WIKI DOC — TOC — Round 2

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Topical affirmatives must advocate for protection of water resources in the United
States to be substantially increased.

The “United States federal government” refers to the three branches established by
the US constitution.
U.S. Legal N.D. — [U.S. Legal, legal definitions dictionary; No Publication Date, “United States Federal
Government Law and Legal Definition”, https://definitions.uslegal.com/u/united-states-federal-
government/; Accessed 01 April 2022]

The United States Federal Government is established by the US Constitution. The Federal Government shares
sovereignty over the United Sates with the individual governments of the States of US. The Federal government has three
branches: i) the legislature, which is the US Congress, ii) Executive, comprised of the President and Vice president of the US and iii)
Judiciary. The US Constitution prescribes a system of separation of powers and ‘checks and balances’ for the smooth functioning of all the
three branches of the Federal Government. The US Constitution limits the powers of the Federal Government to the powers assigned to it; all
powers not expressly assigned to the Federal Government are reserved to the States or to the people.

Water resource protection includes measures adopted to achieve sustainable use.

Liu et al. ’20 — [Haonan Liu, Guangxi Key Laboratory of Theory and Technology for Environmental
Pollution Control @the University of Technology in Guilin, Guilin Farmland Irrigation Experimental
Center Station; Pan Guo, Collaborative Innovation Center for Water Pollution Control and Water Safety
Guarantee @ the University of Technology in Guilin, Xin Jin, Guangxi Key Laboratory of Theory and
Technology for Environmental Pollution Control @the University of Technology in Guilin, Guilin
Farmland Irrigation Experimental Center Station; Published July 2020; IOP Conference Series Earth and
Environmental Science 514(3):032049, “Indicator System for Environmental Impact Assessment Of
Water Resources Protection And Utilization Planning,” DOI:10.1088/1755-1315/514/3/032049; Accessed
01 April 2022]
2. Concept and connotation

2.1. Water protection

Water resources protection refers to legal, administrative, technical and economic measures adopted to protect the
resource attributes of surface water and groundwater and to achieve sustainable use of water resources. Water connects
the upstream, downstream, and the left and right banks in the basin through mobility, and links the socio-economic system with the eco-
environment system through its support for the economic, social, and eco-environment systems [1]. Water quality, quantity and its ecosystem
are the basic conditions for the sustainable function of water resources. Water quality, water quantity, and aquatic ecology
are the organic whole of interaction and influence. Water resources protection should consider goals and needs of water
quality, water quantity, and aquatic ecological protection.

Topics worded in passive voice empower community activism.

Dillard-Knox ’14 — [Tiffany Yvonne Dillard-Know, B.A., Department of Pan-African Studies University
of Louisville; Published December 2014; Electronic Theses and Dissertations, Paper 2161, "Against the
grain : the challenges of black discourse within intercollegiate policy debate.",
https://ir.library.louisville.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3166&context=etd; Accessed 30 March 2022]
**NOTE — Italics in original

Historically, the topics that have been selected have been constructed utilizing the active voice as opposed to a
passive voice. An active voice example would be, “Resolved: The United States Federal Government should substantially increase statutory
and/or judicial restrictions on the war powers authority of the President of the United States.” A passive voice example would be, “Resolved:
The war powers authority of the President of the United States should be substantially restricted.” The active voice topics require
debaters to defend that the United States Federal Government “do something” in a more limited capacity, whereas a
passive voice topic could allow debaters the opportunity to defend a variety of interpretations of “something being done” by or to the United
States Federal Government. The active voice topic always gives the agency to act to the United States Government. For students that see
themselves as having the possibility to access these positions of power, acquiring these skills become empowering. However, many
marginalized students come to Debate from communities that have historically been excluded from these positions of power. Having a
passive topic that removes the agency from the United States Federal Government and allows debaters the flexibility to
choose who has agency thus becomes more empowering to this population of students. These students would then be more
motivated to participate in the process of debate through which they can acquire a variety of skill sets from
politician to community activist.
Secondly, the literature base used to construct the topic has failed to include perspectives found within the race literature, such as the legal and
political scholarship of Derrick Bell (1992), Cornel West (1994), and bell hooks (1995). Very little, if any, attention has been given to Critical Race
Theory or Critical Legal Studies within the chosen controversy areas, such as Immigration and Supreme Court Cases. Even when topic papers are
submitted that do include this literature, they are rarely, if ever selected in the voting process. This is important to the conversation of debating
the topic in that the topic paper sets the definitional guidelines of what is considered topical. If the topic paper is limited to the language and
perspective of the dominant, then so too will the debates be limited to the language and perspective of the dominant. Thus, it could be argued
that the topic does not account for the discourse strategies of marginalized populations and could be an additional source of exclusion from
Debate.

CHAPTER VI

CONCLUSION AND DISCUSSION

The important role that Debate has played throughout history in training students to become the nation‘s most prominent leaders and active
citizens requires special attention to how these students are trained. Debate is the training ground for the future movers
and shakers of society. Therefore, Debate educators have a responsibility to ensure that the ways in which these students think about
the policy making process is inclusive of a diversity of values, perspectives, and cultures. Altering the perspectives of debaters
during their intercollegiate debate careers could have positive long term effects on the ways they choose to interact
with diverse members of the larger society. Debate is no longer an activity mostly comprised of wealthy, white males. Within
the last decade and a half, Debate has had an increase in demographically diverse populations. Thus, it is necessary that Debate has
a process for valuing the voices of all of its students.
Just like the interracial debates of the early twentieth century provided Blacks with a platform to disprove stereotypes about Black intellectual
inferiority, Debate continues to provide a stage for Black students‘ voices. However, these students must not be forced
to assimilate into the traditional norms of Debate to be considered valuable members of the Debate community. In order for Debate to
continue to be relevant well into the future, there has to be a transformation in the culture of the community. This
culture must transition away from a community that holds onto stagnate notions of universalism to one that embraces notions of difference.

This process began in 2000 when Dr. Ede Warner, then Director of Debate at the University of Louisville, had a vision to bring Debate to Black
students. Successfully recruiting a new cohort of Black students in Debate, Warner found that these students were frustrated with being forced
to assimilate into the traditional norms of the activity in order to be successful. The culture of Debate was not inclusive of the values and
perspectives of his students. Thus, in order to retain Black students, challenges to the norms and procedures of debate were necessary. Warner
and his students were not only successful in challenging traditional norms and procedures but they were also innovative in the successful
creation of alternative methods that are most representative of the lives that they experience. The success of this new model of Debate has led
to increased tensions and hostilities throughout Debate in what is now called the clash of civilizations.
An examination of the clash of civilizations debates is not only necessary for the recruitment and retention of the Black student population but
Debate at large. This new model of debate, alternative debate, has been instrumental in the recruitment of other diverse groups, such as:
Latinos, Native Americans, disabled populations, and LGBT students. Additionally, the
inclusion of different values and
perspectives adds another level of training for the future movers and shakers of society. If debaters are trained to make policy
for diverse populations, then understanding the difference in cultures, values and perspectives of these groups is an invaluable experience.
Ultimately, these standpoints are necessary for the growth and development of every member of the Debate
community. Unfortunately, the backlash to alternative debate has overshadowed the benefits of including alternative debate for much of
the community. Therefore, research on the clash of civilization debates is an essential and timely endeavor.

The speech community model of analysis has been a productive model for examining the ways in which the prioritizing of traditional debate
norms and procedures has served to exclude Black discourse, values, and perspectives. While it is not always an intentional act of exclusion, the
effects can often be just as injurious. The debate about Debate, that has been ongoing within Intercollegiate Policy Debate, has provided an
excellent opportunity to examine how the exclusion of different discourse strategies can ultimately lead to the exclusion of an entire culture,
their values, and their experiences.

With the recent growth of the Black student population in Debate, the community has been introduced to new methods of debate. As a result
of the increased use of alternative methods, the discussions regarding the community‘s best practices have become a site of contention for
many of its members. The hostility surrounding the debate about Debate is at an all-time high and the community is split along the lines of
stylistic choice. Additionally, this split has also segregated the community along lines of race. The effects of this conflict have left
these Black students stigmatized and constantly fighting to be recognized as valuable members of the Debate community. In this
regard, the Debate community has failed to become the open and inclusive community that it prides itself on being. Not only are these Black
debaters negatively affected, but the
entire community risks losing the potential benefits that come from the
inclusion of alternative perspectives.
This research isolates specific norms within traditional debate. Specifically, the research targets the use of the flow, speed, and line by line
is not the norms in and of themselves but the ways in which these practices
refutation. To be clear, it
have been used at the exclusion of alternative methods of debate for Black students. Traditional debate
practices have often been defended, by coaches and debaters alike, as the best method to train debaters in the process of policy making.
However, most of the rationale for this defense depends upon a universal understanding of the purpose of Debate. There are various factors
that determine why each student chooses to participate in the activity and what he/she chooses to get out of the activity. The ontological
positioning of traditional debate practices as “the best” inhibits debate traditionalists from understanding the epistemological challenges that
these alternative debaters are issuing.

Topicality is a voting issue — debate is fundamentally a game — every benefit to the

activity requires mutual contestation grounded in a controversial stasis point.
Targeted research centers the resolutional agent and mechanism — the affirmative
moots it, which encourages extremist generics and late-breaking shiftiness.

The impact is revolutionary clash — our interpretation sharpens iterative skills over
the course of the season. Those strategies are vital to combat metaphysical and
material violence — the federal government historically weaponizes water use and
quality in order to subordinate disadvantaged communities — the process of clash
encourages debaters to advocate for the best methods of resistance against white civil
society.
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Universal democracy CP:
The United States federal government should
- adopt a universal job guarantee
- adopt an obligation to provide structurally competent health care to all
residents on the basis of their right to health, including universal and
comprehensive health insurance for all residents
- adopt the 6-plank policy platform of the movement for black lives
- substantially restrict its distribution of Clean Water Act permits to the fossil fuel
industry.

Anti-state rhetoric accelerates neoliberal violence. Levying existing laws is necessary

to galvanize the left.
Parenti and Emanuele, ’15 — [Christian Parenti, Ph.D. in Sociology and Geography from the London
School of Economics, former visiting fellow at CUNY's Center for Place, Culture and Politics, as well as a
Soros Senior Justice Fellow, teaches in the Liberal Studies program at New York University; Vincent
Emanuele, writer, activist and radio journalist who lives and works in the Rust Belt; Published 17 May
2015; “Climate Change, Militarism, Neoliberalism and the State,” http://ouleft.sp-mesolite.tilted.net/?
p=1980; Accessed 06/11/21]

You mention mutual aid and how it was overhyped by the left in the aftermath of Katrina . I’m thinking of the same
critical of the left in the US for not approaching and using the
thing in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy. You’ve been
state apparatus when dealing with climate change and other ecological issues . Can you talk about your critique of
the US left and why you think the state can, and should, be used in a positive manner?

Just to be clear, I think it is absolutely heroic and noble what activists have done. My critique is not of peoples’ actions, or of people; it’s of a
lack of sophistication, and I hold myself partly accountable, as part of the US left, for our deficiencies. With Hurricane Sandy, the Occupy
folks did some amazing stuff. Yet, at a certain level, their actions became charity. People were talking about how many
meals they distributed. That’s charity. That is, in many ways, a neoliberal solution. That’s exactly what the capitalist system in the US
would like: US citizens not demanding their government redistribute wealth from the 1% to the 99%. The capitalists
love to see people turn to each other for money and aid . Unwittingly, that’s what the anarcho-liberal left fell
into.

This is partly due a very American style of anti-state

rhetoric that transcends left and right. The state is not just prisons or
the military. It’s also Head Start, quality public education, the library, clean water, the EPA, the City University
of New York system – a superb, affordable set of schools that turns out top-notch, working-class students with the lowest debt burdens
in the country.

Instead of a robust program of government-subsidized and public housing, we have the prison system. Instead of well-funded public hospitals,
we have profiteering private hospitals, funded by enormous amounts of public money.
There’s a reason theright is attacking these institutions. Why does the right hate the EPA and public education? Because they
don’t want to pay to educate the working class, and they don’t want the working class educated . They
don’t want to pay to clean up industry, and that’s what the EPA forces them to do. When the left embraces anarcho-liberal
notions of self-help and fantasies of being outside of both government and the market, it cuts itself off from
important democratic resources. The state should be seen as an arena of class struggle.

When the left turns its back on the social democratic features of government, stops making demands of the
state, and fails to reshape government by using the government for progressive ends , it risks playing into the
hands of the right. The central message of the American right is that government is bad and must be
limited. This message is used to justify austerity. However, in most cases, neoliberal austerity does not actually involve a
reduction of government. Typically, restructuring in the name of austerity is really just a transformation of
government, not a reduction of it.

Over the last 35 years, the state has been profoundly transformed, but it has not been reduced . The size of
the government in the economy has not gone down. The state has become less redistributive , more punitive. Instead of a
robust program of government-subsidized and public housing, we have the prison system. Instead of well-funded public hospitals, we
have profiteering private hospitals funded by enormous amounts of public money . Instead of large numbers of
well-paid public workers, we have large budgets for private firms that now subcontract tasks formerly conducted by the
government.

We need to defend the progressive work of government, which, for me, means immediately defending public
education. To be clear, I do not mean merely vote or ask nicely, I mean movements should attack government and
government officials, target them with protests, make their lives impossible until they comply. This was done
very well with the FCC. And my hat goes off to the activists who saved the internet for us. The left should be thinking
about the ways in which it can leverage government.

The utility of government was very apparent in Vermont during the aftermath of Hurricane Irene. The rains from
that storm destroyed or damaged over a hundred bridges, many miles of road and rail, and swept away houses. Thirteen towns were totally
stranded. Therewas a lot of incredible mutual aid ; people just started clearing debris and helping each other out. But within
all this, town government was a crucial connective tissue.

Due to the tradition of New England town meeting, people

are quite involved with their local government. Anarchists
should love town meetings. It is no coincidence that Murray Bookchin spent much of his life in Vermont . Town
meetings are a form of participatory budgeting without the lefty rigmarole.

As we enter the crisis of climate change, it’s important to be aware of the actually existing legal and institutional mechanisms with which we
can contain and control capital.

More importantly, the state government managed to get a huge amount of support from the federal
government. The state in turn pushed this down to the town level. Without that federal aid, Vermont would still be in
ruins. Vermont is not a big enough political entity to shake down General Electric, a huge employer in Vermont. The Vermont government
can’t pressure GE to pay for the rebuilding of local infrastructure, but the fed eral government can.

Vermont would still be a disaster if it didn’t get a transfer of funds and materials from the federal government. Similarly in New York City, the
public sector does not get enough praise for the many things it did well after super storm Sandy. Huge parts of
the subway system were flooded, yet it was all up and running within the month.

As an aside, one of the dirty little secrets about the

Vermont economy is that it’s heavily tied-up with the military
industrial complex. People think Vermont is all about farming and boutique food processing. Vermont has a pretty diverse economy, but
agriculture plays a much smaller role than you might think, about 2 percent of employment. Meanwhile, the state’s industrial sector,
along with the government, is one of the top employers, at about 13 percent of all employment. Most of this work is in what’s called
precision manufacturing, making stuff like: high performance nozzles, switches, calibrators, and stuff like the lenses used in satellites, or
handcrafting the blades that go in GE jet engines. But I digress … As
we enter the crisis of climate change, it’s important to
be aware of the actually existing legal and institutional mechanisms with which we can contain and
control capital.
I often joke with my anarchist and libertarian friends and ask if their mutual-aid collectives can run Chicago’s sanitation system or operate satellites. Of course, on one level, I’m joking, but on another level, I’m being quite serious. I
don’t think activists on the left properly understand the complexity of modern society. A simple example would be how much sewage is produced in a single day in a country with 330 million people. How do people expect to
manage these day-to-day issues? In your opinion, is there a lack of sophistication on the left in terms of what, exactly, the state does and how it functions in our day-to-day lives?

It’s sobering to reflect on just how complex the physical systems of modern society are. And though it is very unpopular to say among most American activists, it is important to think about the hierarchies and bureaucracies that
are necessarily part of technologically complex systems.

The EPA has the power to actually de-carbonize the economy.

A friend of mine is a water engineer in Detroit, and he was talking to me about exactly what you’re mentioning. The sewer system in Detroit is mind-bogglingly enormous and also very dilapidated and very expensive. To not have
infrastructure publicly maintained, even though the capitalist class might not admit this, would ultimately undermine capital accumulation.

You asked if there is a lack of sophistication. Look, I’m trying to make helpful criticisms to my comrades on the left, particularly to activists who work so hard and valiantly. I’ve criticized divestment as a strategy, yet I support it. I
criticized the false claims that divesting fossil fuels stocks would hurt fossil fuel companies. The fossil fuel divestment movement started out making that claim. To its credit, the movement has stopped making such claims. Now,
they say that it will remove the industries "social license," which is a problematic concept that comes from the odious world of "corporate social responsibility." However, now, students are becoming politicized, and that’s always
great news.

For several years, some

of us have been trying to get climate activists, the climate left, to take the EPA and
the Clean Air Act seriously. The EPA has the power to actually de-carbonize the economy. The divestment
logic is: Schools will divest, then fossil fuel companies will be held in greater contempt than they are now? Honestly, they’re already hated by
everybody. That does what? That creates the political pressure to stop polluting? We already have those regulations: the
Clean Air Act.
There was a Supreme Court Case, Massachusetts v. EPA, that was ruled on in 2007. It said the EPA must regulate
greenhouse gas emissions. Lots of professional activists in the climate movement, at least up until very recently,
have been totally unaware of this.

Consequently, they are not making demands of the EPA. They are not making demands of their various local, state and federal
environmental agencies. These entities should be enforcing the laws. They have the power. It’s not because the people in the climate
movement are bad people or unintelligent. They’re dedicated and extremely smart. It’s
because there’s an anti-state ethos
within the environmental movement and a romanticization of the local.
Nixon-era laws can be used to sue developers, polluters, etc. You might not be able to stop them, but you can slow them down.

On a side note, I don’t think all of this stuff about local economies is helpful. Sometimes I think this sort of thinking doesn’t recognize how the
global political economy works. The comrades at Jacobin magazine have called this anarcho-liberalism. I think that is a great way to describe
the dominant ideology of US left, which is both anarchist and liberal in its sensibilities. This ideology is fundamentally about
ignoring government, and instead, being obsessed with scale, size, and, by extension, authenticity. Big
things are bad. Small things are good. Planning is bad. Spontaneity is good. It is as insidious as it is ridiculous. But it is the dominant worldview
among the US left.

Do you really think that this is the best way to approach the industry, through mobilizing state resources?

Look, the fossil fuel industry is the most powerful force the world has ever seen. Be honest, what institution
could possibly stand up to them? The state. That doesn’t mean it will. Right now, government is captured by
these corporate entities. But, it has, at least in theory, an obligation to the people. And it also has the laws that
we need to wipe out the fossil fuel industrial complex . This sounds fantastical and nuts, but I don’t think it is. I’ve been
harping on this in articles and a little bit at the end of Tropic of Chaos. According to the Center for Biological Diversity, Nixon-era laws
can be used to sue developers, polluters, etc. You might not be able to stop them, but you can slow
them down. The Clean Air Act basically says that if science can show that smoke-stack pollution is harmful to
human health, it has to be regulated.
If there was a movement really pushing the government, and making the argument that the only safe level of CO2 emissions is essentially zero
… We have the laws in place. We have the enabling legislation to shut down the fossil fuel industry . We
should use the government to levy astronomical fines on the fossil fuel companies for pollution . And we
should impose them at such a level that it would undermine their ability to remain competitive and
profitable.

A universal job guarantee socializes everything — it eliminates mass incarceration,

challenges militarism, and eviscerates wealth inequality while simultaneously
empowering local communities and care service.
Ferguson N.D. — [Scott Ferguson, Ph.D. in Rhetoric and Film Studies from UC Berkeley, co-director of
the Film & New Media Studies Track in the Department of Humanities & Cultural Studies at the
University of South Florida, Research Scholar at the Global Institute for Sustainable Prosperity; No Date
of Publication Listed; Arcade, “The Unheard-of Center: Critique after Modern Monetary Theory”,
https://arcade.stanford.edu/content/unheard-center-critique-after-modern-monetary-theory; Accessed
18 January 2022]
Everyone knows that money makes the world go round. Yet MMT shows us that, far from being a private and finite commodity or an unwieldy
network of global exchange, money operates as a centralized political architecture  that is public, limitless and, above
all, answerable to social needs and contestation. Thus critique after MMT assumes a singular aim, which is to make money’s
answerability perceptible.

Both historically and ontologically money arises from the polity that issues it. Government establishes a money economy, MMT avers, by
demanding taxes be paid in a currency that it alone supplies. And because political governance remains the source of money’s abstract value,
there are no limits to how much government can spend toward the public purpose. As MMTer Warren
Mosler will variously put it, demanding to know whence a political union will procure the funds it requires to support its population is
tantamount to the absurdity of querying a sports referee regarding the source of the points she intends to award during a match. With this,
MMT reveals that every currency-issuing government can “afford” to take care of the peoples and environs it subsumes and that the
cause
of modern economic mystification is not money’s mediation of commodity production , as Karl Marx famously argued,
but the commodification of money as such.
(See here, here, and here for MMT’s understanding of so-called hyperinflation. Though multipart and complex, MMT’s argument is that
inflation is always and everywhere a political phenomena, rather than a narrowly economic one, and that the conventional fear-mongering
used to justify interest-rate hikes and spending cuts is as wrong-headed as it is pernicious.)

