Answers to Capitalism Kritik

2AC Shell
Perm do both. Embracing actions like the plan as acts of resistance within capitalism
raises class consciousness and creates stepping stones to more radical change like the
alt.
Carlo Fanelli and Jeff Noonan 17. Fanelli worked in the Department of Politics and Public
Administration at Ryerson University, Canada at the time of publication and Noonan is a professor in the
Department of Philosophy at the University of Windsor, 4-20-2017. “Capital and Organized Labor”,
Reading ‘Capital’ Today: Marx after 150 Years, edited by Ingo Schmidt and Carlo Fanelli, p. 153-157.
Conclusion: Socialism and the Continuum of Democratic Struggle

The need, therefore, for workers to go beyond traditional trade union based forms of struggle is unquestionable. At the same time, we exist at
a moment of history where vanguard revolutionary parties have been discredited, and there is no evidence, in the European and North
American contexts, that their fortunes will ever be revived. Thus the question remains: if trade unions and social democracy are incapable of
solving the problems they address themselves to because they are not revolutionary, and the historical moment of vanguardist politics seems
to have definitively passed, how is the struggle for socialism to be conducted today? The answer to that question lies in
the creative intelligence of people in struggle; no theoretical intervention can substitute itself for political practice. What we
aim to do in
conclusion is not infer a new mode of struggle from abstract principles but instead try to draw out the implicitly radical
significance of the struggles within capitalism (for higher wages, for free time, for public institutions) in support of the
conclusion that socialism is part and parcel of the struggle for democracy, and the struggle for democracy (as all political struggles) should be
understood along a continuum. Reconceiving the goals of struggle as progressively realizable frees the idea of
revolution from the nineteenth century image of it as a one-off cataclysm, opening space for new ideas of
organization and political strategy that are neither social democratic nor vanguardist (see Hudis, this volume). Here again, Lebowitz
is an instructive starting point. He notes that even when struggles do not ‘transcend the capital/wage labour
relation’, they can be significant for the life-value of working people’s lives because they express the fact that ‘a qualitative development ...
takes place in the course of such struggle’ (2003: 99). The qualitative development is that workers improve the conditions of
their own lives, create life-time and life-space for self-realizing activity and mutualistic interaction, and
thus both teach themselves that society is not impervious to collective struggle, and make their lives
better by realizing some elements of the socialist ideal in their day to day reality. Since every human life is finite,
lived by mortal individuals, revolutionary politics must take into account both the short and the long term .
Immanuel Wallerstein puts the point well: ‘People live in the present’, he argued. ‘Everybody has to eat today, not tomorrow. Everybody has to
sleep today, not tomorrow. Everybody has to do all these just ordinary things today, and you can’t just tell people that they have to wait
another five or ten or twenty years, and it is going to get better ... So you’ve got to worry about today, but you can’t worry only about today’
(quoted in Boggs 2012: 197). No one can be expected to sacrifice the whole of their present life for the sake of a distant future that they will
never experience. A politics capable of motivating people must demonstrate its capacity to improve workers’
lives in their own here and now and not just function as a way-station on the way to a promised
transcendence. Hence the struggle for free time by shortening the working day without loss of real wages has historically been (and could
become again, if it were taken up once more by a revivified trades union movement) a victory over the power of capital over the whole of
human life. So too the struggle for higher wages. If it is understood as a struggle against the power of capital over human life and not an end in
itself or instrumental to higher levels of life-destructive consumption of capitalist commodities, it becomes a basis and a building block for more
radical demands. Such struggles can become bases and building blocks if they are used as occasions to raise
critical questions: why is it that capitalism permits both mass unemployment and resists shortening the working week without loss of real
wages? Why is it that real wages have stagnated while corporate profits have soared? Why is it that capitalism continues to ravage the planet
(see Holleman, this volume) even though there is an unshakeable scientific consensus that without drastic socio-economic changes a massive
life-crisis awaits us in the not too distant future? When
workplace struggles are connected to these sorts of questions
workers can realize – without being preached at or otherwise dogmatically exhorted to overthrow capitalism – that the real
implications of their struggles contest the power of capital over human (and planetary) life . Let us take
another example to further illustrate the point – the struggle for universally accessible public institutions. Here too trade unions have
historically played a decisive role. What does the creation of universally accessible public institutions mean? The re-channelling of wealth away
from private accumulation towards life-requirement satisfaction on the basis of need, not the ability to pay. In other words, the funding of
universally accessible public institutions through taxation is another inroad against the power of capital over life. When education, health care,
access to cultural institutions, and pensions are taken out of the cycle of commodified exchange and made available to all people on the basis
and to the extent of their needs for them, real life improves: ‘The public provision of goods and services, well-managed in a way that fosters
sustainable development and social justice initiatives, and which is accountable to the community, significantly improves standards of living’
(Fanelli 2016: 86). Such improvements take society some way towards instantiating the principle of socialist society: ‘from each according to
their abilities, to each according to their needs’ (Marx 1875). Of course, public institutions do not fully realize that principle, but nor do they
fully ignore it, as commodified exchange does. Nor are actually existing public institutions free of invidious, often racialized and sexualized,
oppressive hierarchies of power (see Sears 2014: 56, 88). Nevertheless, they do represent a victory over what Lebowitz calls the ‘mediating
power’ of capital, i.e., the way it makes people dependent on the possession of money, as opposed to nature and each other, for their life-
support. Theroad to socialism thus lies along a continuum of struggle against the power capital exerts over
people’s ability to satisfy their real life-needs and express and enjoy their life-capacities. This struggle
brings to light the deepest contradiction of capitalism, that it masks the real relations of dependence of
human life on nature and collective labour with its own structurally imposed dependence on access to
labour and commodity markets. Once workers peer behind this curtain of capitalist reification, they see that the real purpose of
labour is not the production of private money-value for the capitalist, but life-capital – ‘the life wealth that produces more life wealth without
loss and with cumulative gain’ (McMurty 2015) – for the need-based appropriation and use of all. Whatever
struggles expose this
contradiction, recapture wealth and resources for the production of life-capital, and create universally
accessible pathways for all to appropriate life-capital are elements of the struggle for a socialist society .
In sum, we have argued that the struggle for socialism must be reconceived as a struggle along a continuum. The ‘political economy of the
working class’, implied but largely absent from Capital, focuses on the ways in which organized collective struggle can divert wealth from the
circuits of capital to the circuits of collective life-capital through which real human beings preserve and develop themselves. Life
can be
better or worse in capitalism, and struggle that makes life better without overthrowing it should not
be dismissed as ‘reformist’ but understood as part of a continuum of struggle towards socialism. People
do not fight, normally, for abstractions or slogans, but for achievable goals that will improve their lives. To radicalize the struggle does not mean
radicalizing slogans, but treating each victory as a plateau on which to rest for a moment before extending the counterlogic of public provision,
need-satisfaction, and democratic control over wealth and resources further into the life-space and life-time dominated by capital.

Using the state to reimagine and reform capitalism is both possible and necessary to
solve at the macro level.
Mariana Mazzucato 21. Professor in the Economics of Innovation and Public Value at University
College London where she is the founding director of the UCL Institute for Innovation and Public
Purpose, 1-28-2021. Mission Economy: A Moonshot Guide to Changing Capitalism, p. 204-10.
This book has applied what I believe is the immensely powerful idea of a mission to solving the ‘wicked’ problems we face today. In it, I have
argued that tackling
grand challenges will only happen if we reimagine government as a prerequisite for
restructuring capitalism in a way that is inclusive, sustainable and driven by innovation.
First and foremost, this means reinventing government for the twenty-first century – equipping it with the tools, organization and culture it
needs to drive a mission-oriented approach. It also means bringing purpose to the core of corporate governance and taking a very broad
stakeholder position across the economy. It means changing the relationship between public and private sectors, and between them and civil
society, so they all work symbiotically for a common goal. The reason for the emphasis on rethinking government is simple: only
government has the capacity to bring about transformation on the scale needed . The relationship between
economic actors and civil society shows our problems at their most profound, and this is what we must unravel.

