifies forcing the aff to prove that all their authors agree
with all the arguments that aff is making in the round
2NR checks- we wont go for two contradictory arguments in the 2nr, so youll
always have the 2ar to adapt
Time Skew arguments are ridiculous- justifies always dropping the faster team
and the 1ar still has to answer a 13 minute block, a contradictory is different
No abuse- we havent used the performative contradiction to our advantage- you
should only punish us for what we do

AT: Root cause of war

Arguments that there is a Root cause of war are false- Their claims prevent an
adequate discussion of all of the causes of modern warfare
Martin,1990 [Brian, associate professor at University of Wollongong, Australia, Uprooting
War]
In this chapter and in the six preceding chapters I have examined a number of structures
and factors which have some connection with the war system. There is much more that
could be said about any one of these structures, and other factors which could be examined.
Here I wish to note one important point: attention should not be focused on one single factor
to the exclusion of others. This is often done for example by some Marxists who look only at
capitalism as a root of war and other social problems, and by some feminist who attribute
most problems to patriarchy. The danger for monocausal explanations is that they may lead
to an inadequate political practice. The revolution may be followed by the persistence or
even expansion of many problems which are not addressed by the single factor perspective.
The one connecting feature which I perceive in the structure underlying war is an unequal
distribution of power. This unequal distribution is socially organised in many different ways,
such as in the large-scale structure of state administration, in capitalist ownership, in male
domination within families and elsewhere, in control over knowledge by experts, and in the
use of force by the military. Furthermore, these different systems of power are
interconnected. They often support each other, and sometimes conflict.
This means that the struggle against war can must be undertaken at many different levels. It
ranges from struggles to undermine state power to struggles to undermine racism, sexism
and other forms of domination at the level of individual and the local community.
Furthermore, the different struggles need to be linked together. That is the motivation for
analysing the roots of war and developing strategies for grassroots movements to uproot
them. >
The context of social change always matters more than the particular demandslavery and racism prove
Young 87 [Nigel, Professor of Peace Studies @ Colgate University, Towards a just world
peace eds Walker and Mendlovitz]
With peace movements, as with other social movements, the results of public activity are
always ambiguous. Like other great social change or social protest campaign, they have
both latent and manifest consequences. They may actually prolong the wars they aim to
stop. They may alienate public opinion. Their relative success or failure always depends on
others independent or external factors, not just the degree or level of activity achieved. This
has always been one of the weakening illusions of peace movement: the structural and
historical context of the deeply humanist abolitionist movement against slavery, for
example, was just as or more important than the efforts of the abolitionist campaigns
themselves. Moreover, the abolition of slavery left or even produced new evils, and involved
the injustices and carnage of a terrible civil war that split and virtually destroyed the
American peace movement, whilst racist oppression son grew in virulent forms.

The slavery examples cut against them

Demands to end slavery werent responsible for the change in govt policy and
prove why the act. Is the best way to change social policy plus a decrease in
violence.

AT: What is the State

The state refers to the group of people that make administer and enforce laws or
the politically organized society
Walker and Mendlovitz 90 [R.B.J. Professor @ university of Victoria (Canada) Saul H.
Professor @ Rutgers law school, contending sovereignties redefining political community
EDS Walker and Mendlovitz]
The origin and history of the concept of sovereignty is closely related to the nature, origin,
and evolution of the state, and in particular to the development of centralized authority and
an administrative system of political control. But the notion of the state is itself highly
problematic and has given rise to a variety of interpretations. For he absolutist theorist of
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, notably Bodin and Hobbes that state refers to
those individuals and institutions that exercise supreme authority within a given territory or
society. In this account, that state represents the highest power in the land, acting as a
court of last resort and holding an effective monopoly in the use of force. The state is
identified with the power to make, administer, and enforce laws and with the network of
institution necessary for this purpose. For others the state represents not just the institutions
of the government, but the politically organized society the body of politic or the nation.
According to this view, associated primarily with traditionalists like Hooker and Burke but
also idealist like Rousseau and Hegel, the state is a community of free people based on an
implicit or explicit consensus. These two contrasting conceptualization of that state have
deeply influenced that theory and practice of state sovereignty and to a considerably extend
account for the tension and ambiguous that have surrounded the concept since its earliest
formulation.

AT: Gender IR K
Working within the structures of patriarchy is successful- it makes violence more
difficult while empowering groups for further collective action
Martin 1999 [Brian, associate professor at the University of Wollongong, Australia,
Uprooting War]
One basic strand to the womens movement has been to push for equality for women in
society as it is presently organised. The immediate goal is removal of formal inequalities
such as unequal pay, lack of support facilities such as childcare, and gender -linked job
categories. Discrimination against women is strongly opposed, and legal or quasi-legal
avenues for redress are favored. The goal is a fair representation of women with

bureaucracies, profession, corporations, political parties trade unions and churches.