MMT is by no means an innocuous description of modern monetary operations, as both its supporters and detractors frequently claim. Rather,
it spells a complete topological inversion of the money form as traditionally conceived. I envision it this way: MMT turns customary economic
reasoning on its head by folding the conventional image of money outside-in. That is to say, whereas Left
and Right orthodoxies
situate money in a quasi-autonomous marketplace and envision the nation-state as a sideline enforcer
of private exchange, MMT positions the state as the grounding center of economic relations and frames the market as an internal
supplement to monetary governance. Money, then, is resolutely interior to formal political power. A governing body may employ monetary
technologies directly or indirectly, through immediate public spending or through bank lending and so-called “market mechanisms.” However,
in no way should monetary power be reduced to private power nor should money’s governing center be mistaken for the market’s
decentralizing and often destabilizing effects.

Needless to say, the history of modern money is the history of this center’s ongoing repression. This process
begins in the late seventeenth-century when the English bourgeoisie invents the legal ruse of public debt and
continues today with the crushing obligations and austerity perpetuated by the Troika in the Eurozone. Still, no matter how intensely money’s
political interior is neglected or disavowed, MMT reasons, government continues to condition economic relations and
shape their recurrent failures and excesses.
By inverting money’s conventional topology, MMT clears the way for an unprecedented mode of critique: a practice that reads social
formations through money’s political center and does so in order to make money’s answerability palpable.
Money is an infinite public reserve that has been choked off at its source. The state, on MMT’s view, maintains the
money relation as a variable infrastructure of laws, ledgers, dispensations, qualifications, and cancellations. This maintenance requires constant
retooling in response to extant crises and antagonisms. Unlike money’s private users, moreover, only government wields the capacity to furnish
all persons with meaningful employment and sufficient access to the common store of wealth. To choke off this power, MMT insists, is not a de
facto consequence of a money economy—there is no such thing as a natural rate of unemployment, for instance—but,
rather, a political decision to maintain populations in conditions of poverty, violence, and despair.
Critique after MMT must hold open money’s unlimited reserve by tending at once to the political infrastructures that sustain economic activity
and to the social emanations such forms condition.

It is precisely in overlooking money’s political center , meanwhile, that the Marxist critical tradition meets its limit.
Marxism remains indispensable for tracing the contradictions and injustices precipitated by private exchange relations and, for this reason, it
plays a significant role in MMT’s ongoing interventions (see here, here, and here). However, the Marxist
tradition reifies economic
negligence and cruelty every time it declares capital, rather than monetary governance and public spending, the
proletarian’s primary horizon of contestation. One must never condone the brutal history of what Marx termed primitive
accumulation. But we also should not allow our condemnation of state violence to block the path to a more equitable future.

Folding the conventional image of money outside-in, MMT attunes critique to what I shall henceforth call the unheard-of center of modern life.
(I borrow this expression from Rilke via Martin Heidegger and admittedly turn it toward purposes not originally intended.) By unheard-of
center, I mean money’s deep political architecture and the social expressions to which it variously gives rise and responds. MMT points the way
to this unheard-of center. However, since MMT is essentially an economic discourse and one that, by its own admission, struggles in addressing
the cryptic site where monetary and social production meet, the critical attunement it makes possible necessitates a total cultural
reorientation: one that turns the entirety of cultural production irreducibly outside-in.

This means resisting the Marxist impulse to reduce the complexities of cultural production to a dance with private exchange value. Presently,
no cultural artifact is a pure effect of decentralized financial technics. Both the artifact and financial media are paracentric phenomena,
conditioned by the deficiencies and excesses of a public utility. This is not wishful thinking, but a brute operational reality. As economist Zoltan
Pozsar has shown, even the so-called “shadow banking” sector operates wholly within state-insured monetary systems. This sector not only
regularly anchors its complex private bets on the security of U. S. Treasury Bills (and ever riskier instruments fashioned in the image of Treasury
Bills), but also immediately circles back to the sovereign monetary base during financial crises.

For this reason, critique after MMT must mind the strivings, irresolutions, and repressions that inhere within money’s centrally-conditioned
social orbits and leverage such discoveries toward a more just future.

The critic animated by MMT assumes that the center does not hold, but insists that it nonetheless persists as so many holding patterns:
patterns that no social actor can presently think or act without. Government austerity, permissive financial laws, massive private debt,
uncompensated care work, racialized incarceration, the phenomenology of CGI blockbusters, the subtleties of aesthetic criticism: these forms
realize the money relation under neoliberalism and keep our fallen world afloat. They give us our bearing. They hold us in tension. They
condition our futurity. Money’s holding patterns comprise the grounds in which we dwell and hence constitute the only bases from which
critique can proceed.

I agree with media theorist Steven Shaviro: the only way out is through. Where I part with this familiar appeal to critical immanence,
however, concerns the aperture through which it imagines itself passing. In holding up private exchange value as a porthole to the future,
Marxist modes of immanent criticism mire us in the contradictions of the global marketplace, while reducing the riddle of tomorrow to the
enigmas found in capital’s fantastical expressions. Critique after MMT, by contrast, shifts the plane of immanence to the political center that
conditions social expression and treats money’s holding patterns as an interior threshold onto better days.

No matter how centrifugal or aleatory, every sensuous exchange in modern society bears the mark of the center’s opaque rhythms and sway.
To make money answerable to politics, one must not only mind these historical registrations, but also problematize how orthodox visions of
abstract value have come to order appearance itself.

La nouvelle gauche

is a boundless public reserve, MMT offers means to socialize everything

By revealing that money
from banking and electoral campaigns to higher education and non-commercial artmaking. But the lynchpin
of MMT’s intervention is its commitment to full employment and what its adherents call “the Job Guarantee.”

The appellation “Job Guarantee” is cringeworthy, to be sure. At best, its reduction of social labor to a “job” demonstrates a lack of critical savvy.
At worst, its promised “guarantee” conjures neo-Puritan fantasies of salvation through work.
Yet the implications of MMT’s ill-termed proposal could not be more radical. MMT’s Job
Guarantee involves the permanent
financing of community-organized public works programs, which would give every person the right to non-
corporate living-wage employment, compensate and reorganize much feminized and unpaid care work, and force service sector
employers such as Walmart and McDonalds to outdo the public sector’s wages and working conditions. Hence, far from a neoconservative prop
for capitalist interests, the
Job Guarantee is designed to involve people in the labor of serving communal and
ecological wellbeing, while transforming the social totality from below.

When a governing body elects to maintain even a small percentage of its population in conditions of unemployment and moneylessness,
it sends capital into global tailspins in search of cheap labor and profitable investment, shackles disparate
classes to unredeemable private debts, prevents alienated communities from addressing local crises, and debilitates everyone’s capacity to
demand a better world. In its neoliberal instantiation, this Liberal gambit then shores up the fallout with punishing fees and taxes,
paltry welfare checks, an out of control prison industry, and vast informal care networks.

In contrast to this frenzied and inadequate supplementation, MMT’s Job

Guarantee aims to endow local councils with funds
to furnish every market reject with living-wage employment (say $25 per hour plus health care, to start). The program
would expand and contract countercyclically with market fluctuations and would involve its participants in meaningful social and environmental
projects. Drawing upon non-profits and existing informal support networks, such projects might include child and elderly care
facilities that socialize what Marxo-feminist Nancy Fraser has called capitalism’s hidden abode; sustainable gardens and public
beautification services that bring dignity and vitality to the other side of the tracks; and art and cultural centers that help
communities simultaneously imagine and shape the transformations the Job Guarantee makes
possible.

The Job Guarantee would not be beset by financial constraints . Unlike the ludicrous America Works program proposed
by President Underwood on Netflix’s House of Cards, MMT’s proposal does not require draining funds away from FEMA or dismantling the
Social Security System. Instead, the Job Guarantee is to be limited only by real resources, the collective imagisnation,
and political will.
Some participants may make a life in the public sector. Others will elect to join the private domain. But no longer will market activity be
predicated upon a moneyless underclass or will it be acceptable to pass off systemic abandonment as the vagaries of nature.

Undoubtedly, MMT’s Job Guarantee is no cure-all or quick-acting salve. It will not eradicate injustice or turn the greedy into saints. What the
Job Guarantee will do, however, is introduce a radical new directionality into the present totality, which shall drastically curtail systemic poverty
and shift the structural foundations of economic life. It will set the agonies and ecstasies of the marketplace atop a resilient care economy and
give every member of society basic access to the combined yields of public and private labor. It will force today’s low-paying service sector to
either offer better wages and working conditions or risk losing laborers to local public works projects. But the Job Guarantee is by no means a
total loss for capital either. Creating a stable consumer base that in turn increases private profits, the Job Guarantee would soften the blow of
its wage increases, while making socially productive business investments far less risky. With this, the Job Guarantee promises to lessen the
structural need for hazardous speculation and private usury. Surely, this increased stability and reduction in indebtedness would amplify
everyone’s capacity to demand better living conditions.

If such a program were implemented by a global hegemon such as the United States, moreover, threats of mass
emigration and economic collapse elsewhere would impel other governments to follow suit. The result will
not immediately liberate Chinese factory workers or stop corporations from looting African mines. Nor will it reign in Wall Street or the City of
London overnight. But it will reorganize global supply chains and multinational finance by confronting them with new pressures and prospects.
For example, an international political economy driven by robust full employment programs would decouple problems of employment and
social welfare from capital’s erratic global trajectories in addition to mitigating the market hazards that condition such movements in the first
place. Supplanting what economist Abba Lerner once termed the myth of world money with an interdependent politics rooted in strong public
spending regimes, the MMT Job
Guarantee would thus begin to turn neoliberal financial capitalism outside-
in and expose the constricting paroxysms of present social production  to more congenial and commodious orbits.

Though seemingly unromantic and bureaucratic, MMT’s Job

Guarantee offers today’s Left an ulterior erotics of struggle, which avoids
the twin pitfalls of “no alternative” zealousness, on one hand, and the disastrous exits proposed by accelerationists,
autonomists, and communisation advocates, on the other. While neoliberal apologists promise capitalist renewal with the same
monetary imagination in view, radicals imagine bohemian coalitions leading the multitudes through the rubble to a moneyless beyond. MMT’s
proposal lacks the allure of both visions. Yet as I wish to argue, it courts the future in a manner that is at once more stirring and far-reaching
than either.

Universal programs are engines of solidarity and public good.

Day and Brown ’17 — [Megan Day, staff writer at Jacobin, coauthor of “Bigger than Bernie: How We
Go from the Sanders Campaign to Democratic Socialism.”; Keith Brower Brown, co-chair of the East Bay
chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, and a PhD student in geography at UC Berkeley;
Published 08/02/17; Jacobin, “How Socialists Can Fight for Single Payer”,
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/08/socialist-left-single-payer-medicare-for-all-dsa-nurses-union;
Accessed 18 January 2022]
Advancing the Program

The advantages for our organization are only part of the equation. Any unifying campaign will be beneficial to an organization
finding its footing, but single payer is a strategic central focus. In fighting for it, we can build solidarity across
lines of difference and continue to build power for the working class.

Everybody needs health care. Nearly everybody in the working class has been hurt by private insurance greed,
or has seen a friend or family member denied care so that a rich few can profit. When we organize in the East Bay, we share our own personal
stories and ask our neighbors about what they could personally gain from single payer.

We work to show how our direct self-interest intersects with that of all working people: we can only win single
payer for ourselves if we win it for each other. Political education that fosters this sense of shared self-interest — rather than
charity for a distant other — is the foundation of a sense of solidarity built to last.

The fight for single payer is an urgent anti-racist struggle. Currently in the United States, the uninsured rate is 60
percent higher for black people than for white people. The Movement for Black Lives platform demands a
universal, guaranteed health care system, with particular focus on equitable access for currently excluded communities of color. In
committing to the fight for single payer, socialists can take up that call to action.

Meanwhile, across the US, Latinos

have an uninsured rate 300 percent higher than white people. Undocumented
immigrants — and many documented ones — are not covered by Medicare, nearly all Medicaid programs, and many subsidized
private plans. This cruel exclusion is despite the fact that immigrants pay into the public system through taxes, and worse, is in spite of the fact
that they are members of our communities who need care like everybody else.

By providing coverage to all state residents regardless of documentation status, California and New York’s single-payer bills not only directly
help millions, but could point a socialist path out of the current dead end around immigration politics in the US and Europe. Over the past
decade, most
parties of the center and many on the left have shifted towards far-right positions on refugees
and migrants as a supposedly necessary concession to white-working-class xenophobia. This is morally and strategically wrong.
When socialists win truly universal social programs that cover migrants, we can demonstrate that social care is not a zero-sum game. Instead,
building social systems for everyone who lives here makes for stronger public institutions and a healthier society for all. If we are to push
further towards building a powerful multiracial working-class movement, then a proud politics of inclusion for immigrants is not only right —
it’s essential.

Single payer is also a critical feminist fight. Public health coverage for all would be transformational to a society in which most
unpaid and underpaid care work falls to women. When people can’t get the care they need, someone is usually compelled to
pick up the slack — and, especially in the realm of home care for family members, those people are disproportionately
women. (“The best long-term care insurance in our country,” concluded a recent study about home care for older adults, “is a conscientious
daughter.”)
Women are more likely to receive health insurance as dependents, which means that losing a spouse through death or divorce puts them at
greater risk for being uninsured. Single mothers are nearly twice as likely to be uninsured as mothers in two-parent households. Meanwhile,
women who are insured also suffer disproportionately from confusing and predatory private insurance industry practices. Care
costs
more for women, is harder to obtain, and employers can refuse to cover contraception on religious grounds,
meaning a woman’s reproductive health is in many cases dependent on the conditions of her employment. California’s Medicaid program
covers abortion, contraception, and prenatal care. To universalize that comprehensive and inclusive care is an urgent and crucial feminist
reform.

The California Nurses Association, which is leading the charge on the state single-payer effort, has eighty thousand members across both
unionized and non-unionized workplaces in the state. These workers are overwhelmingly women, and about half are people of color. Women
fill nearly all of the top leadership roles at CNA.

Who better to lead the fight to bring care into the public sphere than women care workers, who disproportionately shoulder the burden of
undervalued care? Organizing in close alliance with care workers is an essential way we can put our principles
into practice and expand socialist-feminist understanding within our ranks.
Working with organized nurses is also strategic for building solidarity between socialists, the labor movement, and the broad working class. CNA
has led the drafting of legislation and steered the inside game while coordinating and supporting grassroots allies across the state. Nurses at the
helm makes this not just a “consumer movement,” made up of health-care users, but a workers’ movement. The nurse-led campaign sets up a
clear dynamic of workers, both inside and outside the industry, against our common adversaries at the very top: health insurance executives,
shareholders, and the 1 percent.

Over the last half-century, the relationship between socialists and the labor movement has grown tenuous, as both groups have been
diminished and devitalized by state repression and capitalist advancement. As socialists, we know that acting in concert with organized labor is
fundamental, and that it’s necessary to rebuild our role, both as socialist organizers and workers ourselves, in the labor movement. By uniting
with nurses against CEOs, we’re committing to working-class solidarity in practice, not just in theory.

Socialists must continue to build our own independent organizations steered by the democratic power of our
members, but the nurses are a strategic ally to learn from and fight alongside in this moment.

Finally, single payer would win power for the working class like no other reform popularly on the table in the US today.
When socialists consider fighting for a reform, we should ask if it builds working-class power towards future struggles. Some left organizers and
scholars call this “building the crisis”: by winning
reforms that strengthen the material conditions and class
consciousness of working people, we advance the fight for more radical victories.
Many union workers, who have seen spiraling private health insurance costs undermine their position for wage and benefit increases, have
rallied behind single payer as a bulwark for future battles with management. For non-union workers, too, single payer would strengthen both
their actual health and their bargaining position for raises and other benefits. A push for single payer, in this political moment, is uniquely able
to draw clear lines of class conflict: it’s capitalists versus all of us who work.

Single payer is already a concession on the part of socialists. We want fully socialized medicine, which would function on
the same principles but extend to hospitals and doctors themselves , and which already exists in many nations. We
envision single payer as a first step in a long struggle to implement full universal social programs. We see it as a non-reformist reform:
that is, a structural modification of power relations that elevates the ability of working-class people to fight against
capital while radically shifting the window of political possibility.
We’re interested in using SB562 as a political education opportunity for our membership and neighbors, and publicly advancing the idea that
universal social programs are better than means-tested ones. According to the neoliberal logic of means-testing, some people need public
assistance to attain things like health insurance, but only those in the direst of straits. Socialists, on the other hand, believe in the
decommodification of essential goods and services for all, for both moral and politically strategic reasons.

Universal programs are essential to eliminating wealth inequality. They decrease disparities in the here and now,
creating a stronger working class that is less fearful and insecure, and therefore less easily exploited by capital. They also build powerful new
constituencies dedicated to defending public goods against privatization.
The “Vision for Black Lives” creates true democracy — transferring wealth from
bureaucratic warfare to communal good is vital.
Kelley ’16 — [Robin D.G. Kelley, Gary B. Nash Professor of American History at UCLA, is author
of Africa Speaks, America Answers: Modern Jazz in Revolutionary Times  and  Freedom Dreams: The Black
Radical Imagination; Published 17 August 2016; Boston Review, “What Does Black Lives Matter Want?”,
https://bostonreview.net/articles/robin-d-g-kelley-movement-black-lives-vision/; Accessed 18 January
2022]

On August 1 the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL), a coalition of over sixty organizations, rolled out “A Vision for Black Lives: Policy
Demands for Black Power, Freedom & Justice,” an ambitious document described by the press as the first signs of what young black activists
“really want.” It lays out six
demands aimed at ending all forms of violence and injustice endured by black
people; redirecting resources from prisons and the military to education, health, and safety; creating a
just, democratically controlled economy; and securing black political power within a genuinely inclusive
democracy. Backing the demands are forty separate proposals and thirty-four policy briefs, replete with data, context, and legislative
recommendations.

But the document quickly came under attack for its statement on Palestine, which calls Israel an apartheid state and characterizes the ongoing
war in Gaza and the West Bank as genocide. Dozens of publications and media outlets devoted extensive coverage to the controversy around
this single aspect of the platform, including The Guardian, the Washington Post, The Times of Israel, Haaretz, and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Of
course, M4BL is not the first to argue that Israeli policies meet the UN definitions of apartheid. (The 1965 International Convention for the
Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination and the 1975 International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of
Apartheid define it as “inhuman acts committed for the purpose of establishing and maintaining domination by one racial group of persons over
any other racial group of persons and systematically oppressing them.”) Nor is M4BL the first group to use the term “genocide” to describe the
plight of Palestinians under occupation and settlement. The renowned Israeli historian Ilan Pappe, for example, wrote of the war on Gaza in
2014 as “incremental genocide.” That Israel’s actions in Gaza correspond with the UN definition of genocide to “destroy, in whole or in part, a
national, ethnical, racial or religious group” by causing “serious bodily or mental harm” to group members is a legitimate argument to make.

The few mainstream reporters and pundits who considered the full M4BL document either reduced it to a laundry list of demands or positioned
it as an alternative to the platform of the Democratic Party—or else focused on their own benighted astonishment that the movement has an
agenda beyond curbing police violence. But anyone following Black Lives Matter from its inception in the aftermath of the George Zimmerman
verdict should not be surprised by the document’s broad scope. Black Lives Matter founders Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi are
veteran organizers with a distinguished record of fighting for economic justice, immigrant rights, gender equity, and ending mass incarceration.
“A Vision for Black Lives” was not a response to the U.S. presidential election, nor to unfounded criticisms of the movement as “rudderless” or
merely a hashtag. It was the product of a year of collective discussion, research, collaboration, and intense debate, beginning with the
Movement for Black Lives Convening in Cleveland last July, which initially brought together thirty different organizations. It was the product of
some of the country’s greatest minds representing organizations such as the Black Youth Project 100, Million Hoodies, Black Alliance for Just
Immigration, Dream Defenders, the Organization for Black Struggle, and Southerners on New Ground (SONG). As Marbre Stahly-Butts, a leader
of the M4BL policy table explained, “We formed working groups, facilitated multiple convenings, drew on a range of expertise, and sought
guidance from grassroots organizations, organizers and elders. As of today, well over sixty organizations and hundreds of people have
contributed to the platform.”

The result is actually more than a platform. It is a remarkable blueprint for social transformation that ought to be read and
discussed by everyone. The demands are not intended as Band-Aids to patch up the existing system but achievable goals that will produce deep
structural changes and improve the lives of all Americans and much of the world. Thenjiwe McHarris, an eminent human rights activist and a
principle coordinator of the M4BL policy table, put it best: “We hope that what has been created carries forward the legacy of our elders and
our ancestors while imagining a world and a country profoundly different than what currently  exists. For us and for
those that will come after us.” The document was not drafted with the expectation that it will become the basis of a mass movement, or that it
will replace the Democratic Party’s platform. Rather it is a vision statement for long-term, transformative organizing.
Indeed, “A Vision for Black Lives” is less a political platform than a plan for ending structural racism, saving the planet, and transforming the
entire nation—not just black lives.