We can start by recognizing that capitalist markets are an outcome of how each actor in the system is organized
and governed, and how the different actors relate to one another. This holds for the private and public sectors and for other sectors such
as non-profits. No particular kind of market behaviour is inevitable. For example, the market pressure often
cited as forcing a business to neglect the long term in favour of the short term, as too many companies do today,
is the product of a particular organization of the market. Nor is there anything inevitable in government
bureaucracies being too slow to react to challenges such as digital platforms and climate change. Rather, both are
outcomes of agency, actions and governance structures that are chosen inside organizations, as well as the legal and institutional relationships
between them. It is all down to design within and between organizations.

Capitalism is, indeed, in crisis. But the good news is that we can do better. We know from the past that public and private actors can come
together to do extraordinary things. I have reflected on how, fifty years ago, going to the moon and back required public and private actors to
invest, to innovate and to collaborate night and day for a common purpose. Imagine if that collaborative purpose today was to build
a
more inclusive and sustainable capitalism: green production and consumption, less inequality, greater
personal fulfilment, resilient health care and healthy ageing, sustainable mobility and digital access for all. But small,
incremental changes will not get us to those outcomes. We must have the courage and conviction to lift our gaze higher – to lead
transformative change that is as imaginative as it is ambitious, aiming for something far more ambitious than sending a man to the moon.

To do this successfully, governments

need to invest in their internal capabilities – building the competence and
confidence to think boldly, partner with business and civil society, catalyse new forms of collaboration
across sectors, and deploy instruments that reward actors willing to engage with the difficulties . The task is
neither to pick winners nor to give unconditional handouts, subsidies and guarantees, but to pick the willing. And missions are about making
markets, not only fixing them. They’re about imagining new areas of exploration. They’re about taking risks, not only ‘de-risking’. And if this
means making mistakes along the way, so be it. Learning through trial and error is critical for any value-creation exercise. Ambitious missions
also have the courage to tilt the playing field.

If government is indeed a value creator that is driven by public purpose, its policies should reflect and reinforce that. Too many green policies
today are just minor adjustments to a trajectory that still favours the old waste-prone behaviours and the financial casino that worsens
inequality. A
healthy economy that works for the whole of society must tilt the playing field consistently to
reward behaviours that help us achieve agreed and desirable goals. That means achieving coherence in
a multiplicity of fields, from taxes to regulation, from business law to the social safety net .
As emphasized throughout the book, it is key to not pretend that social missions are the same as technological ones. With challenges that are
more ‘wicked’ it is essential that moonshot thinking is linked with support to underlying government systems. For example, a moonshot around
disease testing or health priorities must interact closely with the public-health system, not replace or circumvent it. Similarly, a moonshot
around clean growth must interact with transport systems and planning authorities and understand behavioural change. Thus it is critical to
perceive missions not as siloed projects but as being intersectoral, bottom-up, and building on existing systems (such as innovation systems,
among others).

Governments cannot pursue missions alone. They must work alongside purpose-driven businesses to achieve them. As I’ve
argued in this book, this requires addressing one of the biggest dilemmas of modern capitalism: restructuring
business so that private profits are reinvested back into the economy rather than being used for short-
term financialized purposes. Missions can accelerate this shift by shaping expectations about where business opportunities lie and
also getting a better return for public investment. In this sense they can begin to walk the talk of stakeholder value. This means creating a more
symbiotic form of partnership and collaboration in different sectors, whether in health, energy or digital platforms. A market-shaping
perspective requires governing these interactions so that intellectual property rights, data privacy, pricing of essential medicines and taxation
that must mean health innovation driven by the
all reflect what needs to happen to reach the common objective. In health
mission of better health care for all; in energy it must mean divestment from fossil fuels and the creation
of public goods like green infrastructure and green production systems that protect the earthly oasis that
Armstrong referred to; and in the digital domain it must mean the use of digitalization to improve the access of all
people to the power of the technologies of the twenty-first century – while ensuring both data privacy and that our welfare
states are strengthened, not weakened, by digital platforms.

Doing capitalism differently requires reimagining the full potential of a public sector driven by public
purpose – democratically defining clear goals that society needs to meet by investing and innovating
together. It requires a fundamentally new relationship between all economic actors willing and able to
tackle complexity to achieve outcomes that matter.
No link—material improvements in the conditions of the working class are still
valuable challenges to capitalism, even if they don’t result in its immediate overthrow.
Carlo Fanelli and Jeff Noonan 17. Fanelli worked in the Department of Politics and Public
Administration at Ryerson University, Canada at the time of publication and Noonan is a professor in the
Department of Philosophy at the University of Windsor, 4-20-2017. “Capital and Organized Labor”,
Reading ‘Capital’ Today: Marx after 150 Years, edited by Ingo Schmidt and Carlo Fanelli, p. 141-142.
According to Lebowitz (2003: 27–8), Marx intended to explain the role of class struggle on the operations of capitalism in a volume on wage
labour that he never wrote. We are not interested here in the Marxiological question of whether Marx ever formally abandoned the original
six-volume plan for Capital. Rather, we
are interested in the practical question of what the struggle for socialism
looks like when we take seriously, as Marx typically did in his political work and as Lebowitz does, struggles within
capitalism for a shorter working day, higher real wages, and universal access through public provision of
needed life-goods. When we take those struggles seriously we discover that the struggle for socialism is neither the
necessary product of the working out of the endogenous laws of capitalism nor the result of a
voluntaristic, all or nothing, once and for all revolutionary movement, but a process arrayed along a
continuum of better or worse lives for working people, determined by the degree of democratic control
they are able to assert over the production process, the amount of time outside of alienated labour they
are able to secure, the extent to which they are able to satisfy their human life-requirements, and the
extent to which the private accumulation of capital is redirected towards the public provision of life-
requirement satisfiers. These struggles occur within the dynamics of capitalist society, but react back
against them, modifying their impact on real human lives. Lives can be better or worse for working
people in capitalism depending on whether or not their struggles are successful . The laws of capitalism that Marx
explains in Capital are not, in reality, forces that can exist independently of the combined actions of people (if they were, they could never be
overthrown but only transform themselves into different laws or exist in perpetuity). The difference between natural laws and social laws is
that the latter emerge from human action and interaction and change when those patterns of interaction change (see Gose and Paulson, this
volume). As Marx himself notes in Capital, ‘the economic categories ... bear the stamp of history’ (Marx 1986: 120). While Marx himself in
Capital often fails to follow out consistently the implications of this position, frequently referring to capitalist dynamics as governed by ‘iron
laws’, we must interpret these claims in the philosophical context furnished by historical materialist method, which, as the quotation above
reveals, is rooted in the principle that humanity is ultimately a self-determining subject (see, for example, Marx 1986: 7). As such, nothing
that the exploited and alienated segments of humanity do to free themselves from alienation and
exploitation is irrelevant, nor are the organizations through which those class struggles are expressed
irrelevant just in case they are not directed immediately to the overthrow of capitalism . What matters, in our
view, is whether the struggles aim at reducing the structural power of capital over human life, and whether they are rooted in explicit
recognition of a shared life-interest in reducing that power over human beings, and not whether they are led by trade unions or revolutionary
parties, or explicitly aim at revolution in the short term or only at demonstrable improvements in human life within capitalism.
 2AC – Framework
Interpretation – weigh only the consequences of the fiated implementation of the
plan against the status quo or competitive alternative.
This is the best model for debate:
a. Fairness—forcing us to defend every potential ideological association with the plan
gives the aff an impossible prep burden.
b. Key to topic education—shifting the focus of the debate from what the plan does
to rhetoric and ideology means we never learn about the topic.
 2AC – No Link – Reform
No link—material improvements in the conditions of the working class are still
valuable challenges to capitalism, even if they don’t result in its immediate overthrow.
Carlo Fanelli and Jeff Noonan 17. Fanelli worked in the Department of Politics and Public
Administration at Ryerson University, Canada at the time of publication and Noonan is a professor in the
Department of Philosophy at the University of Windsor, 4-20-2017. “Capital and Organized Labor”,
Reading ‘Capital’ Today: Marx after 150 Years, edited by Ingo Schmidt and Carlo Fanelli, p. 141-142.
According to Lebowitz (2003: 27–8), Marx intended to explain the role of class struggle on the operations of capitalism in a volume on wage
labour that he never wrote. We are not interested here in the Marxiological question of whether Marx ever formally abandoned the original
six-volume plan for Capital. Rather, we
are interested in the practical question of what the struggle for socialism
looks like when we take seriously, as Marx typically did in his political work and as Lebowitz does, struggles within
capitalism for a shorter working day, higher real wages, and universal access through public provision of
needed life-goods. When we take those struggles seriously we discover that the struggle for socialism is neither the
necessary product of the working out of the endogenous laws of capitalism nor the result of a
voluntaristic, all or nothing, once and for all revolutionary movement, but a process arrayed along a
continuum of better or worse lives for working people, determined by the degree of democratic control
they are able to assert over the production process, the amount of time outside of alienated labour they
are able to secure, the extent to which they are able to satisfy their human life-requirements, and the
extent to which the private accumulation of capital is redirected towards the public provision of life-
requirement satisfiers. These struggles occur within the dynamics of capitalist society, but react back
against them, modifying their impact on real human lives. Lives can be better or worse for working
people in capitalism depending on whether or not their struggles are successful . The laws of capitalism that Marx
explains in Capital are not, in reality, forces that can exist independently of the combined actions of people (if they were, they could never be
overthrown but only transform themselves into different laws or exist in perpetuity). The difference between natural laws and social laws is
that the latter emerge from human action and interaction and change when those patterns of interaction change (see Gose and Paulson, this
volume). As Marx himself notes in Capital, ‘the economic categories ... bear the stamp of history’ (Marx 1986: 120). While Marx himself in
Capital often fails to follow out consistently the implications of this position, frequently referring to capitalist dynamics as governed by ‘iron
laws’, we must interpret these claims in the philosophical context furnished by historical materialist method, which, as the quotation above
reveals, is rooted in the principle that humanity is ultimately a self-determining subject (see, for example, Marx 1986: 7). As such, nothing
that the exploited and alienated segments of humanity do to free themselves from alienation and
exploitation is irrelevant, nor are the organizations through which those class struggles are expressed
irrelevant just in case they are not directed immediately to the overthrow of capitalism . What matters, in our
view, is whether the struggles aim at reducing the structural power of capital over human life, and whether they are rooted in explicit
recognition of a shared life-interest in reducing that power over human beings, and not whether they are led by trade unions or revolutionary
parties, or explicitly aim at revolution in the short term or only at demonstrable improvements in human life within capitalism.