By helping to understand dominance of men over women with organisations, liberal feminist
action of this sort can to some degree weaken the existing power distribution. In a social
environment in which explicit discrimination against women is illegitimate, the use
patriarchal inequality to bolster bureaucratic and other power structure is made more
difficult.
Furthermore, collective actions to empower women to push for their rights and due rewards
within existing hierarchies can serve a radicalizing function. In confronting discrimination
women may come to question and organize against hierarchies themselves. For example,

struggles for maternity leave and time off to care for children may become linked
with struggles for more flexible work hours and career pattern for more worker
autonomy on the job.

AT: Moral Opposition

The affirmative talks about their harms is a descriptive manner as opposed to
describing them as symptoms of statist system- this focus destroys hope for
solvency
Bookchin and Biehl 1991 [Murray and Janet, Left Green Perspectives, Number 2, June

http://1pg.social-ecology.org/

There are, to be sure, social problems around which Left Green should make demand s
that could well be ameliorated within capitalism although not , we think, resolved by it.
These problems are those that threaten the basis for life itself, which are by their very
nature prepolitical. The worst disasters- the massive destruction of nonhuman nature

to the point where forests are virtually disappearing:; the ravages of diseases and
epidemics like AIDS: genocide, whether in the form of catastrophic famine or outright
mass murder that threatens to biologically exterminate an entire people- all these directly
threaten not only the existence of complex life-forms but vast sections of humanity itself. A
Left Green program should oppose anything that threatens this prepolitical fabric of human
and nonhuman life. It should demand immediate solutions to the problems raised by the

AIDS pandemic that threatens to wipe out the populations of entire Third World
countries, for example, and by the destruction of tropical rainforests, which may
disastrously alter climatic patterns and completely efface aboriginal cultures that
have been in existence from prehistory. It should voice Left Greens unqualified
opposition to genocide most recently the danger of biological and cultural extinction
that faced the Kurdish people in northern Iraq. Furthermore, Left Green should
adamantly oppose anything that threatens the rights that have been hard won over
centuries of human history, such as civil rights and human right s. They should seek to
preserve and expand these rights (including reproductive freedom for women) in any way
they can, for it is essential to the Left Green project to expand existing human rights, even,
within the capitalist system. It is not accidental that as social ecologists, we have

raised the slogan: Democratize the Republic, and Radicalize the Democracy!- a the
slogan that is underpinned by a considerable analysis of North American History.
Like all Left Greens, we are sympathetic to the miserable conditions under which the
homeless exist. Like all Left Greens, we are horrified by the devastation that drugs
like crack have wrought in black communities (not even mentioned in the proposed
program). Like all Left Greens, we want the conditions of peoples lives to improve. But Left
Greens should raise these problems in a descriptive manner, as symptoms of the systems
irrationality to orient the thinking of people toward basic social change. There are other
movements that are more than willing to engage in reformist enterprise- liberals, socialist,

progressives, Jesse Jackson supporters, Audrey McLaughlin supporters, et cetera

ad nauseam. The most fundamental problems of the present society can be solved only by
a transformation of the social order. It is the existence or intractable problems that cannot
be solved within the capitalist system that makes it necessary for us to be revolutionaries
rather than social engineers. A lefust movement that seeks to distribute a piece of the
existing pie for everyone, within the existing social order, faces the problem of its own
embourgoisement and renders it and its planks vulnerable to absorption or negotiation by
reformist movement. One has only to look at the German Greens to see how easily

this was done- owing in great measure to their attempt to form coalitions with
bourgeois parties and gain electoral support in periods of social reaction.

AT: Our Project- Realization that the State is bad

Constructing ways by which resistance can actually fight for social change is keyself-realization is not enough
Bookchin 1994 [Murray, Left Green Perspectives, number 31, Oct, http:// 1pg.socialecology.org]
Today, there must be a place on the political spectrum where a body of anti-authoritarian
thought that advances humanitys bitter struggle to arrive at the realization of its authentic
social life- the famous Commune of communes can be clearly articulated institutionally
was well as ideologically. There must be a mean by which socially concerned antiauthoritarian can develop a program and a practice for attempting to change the world not
merely their psyches. There must be an arena of struggle that can mobilize people help
them to educate themselves and develop an anti-authoritarian politics to use this word in its
classical meaning indeed that pits a new sphere against the state and capitalism.
In short, we must recover not only the socialist dimension of anarchism but its political
dimension democracy. Bereft of its democratic dimension and its communal or municipal
public sphere, anarchism may indeed denote little more than a collection of individuals , nor
more or less. Even anarcho-communism, although it is by far the most preferable of
adjectival modifications of the libertarian ideal, nonetheless retains a structural vagueness
that tells us nothing about the institution necessary to expedite a communistic distribution
of goods. It spells out a broad goal, a desideratum- one, alas, terribly tarnished by the
association of communism with Bolshevism and the state- but its public sphere and forms
of institutional association remain unclear at best and susceptible to a totalitarian onus at
worst.