If heeded, the
call to “end the war on Black people” would not only reduce our vulnerability to poverty, prison,
and premature death but also generate what I would call a peace dividend of billions of dollars. Demilitarizing the police,
abolishing bail, decriminalizing drugs and sex work, and ending the criminalization of youth, transfolk,
and gender-nonconforming people would dramatically diminish jail and prison populations, reduce
police budgets, and make us safer. “A Vision for Black Lives” explicitly calls for divesting from prisons, policing, a
failed war on drugs, fossil fuels, fiscal and trade policies that benefit the rich and deepen inequality, and
a military budget in which two-thirds of the Pentagon’s spending goes to private contractors. The savings are to be invested
in education, universal healthcare, housing, living wage jobs, “community-based drug and mental
health treatment,” restorative justice, food justice, and green energy.

But thepoint is not simply to reinvest the peace dividend into existing social and economic structures. It is to change those
structures—which is why “A Vision for Black Lives” emphasizes community control, self-determination, and
“collective ownership” of certain economic institutions. It calls for community control over police and schools,
participatory budgeting, the right to organize, financial and institutional support for cooperatives, and “fair development” policies based on
human needs and community participation rather than market principles. Democratizing the institutions that have
governed black communities for decades without accountability will go a long way toward securing a
more permanent peace since it will finally end a relationship based on subjugation, subordination, and surveillance. And by insisting
that such institutions be more attentive to the needs of the most marginalized and vulnerable—working people and the poor, the homeless, the
formerly incarcerated, the disabled, women, and the LGBTQ community—“A Vision for Black Lives” enriches our practice of
democracy.

For example, “A Vision for Black Lives” advocates not only closing tax loopholes for the rich but revising a regressive tax policy
in which the poorest 20 percent of the population pays on average twice as much in taxes as the richest 1 percent. M4BL supports a massive
jobs program for black workers, but the organization’s proposal includes a living wage, protection and support for unions and worker centers,
and anti-discrimination clauses that protect queer and trans employees, the disabled, and the formerly incarcerated. Unlike the Democratic
Party, M4BL does not subscribe to the breadwinner model of jobs as the sole source of income. It instead supports a universal basic
income (UBI) that “would meet basic human needs,” eliminate poverty, and ensure “economic security
for all.” This is not a new idea; some kind of guaranteed annual income has been fundamental to other industrializing nations with strong
social safety nets and vibrant economies, and the National Welfare Rights Organization proposed similar legislation nearly a half century ago.
The American revolutionary Thomas Paine argued in the eighteenth century for the right of citizens to draw a basic income from the levying of
property tax, as Elizabeth Anderson recently reminded. Ironically, the idea of a basic income or “negative income tax” also won support from
neoliberal economists Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek—although for very different reasons. Because eligibility does not require means
testing, a UBI
would effectively reduce the size of government by eliminating the bureaucratic machine of
social workers and investigators who police the dispensation of entitlements such as food stamps and
welfare. And by divesting from an unwieldy and unjust prison-industrial complex, there would be more than enough revenue to create good-
paying jobs and provide a basic income for all.

Reducing the military is not just about resources; it is about ending war, at home and abroad. “A Vision for Black Lives” includes
a
devastating critique of U.S. foreign policy, including the escalation of the war on terror in Africa,
machinations in Haiti, the recent coup in Honduras, ongoing support for Israel’s occupation of Palestine,
and the role of war and free-trade policies in fueling the global refugee crisis. M4BL’s critique of U.S. militarism is
driven by Love—not the uncritical love of flag and nation we saw exhibited at both major party conventions, but a love of global humanity. “The
movement for Black lives,” one policy brief explains, “must be tied to liberation movements around the world. The Black community is
a global diaspora and our political demands must reflect this global reality. As it stands funds and resources
needed to realize domestic demands are currently used for wars and violence destroying communities abroad.”

Finally, a peace dividend can fund M4BL’s most controversial demand: reparations. For M4BL, reparations
would take the form of
massive investment in black communities harmed by past and present policies of exploitation, theft,
and disinvestment; free and open access to lifetime education and student debt forgiveness; and mandated changes
in the school curriculum that acknowledge the impact of slavery, colonialism, and Jim Crow in producing wealth and racial inequality.
The latter is essential, since perhaps the greatest obstacle to reparations is the common narrative that American wealth is the product of
individual hard work and initiative, while poverty results from misfortune, culture, bad behavior, or inadequate education. We have for too long
had ample evidence that this is a lie. From generations of unfree, unpaid labor, from taxing black communities to subsidize separate but
unequal institutions, from land dispossession and federal housing policies and corporate practices that conspire to keep housing values in black
and brown communities significantly lower, resulting in massive loss of potential wealth—the evidence is overwhelming and incontrovertible.
Structural racism is to blame for generations of inequality. Restoring some of that wealth
in the form of education, housing,
infrastructure, and jobs with living wages would not only begin to repair the relationship between black
residents and the rest of the country, but also strengthen the economy as a whole.
To see how “A Vision for Black Lives” is also a vision for the country as a whole requires imagination. But it also requires seeing black people as
fully human, as producers of wealth, sources of intellect, and as victims of crimes—whether the theft of our bodies, our labor, our children, our
income, our security, or our psychological well-being. If we had the capacity to see structural racism and its consequences not as
a black problem but as an American problem we have faced since colonial times, we may finally begin to hear what the Black Lives Matter
movement has been saying all along: when all black lives are valued and the structures and practices that do harm to black
communities are eliminated, we will change our country and possibly the world.

Targeting corporate exploitation is crucial for Indigenous activism.

NoiseCat ’16 — [Julian Brave NoiseCat, History @ Columbia University & the University of Oxford,
enrolled member of the Canim Lake Band Tsq'escen in British Columbia, 11th Hour Fellow at New
America as well as a Fellow of the Type Media Center; Published 26 November 2016; Jacobin, “The
Indigenous Revolution”, https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/11/standing-rock-dakota-access-pipeline-
obama/; Accessed 22 December 2021]

Yet these same communities are uniquely positioned to resist unjust systems and force them to retreat. We
must hold these two
seemingly contradictory realities of devastation and resilience in our minds at the same time. The Fourth World
lives in devastation. The Fourth World is unconquered and on the rise.

Since the 1970s, indigenous people in the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand have danced impressive
victories. They have compelled states to forego assimilationist policies like the involuntary removal of indigenous
children to abusive residential schools and the relocation of indigenous workers to cities. Overtly coercive policies have been
slowly and steadily replaced with policies that recognize indigenous rights to land, jurisdiction, and
sovereignty. Gains are limited, but they are still gains.

At certain times over the past thirty years, indigenous

claims have prevented corporations from exploiting natural
resources. In New Zealand in the 1980s, Maori claims under the Treaty of Waitangi stopped a state drive to
privatize fisheries and hydroelectric power. In Canada and Australia, from the 1990s to the present, aboriginal claims
have increased risk for prospective investors in extractive industries.

But the dance with the state can be perilous. In recent decades, some
indigenous groups mistook neoliberals who
denounced “big government” for allies. They accepted land claims settlements, treaty agreements, and business deals that
enabled states to slash social services for the most vulnerable while restructuring indigenous communities as junior corporate
partners in the global economy.
As Trump prepares to take power in the US and Brexit changes the economic calculus in Britain and across the world, it is clear that the dance with the state is entering a new age.

The New Colonialism

The new age has precedents.

Any Howard Zinn reader knows that the United States is built on stolen land with stolen labor. However, this is an observation too imprecise to help us understand and predict the trajectory of a global political economy steered
and shaped by the likes of Trump and Nigel Farage. If you squint hard enough, Jack Dalrymple might look like a young George Custer, but that does not make him so.

To prevail, indigenous people and the Left must fully understand the precise ways that emerging systems will dispossess indigenous communities. In the nineteenth century, the United States Army incarcerated indigenous people
on reservations, claimed land for homesteaders, protected prospectors, and cleared the way for railroad barons. In the 1960s, a different set of historical, political, and economic forces erected the Lake Oahe Dam on the Missouri
River, flooding two hundred thousand acres of the Standing Rock reservation to provide power to suburban homeowners.

Today, the drive for independence from OPEC sees a solution in hydraulic fracturing technology. North American oil fields and infrastructure are funded by a financial system that encourages speculation, drives massive inequality,
and fails to account for costs associated with human and environmental risks — passing these very real risks and consequences on to communities, workers, and indigenous nations. Inherently unaccountable capitalists are paid big
money for being even more unaccountable, and indigenous dispossession continues on new frontiers.

Preliminary post-election forecasts indicate that Trump’s victory and Brexit will redirect capital back toward the American West and the British Commonwealth.
In particular, Trump — a DAPL investor himself — will expedite completion of DAPL and similar projects. He will push to reopen and complete the Keystone XL Pipeline. If he keeps his campaign promises, he will support
infrastructure projects and extractive industries, including coal and fracking, in indigenous homelands across the American hinterlands.

At the same time, a conservative Supreme Court, an Interior Department led by Sarah Palin or oil baron Lucas Forrest, and a Justice Department led by Jeff Sessions means limited but hard-won Native rights will be rolled back. If
this gang of reactionary appointees can’t figure out how to dismantle complex legal precedents, they can just cut funding to essential services like housing, schools, and health care that are already woefully underfunded, putting
tribes in a stranglehold of austerity. Native resistance will be policed by Orwellian surveillance systems finely tuned by the Obama administration. Militarized law enforcement will find reinforcements in the booming private
security and prison industries.

Surveillance, state law enforcement, and private security will drive mass arrests, as we’re seeing at Standing Rock. Law enforcement will have more power than ever to quash protesters and silence dissent.

In the former British Wests of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, where the right-wing populist revolution has yet to take hold in the same way, suppression of indigenous resistance may be less visibly coercive — perhaps with
the exception of skyrocketing policing, incarceration, and deaths-in-custody of indigenous people, particularly Aboriginal Australians (the “most imprisoned people in the world”).

Politicians in the Commonwealth will look to roll back or restructure indigenous rights won over the last three decades in ways that are favorable to capital.

Governments, like Justin Trudeau’s Liberals in Canada, are already abandoning campaign promises to indigenous people, opting instead to grab land and resources (as seen in the ham-fisted effort to force through the Site C
Dam against indigenous opposition). Trudeau’s minister of natural resources has already stated that Canada will no longer ask First Nations for consent before going forward with lucrative natural resource projects like Kinder
Morgan’s Trans Mountain Expansion project and Enbridge’s Northern Gateway pipelines.

In Australia, the government is steamrolling the Wangan and Jagalingou peoples’ Native Title claims in order to move forward with the massive Carmichael Coalmine in Queensland.

With the Commonwealth clamoring to cash in on opportunities created by Brexit, new free trade deals with the United Kingdom will be struck, resuscitating and rebuilding the capital networks of the former British Empire,
previously weakened by globalization and the European Single Market. The Tory dream of a revived Anglosphere, long derided as fanciful, nostalgic, and bad business by Liberals, may even emerge as a legitimate principle and
framework of international relations and trade. It will compete with increasingly powerful Chinese and Indian capital throughout the Commonwealth, as already witnessed in the Canadian  tar sands, Australian coalmines, and New
Zealand real estate and dairy.

Combined with the rise of China and India, this will bring new waves of exploitive capital into indigenous homelands, along with increased policing and the dismantling of indigenous rights.

Renewed colonial and capitalist pressure on indigenous people means that the Fourth World’s adversarial relationship with the state will become more central to the struggle to transform political and economic systems for all. If
the history of the indigenous dance with the state is any indication, the Fourth World will suffer tremendously while at the same time standing athwart the forces of capitalism and exploitation.

The Left must stand with the Fourth World in our collective struggle.
The Fourth World and a Fourth Way

On November 14, the Army Corps of Engineers temporarily halted DAPL’s progress, stating that “the history of the Great
Sioux Nation’s dispossessions of lands” and the United States’ “government-to-government” relationship with indigenous nations demanded
that the route of the proposed pipeline be reassessed. The Army told Energy Transfer Partners (ETP), the company building DAPL, that
construction beneath the Missouri River required explicit approval, and asked the Standing Rock Sioux to negotiate conditions for the pipeline
to cross tribal territory. Faced with a momentary victory for Standing Rock, Kelcy Warren, Dallas billionaire and CEO of ETP, denounced the
decision as “motivated purely by politics at the expense of a company that has done nothing but play by the rules.”

Warren was right. Had

it not been for thousands of people mobilizing behind an indigenous-led coalition,
DAPL would have been business as usual. ETP would have desecrated the graves of Standing Rock ancestors unimpeded.
Workers, lured by relatively high wages, would have taken on toxic and insecure work. The tribe’s hunting and fishing grounds would have been
jeopardized, and if the pipeline leaked, Standing Rock and its downstream communities would have been poisoned. Environmental degradation
and runaway climate change would have pressed ahead unabated. Carbon dependency would have become even more deeply engrained in our
political economy. Eventually, ETP and their investors would have cashed out, and future generations would have been robbed.

And all of this still will happen if President Obama doesn’t heed the water protectors and instead sides with ETP.

ETP spent $1.2 million over the last five years paying politicians to legislate in its favor. Warren personally donated $103,000 to the Trump
campaign. But when indigenous people organized, turning to direct action and the law to pressure elected officials and government systems,
they wrested power from ETP’s hands.

DAPL is just one chapter in a much longer story of indigenous resistance to, and victories against, pipelines across North America. In 2015, the
Obama administration nixed the Keystone XL Pipeline, yielding to pressure from the Cowboy Indian Alliance. In Minnesota, Enbridge shelved
plans for the Sandpiper pipeline, after encountering tribal opposition. The Unist’ot’en camp in northern British Columbia has held out against
numerous proposed pipelines through their territory, building a space where indigenous sovereignty stands tall on lands defined by industry as
an “energy corridor.”

The American and Canadian oil industries are more vulnerable than we realize. Fracked oil from the Bakken and Tar Sands is expensive to
extract and refine. Meanwhile, OPEC is pumping at breakneck speed, driving down global oil prices. Oil infrastructure is costly, not only for
indigenous people, workers, and the environment, but for investors too. Canadian oil producers have sold crude at a loss. The North Dakota
and Tar Sands oil booms have busted. Indigenous opposition to pipelines through their territories has made investors uneasy.

ETP was concerned that their $3.7 billion pipeline would be cancelled. Just this week, Warren used another one of his companies, Sunoco, to
buy ETP for $20 billion in order to cut his losses. The move will lower profits for shareholders of ETP in order to protect profits for Energy
Transfer Equities (ETE), the DAPL umbrella company in which Warren owns more than 10 percent of shares. Simply put, in the face of massive
opposition, the Dallas billionaire reshuffled his companies at shareholders’ expense in order to safeguard and grow his own vast fortune.
The show of force against indigenous protesters, however brutal, is an act of desperation to protect his infinitely deep pockets. If DAPL is not
moving oil by the New Year, shipping contractors can cancel their transportation agreements. Warren’s time is running out.

Standing Rock, on the other hand, is the future. Populism

is killing the “Third Way” politics advocated by Bill Clinton,
Tony Blair, and their equivalents around the world . This is the Fourth Way.

The Fourth Way will harness the power and strategic location of indigenous people, exploiting pressure points beyond the workplace to oppose
and transform unjust, unequal, and undemocratic systems.

Movements working to reshape infrastructure, environmental policy, financial systems, policing, and work will be
of particular importance to indigenous people. Fossil fuel divestment and the “Keep It in the Ground” movement can weaken and
even undermine companies seeking to exploit fossil fuels on indigenous lands. Regulations that dismantle financial instruments and policies
that profit from natural resource speculation could divert and damage returns on capital flows. The abolition
of mass incarceration
would loosen the death grip of prisons and police on indigenous communities . Unions can turn individual workers
into collective forces of resistance, helping drive up costs for developers and protect laborers from unsafe working conditions. Long-term
efforts to reimagine work through full automation and a universal basic income could prevent laborers from having to seek such dangerous
work in the first place.

As Standing Rock has shown, indigenous nations that use their unique standing to advocate for viable
alternatives to unjust systems will gain supporters. Our traditional territories encompass the rivers, mountains, and forests
that capital exploits with abandon. Our resistance — to the pipelines, bulldozers, and mines that cut through our lands and communities — has
greater potential than yet realized. Ours is a powerful voice envisioning
a more harmonious and sustainable relationship
with the natural world rooted in the resurgence of indigenous sovereignty.

As long as indigenous people continue to make this argument, we

are positioned to win policies, court decisions, and
international agreements that protect and enlarge our sovereignty and jurisdiction. As our jurisdiction and sovereignty grow, we will
have more power to stop, reroute, and transform carbon-based, capitalist, and colonial infrastructure . When the
Justice Department halted construction of DAPL in October, they also said they would begin looking into Free Prior Informed
Consent legislation. This is a minimal first step, and we must hold them to it.

Longstanding alliances with progressive parties and politicians are key to our success. In the United States, Native people have
worked with Democratic elected officials like Bernie Sanders and Raúl Grijalva to advance bills like the Save Oak Flat Act,
which aimed to stop an international mining conglomerate from exploiting an Apache sacred site in Arizona. In Canada, First Nations have
supported the New Democratic Party. In New Zealand, the Maori Rātana religious and political movement has an alliance with the Labour Party
that stretches back to the 1930s. Some indigenous leaders, such as outspoken Aboriginal Australian leader Pat Dodson, a Labour senator
for Western Australia, have won prominent positions in these parties.

This does not mean, of course, that we

should pay deference to elected officials. In 2014, Obama became one of the first
sitting presidents to visit an Indian reservation when he travelled to Standing Rock. His visit
was historically symbolic and
emotionally important, but if Obama fails to stop DAPL, indigenous people should renounce him. Politicians are helpful when
they change policies and outcomes. We cannot and should not settle for symbolic victories.

If there is to be an enduring indigenous-left coalition, the Left must support indigenous demands for
land, jurisdiction, and sovereignty. At their core, these demands undermine the imperial cut-and-paste model
of the nation-state, stretching from Hobbes to the present, which insists that there is room for just one sovereign entity in the state
apparatus. Thomas Piketty’s call for a global wealth tax implies an international governance structure to levy such a tax. He pushes us to think
beyond the state. Similarly, indigenous demands for lands, jurisdiction, and sovereignty imply that we must think beneath it.
As the Fourth World continues to push states to recognize our inherent, constitutional, and treaty rights as sovereign nations, the Left cannot
remain neutral. To remain neutral is to perpetuate a long history of colonization. To remain neutral is to lose a valuable, organized, and
powerful ally.

Struggle Without End

On November 15, morethan 1,500 protesters gathered in Foley Square in Manhattan. With songs and chants of
“Water is life,” we expressed our solidarity with Standing Rock, and sent a strong message to Obama and the Army Corps
of Engineers, whose offices lie just across the street: rescind DAPL. We were just a fraction of the thousands who came together in cities across
the country that day.

Marching into the street, a few dozen of us locked arms, sat down and stopped traffic in an act of civil disobedience. We refused to move. We
became the bodies blocking the behemoth.

Police corralled us. An automated announcement warned us that we faced imminent arrest if we refused to move. The machine blared
louder and louder: “you are unlawfully in the roadway and blocking vehicular traffic . . .” We responded with even louder chants
and songs to drown out the machine. The officers tightened their ranks and arrested us one by one.
In jail, I was surprised to learn that I was just one of two indigenous arrestees. The radical potential of July’s canoe journey had spread farther
and wider than anything we’d imagined just a few months earlier.

We can still stop the Dakota Access pipeline. The police may turn water cannons on us, assault and maim us, and lock us up, but we own the
momentum. And even if we fail to defeat this pipeline, we will have prevailed in many battles along the way, and we can still win the long war.

As we seek a way forward amid an ascendant right, the Fourth World has opened up a new window of political possibility. The Left must
stand with them and start stitching their successful formula for resistance and transformation together with movements for economic,
racial, environmental, gender, and sexual justice into a winning coalition.

This is, and always has been, a long and difficult struggle of incremental victories and defeats. For the first people of this continent, it has raged
for centuries. It is, as the late Maori intellectual and activist Ranginui Walker put it in Ka Whawhai Tonu Matou, a “Struggle Without End.” The
title of Walker’s book refers to the legendary words of Rewi Maniapoto, a Maori King Movement leader, who responded to a call to surrender
at the Battle of Orakau in 1864, with these immortal lines:

“Ka whawhai tonu matou, Ake! Ake! Ake!” We will fight on, forever and ever and ever.

As we fight on, the songs and dances of our indigenous resistance find new steps, new verses, and new
voices.
Hey ya ho, hey ya hey yo ho

Hey ya ho, hey ya hey yo ho

Ya hey ya ha, hey ya hey ya ho

Ya hey ya ho, hey ya ho,

Get your pipelines the fuck off our land!

We kicked your ass at the Sacred Stone camp!

We will fight and we will win!

Ya hey ya ho, hey ya ho.