Reforms don’t necessarily legitimize the system and create the material conditions
that allow people to focus on organization instead of survival.
Richard Delgado 87. Distinguished Professor of Law at Seattle University School of Law, 1987. “The
Ethereal Scholar: Does Critical Legal Studies Have What Minorities Want?”, Harvard Civil Rights-Civil
Liberties Law Review, Vol. 22. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2712365

2. The CLS Critique of Piecemeal Reform Critical

scholars reject the idea of piecemeal reform. Incremental change,
they argue, merely postpones the wholesale reformation that must occur to create a decent society .38
Even worse, an unfair social system survives by using piecemeal reform to disguise and legitimize
oppression.39 Those who control the system weaken resistance by pointing to the occasional concession to, or periodic court victory of, a
black plaintiff or worker as evidence that the system is fair and just.40 In fact, Crits believe that teaching the common law or using the case
method in law school is a disguised means of preaching incrementalism and thereby maintaining the current power structure. 41 To avoid this,
CLS scholars urge law professors to abandon the case method, give up the effort to find rationality and order in the case law, and teach in an
unabashedly political fashion.42 TheCLS critique of piecemeal reform is familiar, imperialistic and wrong. Minorities
know from bitter experience that occasional court victories do not mean the Promised Land is at hand.43 The critique is imperialistic
in that it tells minorities and other oppressed peoples how they should interpret events affecting them.44 A court
order directing a housing authority to disburse funds for heating in subsidized housing may postpone the revolution, or it may not. In the
meantime, the order keeps a number of poor families warm. This may mean more to them than it does to a comfortable academic working in a
warm office. It
smacks of paternalism to assert that the possibility of revolution later outweighs the
certainty of heat now, unless there is evidence for that possibility. The Crits do not offer such evidence. Indeed, some
incremental changes may bring revolutionary changes closer, not push them further away. Not all small
reforms induce complacency; some may whet the appetite for further combat. The welfare family may
hold a tenants' union meeting in their heated living room. CLS scholars' critique of piecemeal reform often
misses these possibilities, and neglects the question of whether total change, when it comes, will be
what we want.
 2AC – No Link – Work Ethic
UBI gives people the flexibility to redefine their relationship to work and lead
dignified, fulfilling lives without having to “earn a living.”
Olivia Hanks 18. Green New Deal political strategist and organizer, former editor, political researcher,
and contributor to The Norwich Radical, 2018. “What we talk about when we talk about work”, It’s Basic
Income, edited by Amy Downes and Stewart Lansley, p. 77-80.

Most of us define ourselves by our paid work. It’s what we spend more time doing than anything else. And the rest of
our time is often defined by work: travelling to it, recovering from it , or lapsing into total lethargy during holidays as a
reaction to it. Yet a 2013 Gallup poll of 142 countries showed that only 13% of people feel engaged by their jobs. 14 This source of unhappiness
and waste of human potential has led some to argue that the ideal would be to abolish work.15 This may be taking things a little far, even if we
take ‘work’ to mean only ‘paid employment’ – I wouldn’t like to abolish doctors, for instance. Nevertheless, it gets us thinking about what work
really is. Until the industrial revolution, most people were subsistence farmers, working to produce what they needed and no more. Work as a
transaction – time in exchange for money – only became widespread with industrialisation and the mass movement of people into the cities in
the 19th century. There, people had no access to land to provide their food, so were forced to ‘earn their living’ in factories, gaining only a
fraction of the fruits of their labour as reward. Though working conditions in the UK have improved dramatically, this state of affairs remains
fundamentally the same for employees today. The idea that your ‘living’ is something you have to ‘earn’ persists, for the most part quite
unchallenged. Yet many people would freely admit that they see their job as essentially pointless. Phrases like ‘earning a living’ and, more
recently, ‘hardworking families’ or the rhetorical division of citizens into ‘strivers’ and ‘skivers’ reinforce the view that paid employment is a
virtue, and the more hours of it you do, the better. Other useful or fulfilling types of work such as caring and community work are disregarded.
The anthropologist David Graeber writes in a 2013 essay that ‘bullshit jobs’ have been created because ‘the feeling that work is a moral value in
itself, and that anyone not willing to submit themselves to some kind of intense work discipline for most of their waking hours deserves
nothing, is extraordinarily convenient’ for the ruling class.16 This is almost an exact echo of the opening of William Morris’s 1884 lecture ‘Useful
Work Versus Useless Toil’: ‘Most people, well-to-do or not, believe that, even when a man is doing work which appears to be useless, he is
earning his livelihood by it – he is “employed,” ; and most of those who are well-to-do cheer on the happy worker with praises, if he is only
“industrious” enough and deprives himself of all pleasure and holidays in the sacred cause of labour. In short, it has become an article of the
creed of modern morality that all labour is good in itself – a convenient belief to those who live on the labour of others.’ 17 Graeber’s repetition
of these thoughts well over a century later, despite the advances in productivity during that time, shows that this is not a question that will ever
be solved by more technology or ever-greater productivity – it is clearly a political matter. Much has been written about the impact on jobs of
the new wave of automation. Yet despite the widespread concern about the impact on employment, previous waves of automation have not
led to a hike in unemployment. Instead, directly productive jobs now done by machines have been replaced by Graeber’s ‘bullshit jobs’ in the
clerical, sales and service sectors. Unless we change the way we think about work, we will simply end up with a new generation of meaningless
jobs to replace those lost; another generation of workers stuck in jobs they do not like and of which they do not see the point. If we see
unemployment as the problem, as artificial intelligence renders vast numbers of jobs obsolete, we risk seeing the creation of a new wave of
‘bullshit jobs’ as the solution. Instead, we
should seize upon the growth of artificial intelligence (AI) as the ideal
opportunity to introduce a universal basic income, alongside a more progressive system of taxation. A
guaranteed, subsistence-level income would end extreme poverty and allow people time to look for
meaningful work instead of relying on jobs that are short-term, insecure and exploitative . Recognising that
material wealth comes from the earth’s resources and belongs to society as a whole, it would more fairly distribute the wealth created by
technological advances, rather than concentrating that wealth in fewer and fewer hands. When
we no longer see paid work as
an immediate necessity for survival, other reasons for working will come to the fore: intellectual
challenge or physical fitness, social interaction, the sense of doing something useful. Once the financial
imperative to accept poor pay and conditions has vanished, workers will start demanding that their jobs
fulfil some of these other needs. UBI would also give people more choice about how much they work. The
result would be better health, both physical and mental; better family life, as parents are no longer forced by financial necessity and social
pressure to go back to work at the earliest possible opportunity; and more engagement with politics and community life. Paid
employment would no longer be the only or principal determiner of people’s identity, status and self-
esteem. One of the most common arguments against UBI is that large numbers of people would give up work. This rests on two
assumptions: first, that most people only work for the money, and would stop working if they could; second, that people leaving the workforce
would be a terrible thing. The first is unlikely to be the case: most people want to work in some form. Insofar
as people do work
‘only for the money’ because they have meaningless, unfulfilling jobs, the greater bargaining power
would make employers offer more appealing jobs, whether through improved pay or other means. And while UBI would be
sufficient for survival, it would not pay for a life of material comfort. Those who wanted more would still need to be part of the paid workforce.
Given that there are always concerns about a shortage of jobs, it cannot logically be argued that some people withdrawing from the workforce
would cause society to collapse. Rather, the second assumption is based principally on the belief that everyone has a moral duty to ‘pay their
way’ financially, and that any other system is unfair. This is a symptom of the tendency of modern political discourse to place the economy
above all else; to refer to it as though society existed to serve its needs, and not the other way round. UBI implicitly recognises a
fundamental point: that paid work has no intrinsic value, and that not all valuable work is paid . Many people
contribute in other ways, as carers, as artists or as volunteers; some people are simply unable to work full time, and UBI would enable
those people to live dignified, meaningful lives.
 2AC – Alt Fails
Every historical attempt at socialism has failed. The romanticized alt depends on
shifting the goalposts on what counts as “real” socialism.
Kristian Niemietz 19. PhD in Political Economy from King’s College London and Institute of Economic
Affairs’ Head of Political Economy, 2019. Socialism: The Failed Idea That Never Dies, Institute of
Economic Affairs, p. 293-296.