AT: The State is Too big

This takes out their solvency more than ours- if the state is huge, it means it
would never respond to their demand
Its not the size that counts, its how you use it- our Walker and Bookchin
evidence indicates that direct confrontation with the state opens up space for
new political space and allows us to delegitimize that state
Even if the alternative seems marginal- its not
Walker, Professor at the University of Victoria, One World, Many Worlds: Struggle for a just
World Peace ED RBJ 1998
Small-scale local action, ambivalence, uncertainty. These are hardly signs of an emerging
potential for significant transformation, at least judged by conventional images of political
life. Like the spaces in which movements act the way they act can seem marginal and even
frivolous. Yet, there is in many of these practices a sophisticated appreciation that real
political power is not a simple commodity that can be measured by the accumulation of
weapons or wealth. It is much more complex affair in which less tangible things like
credibility and legitimacy are immensely important Indeed, a capacity to redefine the nature
of political powers is itself an important element of political power .
The more one is able to define what is legitimate, or necessary, or sensible, for example, the
less one has to rely on direct physical force. Critical, social movement are able to understand
very clearly that to challenge the prevailing standard of common sense, or to use official
claims and principles in order to judge the extent to which particular policies fall short of
them, is not marginal at all. It is to recognize that dominant powers are never omnipotent; if
they have to rely on force alone, then their strength is brittle, subject to fatigue and
unexpected fracture.
It is possible to struggle for the normative initiative, to show that dominant forces may in
fact claim nothing more than that might is right, to show that machismo is laughable as well
as violent. Above all, it is always possible to recognize that every person can work to define
and redefine the character of social reality. It is always possible to realize that political life is
not something that occurs out there among professional politicians or elites, but is
implicated in everyones daily life, whether they recognize it or not.

Miscellaneous
Must withdrawal from the electoral politics--the party system is intertwined with
the state

Martin 1990 (Brian, associate professor at the University of Wollongong,

Australia, Uprooting War)
In developing strategies which withdraw support from the state, activists
must come to grips with the issue of electoral politics. In most countries with
systems of representative democracy the dominant political parties are well
and truly interlinked with the state. Far from providing a means for externally
controlling state power the party system is really an adjunct of the state. The
party in the government can achieve little without the cooperation of the
state bureaucracies, especially the bureaucratic elites. Likewise, the ability of
the government to implement policies depends on fitting those policies into
the mound of state bureaucratic activity. This government-bureaucratic
feedback provides enormous pressure to turn the party in the government
into co-administrators: helping to administer the state along with
bureaucratic elites. This relationship is strengthened by the bureaucratic
structure of most political parties which are organized similarly to state
bureaucracies and by the system of patronage which promotes interchange
of key personnel.
If the electoral system is so closely intertwined with the state this may
suggest that activists wishing to strengthen local and transnational rather
than state power should withdraw for electoral politics. This is indeed the
conclusion drawn by many anarchists.
Focusing on reform government is disempowering--it puts focus on elites as
opposed to the grassroots

Martin 1990 (Brian, associate professor at the University of Wollongong,

Australia, Uprooting War)
A focus on helping elect a reform government can be very disempowering for
social movements. Effort is put into influencing electoral and parliamentary
processes. As a result, activists and supporters come to look to political party
elites for bringing about change rather than looking to themselves to build
the skills, understanding and alternatives for the social movement.
Electing reformed government empirically fail

Martin 1990 (Brian, associate professor at the University of Wollongong,

Australia, Uprooting War)
The election of a reform government is yet another potential dead end for
antiwar efforts built around mobilizing public opinion. Ralph Miliband in his

book The state in capitalist society argues that reform governments elected
in Europe since World War Two almost invariably have served to dampen and
contain the radical social and political demands of the people who elected
them. If this applies to such issues as redistributing social wealth and
increasing the power of workers vis-a-vis employers, it is even more true on
military issues. In many countries the major political parties have virtually
indistinguishable policies on military issues.
Sometimes a party, typically a socialist a social democratic part, adopts
some antiwar policies when not in government, usually as a result of
pressure from a strong antiwar movement with strong influence in the party.
But once in government, any such policies which call into question the role of
the military are unlikely to be taken seriously.
Quite a number of political parties around the world have been elected to
office with policies questioning the presence of US military bases, including
Australia (1972), Greece (1981), Spain (1982) and the Philippines (1986).
Time after time, these policies have been ignored or re-evaluated. The
bases stayed. Even less likely than removal of foreign military bases is the
prospect of a reform government both promising and implementing
significant cuts in its own military forces.
Sovereignty actually precludes effective democratic decision-making