The state is necessary — the aff’s rejection freezes Indigenous movements in purified
ways of being, which locks in Anthropogenic path-dependence.
Hamilton 17, Professor of Public Ethics at Charles Sturt University in Canberra (Clive Hamilton, 6-26-
2017, “3 Friends and Adversaries,” in “Defiant Earth: The Fate of Humans in the Anthropocene,” 1st
Edition, Polity, pp. 60-82)
The ontological wrong turn
For all its “materialism” post-humanism moves in a world of knowledge, or rather knowledges and
perspectives. It is a reaction against modernity’s claim that the only legitimate way to understand the world is through a
single universal kind of reason, one that emerged from the foundational distinction between the subject
who knows and the object that is known. The “ontological turn” goes beyond post-humanism’s defense
of different knowledges to defend the truth of a variety of ways of being, a plurality of ontologies. The
turn has been lent empirical force from anthropology in the observation that other cultures did not separate and elevate the human in the way
the Moderns did. Of course this has been known for a long time. The novel move is to understand these cultures not as
alternative ways of seeing the world – perspectives interpreted as anything from primitive to respect-worthy to the only means of
saving the Earth – but of different worlds, that is, different ways of being. The most systematic, powerful and scholarly statement of this
position is by Philippe Descola in Beyond Nature and Culture, which systematizes ontologies with various combinations of modes of interiority and physicality. He posits four: naturalism (the
modern Western way of being), animism (among Amazonian Indians, for example), totemism (Australian Aborigines), and analogism (Chinese geomancy or Europe in the Middle Ages). In this
way the Western mode of being is merely one among others, and Descola is not afraid to point to its faults, while maintaining a respectful neutrality toward the other three. In considering the
(Western naturalist) opposition between nature and culture, the non-human and the human, Descola asks which unique feature could separate humans from nature. He concedes that children
learn early to distinguish between entities endowed with intentionality and those without it, and that intentionality is only one of a range of obvious differences between oneself and natural
objects. Yet, he asks, why draw the frontier between human and object at intentionality or language or the ability to make things? Why not draw the frontier at independence of movement, or
at life, or even at material solidity? We Moderns would do better to go to pre-modern ontologies to understand the world around us rather than rely on “the tiny quantum by which we
distinguish ourselves” from other objects. 31 Well, that tiny quantum was enough to shift the Earth’s geological arc and to do so more or less consciously. It was the place at which Moderns
stood to move the Earth, and where the lever they used to do it, modern technology wielded by the force of capital accumulation, was manufactured. And the truth is that preventing the Earth
from moving a great deal further from its Holocene homeliness cannot be achieved by standing somewhere else, and certainly not in the Amazon rainforest. Or, more accurately, the place to
stand must be a step forward from the modern one rather than a step backwards. Descola observes, quite rightly, that nowadays it is hard to refer to any difference between “Us and Others”
without being accused of incipient racism (in the case of the bad guys) or “impenitent nostalgia for the past” (in the case of the well-meaning ones). 32 He defends himself from the latter
accusation with the argument of his book – that Western cosmology is only one among several ways of being and those immersed in it cannot use it to judge the others (although he in fact
does, in a positive way). How am I to defend myself against the accusation of incipient racism when I underscore the difference between modern Us and pre-modern Others? The immediate

Others did not make the Anthropocene; that was done by Us. The implication is, as I
response is to remind ourselves that

have been arguing throughout, that the Moderns are responsible for immense accomplishments by building a system of astonishing
dynamism, transforming the conditions of life in ways at once magnificent and ruinous. A second defense is that, notwithstanding all their
merits, pre-modernontologies cannot help us now. While acknowledging the unheralded sophistication of
their cosmologies and deep relationships with the natural world, they could not provide the ontological
grounding for the vast technological achievements of modernity nor its world-ruining effects. At the very
end of his volume Descola writes that it would be mistaken to think that pre-modern cultures “can bring us a deeper wisdom for the present
time than the shaky naturalism of late modernity.” 33 Elsewhere he tells us we should not “cling to” our way of seeing the world when there
are better ways “still very much alive.” 34 But not even the inheritors of those other ways believe that. If we accept the validity of the division
of the world into various ways of being and corresponding ontologies, it nevertheless remains true that one of those ontologies, Western
naturalism, has become utterly dominant and continues to drive the others from the face of the Earth. This “ontocide” may not succeed
completely because Indigenous people, while negotiating their existences in the modern world, are finding means of retaining elements of their
cosmologies and ways of being, creating modern-traditional hybrids. At the risk of speaking on their behalf, most Indigenous people understand
that old worlds cannot be preserved except by rearticulating them in a dialogue with the modern world. Social scientists who call for a return to
non-dualistic pre-modern ways of being – Descola even suggests we might find dead ones on library shelves and make them “come to life once
more’ 35 – propose a political strategy that Indigenous people themselves typically do not entertain. So ontological
anthropology
risks freezing Indigenous people in purified ways of being , whereas they are daily negotiating blends
and compromises between modern and non-modern ontologies, not least when engaged in practices
such as the production of “traditional” artworks. The new ontological divisions of the avantgarde
anthropologists are not worlds that Indigenous people themselves feel obliged to occupy. There are
bridges to cross from the modern to the nonmodern and back again, and many do it several times a day.
It is true that the grounding of certain Indigenous ontologies holds something that ought to be recovered in a new Anthropocene way of being
beyond modernity, and that is their cosmological sensibility. It is the very “primitivity” of these cosmo-ontologies that separates them from
more “sophisticated” premodern traditions like Christianity, city religions that turned inwards to become preoccupied with the self and its
salvation. As the Anthropocene consumes the world, it’s hard to listen to earnest words spoken in prayer halls or meditation rooms about how
to know God or to achieve emptiness without being struck by the thought that the inwardness of all such journeys of the self serves as a
distraction from what is happening outside the window, and that the absence of separation of the traditional Indigenous self from its natural
world may hold a powerful message for how to live in the Anthropocene. Nevertheless, it is not patronizing to say that Indigenous people do
not have the solutions to the Anthropocene. The Anthropocene is as much a shock to them as it is to everyone else. To turn to them for
answers shoulders them with an impossible burden. We
made the mess and “going native” ontologically is no
answer. Looking upon Indigenous cultures with awe and regarding them as having magical potency is to
fetishize them, a tendency now taken so far by some as to attribute to them the power to fix the
climate and reverse the geological destabilization of the planet . There is no need to reject the historical
truth of modernity and go looking among pre-modern ontologies for an alternative. The only way forward is to begin from
where we are, in modernity, and from there work toward a “beyond-modernity” way of being, a fifth ontology to add
to Descola’s four. Even if we set all this aside there is a much more compelling reason why it is futile to look to Indigenous ontologies for an answer to the Anthropocene. The vast majority of
non-Western people live not in the Amazon rainforests, the Arctic Circle, or the central deserts of Australia; they live in the sprawling cities of China, Nigeria, Brazil, and Indonesia. For the most
part, they are quite willing to leave behind the remnants of non-naturalist ontologies – which typically they see anyway as the preserve of primitive tribes within their own territories – and
seek to adopt Western ways as quickly as they can. The largest populations of Asia, Latin America, and Africa are attempting, many with extraordinary success, to emulate the growth mania,
technological practices, consumer lifestyles, and personal identity formation of the Euro-American way of being. Introducing Beyond Nature and Culture, Marshall Sahlins writes that Descola’s
claim is that “other people’s worlds do not revolve around ours.” But the hard truth is that in practice they do and, like ours, their worlds are being sucked into the whirlwind of the
Anthropocene. The new great power, China, strives to ensure its best and brightest are steeped in modernity’s subject–object ontology by sending them to be shaped by the universities of the
North, the cathedral schools of naturalism. If Europe made the transition from the analogism of astrology and alchemy to the naturalism of science across the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, China has done it in 30 years of industrial growth, albeit on cultural grounds thoroughly tilled, fertilized, and cultivated over the previous four decades by that other great agent of

Neither comparative ontology nor science studies provides a

Western naturalism – Marxism. It’s too late to exhume the corpse of Confucius.

firm basis for social analysis. The preoccupation with objectivity and the “subject–object split” has
never extended to the other domains of modernization – business, technology, the state, politics, law,
and colonial conquest. Modernity, in the words of Lucas Bessire and David Bond, “has never been organized around
any single binary.” 36 A mistaken understanding of nature by scientists in their labs was no guide to the
messy historical world outside that gave rise to the actual practices of modernity. And against the excessive power
attributed to the modern philosophy of culture versus nature, Bessire and Bond remind us that climate change is not due to
modernity but to the burning of fossil fuels, and we are better off going to actual history and recent
politics to find a way to counter it. One interrogates the nature–culture split in vain for an explanation
of why France decided to generate its electricity from zero-emissions nuclear power while Britain took
the coal option. It is a stretch of logic to go from modern science’s claim to objectivity to the chauvinism
of the anthropologist studying “the savage mind” of the non-Westerner. Those immersed in Western
naturalist ontology were not alone in viewing the Other through eyes of racial superiority , as every black
person or Korean arriving in nineteenth-century Japan discovered. Cultural chauvinism knows no ontological boundaries. The step from the
Moderns seen through science studies to the modernization worldview of the anthropologist – let alone the colonial conqueror – is in fact a
large leap. “The
Modern” risks becoming a portmanteau into which is stuffed every attitude, practice, and
ideology that might be called “Western,” one that can be opened up for an answer to any question.
Ostensibly, ontological pluralism has emerged to release us from “the crushing division between Object and Subject.” 37 Such a pluralism
means we no longer judge other ways of seeing the world through Western eyes, scorning them as superstitious or backward cultures while
basking in the light of modernity. But isn’t there a third option, other than dismissing pre-modern ontologies as superstition or giving them
equal or higher ontological status? It is one that maintains a respectful distance, standing aside and saying “we cannot know, and will not
judge,” and then acknowledges that Western
naturalism emerged supreme, even if it did so merely as the philosophical
enabler of European military-technological power and colonial conquest .
Recovering the cosmological sense?

When Indigenous people found white invaders on their shores they did not see the occasion as a meaningless accident that “just happened”; they went looking in their cosmologies for an
understanding of where the episode fits in their world. Are these white visitors old spirits returning? The sense of grand events embedded in an unfolding order rather than arriving
accidentally is characteristic of non-modern cosmologies, and of course to religious traditions in the West. Yet, like humanists, post-humanists understand world history as a series of accidents.
A world history purged of all inner meaning is the ontological heart of modern cosmology, one captured in the shift in the meaning of the word – from a life-governing set of beliefs about the
creation of the world, its meaning, and the place of the tribe within it, to that of theories of the origins and physical structure of the universe. So a view of modernity as a meaningful unfolding
within a larger world or cosmic order is more deeply non-modern than the ontological pluralists’ view that it was a historical misfortune to be rectified by going to the ontologies of the non-
Moderns to learn how we might merge nature and culture once again or recognize that they never really split. Yet I’m suggesting that, for those who sense some larger meaning in the
Anthropocene’s arrival and what it may be telling us about the role of humans on Earth, there is no going back to pre- modern ontologies for an understanding; we must look ahead to the
evolution of modernity itself, driven by its own endogenous forces and contradictions within a larger order. Recasting agency is at the center of this rethinking. For post-humanists, the human
claim to exclusive agency is an illusion. If we are so deeply embedded in networks that the division between humans and non-humans is dissolved and our agency is barely distinguishable from
that of an ant or a robot, then intentionality and freedom become mirages. They are suspicious of all categories of early modern philosophy used to define humans as unique creatures –
freedom, consciousness, will, Reason. Yet turbo-charged agency was the essence of modernity, combining freedom from oppression with power over nature, using science and technology and
the institutions that mobilized them. Yes, post-humanism has taught us to blur the hard-and-fast division between subject and object by accepting our inescapable physical entanglements. It

nothing exists outside of its relationships. And it has demolished the idea of
has made us understand, thanks to ecology and Whitehead, that

capital-S Science rising above the actual world of scientific practice. Yet if humans can exist only within networks that does
not mean we are nothing more than nodes in the tangled web of worldly processes. Modernity was not an illusion
but the arrival of the time of greatest promise and greatest danger, each represented by real social
forces and movements that have fought out the great political and social battles. Only when we accept the
greatness of the human project and the extreme danger that goes with it can we pose the epoch-defining question: how are we to use
our power to pacify and protect the Earth rather than destroy it?
ON
 1NC — Ecological Protection
Past ecologies might have been antiblack BUT they are not codified into the earth
itself—a plurality of past failures produced today’s failure of protection and only
reengaging with protection can change the failures of history.
Connelly ’17 — William E. Connelly, role experimenter, Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Political
Science at Johns Hopkins University; (2017; “FACING THE PLANETARY ENTANGLED HUMANISM AND THE
POLITICS OF SWARMING”; University of Kansas Libraries; Duke University Press, ISBN 9780822373254,
Chapter 1: SOCIOCENTRISM, THE ANTHROPOCENE, AND THE PLANETARY; //LFS—JCM)

To name the Anthropocene, then, is not to name a new era of human mastery nor to name perverse
human interventions into forces that are other-wise gradual and self-maintaining. It is to challenge human
exceptionalism by coming to terms with bumpy processes of planetary self-organization that interact with
each other and with human cultures. It is also, on my usage, to name perils emanating initially from Euro-American
regimes that now imperil other regions that did not initiate these processes. It is, moreover, to dramatize
this condition in ways that encourage more constituencies in several regions and walks of life to respond politically
to it. And it is to invite those in the humanities to forge intellectual and political alliances with geologists, glaciologists,
climatologists, and paleontologists who link this era to several other bumpy periods that preceded it. The preciousness of
classical humanism must be challenged by what I call entangled humanism.
We belong to a large, bumpy variety of temporal processes that exceed us, even as powerful, fossilized constituencies in some older capitalist
states— led by the oil interests and the Republican Party in the United States—refuse to acknowledge the dangerous planetary processes with
which we are imbricated and resist modes of positive organization to respond to them. So I focus on planetary forces and various cultural
modes of imbrication with them, occasionally using the word Anthropocene to do so. But I also oppose any sense of generic human
responsibility for the contemporary planetary condition, a sense that has sometimes been associated with that term. Generic responsibility
must be replaced by regionally distributed responsibilities and vulnerabilities. Finally I resist any notion implying that a host of planetary
processes were slow, gradual, or providential before capitalist states became entangled with them. My aspiration here is to face the planetary
while connecting that face to regional, racial, and urban issues with which it is imbricated.

An Invitational, Diversified “We”

What orientations to the future are most promising during an era when the planetary dimension of being has again become so visible and
intrusive? To what pluralities, human and nonhuman, might we “belong”—even if we decide that the term belonging
must be suspended in favor of a pursuit of plural sites of attachment? As I pursue these questions I hope it becomes clear that this study
poses provisional responses without purporting to clear the issues up altogether. Consummate answers are
suspect today. That said, it might be wise to focus on forging a militant set of constituencies oriented to
interim responses to pressing issues of the day. If and as each minority gains a measure of success, you can
look up again to see where to turn next. Why? In part because it is wise to be dubious about the power and
credibility of old capitalist and communist idealisms during an era of rapid, human-induced climate change. But
also because to challenge sociocentrism is to render problematic the projection of any smooth horizon into
the future. The planet is too large and multifarious for that. One of the attractions of sociocentrism over the past few
centuries was that it supported a series of conflicting , smooth ideals, even as the opposed parties were in fact
rushing blindly together into the Anthropocene.

At various points in this study, I adopt a “we” voice. As will become clear, that voice seeks to hook
into a pluralized and invitational
“us.” The idea is to become part of an active cross-regional pluralist assemblage composed of multiple
minorities in different parts of the world rather than to place any constituency at the center or top of a singular
unity. No single class, nation, faith, gender, state, order, region, party, racialized constituency, or age
group can form the authoritative center of the militant “we” needed today. For example, indigenous
peoples already form indispensable elements within it, advancing many promising ideas about human relations to
the past, pursuing indispensable modes of activism, pressing oil corporations and northern states to acknowledge
the horrors they have introduced as settler states pursued a fictive future on each new “frontier,” calling for
reparations, and pressing others to pursue more sustainable practices. Such movements and practices can teach
others a lot about how to internalize a positive sense of material austerity.28 <<<BEGIN FOOTNOTE
28>>> 28. For texts that explore how both indigenous peoples and dissident traditions in the Euro-
American world help us to come to terms with the contemporary condition, see Ignatov, “Ecologies of the Good
Life”; Singh, Poverty and the Quest for Life; Viveiros de Castro, Cannibal Metaphysics. The authors make creative comparisons
between the pan experientialism of “minor” Western thinkers such as Nietzsche and Deleuze and the “perspectivalism”
or “animism” of living traditions in Africa, India, and the Amazon Valley. “Minor” does not here mean unimportant;
it means a tradition of dissonant perspectives that challenged human exceptionalism, sociocentrism, and
imperialism from inside Euro-American thought in ways ignored or rejected by majoritarian theorists. Kafka, Nietzsche,
Bergson, Butler, Whitehead, Bennett, Grosz, Massumi, and Deleuze form some diverse members of the latter tradition. <<<END
FOOTNOTE 28>>>

But even they may not have all the answers today. Their rich and diverse traditions arose in a world with
a small total population, and the world now stumbling under the fragile hegemony of extractive
capitalism holds 7 billion and counting. The world is in a pickle; no preset orientation is perhaps entirely
sufficient to it. Each element in the aspirational assemblage projected here expresses several loyalties and
identifications as well as those assembled by this invitational “we.” Each constituency works on itself as it calls out to
the others, so that none remains exactly as it was before it became attached to this assemblage in the making. Old notions of pluralism as a
coalition of diverse interests are thus insufficient to it. We seek an evolving, complex, cross-regional “we” that propels
diverse constituencies into larger assemblages, even as each constituency retains a host of differences. It will assemble, if it
does, to respond to a planetary condition asymmetrically distributed in its effects and dangers, as participants also pay
attention to other local, regional, class, racial, state, and religious questions. Many of these forces, as we shall
see, are already imbricated with the effects of the Anthropocene. The new assemblage, if it grows, will build upon a
host of environmental movements currently in play, some of which already pursue new connections across
regions and constituencies. If such interconnected populist movements do crystallize, could they eventually
foment general strikes in numerous countries and regions at the same time? Such strikes would impose demands
upon multiple institutions from the inside and outside at the same time; the sources of injury,
energy, and hope they draw upon would emanate from several sites.

AND fixed-frame inherencies explaining environmental operation are ineffective and

entrench fossil fuel capitalism.
Wapner ’19 — Paul Wapner, Professor of Global Environmental Politics in the School of International
Service at American University, faculty member, Earth System Governance Project, board, Lama
Foundation and REVOLV; (2019; “ANTHROPOCENE ENCOUNTERS: NEW DIRECTIONS IN GREEN POLITICAL
THINKING”; University of Michigan Libraries, Cambridge Online Books; Cambridge University Press, Earth
System Governance, ISBN 978-1-108-48117-5, Chapter 11: The Ethics of Political Research in the
Anthropocene; //LFS—JCM) [***NOTE*** Italics added]

One central tenet of political research is value-neutrality. For decades, social

scientists have been trained to set their political
commitments aside so as not to blind themselves to false observations. The job of the political analyst is to see the
world in the way it is, not as they wish it should be. In politics, this is particularly challenging because many
come to research subscribing to worldviews – such as Realism, Liberalism, or Marxism – that overlay
events with implicit assumptions. This can lead to starry-eyed utopianism or corrosive cynicism in terms of
speculating about political possibility, and such predispositions can often sneak into one’s research. One of the
hallmarks of modernity, which produced the social sciences as disciplines, is the commitment to objectivity revealed
through reason rather than faith or other nonrational epistemological capacities. As a result, social scientists (and all
researchers) have been repeatedly warned against letting emotions, principled commitments, and philosophical
orientations contaminate reason. Cold reason, not warm fuzzy affections, produces objective
knowledge, and thus, researchers must endeavor to keep values out of their work.

Over the past few decades, especially with the advent of postmodern political studies, many scholars have
recognized the poverty, or at least false promise, of objectivity, and the limitations of reason as the sole form of
inquiry. Many now understand that it is impossible to rid oneself of value commitments. (Indeed, it is difficult even to
notice the precise ways such commitments interfere in one’s scholarship.) Postmodern insights suggest
that every researcher is animated by interests, and that the “will to truth” itself is a guise for advancing
one’s agenda (Foucault 2014). Notwithstanding this understanding, much social science – and a fair amount of scholarship
on global environmental politics – proceeds as if inquiry could still be free from value commitments. This is not to
discount the value of utilizing empirical evidence within political research in the Anthropocene . While value-
neutral studies continue to add to our understanding of the discipline, most researchers give an epistemological wink to
postmodern criticisms and then continue as if merely being aware of the critiques gives license to do proper
social scientific work. Put differently, social inquiry still pines for the imprimatur of “objective science” to be worthy. And this, as most of
us have long been told, appears fundamentally at odds with values, principles, and commitments.