And yet, that support for socialism as an ideal is not matched by a positive view of any particular example,
contemporary or historical, of socialism in action. On the contrary: whenever any such example is mentioned,

socialists invariably roll their eyes and dismiss it as a lazy straw man. Socialists have largely succeeded in distancing
them-selves from previous attempts to build socialist socie- ties. Holding a real-world example of
socialism against a self-described socialist is considered a cheap shot today. The conventional wisdom is that people who
associate socialism with the Warsaw Pact countries, Maoist China, North Korea or North Vietnam are simply not clever enough to understand the difference
between an idea and a distorted application. Holding the Gulags or the Berlin Wall against democratic socialists is considered just as boorish as holding the atrocities
of Al Qaida or the Islamic State against peaceful Muslims. And yet, when asked what exactly was ‘unreal’ about previous variants
of socialism, or what they would have done differently, contemporary socialists struggle to come up
with a clear answer. When pressed, they escape into the abstract, talking about lofty aspirations rather than tangible characteristics. But the lofty
aspirations that are usually cited are exactly the same old aspirations that have always been the aspirations of
socialism. The idea that a socialist system should empower ordinary working people, rather than party apparatchiks, is not remotely as original as
contemporary socialists think it is. That has always been the idea. Contemporary socialists define ‘real’ socialism in terms of the

outcomes they would like to see, rather than the institutional setup which is supposed to produce those
outcomes. By mixing a desired outcome of a system into the very definition of that system, the idea that
‘real’ socialism has never been tried becomes unfalsifiable. It is as if we defined a rain dance as ‘a dance that causes rainfall’, as
opposed to ‘a dance that aims to cause rainfall’. Under the latter definition, it is possible to conclude, after a sufficiently large number of failed attempts, that rain
dances cannot, after all, cause rain. Under the former definition, that is not possible. If an attempt at a rain dance does not cause rain, then by definition, it cannot
have been a real rain dance. A real rain dance has never been tried. Those who claim that rain dances have ‘failed’ are just not clever enough to understand the
difference between the idea of a rain dance and a distorted application. Socialism in the sense in which self-identified democratic socialists define it, namely, a

democratised economy planned collectively by ‘the people’, has never been achieved anywhere, and
could not be achieved. Economic planning can only ever be done in a technocratic, elitist fashion, and it
requires an extreme concentration of power in the hands of the state. It cannot ‘empower’ ordinary
workers. It can only ever empower a bureaucratic elite. But while this vision of socialism cannot be attained, it can be easily
projected onto actually existing societies, by virtue of being so abstract and nebulous. For the same reason, that projection can just as easily be ended. This is what
Western intellectuals have been doing for almost a century. Thirty years ago, Hayek (1988) wrote about ‘intellectuals’ vain search for a truly
socialist community, which results in the idealisation of, and then disillusionment with, a seemingly endless
string of “utopias”’. Since then, this string has only grown longer. The reception of socialist experiments usually follows a three-stage pattern.
Socialist experiments often go through an initial honeymoon period, during which they have, or at least seem to have,
some initial successes, and during which their international standing is relatively high. During this honeymoon period, the experiment is usually showered with
enthusiastic praise from Western intellectuals. It
is held up as a role model of ‘true’ socialism, as ‘proof’ that socialism
does work, and as an inspiring alternative to the morally bankrupt capitalist systems of the West. This honeymoon never lasts forever. At some point,
the model’s failures become more widely known in the West, and the respective country’s international standing de- teriorates.
During this period, Western intellectuals look frantically for excuses . There is still widespread support for the model in question, but
language and emphasis change drastically: a hopeful and optimistic case is replaced by an angry and defensive one. Western socialists shoot the messenger; they
act as if the critics of the system were some- how responsible for the system’s failure. Outside
forces and/or members of the old,
discredited elites are accused of ‘undermining’ socialism. Western apologists engage extensively in
whataboutery, raising counteraccusations and trying to shift attention to unrelated issues. But there comes a
point when the system’s failures become so obvious, and its international reputation becomes so
irreparably damaged, that defending it becomes a lost cause. This is the third and final stage. Small sects of true believers continue to defend the
system, but mainstream intellectuals fall silent on the issue. After a while, the pilgrimages and eulogies fade from memory and Western intellectuals begin to
dispute the system’s socialist credentials. The
new narrative becomes that the system was never truly socialist, that
only a handful of extremists ever claimed it was, and that only a complete ignoramus would hold it against a self-described socialist. This
narrative then becomes the conventional wisdom. The reputation of socialism, as an idea, survives unblemished .

Marxism relies on an incoherent and contradictory analysis of historical change that

doesn’t provide a realistic path to socialism/communism.
Sebastiano Maffettone 21. Full Professor of Political Philosophy at Luiss Guido Carli University of
Rome, 2021. Marx in the 21st Century, p. 84-87.