Walker and Mendlovitz 90 (R.B.J. Professor @ University of Vitoria

(Canada), Saul H., Professor and Rutgers Law School, Contending
sovereignties: redefining political community, EDS. Walker and Mendlovitz)
Apart from the questioning of the descriptive and analytical utility of the
concept, the critique of state sovereignty has also contained an important
normative element, which stems from the tensions between power and
autonomy and between hierarchy and democracy. Many have argued that
the principle of state sovereignty , taken to its logical conclusion, undermines
or at least grievously weakens the democratic ethic. Maritain, for example,
focusing on Bodins theory and in particular on his memorable phrase the
prince is the image of God, concludes that the sovereign--submitted to God
but accountable only to him--transcends the political whole just as God
transcends the cosmos. Rather than being a part of and representing the
body politic, the prince is separate and transcendent. He rules not at the
peak but above the peak. The separation and transcendence of the
sovereign state from the political community is antithetical to the democratic
impulse. More importantly perhaps that separation also reflects the legal and
political division of one sovereign from another, one society from the rest of
the international community. For Maritain this separateness is all the more
questionable as the State is mistaken for the body politic itself or for the
personification of the people themselves. Understood in this sense, state
sovereignty becomes divorces from popular sovereignty and related notions
have sought to incorporate institutional arrangements consistent with widely

shared democratic aspirations, but the attempt to graft democratic

institutions on to the sovereign state rests on a fundamental contradiction
that in practice is often resolved at the expense of the democratic people.
Reliance on democratic mechanisms to change state policy actually increases
state sovereignty

Ruiz 90 (Professor @ Hofstra University, Contending sovereignties:

redefining political community, EDS. Walker and Mendlovitz)
Thus coming to a meaningful consensus about what or who the people are is
a difficult task. Debate has emphasized two distinctive positions. Some have
argued that the reality of people is to be construed mainly as primarily
religio-cultural. Other insist on a politco-economic perspective. Perhaps more
significantly, both positions have become wedded to assumptions about
liberal democracy, as the ruling elites have demonstrates their politics. In my
view, the bifurcations is misconceived, and the uncritical appropriation of
liberal democratic assumptions is dangerous. Reductionist construals of the
people can lead to disastrous consequences, not least of which is the failure
to comprehend the depth and multi-dimensional character of political
identity. Moreover, an uncritical appropriation of liberal democracy is likely to
reinforce the already profound domination of the state over society.
Humans are not biologically prone to violence--multiple studies and examples
prove otherwise and even if they were, it does not mean that the state is the
cause for the current brutality of modern warfare

Martin 1990 (Brian, associate professor at the University of Wollongong,

Australia, Uprooting War)
One of the most common objections raised against those who oppose war is
that humans are innately aggressive and hence war is inevitable. Contrary to
this, anthropological evidence from numerous non-industrial societies
suggest that human societies can be organised in a variety of ways, some of
which foster aggressiveness and war and others which foster harmonious
human interactions. One implications is that it should be possible, if not
easy, to organise human society to avoid war.
For many years the debate over innate aggressiveness has raged,
nonviolently it might be added. At stake is whether or not, down deep is
genetically conditioned human behaviour patterns, there is a predisposition
to use violence in interpersonal relations. The debate is fascinating and
clearly exhibits the presuppositions of the protagonists. But it is largely
irrelevant to the question of modern warfare which is increasingly
technological and bureaucratic. Instinctive aggression has little to do with
designing missile tracking systems, woking in armaments factories or
pressing switches for bomb delivery. Much more important in these cases are
professional specialisation, the manufacturing division of labour, training in