The injustices that sit

at the core of Anthropocene shake up the aspiration for value-free research. They
expose the raw character of our times, and thus, should pull at the heartstrings of researchers. In doing so, they do
not so much cloud one’s vision as provide significance and direction for research. This does not mean that
scholars should abandon reason or engage simply in screeds against injustice. On the contrary, it calls on
researchers to double down their efforts to understand the political world with all available means,
including reason. This is necessary because, if one wants to change conditions, one needs an accurate
reading of them. It does mean, however, that researchers should not hide or otherwise minimize their normative
commitments. Such concerns actually discipline one’s research; they provide strictures for pursuing knowledge of what is
most valuable. The Anthropocene raises the moral stakes of political research and thus provides, arguably for the first time, the
momentum to move more fully beyond the orthodoxy of value-neutrality and embrace normative political
scholarship. For decades, normative work has been viewed as mere commentary or, at best second-rate research
compared with so-called rigorous, exacting, rationalistic knowledge production. Living in the Anthropocene
requires abandoning this prejudice and seeing the compatibility between normative and scientific work. Normative
commitment is not the enemy but a necessary component of rationalist scholarship. In this sense, the
Anthropocene simply provides new energy and justification for normatively oriented work.

Practicing normative research opens up an additional tool for scholars; namely, their critical capacity for interpreting
political life. In his study Representations of the Intellectual, Edward Said constantly reminds readers of the Gramscian insight that
intellectual work takes place under ideational hegemony. Research is never free floating or somehow
outside socioeconomic, political conditions. However, Said recognizes that, with deep, persistent work,
scholars can occasionally get out from underneath conventional strictures and, in so doing, take up the
responsibility of speaking “truth to power” (Said 1996). This includes unmasking perpetrated falsehoods and, at a deeper
level of intellectual excavation, making connections that are often denied and citing alternative courses of action that
could have been taken. It involves, in other words, assuming a critical perspective and expressing the moral
implications of doing so. For Said, the intellectual is neither a “pacifier nor a consensus-builder, but someone whose whole
being is staked on a critical sense, a sense of being unwilling to accept easy formulas or ready-made clichés, or the smooth,
ever-so-accommodating confirmations of what the powerful or conventional have to say, and what they do” (Said 1996: 23). Said, however,
goes even further. He makes clear that taking
up the responsibility of critical insight requires being sensitive to and assuming
the obligation to work on behalf of the most vulnerable. He recognizes the structural violence that courses through
society – much like the exploitation that accompanies carbon economies – and believes that scholars must
name these and align themselves with their victims. As he puts it, “There is no question in my mind that the
intellectual belongs on the same side with the weak and unrepresented” (Said 1996: 23). For Said and others,
responsible scholarship is not simply about filling in knowledge gaps, knocking down “strawmen,” or otherwise
engaging in purely academic pursuits. Ideas matter; inquiry has consequences; research must advance the plight of the
underprivileged. Anything less than this is an implicit exercise in shoring up hegemonic structures
themselves.

A second orthodoxy of political studies, and one that has special significance to environmental affairs, involves the
so-called “unit of analysis” question. For decades, Political Science, International Relations, and related disciplines focused almost
exclusively on the state as the main actor in public affairs. Domestically, the government holds dramatic power
over collective life, and internationally, the state serves as the primary agent of world events. Scholars have
traditionally taken this to mean that all relevant political activity centers on the state, and therefore, research
should concentrate primarily on state affairs. Since at least the 1990s, the state-centric model has been qualified as
scholars recognized the importance of nongovernmental entities in domestic and global life. Activist groups, research institutes,
corporations, artists, cultural trend-setters, and other actors in civil society significantly influence the way
people think about and act in relation to public issues (Rosenau 1990). They have targeted and manipulated
mechanisms of power strewn throughout societies, and their efforts rival state action in shaping widespread
thought and behavior (Keck and Sikkink 1998; Betsill and Corell 2007). Moreover, researchers have also shifted foci away from individual agents
to structural factors in trying to understand world affairs. They
have come to see states and other actors as embedded in
various cultural and material regimes that animate and instrumentalize individual actors, and this trend has also
softened the state-centric model of politics.
 1NC — Policy Focus
Debating about political demands is effective and turns the case.
Battistoni, 19—editor at Jacobin, Department of Political Science, Yale University (Alyssa,
“Spadework: On political organizing,” https://nplusonemag.com/issue-34/politics/spadework/, dml)
By the time I started organizing so much that it felt like a full-time job, it was the spring of 2016, and I had plenty of company. Around the
country there were high-profile efforts to organize magazines, fast-food places, and nursing homes. Erstwhile Occupiers became involved in the
Bernie Sanders campaign and joined the exploding Democratic Socialists of America, whose members receive shabby business cards
proclaiming them an “official socialist organizer.” Today’s
organizers — not activists, thank you — make clear that they are not
black bloc participants brawling
with police or hippies plotting a love-in. They are inspired by a tradition of
professional revolutionaries, by Lenin’s exhortation that “unless the masses are organized, the
proletariat is nothing. Organized — it is everything.” Organizing, in other words, is unembarrassed about
power. It recognizes that to wield it you need to persuade untold numbers of people to join a cause,
and to begin organizing themselves. Organizing means being in it to win.

But how do you win? Historical materialism holds that crises of capitalism spark revolts, perhaps even revolutions, as
witnessed in the eruption of Occupy and Black Lives Matter; uprisings in Spain, Greece, and Egypt; and
the British student movement against tuition fees. But there’s no guide for what happens in the long
aftermath, as the left has often learned the hard way.
In previous moments of upheaval and promise the left has often turned to Antonio Gramsci, who sought to understand why working-class
revolts in Europe following the Russian Revolution had led to fascism. Gramsci concluded that on some level people consent to subservience,
even take it for granted, when the order in which they live comes to seem like common sense. Hegemony was subtler than outright coercion,
more pervasive, permeating the tempos of daily life.

It was hegemony, Stuart Hall argued in 1983, that was key to understanding the disappointment of his own generation — why Thatcher and the
new right had triumphed in remaking common sense after a decade of labor union revolt. Hegemony shaped how people acted when they
weren’t thinking about it, what they thought was right and wrong, what they imagined the good life to be. A hegemonic project had to “occupy
each and every front” of life, “to insert itself into the pores of the practical consciousness of human beings.” Thatcherism had understood this
better than the left. It had “entered the struggle on every single front on which it calculated it could advance itself,” put forth a “theory for
every single arena of human life,” from economics to language, morality to culture. The domains the left dismissed as bourgeois were simply
the ones where the ruling class was winning. Yet creating hegemony was “difficult work,” Hall reminded us. Never fully settled, “it always has to
be won.”

In other words, there

is no economic deus ex machina that will bring the revolution. There are still people, in
their stubborn, contradictory particularities, as they exist in concrete space and time. It is up to you to
figure out how to act together, or not; how to find common ground, or not. Gramsci and Hall insist that you
must look relentlessly at things and people as they are, face your prospects with brutal honesty, and
act in ways that you think can have an effect. In these ways they are an organizer’s theorists.
BUT IN FACT, one doesn’t become an organizer by reading theory, or at least I didn’t. I went to graduate school to study political theory, in hopes of figuring out what to do about the dilemmas that weighed on me. But it took
something else to give that theory meaning in my own life. This was the experience of graduate school, which wasn’t necessarily your typical workplace — so the Yale administration kept telling us.

I’d joined the union as a matter of course, stopping by the Graduate Employees and Students Organization (GESO) table at the extracurriculars fair before I’d gone to a single day of class. Politically, it seemed obvious: I supported
unions in general, so why not join? Plus my college roommate had been at Yale and organizing for years already: I’d heard from him of struggles and triumphs, of how he’d knocked doors all summer to help a slate of union
members and supporters take over city government the year prior. A few days after I signed my card, I went to a union pizza lunch in my department to welcome our new cohort  — I was one of just three people who’d showed up,
out of seventeen — and nodded along with the organizer’s rap about why the union was good. I didn’t need convincing.

Yet when another organizer asked me to join the union communications team a few weeks later, I burst into tears. I was already completely overwhelmed with hundreds of pages of reading I couldn’t possibly hope to complete,
response papers to write and presentations to give on said reading, obligatory departmental workshops and talks to attend. Doing one more thing seemed impossible. She talked me down from panic and I agreed to do something
small — an interview with a union member for a newsletter we hoped to revive. I took on a series of other projects — more interviews, filming testimonials for a new website. At the end of our first year, my closest friend in my
graduate cohort ran for a municipal office on the union slate, and I spent the summer knocking doors for his campaign. I met up with other organizers for “visits,” where we walked around campus looking for members to sign
whatever petition we were running at the time, and joined my department’s organizing committee. I cried in many more meetings.

Graduate school, I came to realize, was not the place to go to learn about politics. I was bewildered by its rituals, which counterintuitively seemed structured around avoiding intellectual conversation in favor of gossip and shoptalk.
At house parties and department receptions, we rarely talked about the things we’d read or thought about; instead we complained about how many papers we’d written that week, how many deadlines loomed for funding
applications or summer programs, how little sleep we’d gotten. We tiptoed around more sensitive conversations: access to mental-health care, caring for children on a stipend, the cratering job market and growing pool of adjunct
labor. I was desperate for those conversations, and organizing, I found, was the way to have them. Like a consciousness-raising group, organizing conversations allowed you to air grievances long suppressed in the name of
politeness or professionalism, to create a space for politics where it wasn’t supposed to be. The point was to locate the fundamental experience of powerlessness lurking beneath the generalized misery. Yet for all that we griped
about how much we worked, in organizing conversations the question of whether we were really workers came up constantly.
Why was it so hard to see ourselves as people who might need a union? Gramsci had observed that any individual’s personality was “strangely composite,” made up of a mixture of beliefs, thoughts, and ideas gleaned from family
history, cultural norms, and formal education, filtered through their own life experiences read through the prevailing ideology of the time. Hall had taken this up to argue that when the working class failed to espouse revolutionary
thought, women to embrace feminism, or people of color to advocate antiracism, it wasn’t because they suffered from false consciousness. The idea that consciousness could be true or false simply made no sense: it was always,
Hall stated, “complex, fragmentary, and contradictory.” This was just as true for those on the left as for anyone else. “A tiny bit of all of us is also somewhere inside the Thatcherite project,” Hall had warned in 1988. “Of course,
we’re all one hundred per cent committed. But every now and then — Saturday mornings, perhaps, just before the demonstration—we go to Sainsbury’s and we’re just a tiny bit of a Thatcherite subject.”

The Thatcherite project was since then much advanced, and we had internalized its dictates. For our whole lives we had learned to do school very well; in graduate school we learned to exploit ourselves on weekends and vacations
before putting ourselves “on the market.” Many of us still believed in meritocracy, despite learning every day how it was failing us. The worse the conditions of academic life became, the harder everyone worked, and the harder it
became to contest them. Plus, we were so lucky to be there — at Yale! Compared to so many grad students, we had it good, and surely jobs were waiting on the other side for us, if for anyone. Who were we to complain?
Organizing a union of graduate students at Yale seemed to many like an act of unbearable privilege — a bunch of Ivy League self-styled radicals doing worker cosplay.

Then there was the prevailing ideology. Many people liked unions in the abstract, for other people, but had reservations about whether one made sense for us. We worked independently for the most part (getting paid to read!);
we exercised control over our own work — or at least hoped to one day. Nearly all of us had grown up hearing about how bad teachers’ unions were for our own precious educations. Few of us came from union families; almost no
one had belonged to a union before, and those who had sometimes cited bad experiences. Even among those who were nominally sympathetic, “I think unions are good, but . . . ” was a common refrain.

The really controversial thing, though, wasn’t joining the union but organizing it. We asked people to help build the union, and to help lead it. We asked them to sign a card, then to ask a friend to sign one, too; to commit to
meeting regularly with an organizer; to join the organizing committee and bring the people they knew to meetings and to rallies. We asked a lot — too much, some thought. Many people were happy to sign a membership card and
a petition from time to time but didn’t want to go to more meetings or talk to colleagues about the union: they were already busy, so busy. They supported the union, they said, but they wanted it to leave them alone.

This seemed like a distinctive challenge of organizing graduate students, who on the one hand were notoriously overworked and never really
off the clock, and on the other were not quite immiserated, at least at Yale. (In fact, this was partly because the university had increased
graduate stipends and benefits over the years in order to undercut the union; it was the price of success.) Yet I came to think it was part of the
challenge of organizing more generally. Reading Charles Payne’s I’ve Got the Light of Freedom, about
civil rights organizing in
the Jim Crow South, I was struck by the list compiled by Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)
canvassers of reasons black Mississippians gave for not wanting to register to vote in the early 1960s ,
which could by and large have been given by grad students: “Just not interested.” “Don’t have the time to discuss
voting.” “Feel the politicians are going to do whatever they want, regardless of votes cast.” “Too busy,
engaged in personal affairs.” “Wants time to think it over.” “Satisfied with things as they are.”

We were not, of course, fighting Jim Crow. Yale was miserable and feudal in many respects, but we were there temporarily and by
choice; many of us feared our advisers but did not fear for our lives . We might give the same excuses, but they didn’t mean the
same things. Still, certain dynamics of the two organizing campaigns were similar, despite the obvious
differences. People often told you why they weren’t going to do something, often with perfectly good
reasons, and you tried to convince them that they should.
We were all too busy, but the too-busyness wasn’t really about time, or at least not only. Being too busy meant people didn’t see why the
union was worth making time for. Your
job as an organizer was to find out what it was that people wanted to be
different in their lives, and then to persuade people that it mattered whether they decided to do
something about it. This is not the same thing as persuading people that the thing itself matters: they
usually know it does. The task is to persuade people that they matter: they know they usually don’t.
“THE BEGINNER WHO has learned a new language always translates it back into his mother tongue,” Marx observed in The Eighteenth Brumaire
of Louis Bonaparte, “but he assimilates the spirit of the new language and expresses himself freely in it only when he moves in it without
recalling the old and when he forgets his native tongue.” Organizing
requires you to learn the language of politics so
well that it becomes your own. Like any other language, it takes a lot of practice, during which time you
often feel awkward and unsure. For this stage there are exercises like “stake, take, do,” which lays out a sequence of
questions for you: What is at stake for you? What will it take to win? What will
you do about it? You have to start with what matters to you and the person you’re organizing
before jumping into how hard it’s going to be and why they should do it anyway. These exercises are
useful, but they can be stiff and artificial, because you’re not really speaking politics yet: you’re still
translating. It’s why ne \w organizers often sound slightly robotic, repeating something they’ve clearly learned from someone else. But
eventually you learn to leave this scaffolding behind and speak as yourself.

Often, however, you have to learn to speak differently — to speak as a different version of yourself. This
means discarding many of your most familiar habits. Like many women, for a while I managed to get by on likability; I was
already good at a certain kind of emotional labor. But as the asks got bigger, I hit a wall: people might spend thirty seconds signing a petition
they didn’t think mattered much because they liked me, but they weren’t going to piss off their boss just to stay in my good graces. So I had to
learn something else. “An axiom of organizers,” writes Jane McAlevey, “is that every good organizing conversation makes everyone at least a
little uncomfortable.” The most awkward part is what McAlevey calls “the long uncomfortable silence” — the moment when you make an ask
and let someone think about their answer. For a long time my biggest weakness was my tendency to shy away from making sure people knew
that winning the things they said they wanted was up to them. Too
often I tried to gloss over the discomfort instead of
letting it sit. It was a lot easier to talk about our brilliant plan or how much support we had from our
allies than to insist with the people I was organizing that whether we won our own union or not depended
on them. As a result, people saw me as the union person who would deliver information and lay out a plan and keep them posted; they did
not see themselves as union people who were also responsible for helping to win the things they said they wanted. McAlevey would call this a
shortcut; we
called it protecting people from the organizing. To soften the ask seems compassionate, but
like any other protective measure, it condescends, and like any other shortcut, it makes things harder
in the long run.

Realizing that it was not enough for people to like me was revelatory. I
had to learn to be more comfortable with
antagonism and disagreement, with putting a choice in front of people and letting them make it
instead of smiling away tension and doing the work myself. I had to expect more from other people. With other
organizers, I role-played the conversations I feared most before having them;
afterward, I replayed them over and over in my head. I struggled to be different: the version of myself I wanted to
be, someone who could move people and bend at least some tiny corner of the universe .

It’s not easy to be the site of a battle for hegemony . It’s not a beatific Whitmanesque “I contain multitudes”; it’s an
often painful struggle among your competing selves for dominance. You have one body and twenty-
four hours in a day. An organizer asks what you’ll do with them, concretely, now. You may not like
your own answer. Your inner Thatcherite will raise its voice. You can’t kill it off entirely; you will almost certainly find that it’s a bigger
part of you than you thought. But organizing burrows into the pores of your practical consciousness and asks
you to choose the part of yourself that wants something other than common sense. It’s unsettling. It
can be alienating. And yet I also often felt I was finally reconciling parts of myself I’d tried to keep
separate — what I thought, what I said, what I did. To organize, and to be organized, you have to keep in
mind Hall’s lesson: there is no true or false consciousness, no true self that organizing discovers or undoes.
You too, Hall reminds us, were made by this world you hope to change. The more distant the world you want
to live in is from the world that exists, the more deeply you yourself will feel this disjuncture. “ I’m not
cut out for this,” people often say when they struggle with organizing. No one is: one isn’t born an
organizer, but becomes one.
THE SOBER, UNSEXY character of organizing is often reromanticized in paeans to the “real work.” Organizing’s defenders are the most likely to
insist that it is boring. For a generation maligned as flighty and self-absorbed, the mundanity and dullness signify authenticity, like political
normcore. Organizing signals heroic commitment rather than faddish dilettantism, a noble resolve to do something in real life rather than trade
memes in Facebook groups or dunk on Twitter enemies. It’s true that organizing
is the day-to-day work of politics — what
Ella Baker called “spadework,” the hard labor that prepares the ground for dramatic action. But I’ve
never understood the charge of mundanity. Canvassing on a slow day can be tedious, but no other part of
organizing has ever felt dull to me. Quite the opposite: nothing has ever felt more thrilling or more
wrenching. Nothing has ever been harder to do, or harder to stop thinking about.
In The Romance of American Communism, Vivian Gornick tells a story I think about often, about a young woman tasked with selling the Communist Party newsletter The Daily Worker. “My God! How I hated selling the Worker!”
she recalls. “I used to stand in front of the neighborhood movie on a Saturday night with sickness and terror in my heart, thrusting the paper at people who’d turn away from me or push me or even spit in my face. I dreaded it.
Every week of my life for years I dreaded Saturday night. . . . God, I felt annihilated. But I did it, I did it. I did it because if I didn’t do it, I couldn’t face my comrades the next day. And we all did it for the same reason: we were
accountable to each other.”

No one ever spat in my face, but the rest I recognize. Though I didn’t always dread organizing, I often woke up with a pit in my stomach, thinking of the phone calls I’d have to make that day and the people I was supposed to catch
in the hallway after class. If anything, it was worse: the people I was talking to weren’t strangers on the street, but friends and colleagues. It hurt when they stopped picking up the phone or looked away in the halls. Why on earth
did I keep doing it?

Why did anyone? Because of their political beliefs? Maybe at first — I didn’t want to be an armchair revolutionary. But sheer ideological conviction is rarely a predictor of someone’s organizing stamina. More importantly: because
your father was in a union, or — more likely — your mother needed to be; because your friend needed child care or you needed a therapist. These things genuinely mattered. But at some point you took a leap into excess. Was I
really organizing forty hours a week because I wanted dental? At the rate we were going, I was unlikely to see any of the benefits anyway.
If much of my daily struggle was against the experience of grad school itself, I had also been looking for something like the union for a long time. I had ended up at the community-organizing nonprofit all those years prior after a
few months spent volunteering with an anarchist collective in the ruins of New Orleans after Katrina, frustrated with the limits of mutual aid in the face of total state breakdown, and had been grasping for some kind of political
activity that was both transformative and pragmatic ever since. Organizing was all about that dialectic. The union connected our demands — which were real but not exactly world-historical — to the long history of labor struggles,
contemporary efforts to rebuild worker power, visions of a radically different future that we could play a role in bringing about.

So we demanded bread and butter, but we were ultimately organizing for the future of academic life, which was visibly crumbling around us; or for the revival of the labor movement, which had mostly already crumbled; or
because it was intolerable to live in a city as segregated as New Haven and not do something about it. That our union had been organizing for three decades was both motivating and burdensome. We knew the past triumphs and
failures, attachments and wounds; we inherited hope and melancholy. In this, it was not unlike the broader left: so much history, so much struggle — sometimes too much. We knew we had tuition waivers and stipends and health
care because of the union; still, the fact that no one yet had won the whole thing in the end could be sobering. Why would we be the ones to succeed where so many others had failed? But it was also comforting: as there was
GESO before us, so there would be GESO after. The campaign to unionize US Steel had taken nearly fifty years; more recently, Smithfield Foods had taken twenty-four.

Sometimes I felt I was organizing for the future of the entire world, in a deductive train that went: capitalism was going to devastate the planet; to fight it we needed strong unions, which meant new organizing, particularly in low-
carbon fields like teaching, which meant building the academic labor movement — which meant that I needed to unionize the Yale political science department. It was absurd. Could I have been more quixotic, more grandiose, more
self-important? Our style of organizing was intense, often all-consuming, and I knew that, too. I didn’t always like it. Often I longed for a nice life, an easy life, the life of the mind that academics were supposed to have. Couldn’t I
just go to demonstrations here and there on the weekends before stopping off for groceries, the way I had before?