A reconstruction of Marx’s historical materialism is a difficult and arduous task. The first reason for this is that Marx—despite the primary
importance of the concept—never presents a unified theory of historical materialism in his writings. The second reason—
probably at the root of the first—is that he does not seem to have a unitary and coherent vision of historical
materialism itself. The first reason results from the fact that we must use at least four (sections of) different works to
get a complete idea of it, an idea that in any case originates with the critique of Hegel in his early years. In the Manifesto Marx limits
himself to presenting, in the first part of the work, history from the perspective of historical materialism as the history of the class struggle. In
the preface to Critique of Political Economy there is the reconstruction of history in terms of the development of productive forces, and finally,
in Capital and in the Grundrisse, history is presented in light of the systematic search for surplus value on the part of the dominant classes.
Needless to say that these different versions are not always consistent with each other. More generally, as we said,
Marx does not seem to have a unitary and coherent vision of historical materialism. For him, on the one hand, it consists of a
theory of the structure of the modes of production, and on the other hand, in a reconstruction of their
historical succession. The structural approach summarizes what the different modes of production have in common: a nucleus of
productive forces (for example the technology used) and of production relations (based primarily on property) with a superstructure that
includes the law, ethics and the culture of every society in general. The historical reconstruction instead presents what the different modes of
production do not have in common, so that we can distinguish an Asiatic mode of production, one based on slavery, one on feudal servitude, up
to the capitalist mode production. Here again, one cannot say that coherence is Marx’s strong suit in providing a reasonably uniform depiction
of the question. This is made even more complicated by the fact that Marx has a generally ambiguous view
of history (as we have already seen in the case of exploitation). Here, the ambiguity consists in coexistence, within his thinking
of two different conceptions of history: a philosophical history of Hegelian ilk, and an empirical theory of
history. The first offers an interpretation of events in light of their contribution to the realization of the end of history. The end of history for
Marx is communism, and the philosophy of history that justifies its progressive advent is remarkably similar to a religious vision that foresees
the final salvation of humanity. The second offers a set of socio-economic generalizations about social change. Without a doubt, Marx’s
philosophy of history is now widely discredited, and few are willing to believe that the history of
humanity is a kind of long wait for the advent of communism, but the problem is even more serious, if we consider that
Marx’s empirical theory of history is strongly influenced by his philosophy of history (this type of objection, moreover, is at the heart of
Benedetto Croce’s criticism of Marx). This confusion between two levels is clearly seen in what is perhaps the main defect of Marx’s whole
vision, the underlying determinism. Determinism here means that in history there is an iron law that determines what will happen given what
has already happened and in general that the laws of history are the equivalent of the laws of nature, an affinity for which Marx felt along with
Darwin (Engels recalled the centrality of historical necessity in Marx’s thought in his speech at Marx’s funeral). Something like this, besides
being completely unlikely, would take away from history what is perhaps its essential characteristic, that is, a relative unpredictability.
Moreover, what is even worse, a vision of this type deprives human motives and reasons of all meaning and value. Given that determinism tells
us where we are going, why should we work hard to realize the end of history? In short, Marxian determinism inevitably condemns us to a life
of messianic expectation in which our efforts to understand and act on what we understand are superfluous. Furthermore, it is not easy to
understand how Marx was a determinist, in the sense that humans are simply the object of a historical process that passes over their heads, but
how much space is left for human choices and decisions. Among other things, it is not easy to understand how deterministic Marx was, in the
sense that humans are simply the object of a historical process passing over their heads, and how much room there was for human choices and
decisions. The determinism of Marx, if there is any, is still sophisticated. The basic thesis is that within each mode of production there is a
dialectic between productive forces and production relations, or if you will between technology and legal regulation of ownership. This
relationship is progressively realized until reaching a level of optimality. After this however, this fortunate correspondence degenerates sooner
or later into contradiction and over time the production relations become incompatible with the productive forces. The contradiction is
generated by the development of new productive forces that render existing production relations obsolete. At this point the necessity arises for
“an era of social revolution” destined to remove the contradiction by bringing out new relations of production. It should be noted that this view
is, if taken into consideration from a historical point of view, bizarre if not perverse. Take, for example, the
necessary transition
from capitalism to communism, which is what most interested Marx. His thesis tells us that the technological and
productive progress of capitalism should, so to speak, make it rupture in the moment of its greatest
development. To imagine something like this is very strange: people turn violent when things go wrong,
not when development reaches its maximum! An impression of this kind seems to have been amply confirmed
by history, as communist revolutions took place in countries that were on average backward in terms of
the development of productive forces. Another weak point, in this perspective, concerns the absolute uncertainty that surrounds
Marx’s communism when we consider it from the point of view of the balance between productive forces and relations of production. Once
again in this case the Hegelian dialectic and Hegel’s philosophy of history seem to replace the arguments in favor of Marx’s thesis in this regard.
We, in other words, can bet on communism only if we imagine it as an imminent end of history through a general dialectic which sees history
go from primitive communism to capitalist alienation, which is then in turn removed by the final conquest of saving communism. But this is a
quasi-religious vision that seems to have little to do with the desired balance between new modes of production and social relationships that
can bring them to power. What has been said in the last paragraph shows how Marx,
to reach the revolution, does not focus
so much on an argument in favor of communism as on an argument against capitalism. Capitalism, in his
opinion, is condemned to failure according to its own principles, and sooner or later it will fail to provide the material goods on which it had
founded its hope of success. Although it is strange to imagine the two together, Marx often seems
to think that capitalism will
simultaneously lead to an extreme impoverishment of the working class and to the end of capitalist
profit.
 2AC – Permutation
Perm do both. Embracing actions like the plan as acts of resistance within capitalism
raises class consciousness and creates stepping stones to more radical change like the
alt.
Carlo Fanelli and Jeff Noonan 17. Fanelli worked in the Department of Politics and Public
Administration at Ryerson University, Canada at the time of publication and Noonan is a professor in the
Department of Philosophy at the University of Windsor, 4-20-2017. “Capital and Organized Labor”,
Reading ‘Capital’ Today: Marx after 150 Years, edited by Ingo Schmidt and Carlo Fanelli, p. 153-157.
Conclusion: Socialism and the Continuum of Democratic Struggle