technical skills, conditioned acceptance of hierarchy and identification with

ones own state.
My personal view is that the evidence for innate human aggressiveness is
quite tenuous and has little significance for human behaviours. But there is
no need to be dogmatic. For even if humans can meaningfully be said to
have some reluctance to kill. Studies have shown that only a fraction of the
soldiers thrust unto the front lines actually fire their rifles. Innate violence, if
it can meaningfully be said to exist, needs a lot of pampering for wars to be
fought.
Furthermore, just because certain sorts of aggressive behaviour are common
among the anthropoid apes does not mean such aggression is inevitable in
human socities. After all, no one suggests that we should eat dinner or travel
the way chimpanzees do. Hormones and prehistoric experiences hardly
provide a prescription for the limits of human behaviour.
Genetics does provide some limits to human activity: humans do not have
wings. The key point here it that whatever genetic inclinations there are
towards aggressiveness and violence, they do not automatically result in
war. This is because socities can be arranged in many ways, and the way
people choose to arrange the society they live in is not genetically
determined.
War proceeded the state arguments are bunk--that type of warfare was
completely distinct from modern warfare--addressing the causes of war requires
confronting the state

Martin 1990 (Brian, associate professor at the University of Wollongong,

Australia, Uprooting War)
It is true that war proceeded the state. But war is not a timeless category:
its significance and dynamics depend on the social structures in which it
occurs. Few of the conditions for tribal or feudal warfare exist int
industrialised societies today. Understanding the nature of war in prehistoric
times can be illuminating, but the insights cannot readily be used to analyse
modern war. This is because the structures through which organsed violence
is mobilises and the uses for which it is directed are so different. Modern war
is tightly linked with the modern state system and associated structures such
as bureaucracy, patriarchy, and capitalism. To address the problem of
modern war it is necessary to confront the state.
Utilization of the state guarantees that their moral framework is bunk--their
project reinforces the power of the state to determine appropriate behavior,
destroying individuals ability to adequately discuss moralist and ethics

Bookchin 1982 (Murray, the ecology of freedom: the emergence of

dissolution of hierarchy)
With the breakdown of the organic community, privelege began to replace
parity, and hierarchical or class society began to replace egalitarian

relationships. Moral precepts could now be used to obscure the mutilation of

organic society by making social values the subject matter of ideological
rather than practical criteria. Once acts were transferable from the real world
to this mystified realm, societys rules were free to mystify reality itself and
obscure the contradictions that now emerged int he social relm. But, as yet,
this process was merely the ideological side of a more crucial restructuring of
the psyche itself. For morality not only staked out its sovereignty over the
overt behavior as restraints on immoral acts; it went further and assumed
guardianship against the evil thoughts that beleaguered the individuals
mind. Morality demands not only behavioral virtue but spiritual, psychic,
and mental as well. The rational evaluation of right and wrong is ignored.
That was to be left to ethics. Hierarchy, class, and ultimately the State
penetrate the very integument of the human psyche and establish within it
unreflective internal powers or coercion and constraint. In this respect, they
achieve a sanitizing authority that no institution or ideology can hope to
command. By using the guilt and self-blame, the inner State can control
behavior long before fear of the coercive powers of the State have to be
invoked. Self-blame, in effect, become self-fear--the introjection of social
coercion in the form of insecurity, anxiety and guilt.
Low-level cooperation with the state functions as social control--it increases the
states legitimacy while decreasing the likelihood of resistance

Martin 1990 (Brian, associate professor at the University of Wollongong,

Australia, Uprooting War)
In many cases agencies of the state can act without consulting or involving
members of the public. But when community disenchantment or outright
opposition begins to play a major role, the the state may sponsor limited
participation which helps to mobilise consent for its policies and actions.
For example, city planners for many years simply proceeded without
consulting the public. But in the late 1960s and 1970s community resistance
developed: local pressure groups were established to oppose freeways, new
airports, demolitions prammes, uncontrolled commercialisation of
neighbourhoods, and other aspects of urban development. One official
response to his grassroots response resistance was to sponsor limited forms
of participation in urban planning, for example by setting up neighbourhood
councils to advise planners. Participants as used and promoted by state
bureaucrats served to mobilise support and legitimacy for the state. Lowlevel participation can serve as a form of social control. It ensures that
participation takes the form of consultation or placation rather than
community control. It also serves to coopt and absorb many social activists,
and to isolate radicals from their constituency.
A crucial way in which the state mobilises support is through elections.
Voting seems to offer some citizen control over the state; its less obvious
effect is to foster acceptance of the states system of bureaucratic

administration. Benjamin Ginsberg, in his insightful book The consequences

of consent, argues that elections aid the states authority and help persuade
citizens to obey. Elections channel political activity into electing
representatives who become a part of the state and away from potentially
dangerous mass action Contrary to common belief, governments have often
introduces voting and expanded suffrage on their own intiative, in order to
prevent disorder.
State sponsored participants serves mobilise consent both to support
particular policies and to support the prevailing system of top-down
administration. This is similar of limited forms or worker participation in
corporations.