But that hadn’t worked. And the gap between the smallness of everything I could realistically do and the largeness of everything I wanted to happen was so immense. I was deeply pessimistic, intellectually. The time in which to
transform the global economy in order to prevent untold death and destruction shrank daily, and the forces of reaction grew stronger just as fast. So I wanted to do something ambitious and hard: something commensurate with
the monstrosity of the world, with the distance of utopia and the nearness of catastrophe. There was so much I wanted to change, so many people I wanted to move. In the daily struggle to build the union and beat the boss and
the odds, I saw something I desperately wanted to learn.

THE RELATIONALITY of organizing is maybe the hardest thing to understand before you’ve done it. But it is the
most important. This is not because people are governed by emotions instead of reason, though they sometimes are. It’s because the
entire problem of collective action is that it’s rational to act collectively where it’s not to act alone. And
you build the collective piece by piece.

Organizing relationships can be utopian: at their best, they offer the feminist dream of intimacy outside
of romance or family. In the union, I loved people I did not know very well. In meetings I was often overcome with awe and affection at
the courage and wisdom of the people there with me. I came to count many of the people I organized with as my dearest friends. When I
needed help, there were always people I could call, people who would always pick up the phone, people I could and did talk to about anything.
These relationships often served as a source of care and support in a world with too little of those
things. But they were not only friendships, and not only emotional ballast. The people I looked to for support
would also push me when it was called for, as I would them; that, I knew, was the deal.

Our relationships forged the practical commitments to one another that held the union together. They made us
accountable to each other. They were difficult and multifaceted, often frustrating, intensely vulnerable, and potentially
transformative but no less prone than any other relationship to carelessness, hurt, and betrayal, and always a lot of work. We were
constantly building them and testing their limits, pushing each other harder the closer we got . They had to
bear a lot of weight. In more abject moments, I wondered whether they were anything more than instrumental. More often, though, I
wondered what was so menacing about usefulness that it threatened to contaminate all else.

The word comrade, Jodi Dean argues, names a political relationship, not a personal one: you are someone’s comrade not because you like them
but because you are on the same side of a struggle. Comrades are not neighbors, citizens, or friends; nor are they any kind of family, though
you might call them brother or sister. The comrade has no race, gender, or nation. (As one meme goes: “My favorite gender-neutral pronoun is
comrade.”) Comrades are not even unique individuals; they are “multiple, replaceable, fungible.” You can be comrades with millions of people
you have never met and never will. Your relationship is ultimately with the political project you have in common. To many noncommunists,
Dean readily admits, this instrumentalism is “horrifying”: a confirmation that communism means submitting to the Borg. But the sameness of
the comrade is a kind of genuine equality.

Being an organizer is like being a comrade in some ways but different in others. The
people you organize alongside may be
comrades, but the people you are organizing often aren’t; the point of organizing, after all, is to reach
beyond the people who are already on your side and win over as many others as you can. So you can’t
assume the people you organize share your values; in fact, you should usually assume they don’t. This
means that unlike comrades, organizers aren’t interchangeable. It matters who you are. McAlevey’s theory of
the organic leader is that people have to be organized by people they know and trust, not by strangers who claim to have the right ideas. The
SNCC looked for “strong people” — not necessarily traditional leaders, but people who were respected and trusted among their peers, on the
logic that people would only take risky political action alongside people they trusted. When organizers reflect the people they organize, they
win: when women of color organize other women of color, a 2007 paper by Kate Bronfenbrenner and Dorian Warren shows, they win almost 90
percent of elections. This cuts both ways: when women and people of color led the organizing in my department, we often struggled to get
white men to take us seriously.

Yet the
comradely element of organizing can also open up space for building relationships with people
beyond those boundaries. It’s not that class and race and gender disappear, transcended by the cause 
— but the need to work together to achieve a shared end provides a baseline of commonality that
makes it possible to relate across difference and essential to figure out how. That’s why you meet people
one-on-one and talk about what you both care about, why you open up to someone you only know as a colleague or share
with a stranger things you hardly even discuss with your friends. It’s why I cried about the humiliation of the grad-school pecking order with my
organizer when I wouldn’t admit to anyone else that I was struggling. One-on-ones
are countercultural: the conversations
you have in them challenge your default expectations of who you can relate to, force you outside of
the demographic categories that organize most of your life and the scripts you’ve learned for
interacting with people accordingly. You build trust with people you have no prior reason to trust not
simply by affirming your commitment to the shared project, your devotion to the Borg, but by coming to
understand what brought someone else to it.
1NR
 CP
3 — Unfettered neoliberal governance culminates in extinction through environmental
destruction and endless war — we have the capacity to mitigate it, but the aff ensures
it.
Von Werlhof, ’08 — [Claudia von Werlhof, Women`s Studies @ Innsbruck, Sociologist and Political
Scientist; Published 01 February 2008; “Globalization and Neoliberal Policies. Are there Alternatives to
Plundering the Earth, Making War and Destroying the Planet?,” https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-
consequences-of-globalization-and-neoliberal-policies-what-are-the-alternatives/7973; Accessed 11
June 2021]

The question remains, of course, why Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” (which supposedly guides the economic process towards the
common good, even if this remains imperceptible to the individual, Binswanger 1998) has become a “visible fist”? While a tiny
minority reaps enormous benefits of today’s economic liberalism (none of which will remain, of course), the vast
majority of the earth’s population, yes the earth itself, suffer hardship to an extent that puts their very survival at
risk. The damage done seems irreversible.

All over the world media outlets – especially television stations – avoid addressing the problem. A common excuse is that it
cannot be explained (Mies/Werlhof 2003, p. 23ff, 36ff). The true reason is, of course, the media’s corporate control.
Neoliberalism means corporate politics.
Unfortunately, this still evades the public. In most Western countries – as, for example, in Austria – “neoliberalism” is not even commonly
accepted as a term, and even “globalization” struggles to find recognition (Salmutter 1998, Dimmel/Schmee 2005). In the Austrian example, a
curious provincialism reigns that pretends the country was somehow excluded from everything happening around it. If one listened to former
chancellor Schüssel, it sounded like Austria knew no problems at all. The logic seems that if there is no term, there is no problem either.
Unnamable, unspeakable, unthinkable: non-existing. Felix Austria.

Although Austria’s decision to join the European Union in 1995 bore the same consequences that neoliberalism bears everywhere, the
connections remain ignored. This despite the fact that the European Union is – next to, and partly even ahead of, the US – the main driving
force behind neoliberalism and its globalization. But let us take one step at a time…

1.2 What Does the “Neo” in Neoliberalism Stand for?

Neoliberalism as an economic politics began in Chile in 1973. Its inauguration consisted of a US-organized coup against a democratically elected
socialist president and the installment of a bloody military dictatorship notorious for systematic torture. This was the only way to turn the
neoliberal model of the so-called “Chicago Boys” under the leadership of Milton Friedman – a student of Austrian-born Friedrich von Hayek –
into reality.

The predecessor of the neoliberal model is the economic liberalism of the 18th and 19th century and its notion of “free trade”. Goethe’s
assessment at the time was: “Free trade, piracy, war – an inseparable three!” (Faust 2)

At the center of both old and new economic liberalism lies “self-interest and individualism; segregation of
ethical principles and economic affairs , in other words: a process of ‘de-bedding’ economy from society; economic
rationality as a mere cost-benefit calculation and profit maximization ; competition as the essential driving force for growth
and progress; specialization and the replacement of a subsistence economy with profit-oriented foreign
trade (‘comparative cost advantage’); and the proscription of public (state) interference with market forces” (Mies 2005, p. 34).

Where the new economic liberalism outdoes the old is in its global claim . Today’s economic liberalism functions
as a model for each and everyone, all parts of the economy, all sectors of society, yes, of life/nature
itself. As a consequence, the once “de-bedded” economy now claims to “im-bed” everything, including
political power. Furthermore, a new, twisted “economic ethics” (and with it a certain idea of “human nature”)
emerges that mocks everything from so-called “do-gooders” to altruism to selfless help to care for others to a
notion of responsibility (Gruen 1997).

This goes as far as claiming that the

common good depends entirely on the uncontrolled egoism of the
individual and, especially, on the prosperity of transnational corporations. The allegedly necessary “freedom” of the
economy – which, paradoxically, only means the freedom of corporations – hence consists of a freedom from
responsibility and commitment to society. In turn, the rational cost-benefit calculation aiming at maximized profit not only serves
as a model for corporate production and the associated service industry and trade, but also for the public sector that
has so far been exempted from such demands (in fact, it has historically been defined by this exemption). The same goes
for the sector of reproduction, especially the household.
The maximization of profit itself must occur within the shortest possible time; this means, preferably, through speculation and “shareholder value”. It must meet as few obstacles as possible. Today, global economic interests
outweigh not only extra-economic concerns but also national economic considerations since corporations today see themselves beyond both community and nation (Sassen 2000). A “level playing field” is created that offers the
global players the best possible conditions. This playing field knows of no legal, social, ecological, cultural or national “barriers” (Mies/Werlhof 2003, p. 24). As a result, economic competition plays out on a market that is free of all
non-market, extra-economic or “protectionist” influences – unless they serve the interests of the “big players” (the corporations), of course. The corporations’ interests – their maximal “growth” and “progress” – take on complete
priority. This is rationalized by alleging that their well-being means the well-being of small enterprises and workshops as well.

The difference between the new and the old economic liberalism can first be articulated in quantitative terms: After capitalism went through a series of ruptures and challenges – caused by the “competition of systems”, the crisis
of capitalism, post-war “Keynesianism” with its social and welfare state tendencies, internal mass consumer demand (so-called “Fordism”), and the objective of full employment in the North – the liberal economic goals of the past
are now not only euphorically resurrected but they are also “globalized”. The main reason is indeed that the “competition of systems” is gone. However, to conclude that this confirms the victory of “capitalism” and the “golden
West” over “dark socialism” is only one possible interpretation. Another – opposing – interpretation is to see the “modern world system” (which contains both capitalism and socialism, Wallerstein 1979, 2004) as having hit a
general crisis which causes total and merciless competition over global resources while leveling the way for “investment” opportunities, i.e. the valorization of capital.

The ongoing globalization of neoliberalism demonstrates which interpretation is right. Not least, because the differences between the old and the new economic liberalism can not only be articulated in quantitative terms but in
qualitative ones too. What we are witnessing are completely new phenomena: Instead of a democratic “complete competition” between many small enterprises enjoying the “freedom of the market”, only the big corporations win.
In turn, they create new market oligopolies and monopolies of previously unknown dimensions. The market hence only remains free for them, while it is rendered “unfree” for all others who are condemned to an existence of
dependency (as enforced producers, workers and consumers) or excluded from the market altogether (if they have neither anything to sell or buy). About 50% of the world’s population fall into this group today, and the percentage
is rising (George 2001).

Anti-trust laws have lost all power since the transnational corporations set the norms. It is the corporations – not “the market” as an anonymous mechanism or “invisible hand” – that determine today’s rules of trade, for example
prices and legal regulations. This happens outside any political control. Speculation with an average 20% profit margin (Altvater 2005) edges out honest producers who become “unprofitable”. Money becomes too precious for
comparatively non-profitable, long-term projects, or projects that “only” – how audacious! – serve a good life. Money instead “travels upwards” and disappears. Financial capital determines more and more what the markets are
and do (Altvater/Mahnkopf 1996). In fact, it has by now – through Nixon’s separation of the dollar from the gold standard in 1971 – “emancipated” from productive capital und forms its own “fiscal bubble” multiplying the money
volume that is covered by the production of the many (Lietaer 2006, Kennedy 1990). Moreover, these days most of us are – exactly like all governments – in debt. It is financial capital that has all the money – we have none (Creutz
1995).

The consequences of neoliberalism are:

Small, medium, even some bigger enterprises are pushed out of the market, forced to fold or swallowed by transnational corporations because their performances are “below average” in comparison to speculation – rather:
spookulation – wins. The public sector, which has historically been defined as a sector of not-for-profit economy and administration, is “slimmed” and its “profitable” parts (“gems”) handed to corporations (“privatized”). As a
consequence, social services that are necessary for our existence disappear. Small and medium private businesses – which, until recently, employed 80% of the workforce and provided “normal working conditions” – are affected
by these developments as well. The alleged correlation between economic growth and secure employment is false. Where economic growth only means the fusion of businesses, jobs are lost (Mies/Werlhof 2003, p. 7ff);

If there are any new jobs, most are “precarious”, meaning that they are only available temporarily and badly paid. One job is usually not enough to make a living (Ehrenreich 2001). This means that the working conditions in the
North become akin to those in the South and the working conditions of men akin to those of women – a trend diametrically opposed to what we have always been told. Corporations now leave for the South (or East) to use cheap –
and particularly female – labor without “union affiliation”. This has already been happening since the 1970s in the “Free Production Zones” (FPZs, “world market factories” or “maquiladoras”), where most of the world’s computer
chips, sneakers, clothes and electronic goods are produced (Fröbel/Heinrichs/Kreye 1977). The FPZs lie in areas where century-old colonial-capitalist and authoritarian-patriarchal conditions guarantee the availability of the cheap
labor needed (Bennholdt-Thomsen/Mies/Werlhof 1988). The recent shift of business opportunities from consumer goods to armaments is a particularly troubling development (Chossudovsky 2003).

It is not only commodity production that is “outsourced” and located in the FPZs, but service industries as well. This is a result of the so-called “Third Industrial Revolution”, meaning the development of new information and
communication technologies. Many jobs have disappeared entirely due to computerization, also in administrative fields (Fröbel et al. 1977). The combination of the principles of “high tech” and “low wage”/“no wage” (always
denied by “progress” enthusiasts) guarantees a “comparative cost advantage” in foreign trade. This will eventually lead to “Chinese salaries” in the West. A potential loss of Western consumers is not seen as a threat. A corporate
economy does not care whether consumers are European, Chinese or Indian.

The means of production become concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, especially since finance capital –
rendered precarious itself – controls asset value ever more aggressively . New forms of private property are created ,
not least through the “clearance” of public property and the transformation of formerly public and small-scale private services and industries to
a corporate business sector. This concerns primarily fields that have long been (at least partly) excluded from the logics of
profit – e.g. education, health, energy, or water supply/disposal. New forms of so-called “enclosures” emerge from today’s total
commercialization of formerly small-scale private or public industries and services, of the “commons”,
and of natural resources like oceans, rain forests, regions of genetic diversity or geopolitical interest (e.g.
potential pipeline routes), etc. (Isla 2005). As far as the new virtual spaces and communication networks go, we are
witnessing frantic efforts to bring these under private control as well (Hepburn 2005).

All these new forms of private property are essentially created by (more or less) predatory forms of appropriation .
In this sense, they are a modified continuation of the history of so-called “original accumulation” (Werlhof 1991,
2003a) which has expanded globally following to the motto: “Growth through expropriation!”
Most people
have less and less access to the means of production , and so the dependence on scarce and
underpaid work increases. The destruction of the welfare state also destroys the notion that individuals can rely on
the community to provide for them in times of need. Our existence relies exclusively on private, i.e. expensive, services
that are often of much worse quality and much less reliable than public services. (It is a myth that the private always outdoes the public.) What
we are experiencing is undersupply formerly only known by the colonial South. The old claim that the South will eventually develop
into the North is proven wrong. It is the North that increasingly develops into the South . We are witnessing the latest form
of “development”: namely, a world system of underdevelopment (Frank 1969). Development and underdevelopment go hand
in hand (Mies 2005). This might even dawn on “development aid” workers soon.

It is usually women who are called upon to counterbalance underdevelopment through increased work
(“service provisions”) in the household. As a result, the workload and underpay of women takes on horrendous
dimensions: they do unpaid work inside their homes and poorly paid “housewifized” work outside (Bennholdt-Thomsen et al. 1988). Yet,
commercialization does not stop in front of the home’s doors either. Even housework becomes commercially co-opted (“new
maid question”), with hardly any financial benefits for the women who do the work (Werlhof 2004).

Not least because of this, women are increasingly coerced into prostitution (Isla 2003, 2005), one of today’s biggest global
industries. This illustrates two things: a) how little the “emancipation” of women actually leads to “equal
terms” with men; and b) that “capitalist development” does not imply increased “freedom” in wage labor
relations, as the Left has claimed for a long time (Wallerstein 1979). If the latter was the case, then neoliberalism would mean the voluntary
end of capitalism once it reaches its furthest extension. This, however, does not appear likely.

Today, hundreds of millions of quasi-slaves, more than ever before, exist in the “world system” (Bales 2001). The authoritarian model of the
“Free Production Zones” is conquering the East and threatening the North. The redistribution of wealth runs ever more – and with ever
accelerated speed – from the bottom to the top. The gap between the rich and the poor has never been wider. The middle classes disappear.
This is the situation we are facing.

It becomes obvious that neoliberalism marks not the end of colonialism but, to the contrary, the colonization of the North. This new
“colonization of the world” (Mies 2005) points back to the beginnings of the “modern world system” in the “long 16th century” (Wallerstein
1979, Frank 2005, Mies 1986), when the conquering of the Americas, their exploitation and colonial transformation allowed for the rise and
“development” of Europe. The so-called “children’s diseases” of modernity keep on haunting it, even in old age. They are, in fact, the main
feature of modernity’s latest stage. They are expanding instead of disappearing.

Where there is no South, there is no North; where there is no periphery, there is no center; where there is no colony, there is no – in any case
no “Western” – civilization (Werlhof 2007a).

Austria is part of the world system too. It is increasingly becoming a corporate colony (particularly of German corporations). This, however,
does not keep it from being an active colonizer itself, especially in the East (Hofbauer 2003, Salzburger 2006).

Social, cultural, traditional and ecological considerations are abandoned and give way to a mentality of
plundering. All global resources that we still have – natural resources, forests, water, genetic pools – have turned into objects
of “utilization”. Rapid ecological destruction through depletion is the consequence. If one makes more profit by
cutting down trees than by planting them, then there is no reason not to cut them (Lietaer 2006). Neither the public nor the state interferes,
despite global warming and the obvious fact that the clearing of the few remaining rain forests will irreversibly destroy the earth’s climate – not
to even speak of the many other negative effects of such action (Raggam 2004). Climate, animal, plants, human and general ecological rights
are worth nothing compared to the interests of the corporations – no matter that the rain forest is no renewable resource and that the entire
earth’s ecosystem depends on it. If greed – and the rationalism with which it is economically enforced – really was an inherent anthropological
trait, we would have never even reached this day.

The commander of the Space Shuttle that circled the earth in 2005 remarked that “the center of Africa was burning”. She meant the Congo,
in which the last great rain forest of the continent is located. Without it there will be no more rain clouds above the sources of the Nile.
However, it needs
to disappear in order for corporations to gain free access to the Congo’s natural
resources that are the reason for the wars that plague the region today. After all, one needs petrol, diamonds, and
coltan for mobile phones.
The forests of Asia have been burning for many years too , and in late 2005 the Brazilian parliament has
approved the clearing of 50% of the remaining Amazon. Meanwhile, rumors abound that Brazil and Venezuela have
already sold their rights to the earth’s biggest remaining rain for est – not to the US-Americans, but to the supposedly
“left” Chinese who suffer from chronic wood shortage and cannot sustain their enormous economic
growth and economic superpower ambitions without securing global resources .

Given today’s race for the earth’s last resources, one wonders what the representatives of the World
Trade Organization (WTO) thought when they accepted China as a new member in 2001. They probably had the giant Chinese market
in mind but not the giant Chinese competition. After all, a quarter of the world’s population lives in China. Of course it has long been
established that a further expansion of the Western lifestyle will lead to global ecological collapse – the
faster, the sooner (Sarkar 2001).

Today, everything on earth is turned into commodities , i.e. everything becomes an object of “trade” and
commercialization (which truly means “liquidation”: the transformation of all into liquid money). In its neoliberal stage it is not enough
for capitalism to globally pursue less cost-intensive and preferably “wageless” commodity production. The objective is to transform
everyone and everything into commodities (Wallerstein 1979), including life itself. We are racing blindly towards the
violent and absolute conclusion of this “mode of production”, namely total capitalization/liquidation by “monetarization” (Genth 2006).

We are not only witnessing perpetual praise of the market – we are witnessing what can be described as “market fundamentalism”. People
believe in the market as if it was a god . There seems to be a sense that nothing could ever happen without it. Total
global maximized accumulation of money/capital as abstract wealth becomes the sole purpose of economic activity. A “free” world
market for everything has to be established – a world market that functions according to the interests of the
corporations and capitalist money. The installment of such a market proceeds with dazzling speed. It creates new profit
possibilities where they have not existed before, e.g. in Iraq, Eastern Europe or China.

One thing remains generally overlooked: The abstract wealth created for accumulationimplies the destruction of nature as
concrete wealth. The result is a “hole in the ground” (Galtung), and next to it a garbage dump with used commodities ,
outdated machinery, and money without value. However, once all concrete wealth (which today consists mainly of the last natural resources)
will be gone, abstract wealth will disappear as well. It will, in Marx’ words, “evaporate”. The fact that abstract wealth is not real
wealth will become obvious, and so will the answer to the question which wealth modern economic activity has really created. In the
end it is nothing but monetary wealth (and even this mainly exists virtually or on accounts) that constitutes a “monoculture”
controlled by a tiny minority. Diversity is suffocated and millions of people are left wondering how to survive. And really: how do you
survive with neither resources nor means of production nor money?