The need, therefore, for workers to go beyond traditional trade union based forms of struggle is unquestionable. At the same time, we exist at
a moment of history where vanguard revolutionary parties have been discredited, and there is no evidence, in the European and North
American contexts, that their fortunes will ever be revived. Thus the question remains: if trade unions and social democracy are incapable of
solving the problems they address themselves to because they are not revolutionary, and the historical moment of vanguardist politics seems
to have definitively passed, how is the struggle for socialism to be conducted today? The answer to that question lies in
the creative intelligence of people in struggle; no theoretical intervention can substitute itself for political practice. What we
aim to do in
conclusion is not infer a new mode of struggle from abstract principles but instead try to draw out the implicitly radical
significance of the struggles within capitalism (for higher wages, for free time, for public institutions) in support of the
conclusion that socialism is part and parcel of the struggle for democracy, and the struggle for democracy (as all political struggles) should be
understood along a continuum. Reconceiving the goals of struggle as progressively realizable frees the idea of
revolution from the nineteenth century image of it as a one-off cataclysm, opening space for new ideas of
organization and political strategy that are neither social democratic nor vanguardist (see Hudis, this volume). Here again, Lebowitz
is an instructive starting point. He notes that even when struggles do not ‘transcend the capital/wage labour
relation’, they can be significant for the life-value of working people’s lives because they express the fact that ‘a qualitative development ...
takes place in the course of such struggle’ (2003: 99). The qualitative development is that workers improve the conditions of
their own lives, create life-time and life-space for self-realizing activity and mutualistic interaction, and
thus both teach themselves that society is not impervious to collective struggle, and make their lives
better by realizing some elements of the socialist ideal in their day to day reality. Since every human life is finite,
lived by mortal individuals, revolutionary politics must take into account both the short and the long term .
Immanuel Wallerstein puts the point well: ‘People live in the present’, he argued. ‘Everybody has to eat today, not tomorrow. Everybody has to
sleep today, not tomorrow. Everybody has to do all these just ordinary things today, and you can’t just tell people that they have to wait
another five or ten or twenty years, and it is going to get better ... So you’ve got to worry about today, but you can’t worry only about today’
(quoted in Boggs 2012: 197). No one can be expected to sacrifice the whole of their present life for the sake of a distant future that they will
never experience. A politics capable of motivating people must demonstrate its capacity to improve workers’
lives in their own here and now and not just function as a way-station on the way to a promised
transcendence. Hence the struggle for free time by shortening the working day without loss of real wages has historically been (and could
become again, if it were taken up once more by a revivified trades union movement) a victory over the power of capital over the whole of
human life. So too the struggle for higher wages. If it is understood as a struggle against the power of capital over human life and not an end in
itself or instrumental to higher levels of life-destructive consumption of capitalist commodities, it becomes a basis and a building block for more
radical demands. Such struggles can become bases and building blocks if they are used as occasions to raise
critical questions: why is it that capitalism permits both mass unemployment and resists shortening the working week without loss of real
wages? Why is it that real wages have stagnated while corporate profits have soared? Why is it that capitalism continues to ravage the planet
(see Holleman, this volume) even though there is an unshakeable scientific consensus that without drastic socio-economic changes a massive
life-crisis awaits us in the not too distant future? When
workplace struggles are connected to these sorts of questions
workers can realize – without being preached at or otherwise dogmatically exhorted to overthrow capitalism – that the real
implications of their struggles contest the power of capital over human (and planetary) life . Let us take
another example to further illustrate the point – the struggle for universally accessible public institutions. Here too trade unions have
historically played a decisive role. What does the creation of universally accessible public institutions mean? The re-channelling of wealth away
from private accumulation towards life-requirement satisfaction on the basis of need, not the ability to pay. In other words, the funding of
universally accessible public institutions through taxation is another inroad against the power of capital over life. When education, health care,
access to cultural institutions, and pensions are taken out of the cycle of commodified exchange and made available to all people on the basis
and to the extent of their needs for them, real life improves: ‘The public provision of goods and services, well-managed in a way that fosters
sustainable development and social justice initiatives, and which is accountable to the community, significantly improves standards of living’
(Fanelli 2016: 86). Such improvements take society some way towards instantiating the principle of socialist society: ‘from each according to
their abilities, to each according to their needs’ (Marx 1875). Of course, public institutions do not fully realize that principle, but nor do they
fully ignore it, as commodified exchange does. Nor are actually existing public institutions free of invidious, often racialized and sexualized,
oppressive hierarchies of power (see Sears 2014: 56, 88). Nevertheless, they do represent a victory over what Lebowitz calls the ‘mediating
power’ of capital, i.e., the way it makes people dependent on the possession of money, as opposed to nature and each other, for their life-
support. Theroad to socialism thus lies along a continuum of struggle against the power capital exerts over
people’s ability to satisfy their real life-needs and express and enjoy their life-capacities. This struggle
brings to light the deepest contradiction of capitalism, that it masks the real relations of dependence of
human life on nature and collective labour with its own structurally imposed dependence on access to
labour and commodity markets. Once workers peer behind this curtain of capitalist reification, they see that the real purpose of
labour is not the production of private money-value for the capitalist, but life-capital – ‘the life wealth that produces more life wealth without
loss and with cumulative gain’ (McMurty 2015) – for the need-based appropriation and use of all. Whatever
struggles expose this
contradiction, recapture wealth and resources for the production of life-capital, and create universally
accessible pathways for all to appropriate life-capital are elements of the struggle for a socialist society .
In sum, we have argued that the struggle for socialism must be reconceived as a struggle along a continuum. The ‘political economy of the
working class’, implied but largely absent from Capital, focuses on the ways in which organized collective struggle can divert wealth from the
circuits of capital to the circuits of collective life-capital through which real human beings preserve and develop themselves. Life
can be
better or worse in capitalism, and struggle that makes life better without overthrowing it should not
be dismissed as ‘reformist’ but understood as part of a continuum of struggle towards socialism. People
do not fight, normally, for abstractions or slogans, but for achievable goals that will improve their lives. To radicalize the struggle does not mean
radicalizing slogans, but treating each victory as a plateau on which to rest for a moment before extending the counterlogic of public provision,
need-satisfaction, and democratic control over wealth and resources further into the life-space and life-time dominated by capital.
 2AC – Link Turn
Link turn—UBI is a revolutionary reform that increases the individual and collective
bargaining power of workers.
Edgar Manjarin and Maciej Szlinder 16. Manjarin works in the Department of Philosophy at Adam
Mickiewicz University and Szlinder works in the Department of Sociology at Universitat de Barcelona, 7-
17-2016. “A Marxist Argumentative Scheme on Basic Income and Wage Share in an Anti-capitalist
Agenda”, Basic Income Studies; Berkeley, vol. 11(1) p. 49-59.

To evaluate if a proposal is a revolutionary reform, i. e. leads to strengthening workers to enlarge their possibilities to put an
end to capitalism and establish a new mode of production, implies asking about its effects on the wage share. This is what we
propose that should be done with universal basic income, one of the most discussed proposals in recent years. How should it affect the
dynamics of wage/ profit share? We argue that a basic income should lead to a rise of the share of wages in the GDP, by
significantly improving their bargaining position in various ways. Firstly, the bargaining position of workers
would improve due to the macro-economic consequences of implementing a basic income system . This
reform, by redistributing income to the advantage of the poorer groups of the society would increase internal effective demand creating a
better ground for profitable investments. That should induce investment, which depends on sales and expected profitability, which may
increase employment and decrease the unemployment rate.8 The existence of a huge group of unemployed
or, as Marx puts it, the industrial reserve army, creates a downward pressure on wages, because it plays a role of a
scarecrow discouraging the workers from struggling for their rights, better conditions of labour and
higher wages. As this role is directly proportional to the level of unemployment, the smaller it is the
lesser intimidated the workers are. Secondly, basic income would increase the wage share, because it would get the workers
away from the tight corner – as long as this benefit would exist, they would never have to worry about the
survival of themselves and their families. Therefore, in the worst of cases they could resign from some particular
job if they perceived it as not satisfactory (in terms of wage or working conditions) and have time to look
for a better job (also in a different city or region). In this sense a basic income would obviously improve workers’
bargaining position, especially in the pay negotiations (Vanderborght, 2006, p. 5–6). Thirdly, apart from an individual bargaining
power, a basic income could also have a positive effect on the collective bargaining power, especially
during a strike. As Yannick Vanderborght puts it: ... a BI would make each single strike less harmful financially, since
workers would keep their entitlement to a guaranteed income floor outside the labour market. With a BI, strikers would be able to
face long-lasting resistance from employers, and the collective powers of unions would therefore be
enhanced. (Vanderborght, 2006, p. 5) Finally, basic income, by giving security and time, guarantees everyone
the possibility to engage in alternative relations of production, such as cooperatives, build alternative
non capital-labour relationships (by decommodifying different aspects of social life), and organize politically to struggle
for a better situation of working people (including using the state policies and institutions). So it can foster non-capitalist social
activities, which are worth in and for themselves, as well as helping directly and indirectly to the emergence of collective action with anti-
capitalist goals.

Link turn—UBI increases workers’ autonomy and facilitates anti-capitalist education,