The nihilism of our economic system is evident . The whole world will be transformed into money – and
then it will “disappear”. After all, money cannot be eaten. What no one seems to consider is the fact that it is impossible to
re-transform commodities, money, capital and machinery into nature or concrete wealth. It seems that underlying all economic
“development” is the assumption that “resources”, the “sources of wealth” (Marx), are renewable and
everlasting – just like the “growth” they create (Werlhof 2001 a). The treachery of this assumption becomes harder and
harder to deny. For example, the “peak” in oil production has just been passed – meaning we are beyond exploiting
50% of all there is.

Ironically though, it seems like the prospect

of some resources coming to an end only accelerates the economic
race. Everything natural is commercialized in dimensions not seen before, with unprecedented speed and by means of
ever more advanced technology. The ultimate goal remains to create new possibilities of investment and profit, in other words:
new possibilities of growth able to create new accumulation possibilities – future ones included. The material
limits of such a politics become clearer day by day: the global ecological, economic, monetary, social, and
political collapse (Diamond 2005) it inevitably leads to has already begun. “Global West End.”
How else can we understand the fact that in times when civilization has reached its alleged zenith, a human being starves every second (Ziegler
2004)? How can such a politics be taken seriously? It is in every sense a crime. Unfortunately, thefacade of trivial “rationality” –
what Hannah Arendt called the “banality of evil” – behind which it operates, still makes it invisible to many. People do not
recognize its true character. This is a result of the enormous crisis of spirit and soul that accompanies the material crisis that many
of us remain unaware of; namely, the annihilation of matter through its transformation into commodity , which we,
in delusion, call “materialism” (I call it “patriarchy”, Werlhof 2001 a). The original richness of mat(t)er (“mother earth”) is now giving
way to a barren wasteland that will remain unrecognized by many as long as their belief in “progress” will block their views. The last phase
of patriarchy and capitalism is not only without sense but it will soon be without life as well: kaputalism.
It seems impossible not to ask oneself how the entire economy came to follow one motive only: the monism of making money. Especially since
this does not only apply to the economy, but also to politics, science, arts and even our social relations.

The notion that capitalism and democracy are one is proven a myth by neoliberalism and its “monetary
totalitarianism” (Genth 2006). The primacy of politics over economy has been lost. Politicians of all parties have abandoned it. It is the
corporations that dictate politics. Where corporate interests are concerned, there is no place for democratic convention or
community control. Public space disappears. The “res publica” turns into a “res privata”, or – as we could say today –
a “res privata transnationale” (in its original Latin meaning, “privare” means “to deprive”). Only those in power still have
rights. They give themselves the licenses they need, from the “license to plunder” to the “license to kill” (Mies/Werlhof 2003, Mies 2005).
Those who get in their way or challenge their “rights” are vilified, criminalized and to an increasing
degree defined as “terrorists”, or, in the case of defiant governments, as “rogue states” – a label that usually implies threatened or
actual military attack, as we can see in the cases of Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq, and maybe Syria and Iran
in the near future. US President Bush has even spoken of the possibility of “preemptive” nuclear strikes should
the US feel endangered by weapons of mass destruction (Chossudovsky 2005). The European Union did not object
(Chossudovsky 2006).

Neoliberalism and war are two sides of the same coin (Altvater/Chossudovsky/Roy/Serfati 2003, Mies 2005). Free
trade, piracy, and war are still “an inseparable three” – today maybe more so than ever. War is not only “good for
the economy” (Hendersen 1996), but is indeed its driving force and can be understood as the “continuation of economy with
other means”. War and economy have become almost indistinguishable (Werlhof 2005 b). Wars about resources (Klare 2001) – especially oil
and water – have already begun. The Gulf Wars are the most obvious examples . Militarism once again appears as the
“executor of capital accumulation” (Luxemburg 1970) – potentially everywhere and enduringly.

Human rights and rights of sovereignty have been transferred from people, communities and governments to
corporations (Clarke 1998). The notion of the people as a sovereign body has practically been abolished. We have witnessed a coup of
sorts. The political systems of the West and the nation state as guarantees for and expression of the international
division of labor in the modern world system are increasingly dissolving (Sassen 2000). Nation states are
developing into “periphery states” according to the inferior role they play in the proto-despotic “New
World Order” (Hardt/Negri 2001, Chomsky 2003). Democracy appears outdated. After all, it “hinders business” (Werlhof 2005 a).

The “New World Order” implies a new division of labor that does no longer distinguish between North and South,
East and West – today, everywhere is South. An according International Law is established which effectively functions
from top to bottom (“top-down”) and eliminates all local and regional communal rights . And not only that: many
such rights are rendered invalid both retroactively and for the future (cf. the “roll back” and “stand still” clauses in the WTO agreements,
Mies/Werlhof 2003).

The logic of neoliberalism as a sort of totalitarian neo-mercantilism is that all resources, all markets, all money, all
profits, all means of production, all “investment opportunities”, all rights, and all power belong to the corporations only . To
paraphrase Richard Sennett (2005): “Everything to the Corporations!” One might add: “Now!”
The corporations are free to do whatever they please with what they get . Nobody is allowed to interfere. Ironically,
we are expected to rely on them to find a way out of the crisis we are in. This puts the entire globe at risk since
responsibility is something the corporations do not have or know. The times of social contracts are gone
(Werlhof 2003 a). In fact, pointing out the crisis alone has become a crime and all critique will soon be defined as “terror” and persecuted as
such (Chossudovsky 2005).

1. Activist engagement is exclusive with the praxis they’ve adopted — even if they
aren’t zero-sum, you should put the two on parallel tracks when evaluating the
desirability of political paradigms.
Casey SHOOP Core Teaching Faculty in the Robert D. Clark Honors College, University of Oregon ‘19
http://post45.research.yale.edu/2019/02/angela-davis-the-l-a-rebellion-and-the-undercommons/

For Harney and Moten, viewed from the far side of what they perceive to be the fulfilled
neoliberalization of higher education, Davis's precarious teaching position is no doubt marked in
advance by its imminent "fugitivity," the crimininalization of her classroom already evidence of the
future anterior tense of the undercommons — what will have been driven underground. And they are
not wrong: when the Regents lose the First Amendment case against Davis et. al. in state court, they
nonetheless find the spurious grounds to fire her anyway on the basis of the impropriety of her public
speeches. "Her labor," to quote Harney and Moten once again (if now with special resonance), "is as
necessary as it is unwelcome. The university needs what she bears but cannot bear what she brings."66
But unwelcome for whom? Certainly not the students, the faculty and the legal team who organized in
defense of her right to teach in the University of California . Harney and Moten's view of the public
university risks ceding too much to the forces devoted to its hostile takeover. This is why it is worth
insisting on the scene of Davis's teaching as an event of active struggle in and for the commons of the
public university.

Offering what they forthrightly call a "bad reading" of Jacques Derrida's essay, "The Age of Hegel,"
Harney and Moten affirm that teaching is an operation of "that onto/auto-encyclopedic circle of the
state" that Derrida calls the Universitas.67 In a sustained engagement with Hegel's 1822 report to the
Prussian Minister of Education, Derrida tracks the way in which Hegel's own philosophical system at
once mirrors the state's ambition to impose a worldview and exceeds that very ambition by
demonstrating the local limits of its claim to encyclopedic totality. The deconstructive lesson for Derrida
is that one must remain both for and against the university, within and without its context for thought at
the same time. Sympathetic to Derrida's reading, Harney and Moten nonetheless seek to question the
political price of this undecidability, no doubt with an eye toward the contemporary lumpen-
professoriat that increasingly supports and sustains such interrogation. Derrida's conclusion, however, is
worth quoting in full because of how fully it speaks to the situation at the University of California in the
late sixties:

Whatever the particular forces in 'civil society' may be that dispose over the power of the State, every
university as such (be it on the "right" or the "left") depends upon this model. Since this model (which,
by definition, claims universality) is always in negotiated compromise with the forces of a particular
State (Prussian, Napoleonic—I and II—republican-bourgeois, Nazi, fascist, social democratic, popular
democratic, or socialist), the deconstruction of its concepts, instruments and practices cannot proceed
by attacking it immediately and attempting to do away with it without risking the immediate return of
other forces that would welcome its disappearance. Immediately to cede and make way for the other of
the Universitas might represent a welcome invitation to those very determinate and very determined
forces, ready and waiting, close by, to take over the State and the University. Whence the necessity for a
deconstruction not to abandon the terrain of the University when it begins to come to grips with its
most powerful foundations.68

As we have already seen, the Reaganite forces of privatization were not only "ready and waiting ," in
Derrida's terms, to radically alter the liberal agenda of public education, but also calculatedly
misrepresented the students themselves as precisely the "immediate" (i.e., internal) attack upon the
university and its institutions that would alibi this rollback. Far from a kind of professional "negligence,"
the critical ambivalence of deconstruction seems like a matter of tactical foresight.

But if the events around Angela Davis's hiring and firing might be said to augur the rise the of the
neoliberal university and the downward pressures upon the undercommons, they also offer a
promissory instance of what Derrida elsewhere calls the "university to come." By this figuration Derrida
imagines that

the new responsibility of the "thinking" of which we are speaking cannot fail to be accompanied, at
least, by a movement of suspicion, even of rejection with respect to the professionalization of the
university [...] which regulates university life according to the supply and demand of the marketplace
and according to a purely technical idea of competence.69

The conception of freedom embodied in the Black liberation struggle, and on offer in Davis's course and
in the films of the L.A. Rebellion filmmakers, is perhaps one name for this unrealized futurity. And it
bears remembering that for the large majority of Davis's colleagues, her labor was both necessary and
welcome. A less spectacular and therefore less remembered aspect of Angela Davis's case involved the
UCLA Academic Senate's resolution to condemn the Regents, repudiate their support for the 1950 anti-
communist policy and affirm her employment for the full two-year term of her original contract: As
UCLA historian Gary B. Nash remembers:

1,673 faculty members had already petitioned the Regents, remonstrating against "that revolution, the
unprecedented action of the board of Regents in summarily suspending the power of administration
offices and intruding upon the process of evaluation of academic qualifications by peers, which is
essential to a great university," and then had called upon the regents "to withdraw from a course
fraught with peril for the future of the university."70

More astonishing than these formal, and largely symbolic, responses to the Regents' overreach,
however, was the large-scale mobilization by student protestors and the decision of the Academic
Senate to establish the Angela Y. Davis Fund Committee to raise money from faculty and staff to replace
the salary that the Regents were set on withdrawing in the fall of 1970. Nash was put in charge of the
committee and tasked with the collection of funds. He said:

We asked for three quarterly installments at the following rates: assistant professors ten dollars,
associate professors twelve, and full professors fifteen [...] Between July 6 and July 30, when I made out
the first check, which was for support of her July salary, 287 contributors had sent checks for a total of
$4,505.71
Only one check was distributed a few days before the San Rafael courtroom shooting that would force
Angela Davis underground and on the run, but those events should not eclipse this heroic act of faculty
collectivization in support of their most precarious member. In defiance of the Regents and courting
direct confrontation, their actions constitute what might be called an archaeology of the unmade future
of public education in California. In this optative mood, Professor Nash recalls the faculty senate
meeting in anticipation of further Regental action to strip Davis's courses of not only credit but a place
to teach them:

She would have shown up on campus. Her course, a course of her preference and supported by the
department of philosophy, would have been open to students. As a very controversial figure, students
would have swarmed the course and if the registrar had refused to assign a classroom to it in deference
to regental action, then the course would have taken place in the quadrangle there with the philosophy
department's building on one side and the architecture school, and that would in effect have thrown the
ball back into the Regents' court. What would they do to silence her? What would they do to punish
students who took the course? What would they do to hundreds and hundreds of faculty members who
were supporting her salary while she taught?72

The proper name for this prospective scene of teaching outside and between buildings is the commons,
and the "university to come" also resides in the promissory significance of such past moments, however
unrealized, when common cause in the interest of the public university's mission does not blink in the
face of its imminent dispossession by the ideology of the market. As Derrida argues:

In a period of "crisis," as we say, a period of decadence and renewal, when the institution is "on the
blink," provocation to think brings together in the same instant the desire for memory and exposure to
the future, the fidelity of a guardian faithful enough to want to keep even the chance of a future, in
other words, the singular responsibility of what he does not have and of what is not yet.73

What Derrida calls this "desire for memory" might be repurposed for an activist future in the protection
and advancement of the precariat, to serve here as a ward against the cynical negligence that Harney
and Moten diagnose in neoliberal academia. But the film production of the L.A. Rebellion and the
teaching scene of Angela Davis indicate that we needn't wait for the messianic time invoked by Derrida
as an act of fidelity to the unmet promise of the public university. At the tail-end of the sixties, the
resources of the Black radical tradition had already turned the public university inside out in the manner
that Nash only retrospectively imagines. Life on the streets of Watts, the internal colonization of the
African American community and its connection to the broader Third World decolonization movements,
Black life as the subject of philosophy and film — these issues moved suddenly, if only for a short term,
from the periphery of the public university to its center. Taken together, the brief institutional
occupation by both philosopher and filmmakers points the way toward the realization of the Master
Plan for Higher Education in a radical pedagogy devoted to social justice and equality. Little wonder,
therefore, that this labor was fugitive before it began, a threat to the Right-wing vision of privatized
education so extreme that it must be criminalized. I have tried to suggest here that Davis's course itself,
alongside those films of the L.A. Rebellion filmmakers who realized in their artistic production the
expanded social vision of the public university, might be said to constitute evidence of what Davis called,
in her third lecture, a "hiatus, the break between the noble moral ideas of western society in general
and in particular." They teach us to think meta-reflexively about the concept of freedom — in the break
between the promise of the public university as commons and its neoliberal fulfillment as the institution
that sits above the undercommons.

It also competes functionally — socialist, leftist planning requires levying existing laws
to redistribute power. That’s exclusive with “institutional collapse,” which planned
failure necessitates.
1AC Hunt 20 – Assistant Professor of African American Studies at University of Illinois, PhD, Columbia,
MA, Cal-Berkeley [Irvin, “Planned Failure: George Schuyler, Ella Baker, and the Young Negroes'
Cooperative League,” American Quarterly, Volume 72, Number 4, December 2020, pp. 853-879,
(Article), DKP]

Planned failure inverts the perspective of policymakers ventriloquized by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney in
The Undercommons. Policymakers, they say, are fixed on being fixed, yet always in “need [of] hope,” capital’s
cynosure. These policycrats “keep making plans and plans fail as a matter of policy. Plans must fail
because planners must fail.”23 Those who devise the failure of their own plans inhabit that failure. Sure, this desire for
institutional collapse, for a serial construction and deconstruction, for splintered and rhizomic forms of power over
constituted and centralized ones, for the always-irregular, makes for a counterintuitive activism, but its affects are
ecstasies.

Even if they say the aff isn’t political the perm proves that I could be

Anarchy is worse. Merely democratizing capitalism doesn’t abolish profits or violence.

Instead, it increases capitalism.
Maupin, 21 [Caleb Maupin is a widely acclaimed speaker, writer, journalist, and political analyst. He
has traveled extensively in the Middle East and in Latin America. He was involved with the Occupy Wall
Street movement from its early planning stages, and has been involved many struggles for social justice.
He is an outspoken advocate of international friendship and cooperation, as well as 21st Century
Socialism. “Chapter Two: Redefining Capitalism and Socialism,” 7/1/21, Midwestern Marx]//Townes

Using different words, Engels explained: “Whilst the capitalist mode of production more and more completely transforms the
great majority of the population into
proletarians, it creates the power which, under penalty of its own
destruction, is forced to accomplish this revolution. Whilst it forces on more and more of the transformation of the vast means
of production, already socialized, into State property, it shows itself the way to accomplishing this revolution. The proletariat seizes political
power and turns the means of production into State property.”

He also wrote: “This point is now reached. Their political and intellectual bankruptcy is scarcely any longer a secret to the bourgeoisie
themselves. Their economic bankruptcy recurs regularly every 10 years. In every crisis, society
is suffocated beneath the weight
of its own productive forces and products, which it cannot use, and stands helpless, face-to-face with the absurd contradiction
that the producers have nothing to consume, because consumers are wanting. The expansive force of the means of production bursts the
bonds that the capitalist mode of production had imposed upon them. Their deliverance from these bonds is the one precondition for an
unbroken, constantly-accelerated development of the productive forces, and therewith for a practically unlimited increase of production itself.
Nor is this all. The socialized appropriation of the means of production does away, not only with the present artificial restrictions upon
production, but also with the positive waste and devastation of productive forces and products that are at the present time the inevitable
concomitants of production, and that reach their height in the crises. Further, it
sets free for the community at large a mass of
means of production and of products, by doing away with the senseless extravagance of the ruling
classes of today, and their political representatives . The possibility of securing for every member of society, by means of
socialized production, an existence not only fully sufficient materially, and becoming day-by-day more full, but an existence guaranteeing to all
the free development and exercise of their physical and mental faculties — this possibility is now, for the first time, here, but it is here. With
the seizing of the means of production by society, production of commodities is done away with, and,
simultaneously, the mastery of the product over the producer. Anarchy in social production is replaced by systematic,
definite organization. The struggle for individual existence disappears . Then, for the first time, man, in a certain sense, is
finally marked off from the rest of the animal kingdom, and emerges from mere animal conditions of existence into really human ones.”

In his book The State and Revolution Lenin defined socialism, the lower stage of Communism, in the following passages: “It is this communist
society, which has just emerged into the light of day out of the womb of capitalism and which is in every respect stamped with the birthmarks
of the old society, that Marx terms the “first”, or lower, phase of communist society. The means of production are no longer the private
property of individuals. The means of production belong to the whole of society. Every member of society, performing a
certain part of the socially-necessary work, receives a certificate from society to the effect that he has done a certain amount of work. And with
this certificate he receives from the public store of consumer goods a corresponding quantity of products. After a deduction is made of the
amount of labor which goes to the public fund, every worker, therefore, receives from society as much as he has given to it.”

Lenin also clarifies: “The first phase of communism, therefore, cannot yet provide justice and equality; differences, and unjust differences, in
wealth will still persist.” He then goes on to make clear: “And so, in the first phase of communist society (usually called socialism)
"bourgeois law" is not abolished in its entirety , but only in part, only in proportion to the economic
revolution so far attained; i.e., only in respect of the means of production. "Bourgeois law" recognizes them as the private property of
individuals. Socialism converts them into common property. To that extent--and to that extent
alone--"bourgeois law" disappears.
“Marx wasn’t a statist”

Probably the most blatant distortion of Marxism that is spread in the BreadTube universe is the belief that somehow Marx did not believe in
creating a centrally planned economy, or having the means of production become public property. As the previous quotations make clear, this
is the very definitive act of the social revolution that overturns capitalism and creates socialism.

Yet, with smug arrogance and childish desperation, the BreadTube voices insist this cannot be the case. After all, they
have been told by US media and educational institutions that each and every society where this
transformation has taken place, it has resulted in a brutal human rights violating dictatorship and utter
economic failure. Lacking the courage to question these narratives, like a Biblical creationist confronted by the fossil record, they seek to
“reinterpret” Marx so both he and mainstream US media can be correct . They wish to uphold Marx, but
discount and dismiss all who have put his ideas into practice in order to maintain respectability within
(and funding from) the very institutions and society Marxism seeks to overturn.

Matt “Thought Slime” insists that Marx and Engels never called for a centrally planned economy. In a video released on February 5, 2021
entitled “Prager University Does Not Understand Democracy” the content creator simply bluffs, pretending that the quotations above do not
exist and assuming that their audience will never bother to fact check assertions. Furthermore, Matt goes on to claim Lenin personally invented
the idea of a centrally planned economy, calling his newly invented concept “Democratic Centralism.”

A simple Google search for the term “Democratic Centralism” shows how laughingly inaccurate and ignorant this social-media appointed expert
is. Democratic Centralism was the model for decision-making in Lenin’s “party of new type.” Democratic
Centralism was a
process through which the Bolshevik Party made decisions and obligated all members to carry them out. It distinguished
the vanguard party model from the looser social-democratic organizing methods of the Russian Social-Democratic
Labor Party; i.e., the Mensheviks. It has nothing to do with economic planning in a socialist state. It is a method of political organizing by
Marxists under capitalism in order to take power. Such a gaffe should be embarrassing and discrediting, but Matt “Thought Slime” has not been
discredited for spreading such blatant misinformation. Over 200,000 people have watched this mis-informative video about socialism, most of
them probably believing its contents to be accurate.

Ian “Vaush” Kochiniski, also speaking with the authority of the algorithms, frequently claims “Marx wasn’t a statist.” To justify this he utilizes a
quotation from Marx’s Civil War in France. Matt ‘Thought Slime’ also invokes this quotation, where Marx proclaims: “the working class cannot
simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes.”
The misuse of this quotation seethes with ignorance, if not blatant intentional deception. The passage comes from Marx’s presentation Civil
War in France in which he discusses the Paris Commune of 1871. This briefly existing regime that took power in Paris after the capitalist
government had already surrendered to the Prussian invaders is considered by Marx to be the first historical example of his concept of
“Dictatorship of the proletariat.” Marx points to the Commune, not as an example of why states are not necessary, but rather for the lessons it
taught about what post-capitalist states will look like.