activities, spending habits, and willingness to pursue change.
Mary Lawhon and Tyler McCreary 3/6. Lawhon works in the School of Geosciences, University of
Edinburgh and Global South Studies Centre, University of Cologne and McCreary works in the
Department of Geography, Florida State University and Department of First Nations Studies, University
of Northern British Columbia, 3-6-2023. “Making UBI radical: On the potential for a universal basic
income to underwrite transformative and anti-kyriarchal change”, Economy and Society.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03085147.2022.2131278
Cash transfers underwriting radical change The second key distinction we work to make here is that cash transfers, and particularly a durable,
redistributive UBI, might well induce much greater political economic change. If cash transfers were merely ameliorative,
reducing economic inequality, this might be reason enough to support them. The argument we make here, however, is that the impacts of cash
transfers go beyond this, and that a redistributive UBI
might well be used to underwrite postcapitalist economies.
Greater economic security and improved relations with the state and each other might well increase
many people’s willingness and ability to participate in political economic change . Further, progressive
scholars and activists might well be able to shape practice, highlighting the benefits of using increased
funds and time to underwrite radical political economic change. What might the securing of a state-provided universal,
unconditional basic income do? In what ways might embracing modest statecraft, changing relationships between citizens and the state,
rework how we see and interact with the state and each other? We point to four interrelated possibilities here: (i) freed time might be used to
participate in democracy, (ii) increased incomes might be used to support diverse economies, (iii) reduced reliance on the capitalist economy
might enable greater regulation as well as social and ecological re-embedding, and (iv) reconfigured state-citizenship relations might also
transform how people collectively understand themselves and the possibilities for change. These impacts are not given, but might be created as
part of a radical politics. First, it is easy to imagine that a UBI
might free up time and that this might well enable citizens to be
more informed, active and engaged with politics (Fitzpatrick, 2004). Further, cash transfers – especially those with
limited conditions – have not led to docile populations, but often to more politically engaged citizens who , at
the very least, fight to keep these benefits. The position we develop here advances the idea that freeing up time is politically
useful, building on this towards understanding the role of a UBI in enabling a different type of politics,
and a different type of economy. Leftist scholarship has suggested that a UBI might enable improved bargaining
power for labour by providing a ‘permanent strike fund’; even the threat of striking may increase the
overall gains for workers (Calnitsky, 2017; Stern, 2016). In this version, a UBI is seen as a tool for enabling iterative
change towards a more empowered working class: change can be demanded through the threat of
labour withdrawal. We see value in such a position, but also emphasize the potential of a basic income
as a means for the actual withdrawal from capitalist relations and a resource to be used to build new
political economic relations. Above, we noted that most studies of cash transfers have deployed developmentalist lenses, yet there
are some exceptions. Exploring the politics of Seminole gaming in which cash is transferred to community
members, Cattelino (2008; see also Lewis, 2017) observes that money enables a degree of material autonomy. This
economic independence has provided the conditions for indigenous cultural revitalization, freeing
people from dependency on conditional government programmes. It also enables monetary supports
for members to engage in activities, such as language instruction, that remain culturally meaningful although
undervalued in the capitalist economy. More broadly, we can also reinterpret existing data through a critical lens. Studies of cash
transfers have suggested that money is often spent locally and enables the creation of new businesses (Gertler et al., 2012; Ribas, 2020; Yang,
2018), and such practices might well shift funds away from corporations towards more embedded enterprises. In short, people often
use the money from cash transfers to do just the kinds of things that many advocates of diverse
economies would want to see: end their reliance on capitalism for income, start small businesses,
spend money locally, and devote more time to socially valuable practices . There is already a substantial
community of practice in and, primarily, beyond the academy devoted to building postcapitalist community economies; a UBI might well
underwrite these economies that have proven difficult to sustain and expand in the unequal world we have. It might make it easier both to
spend time as scholars and activists working to build these alternative relations and garner increased public participation. Further, separating
incomes from local economies might well subtend particular political economic conflicts, enabling increasing regulation and embedding of
markets. Elsewhere, we have argued that a UBI
might enable a reworking of longstanding conflicts over
environment and development by reducing the reliance of particular states and citizens on extractive
developments (Lawhon & McCreary, 2020). Such reworked spatialities and dependencies might enable new
pressures, a point that could be extended for other kinds of political economic conflict . Finally, while a single
policy may not substantively change the state, there is evidence from studies of cash transfers as well as wider social theory to suggest that
cash transfers can change how citizens think about and interact with each other and the state . One shift that
we find compelling is that cash transfers (sometimes implicitly, sometimes explicitly) reframe the economy as, at least in part,
collective. Ferguson (2015), for example, suggests thinking of cash transfers as ‘shares’ of the economy. Others have argued for
cash transfers as a recognition of common ecological inheritance (Ranalli, 2020; Standing, 2019; Van Parijs, 1992). More
broadly, it has been demonstrated that recipients feel a greater sense of social trust (Kangas et al., 2019). This enriched sense of
collectivism might well shape willingness to participate in social change.
 2AC – Impact Turn – Environment
Empirics prove regulating capitalism can solve environmental challenges, and
capitalist innovation is the biggest driver of green technologies.
David Rosenberg 17. Economics editor and columnist for Haaretz, 11-21-2017. “Capitalism Is Our Only
Hope of Rescue From Climate Change”, Haaretz. https://www.haaretz.com/world-news/2017-11-21/ty-
article/.premium/capitalism-is-our-only-hope-of-rescue-from-climate-change/0000017f-f333-d487-abff-
f3ffc4870000)

On paper, Fong and other critics of capitalism have some points. But the reality is very different. In
a modern capitalist economy, far
from being the jungle that Fong and Klein portray it, business is subject to regulations, societal values and forces
beyond its control. It may fight back, and sometimes fight back nasty, but it accepts the outcome. Take the energy
crisis of the early 1970s, which combined all of these factors, and in some respects echoes the dilemma facing business
in the era of global warning. Suddenly OPEC raised oil prices. But rather than threaten war (as leftists who see no
bounds to capitalist rapaciousness would assume), the capitalist economies adjusted. Corporations became more
energy efficient and developed products that provided the same savings for consumers, because that’s
what the market demanded. Government stepped in with regulations that filled in the gaps where the
market couldn’t or wouldn’t. It worked. If energy use per unit of GDP in the United States were still at 1973 levels, the country’s
energy use would be over 40% greater than its current level. The fact is, capitalism’s critics are so focused on the system’s
fundamental wickedness, as they see it, that they ignore its assets, namely its dynamism – its willingness to
dispense with anything that doesn’t work and try something else, not because it has the good of humanity in mind, but
because it wants to beat the competition and make bigger profits. Given the right set of incentives,
businesses in capitalist economies will conform to rules that limit environmental damage. More
importantly, they will develop the technologies to help mitigate climate change further. Electric and self-
driving cars, solar and wind power, smart transportation and a host of other energy-saving technologies
are being developed by corporations, not by government, and certainly not in the world’s last surviving
bastions of socialism. Fong doesn’t go into the particulars of the democratic socialism that he fantasizes will rescue the world from
warming. If it’s a kind of centralized economy, he might do well to look back at the environmental record of the old Soviet Union, which was a
disaster. If he imagines some kind of squishy network of socialist collectives, what is to prevent them from engaging in the same selfish
behavior as corporations? Capitalism is messy and uncooperative, but against climate change, it’s the best
chance we’ve got.
 2AC – Impact Turn – War
Capitalism is net better for peace—wealth and democracy is negatively correlated
with aggression.
Mark Harrison 12. Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Warwick, Centre for
Russian and East European Studies at University of Birmingham, Hoover Institution on War, Revolution,
and Peace at Stanford University, 12-20-2012. “Capitalism at War”, University of Warwick.
https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/staff/mharrison/public/capitalism_at_war.pdf
Capitalism’s Wars America is the world’s preeminent capitalist power. According to a poll of more than 21,000 citizens of 21 countries in the
second half of 2008, people tend on average to evaluate U.S. foreign policy as inferior to that of their own country in the moral dimension. 4
While this survey does not disaggregate respondents by educational status, many apparently knowledgeable people also seem to believe
that, in the modern world, most wars are caused by America; this impression is based on my experience of presenting work on
the frequency of wars to academic seminars in several European countries. According to the evidence, however, these beliefs are
mistaken. We are all aware of America’s wars, but they make only a small contribution to the total.
Counting all bilateral conflicts involving at least the show of force from 1870 to 2001, it turns out that
the countries that originated them come from all parts of the global income distribution (Harrison and Wolf
2011). Countries that are richer, measured by GDP per head, such as America do not tend to start more conflicts,
although there is a tendency for countries with larger GDPs to do so. Ranking countries by the numbers of conflicts they initiated, the United
States, with the largest economy, comes only in second place; third place belongs to China. In first place is Russia (the USSR between 1917 and
1991). What do capitalist institutions contribute to the empirical patterns in the data? Erik Gartzke (2007) has re-examined the hypothesis of
the “democratic peace” based on the possibility that, since
capitalism and democracy are highly correlated across
countries and time, both democracy and peace might be products of the same underlying cause, the
spread of capitalist institutions. It is a problem that our historical datasets have measured the spread of capitalist property rights
and economic freedoms over shorter time spans or on fewer dimensions than political variables. For the period from 1950 to 1992, Gartzke
uses a measure of external financial and trade liberalization as most likely to signal robust markets and a laissez
faire policy. Countries that share this attribute of capitalism above a certain level , he finds, do not fight each
other, so there is capitalist peace as well as democratic peace. Second, economic liberalization (of the less
liberalized of the pair of countries) is a more powerful predictor of bilateral peace than democratization , controlling
for the level of economic development and measures of political affinity.
 2AC – Impact Defense
Modern capitalism is not a destructive monolith. Attributing all current issues to
capitalism ignores real-world developments that can’t be explained by Marxist
analysis.
David Lane 20. Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences (UK) and Emeritus Fellow of Emmanuel
College, Cambridge University, 3-18-2020. “Building socialism: from ‘scientific’ to ‘active’ Marxism”,
Third World Quarterly, vol. 41(8) p. 1306-1321.