The particular quote refers to the fact that the existing French state had been created to serve capitalism, and the Paris Communards who led
the workers uprisings were
forced to create NEW state institutions, not simply seize control of the previously
existing ones created by capitalism. Marx spends the following paragraphs describing in detail the nature of the new proletarian
forms of state power the Communards created and praising them. To claim this quote means Marx opposed states existing at all is laughable.

Here is the entire passage from Marx: “But the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own
purposes. The centralized state power, with its ubiquitous organs of standing army, police, bureaucracy, clergy, and judicature – organs
wrought after the plan of a systematic and hierarchic division of labor – originates from the days of absolute monarchy, serving nascent middle
class society as a mighty weapon in its struggle against feudalism. Still, its development remained clogged by all manner of medieval rubbish,
seignorial rights, local privileges, municipal and guild monopolies, and provincial constitutions. The gigantic broom of the French Revolution of
the 18th century swept away all these relics of bygone times, thus clearing simultaneously the social soil of its last hinderances to the
superstructure of the modern state edifice raised under the First Empire, itself the offspring of the coalition wars of old semi-feudal Europe
against modern France… The direct antithesis to the empire was the Commune . The cry of “social republic,” with which the
February Revolution was ushered in by the Paris proletariat, did but express a vague aspiration after a republic that was not only to supersede
the monarchical form of class rule, but class rule itself. The Commune was the positive form of that republic... The first decree of the Commune,
therefore, was the suppression of the standing army, and the substitution for it of the armed people. The Commune was formed of the
municipal councilors, chosen by universal suffrage in the various wards of the town, responsible and revocable at short terms. The majority of
its members were naturally working men, or acknowledged representatives of the working class. The
Commune was to be a
working, not a parliamentary body, executive and legislative at the same time . Instead of continuing to be the
agent of the Central Government, the police was at once stripped of its political attributes, and turned into the responsible, and at all times
revocable, agent of the Commune... Public functions ceased to be the private property of the tools of the Central Government. Not only
municipal administration, but the whole initiative hitherto exercised by the state was laid into the hands of the Commune… The
judicial
functionaries were to be divested of that sham independence which had but served to mask their abject
subservience to all succeeding governments to which, in turn, they had taken, and broken, the oaths of
allegiance… The unity of the nation was not to be broken, but, on the contrary, to be organized by Communal Constitution, and to become a
reality by the destruction of the state power which claimed to be the embodiment of that unity independent of, and superior to, the nation
itself, from which it was but a parasitic excrescence.”

What Vaush claims about his cherry-picked quotation is nothing but blatant distortion. Either Kochiniski was handed this quote by someone
else and never bothered to look at the context, or he intentionally misrepresented its meaning with deceptive intent. To claim Marx was
arguing that no central authority or state power should exist is simply inaccurate. On the contrary, Marx
was emphasizing how
new forms of state power must be created to correspond with the new class in power and its
interests.
Maintaining Profits in Command

Armed with his misrepresentative quotes from Marx, Ian “Vaush” Kochiniski has repeatedly said that socialism in the United States would mean
“everything would be exactly the same except every corporation would be a worker cooperative.” While worker ownership and cooperatives
are not a bad thing, the problem with this definition of socialism is that it does not eliminate capitalism. Capitalism is a system where, as Engels
put it, “the means of production only function as preliminary transformation into capital,” or as Mao Zedong put it, “profits
are in
command.” Simply instituting worker ownership does not eliminate what Marx called ‘The Anarchy of
Production.’

Employee stock ownership programs, co-determination, co-partnership, or profit sharing are not at all foreign
to capitalism. Furthermore, those putting forth these ideas have generally not been socialists, but theoreticians and
academics assigned with the task of making capitalist corporations more productive and efficient.
While BreadTube adherents fetishize the Mondragon Corporation, a federation of worker cooperatives located in the Basque Region of Spain,
the examples of such schemes within the capitalist system are much more widespread.
The Oxford University Act of 1854 in Britain required that the faculty of the University be represented on the
board of directors. The Port of London Act of 1908 passed such a requirement for representation of dock
workers on the board governing London’s port. The Weimar Republic in Germany passed the Supervisory Board Act of
1922, requiring labor unions to have representation on the board of directors of corporations . Many western
European countries maintain such laws up to today.

In the United States, the retirement plans offered to many corporate employees are described as “profit sharing plans” where the pension
paid to retires is related to the performance of the corporation . Many employees across the USA and the world have “stock
options,” incentive pay, and other mechanisms that theoretically make them co-owners of the corporation in which they work. Many different
stock ownership, employee representation and co-ownership programs exist, and they vary in their degree of success.

During the 1920s and 30s, industrial unions often fought hard against “piece wages.” Often factory employers would attempt to maximize their
profits by paying employees only for each item produced, rather than a set hourly wage. In 1938, the Labor Movement celebrated the passage
of the Fair Labor Standards Act which required all employees receive a minimum hourly wage on top of whatever incentives or productivity
linked wages they received. These reforms brought a new level of economic security to industrial workers, because they knew how much
money they would receive, rather than having their incomes subject to the unpredictable fluctuations of the market and however many
products the capitalist assigned them to produce on a given workday.

BreadTube adherents will generally dismiss the many examples of their ideas being put into practice within capitalism. They
will insist that
piece wages, employee stock ownership programs, worker representation, co-partnership, and profit sharing are not enough.
They will say they advocate 100% worker ownership and democratic control.

However, no matter how egalitarian and democratic a worker-cooperative model may be, it still does not eliminate the very
essence of the capitalist system: profits in command. A worker-cooperative will seek to maximize profits for its employee shareholders.

Imagine if the US “defense industry” were operated under a worker-cooperative model. Would this end
the “military industrial complex” long decried by leftists? Would the drive to make profits from war no longer influence US foreign
policy? Not at all. If anything, the lust for war profits would expand beyond the corporate boardrooms to the
factory floor. Employees would be motivated to see the government go to war and for government military spending to increase, as it
would directly impact their incomes.

Having the guards as equal, democratic co-owners of private prisons would not eliminate the inherent
societal problems flowing from the much decried “Prison Industrial Complex.” Having workers as equal co-
owners of pharmaceutical giants would not eliminate the drive to overprescribe potentially addictive or dangerous medications.

Other problems inherent to the capitalist system of production for profit would continue as well. Employee owners would certainly be
incentivized to replace labor with machines, as the fewer workers hired by the cooperative firm, the larger their share of the profits would be.
Employee owned enterprises would compete with other employee owned enterprises producing the same products and services.
Environmental regulations and laws affecting other “externalities” would still be an impediment to the
profits of corporate owners just as they are now, even if the corporate owners were the employees themselves. We could, of course,
expect that “worker owners” would seek to lift regulations and maximize their own profits just as corporate owners would.

A system of “profits in command” is still irrational and unsustainable, even if those profits are shared. Simply declaring workers to be co-owners
of profit centered entities functioning in the chaos of the market does not eliminate the irrationality of capitalism.

In the context of a state centrallyplanned economy, worker-cooperative ownership is very different . The most
successful examples of worker-cooperatives tend to be those that emerge in the absence of the anarchy of production ,
when an overall state central plan guides their activities.

The most successful example of a profit-sharing corporation, by far, is one that BreadTube avoids highlighting. The largest telecommunications
manufacturer in the world is Huawei Technologies, a cooperative corporation established by the Chinese government and its
military in 1988. An article in Harvard Business Review published on September 24, 2015 hails it as “A Case Study of When Profit
Sharing Works” and speaks of the company in glowing terms . In the context of China’s 5 year economic plans, receiving huge
subsidies and directions from the state and military, Huawei has become very successful. The model of worker ownership, profit
sharing, and coordination with state central planning and a socialist economy has made Huawei a model that many corporations in the
capitalist world have studied. Huawei is widely respected for its efficiency and success. Of course, BreadTube voices largely remain silent on
Huawei, as it takes the lead from the US State Department deeming anything associated with China or other anti-imperialist states to be toxic
and evil.

In many socialist countries elements of “worker ownership” have been implemented. The collectivization
of agriculture in 1931
resulted in the prevalence of collective farms as the dominant form in the Soviet countryside. While some state
farms that operated much like state owned factories existed, most of the Soviet Union’s agriculture was carried out by independent kolkhozy,
which sold agricultural goods to the state at a set rate. This motivated the farm workers to produce as much as
possible in order to maximize the payout they would receive from the central government. This model became the dominant form of
agriculture in “really existing socialism” of the Cold War, beyond the Soviet Union. Mao Zedong launched the creation of a collective
farm system with his “Hail The Communes” campaign in the 1950s. Cuba, North Korea, and various Eastern European
countries adopted the collective farm model. Trotsky criticized this, arguing that state farms were more socialistic in nature
than collective farms and arguing that material incentives and differing abilities among farmers would lead to inequality. Stalin defended this
model, arguing it was more efficient. Che Guevara and Mao Zedong both upheld the collective farm model as being more
egalitarian and decentralized, and presented the Soviet Union as being a bit too centralized and bureaucratic in its planning of production,
leading to a lack of participation by the working class and a level of alienation.

The aff conflates encouraging a value shift with change in the world — even if local
change in infeasible, the counterplan is morally correct.
Dorman ’16 [Peter; May 16; faculty member in political economy at the Evergreen State College; “The
Climate Movement Needs to Get Radical, but What Does that Mean?,” http://nonsite.org/editorial/the-
climate-movement-needs-to-get-radical-but-what-does-that-mean]

3. The left has adapted to powerlessness. This Changes Everything practically exudes triumphalism, especially in the final
hundred pages or so. Vibrant,
righteous movements are springing up everywhere, we are told, and through
their proliferation they will change the world.

Except, of course, they won’t. They do not have the means to change the world to something different ,
only to obstruct the bits of the existing world they can get their bodies in front of . That is important to do, and it
can play a crucial role in a larger movement to contest power—if that movement can come into existence. If no larger movement
arises, the local fires will be put out one by one. A radical political vision cannot abjure politics, and it is
politics which is missing from Klein.

Here it is necessary to step back and consider the historical context. In the English-speaking world, and to a lesser extent in other wealthy,
capitalist countries, thepast several decades have seen profound defeat and demobilization on the left . In no
country is there a mass political party with a program to transform the existing political economic order
into something else. Unions, where they have any clout at all, have been fighting a rearguard struggle to retain as many of the gains of
former times as they can. Of course, there have also been substantial victories for racial, gender and other
social equalities and a general drift toward less authoritarian cultural norms. But the core institutions of wealth and
power are more firmly entrenched now than they have been in generations, and the left as a political force is
hardly noticeable.

How have those who still identify with the left coped with this epoch of powerlessness? There are many
answers, but all of them express some form of disengagement. For instance, redefining politics as the
performance of moral virtue rather than the contest for power can provide consolation when political
avenues appear to be blocked. Activities of this sort are evaluated according to how expressive they
are—how good they make us feel—rather than any objective criterion of effectiveness in achieving
concrete goals or altering the balance of political forces . This is how I would interpret Blockadia, for instance, in the
absence of a broader movement that includes both direct action and political contestation: Klein can devote page after page to
how righteous these activists are without any attention to whether they have had or have any prospect of
having an impact on carbon emissions . Their very activism constitutes its own victory, which is convenient
if the more conventional sort of victory is believed to be out of reach . (It is bad form to even bring this up: why, some
will ask, am I dwelling on the negative with so much positive energy to celebrate?)

Another response is to collapse social change into personal choices over lifestyle and philosophy. If you
believe that the threat of climate change can be defeated by a shift to more modest consumption habits and rejection of
the false intellectual gods of globalization and economic growth , one individual at a time, then each
moment of conversion constitutes its own little victory. The reader of Klein’s book, feeling a sense of unity with that
consciousness and its program to downshift consumption, can experience this victory first hand. This is very gratifying, and it reinforces
the message that powerlessness in conventional terms is irrelevant, since the change we are part of is
at a deeper level than governments and their laws or corporations and their assets. After all, what can be more
subversive than thinking new thoughts?

One of Klein’s favorite adaptations is the conflation of wishes and operative political programs . Again and
again she holds up statements of intent—protect Mother Earth, treat all people equally, respect all cultures, live simple, natural,
local lives—as if they were proposals whose implementation would have these outcomes . It’s all ends and
no means. This is a double convenience: first it eliminates the need to be factual and analytical about programs,
since announcing the goal is sufficient unto itself, and second, it evades the disconcerting problem of how
to deal with the daunting political challenge of getting such programs (if they even exist) enacted and
enforced. I believe the treatment of goals as if they were programs is the underlying reason for the
sloppiness of this book on matters of economics and law. Klein can say we should finance a large green investment program by taxing fossil
fuel profits, or we should simultaneously shrink the economy and increase the number of jobs, because in the end it doesn’t
matter whether these or other recommendations could actually prove functional in the real world . The
truth lies in the rightness of the demand, not the means of fulfilling it . But this too is an adaptation to
powerlessness.

To close, I wish to emphasize that this critique is ultimately not directed at a single individual . On the contrary, even if we
consider only this one book, it is clear that its writing was a team effort; the long acknowledgments section identifies both paid assistants and
an army of internal reviewers. But what I find diagnostic is the warm reception it received from virtually every media outlet on the English-
speaking left. This suggests that Klein is moving with the political tide and not against it, and that the problems that seemed obvious to me were
either invisible to her reviewers or regarded as too insignificant to bring up. The
view that capitalism is a style of thinking,
progress is a myth, and political contestation is irrelevant to “true” social change belongs not just to this one
book but to all the commentators who found nothing to criticize . That’s the real problem.

Challenging anti-statist whiteness is the key to effective anti-racism in the current

racial formation.

George LIPSITZ Black Studies & Sociology @ UCSB ‘18

https://haasinstitute.berkeley.edu/race-based-not-race-bound

Malcolm X used to say that racism is like a Cadillac because they make a new model every year. When
automobile models change, repair manuals have to be updated. Problems in a 2016 Escalade cannot be
solved by consulting the manual for a 1965 El Dorado. Similarly, the injustices caused by the skewing of
opportunities and life chances along racial lines in 2016 cannot be addressed adequately with a
framework forged to counter the racial order of the middle of the previous century.

A new user’s manual is needed for the new model of racial subordination that shapes society today.

Yet Minister Malcolm’s formulation reminds us that the new model is still a Cadillac: big, expensive,
wasteful, and dangerous. There is both rupture and continuity in the cars we drive and the social
conditions that drive us.

Throughout California today, and all across the nation, and all around the world, grassroots community
mobilizations are emerging around a new kind of anti-racist politics. These mobilizations are race-based
but not race-bound. They seek to create new democratic opportunities and institutions, rather than
merely eliminate expressly racist prohibitions. They recognize racism as more than individual personal
injury, as a mechanism of—and a justification for—collective, continuing and interconnected structural
vulnerabilities. These groups are expressly anti-racist, but they reject narrow racialisms. Their struggles
are rooted in the particular histories and circumstances of specific racialized groups, but they seek to
cooperate rather than compete with others similarly aggrieved.

They view racism not so much as a matter of prejudice but as a question of power, not as a peripheral
practice excluding individuals from upward mobility but rather as a social system of structured
advantages and disadvantages that skew collective opportunities and life chances along racial lines.

They do not seek primarily to assuage hurt feelings or prevent the squandering of individual talents and
abilities caused by overt and intentional acts of exclusion and denigration, but instead seek to address
covert and systemic practices that can be remedied only by a major restructuring of social institutions.
Perhaps most important, they recognize racial subordination as essential to the workings of
contemporary capitalism and its cultures.

They view racism as always intersectional, as ever-present but never present in isolation from other
axes of oppression.

In today’s “model” of white supremacy, racism manifests itself as collective, disproportionate

vulnerability to displacement, dispossession, and deportation. It manifests from police stops, frisks,
arrests and killings, to mass incarceration and the collateral consequences of a criminal conviction, to
homelessness, foreclosure, eviction, overcrowding and predatory lending. It reaches from labor
exploitation and wage theft, to language discrimination, and to sexual violence and refusals of
reproductive justice. In the eyes of politicians, trade unions, established civil rights organizations, urban
planners, pundits, and policy makers, these conditions may appear to be primarily issues of social class
that are only ecologically and tangentially racialized.

But to the race based but not race bound social movements, these conditions are the inevitable
consequences of a system of racialized capitalism that rather than uniting all aggrieved groups around
the shared experience of economic deprivation, creates, instead, endless new forms of differentiation
rooted strategically in both the deployment and the disavowal of race and other social identities.

New analyses, critiques, and actions are not emerging because of yesterday’s problems having been
successfully solved and the time has come to move on to new ones. On the contrary, these analyses,
critiques, and actions are evidence of the limits and contradictions of the “fixes” imposed from the top
down designed to settle the crises of both the past and present. A social warrant of balanced budget
conservatism and colorblindness was deployed in the 1970s and 1980s to repress, suppress, and distort
the freedom dreams of the egalitarian social movements of the 1960s. Today a social warrant of
neoliberal accumulation by dispossession—based on elevating the interests of owners, investors and
consumers over the interests of workers, renters and community members—is proposed to fix the crises
of the economy, the environment, the educational system and the empire.

Race based but not race bound social movement mobilizations challenge both the practices and the
culture of these social warrants. They recognize that neoliberal policies and social pedagogies require
the simultaneous deployment and disavowal of race.

Race is deployed to make the public sphere seem degraded and unclean. Public spaces and public
institutions are portrayed as synonymous with the needs and interests of communities of color.

The binary oppositions of public and private, producer and parasite, and freedom and dependency
function as racialized metaphors. On the ideological level, race serves as a justification of, and an excuse
for, asymmetrical power, as an explanation for why the market does not deliver general prosperity, as
justification for portraying inequality as natural, necessary, and inevitable. At the same time, neoliberals
also need to disavow race because it refers to historical social identities outside the market, identities
that contain repositories of collective memory, sources of moral instruction, and archives replete with
epistemologies and ontologies inimical to the interests of market capitalism. The key to securing political
power for elite interests over the past four decades has revolved around what Ian Haney López terms
“anti-statist whiteness,” a frame as prominent in the welfare and education “reform” policies of the
Clinton and Obama administrations as in the assaults on school desegregation and affirmative action by
the Reagan and Bush Sr. and Bush Jr. administrations. For white workers, downward mobility is not
experienced as a class injury, but instead as a register of the diminished privileges of whiteness.

For the Environmental Health Coalition (EHC) working in San Diego’s border municipalities and adjacent
parts of Tijuana, race has meaning because of its relation to pollution, health, and opportunity. Air
pollution, hazardous waste, and toxic chemicals are concentrated in the neighborhoods inhabited by low
income people of color, many of them immigrants from Latin America, Asia, and Africa. The cumulative
vulnerabilities that make these places sites of environmental pollution also leave them with limited
public services, industrial truck traffic, largely low wage employment opportunities, overcrowded
schools, a paucity of parks, and inadequate access to fresh fruits and vegetables. The activism of the EHC
draws on long histories of struggle by Mexican mutualistas, the Chicano movement, and community
feminism.1 The group makes extensive use of the Spanish language in its resolutely bilingual discussions,
publications, signs, and slogans. It communicates its ideas and aspirations through mural art, posters,
and performances of music that resonate with the aesthetic and political concerns of the Chicano
movement. It recruits working class Latinas to become promotoras—neighborhood health activists and
teachers. These women draw on their experiences of economic marginality but domestic centrality in
building women’s networks of health promotion and protection. To enter into the spaces created by the
EHC is to walk in the footsteps of Chicano resistance and affirmation, to pick up the banner of anti-racist
and anti-subordination struggle, to inhabit the traditions of women of color feminism. Yet EHC activists
and allies include white, Black, Asian American and Native American men and women.

It is always anti-racist, but never only anti-racist .

Consistent with its participation in the larger movement for environmental justice, the EHC proclaims its
commitment to building a society where all people and communities can live, work, and play in a clean,
healthful, and safe environment.

EHC’s activism seeks distributive justice through campaigns for sustainable development, for green and
healthful homes and jobs, lead free environments, bi-national toxic cleanups, and municipal
development plans focused on the needs of people rather than profit. Yet the EHC also works
assiduously to promote procedural justice and to expand the sphere of politics to enable poor and
working people to shape the policies that govern them and their neighbors. One key to the success of
the EHC has been the Salud Ambiental Lideres Tomando Accion (SALTA) leadership development
strategy. SALTA revolves around an interactive curriculum that builds membership skills in community
organizing, policy advocacy, building power, and effectively communicating about health and
environmental justice. Based on theories of popular education advanced by Paolo Freire and others,
SALTA training requires participants to give voice to their own understandings and feelings about the
issues important to their lives, to process them in deliberations with others, and to work collaboratively
to develop unity, commitment and shared consciousness.

EHC victories include the removal of neighborhood health hazards through toxic cleanups and closing
businesses engaged in illegal polluting practices. The group also promotes city planning from the
bottom-up, including campaigns for zoning changes in areas deemed to have no meaningful exchange
value filled with metal plating shops, exhaust from idling engines of diesel trucks, and piles of industrial
waste. Instead of accepting that these places should be sacrifice zones filled with pollution and poverty,
the EHC promotes redevelopment from the bottom through the recognition that areas that are resource
poor are often network rich, and that society at large will profit from urban plans authored by the
eyewitnesses to the effects of neoliberal accumulation by dispossession.