All the countries of the world have been drawn into the capitalist order; capitalism has continued to
grow and spread, and its developments have confounded Marx’s predictions. Its contradictions have
been resolved, at least partially, through forms of coordination and control exercised by the state and
increasingly by regional and global institutions. The polarisation of class struggle, anticipated by Marx, has
been occluded by a much more differentiated occupational system promoting a pluralistic and socially
diverse political process. Capitalism has moved from chaotic competition to a more organised form
constituted by global financial and non-financial companies and transnational institutions. The cyclical development of
capitalism continues. World capitalism has shown a capability for diffusion and adaptation. It is conditioned by variations which exist in
different economic and political formations. ‘Scientific Marxism’, like ‘Darwinism’ in the physical world, is subject to revision in the light of new
facts and theories. Marx’s materialist approach has been widely accepted, while many of his political predictions have been
discarded. In this respect his work has been absorbed to various degrees by different subjects in the humanities and social sciences; it has
influenced political parties and legitimated political leaders; and it remains a fertile but debatable approach to our understanding of world
history. Marx made a significant contribution to the understanding of the nineteenth-century class structure of capitalism. His knowledge
is limited to the society he knew at the time . To overcome the tendency to reductionism, Marx’s approach might be
developed with insights from other theories and approaches. Bureaucracy, patriarchy, militarism and credentialism (the
exercise of ‘expert’ knowledge) also constitute forms of political and economic power and have their own laws of
development. Social discrimination and political domination should be distinguished from economic
exploitation. Such forms of power sometimes overlap with the interests of economic classes, but they are primarily performed by social
groups and elites sometimes operating on behalf of nation states or international organisations. It is mistaken to attribute all the

malformations, inadequacies and injustices to inherent faults or contradictions in the class structures
of capitalist or socialist regimes . Other problems, such as those concerned with environmental exploitation as
well as the consequences of nuclear war, have assumed greater importance in the twenty-first century and were not anticipated
by Marx’s historical materialism. To understand current international conflict, Thucydides provides a geo-strategic dimension
unheeded by Marx. The oppression of marginalised groups has cultural and historical roots. Cultural values are deeply engrained and prove
obstinate to change. These dimensions
of power might be shaped by, but are not constituent parts of,
economic exploitation and should be analysed separately. Moreover, they cannot be equated with economic exploitation
– Marx has been vindicated in giving to the ownership of private property and economic surplus obtained through market relationships a
qualitatively different level of power than other forms of domination and discrimination.

Using the state to reimagine and reform capitalism is both possible and necessary to
solve at the macro level.
Mariana Mazzucato 21. Professor in the Economics of Innovation and Public Value at University
College London where she is the founding director of the UCL Institute for Innovation and Public
Purpose, 1-28-2021. Mission Economy: A Moonshot Guide to Changing Capitalism, p. 204-10.
This book has applied what I believe is the immensely powerful idea of a mission to solving the ‘wicked’ problems we face today. In it, I have
argued that tackling
grand challenges will only happen if we reimagine government as a prerequisite for
restructuring capitalism in a way that is inclusive, sustainable and driven by innovation.
First and foremost, this means reinventing government for the twenty-first century – equipping it with the tools, organization and culture it
needs to drive a mission-oriented approach. It also means bringing purpose to the core of corporate governance and taking a very broad
stakeholder position across the economy. It means changing the relationship between public and private sectors, and between them and civil
society, so they all work symbiotically for a common goal. The reason for the emphasis on rethinking government is simple: only
government has the capacity to bring about transformation on the scale needed . The relationship between
economic actors and civil society shows our problems at their most profound, and this is what we must unravel.

We can start by recognizing that capitalist markets are an outcome of how each actor in the system is organized
and governed, and how the different actors relate to one another. This holds for the private and public sectors and for other sectors such
as non-profits. No particular kind of market behaviour is inevitable. For example, the market pressure often
cited as forcing a business to neglect the long term in favour of the short term, as too many companies do today,
is the product of a particular organization of the market. Nor is there anything inevitable in government
bureaucracies being too slow to react to challenges such as digital platforms and climate change. Rather, both are
outcomes of agency, actions and governance structures that are chosen inside organizations, as well as the legal and institutional relationships
between them. It is all down to design within and between organizations.

Capitalism is, indeed, in crisis. But the good news is that we can do better. We know from the past that public and private actors can come
together to do extraordinary things. I have reflected on how, fifty years ago, going to the moon and back required public and private actors to
invest, to innovate and to collaborate night and day for a common purpose. Imagine if that collaborative purpose today was to build
a
more inclusive and sustainable capitalism: green production and consumption, less inequality, greater
personal fulfilment, resilient health care and healthy ageing, sustainable mobility and digital access for all. But small,
incremental changes will not get us to those outcomes. We must have the courage and conviction to lift our gaze higher – to lead
transformative change that is as imaginative as it is ambitious, aiming for something far more ambitious than sending a man to the moon.

To do this successfully, governments

need to invest in their internal capabilities – building the competence and
confidence to think boldly, partner with business and civil society, catalyse new forms of collaboration
across sectors, and deploy instruments that reward actors willing to engage with the difficulties . The task is
neither to pick winners nor to give unconditional handouts, subsidies and guarantees, but to pick the willing. And missions are about making
markets, not only fixing them. They’re about imagining new areas of exploration. They’re about taking risks, not only ‘de-risking’. And if this
means making mistakes along the way, so be it. Learning through trial and error is critical for any value-creation exercise. Ambitious missions
also have the courage to tilt the playing field.

If government is indeed a value creator that is driven by public purpose, its policies should reflect and reinforce that. Too many green policies
today are just minor adjustments to a trajectory that still favours the old waste-prone behaviours and the financial casino that worsens
inequality. A
healthy economy that works for the whole of society must tilt the playing field consistently to
reward behaviours that help us achieve agreed and desirable goals. That means achieving coherence in
a multiplicity of fields, from taxes to regulation, from business law to the social safety net .
As emphasized throughout the book, it is key to not pretend that social missions are the same as technological ones. With challenges that are
more ‘wicked’ it is essential that moonshot thinking is linked with support to underlying government systems. For example, a moonshot around
disease testing or health priorities must interact closely with the public-health system, not replace or circumvent it. Similarly, a moonshot
around clean growth must interact with transport systems and planning authorities and understand behavioural change. Thus it is critical to
perceive missions not as siloed projects but as being intersectoral, bottom-up, and building on existing systems (such as innovation systems,
among others).

Governments cannot pursue missions alone. They must work alongside purpose-driven businesses to achieve them. As I’ve
argued in this book, this requires addressing one of the biggest dilemmas of modern capitalism: restructuring
business so that private profits are reinvested back into the economy rather than being used for short-
term financialized purposes. Missions can accelerate this shift by shaping expectations about where business opportunities lie and
also getting a better return for public investment. In this sense they can begin to walk the talk of stakeholder value. This means creating a more
symbiotic form of partnership and collaboration in different sectors, whether in health, energy or digital platforms. A market-shaping
perspective requires governing these interactions so that intellectual property rights, data privacy, pricing of essential medicines and taxation
that must mean health innovation driven by the
all reflect what needs to happen to reach the common objective. In health
mission of better health care for all; in energy it must mean divestment from fossil fuels and the creation
of public goods like green infrastructure and green production systems that protect the earthly oasis that
Armstrong referred to; and in the digital domain it must mean the use of digitalization to improve the access of all
people to the power of the technologies of the twenty-first century – while ensuring both data privacy and that our welfare
states are strengthened, not weakened, by digital platforms.

Doing capitalism differently requires reimagining the full potential of a public sector driven by public
purpose – democratically defining clear goals that society needs to meet by investing and innovating
together. It requires a fundamentally new relationship between all economic actors willing and able to
tackle complexity to achieve outcomes that matter.