DNG Capitalism K

Deleuze & Guattari Capitalism K
Notes
Explanations
Glossary
Assemblage: An assemblage is any number of "things" or pieces of
"things" gathered into a single context. An assemblage can bring
about any number of "effects"—aesthetic, machinic, productive,
destructive, consumptive, informatic, etc. Deleuze and Guattari's
discussion of the book provides a number of insights into this loosely
defined term.
Becoming: "Becoming" is a process of change, flight, or movement
within an assemblage. Rather than conceive of the pieces of an
assemblage as an organic whole, within which the specific elements
are held in place by the organization of a unity, the process of
"becoming" serves to account for relationships between the
"discrete" elements of the assemblage. In "becoming" one piece of
the assemblage is drawn into the territory of another piece, changing
its value as an element and bringing about a new unity. An example of
this principle might be best illustrated in the way in which atoms are
drawn into an assemblage with nearby atoms through affinities rather
than an organizational purpose. The process is one of
deterritorialization in which the properties of the constituent element
disappear and are replaced by the new properties of the assemblage
—"becomingsmolecular of all kinds, becomingsparticles" (D&G 272).
Body Without Organs: The "Body without Organs" or BwO is a term
Deleuze and Guattari have taken from Antonin Artaud which consists
of an assemblage or body with no underlying organizational
principles, and hence no organs within it. The BwO is a post-
Enlightenment entity, a body but not an organism. The Body without
Organs is thus, as Deleuze and Guattari explain, also a "plane of
consistency," which, concretely ties together heterogeneous or
disparate elements" (507). In other words, the BwO provides the
smooth space through which movement can occur. Rather than the
unifying principles of a system of organization, the BwO's system of
embodiment is constituted through principles of consolidation.
Nomad: "Nomadism" is a way of life that exists outside of the
organizational "State." The nomadic way of life is characterized by
movement across space which exists in sharp contrast to the rigid
and static boundaries of the State. Deleuze and Guattari explain: The
nomad has a territory; he follows customary paths; he goes from one
point to another; he is not ignorant of points (water points, dwelling
points, assembly points, etc.). But the question is what in nomad life
is a principle and what is only a consequence. To begin with,
although the points determine paths, they are strictly subordinated to
the paths they determine, the reverse happens with the sedentary.
The water point is reached only in order to be left behind; every point
is a relay and exists only as a relay. A path is always between two
points, but the inbetween has taken on all the consistency and enjoys
both an autonomy and a direction of its own. The life of the nomad is
the intermezzo. (380) The nomad, is thus, a way of being in the middle
or between points. It is characterized by movement and change, and
is unfettered by systems of organization. The goal of the nomad is
only to continue to move within the "intermezzo."
Rhizome: "Rhizome: A prostrate or subterranean rootlike stem
emitting roots and usually producing leaves at its apex; a rootstock."
—Oxford English Dictionary Online. As a model for culture, the
rhizome resists the organizational structure of the roottree system
which charts causality along chronological lines and looks for the
originary source of "things" and looks towards the pinnacle or
conclusion of those "things." "A rhizome, on the other hand,
"ceaselessly established connections between semiotic chains,
organizations of power, and circumstances relative to the arts,
sciences, and social struggles" (D&G 7). Rather than narrativize
history and culture, the rhizome presents history and culture as a
map or wide array of attractions and influences with no specific origin
or genesis, for a "rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the
middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo" (D&G 25). The planar
movement of the rhizome resists chronology and organization,
instead favoring a nomadic system of growth and propagation. In this
model, culture spreads like the surface of a body of water, spreading
towards available spaces or trickling downwards towards new spaces
through fissures and gaps, eroding what is in its way. The surface can
be interrupted and moved, but these disturbances leave no trace, as
the water is charged with pressure and potential to always seek its
equilibrium, and thereby establish smooth space.
Smooth Space: "Smooth space" exists in contrast to "striated
space"— a partitioned field of movement which prohibits free motion.
Smooth space refers to an environment, a landscape (vast or
microscopic) in which a subject operates. Deleuze and Guattari
explain: Smooth space is filled by events or haecceities, far more than
by formed and perceived things. It is a space of affects, more than
one of properties. It is haptic rather than optical perception. Whereas
in striated forms organize a matter, in the smooth materials signal
forces and serve as symptoms for them. It is an intensive rather than
extensive space, one of distances, not of measures and properties.
Intense Spatium instead of Extensio. A Body without Organs instead
of an organism conducive to rhizomatic growth and nomadic
movement, smooth space consists of disorganized matter and tends
to provoke a sensual or tactical response rather than a starkly rational
method of operation or a planned trajectory.
State: One of the fundamental tasks of the State is to striate the space
over which it reigns, or to utilize smooth spaces as a means of
communication in the service of striated space. It is a vital concern of
every State not only to vanquish nomadism but to control migrations
and more generally, to establish a zone of rights over an entire
"exterior," over all flows traversing the ecumenon. If it can help it, the
State does not dissociate itself from a process of capture of flows of
all kinds, populations, commodities or commerce, money or capital,
etc. There is still a need for fixed paths in welldefined directions,
which restrict speed, regulate circulation, relativize movement, and
measure in detail the relative movements of subjects and objects.
(D+G 38585) In other words, "the State" operates through the capture
of movement and the partition of space. Similarly, the State is also
concerned with striating space or building into it a hierarchical
system of relations which places the occupants of each strata at odds
with those of other strata. As Deleuze and Guattari describe it, the
State is concerned chiefly with creating structures or constructs
through which lines of flight can be harnessed and controlled. The
State, thus, harnesses energy by creating inequalities. Interestingly,
Deleuze and Guattari mention the necessity of "smooth space as a
means of communication" in the service of the State. But, as
information becomes more and more central to the economy and as
the exploding telecommunications market becomes more central not
only to the workings of capital, but to its very creation, it would seem
that the organization of the State itself could be subject to disruption
or deterritorialization. If the "striated space" that "smooth space" is
enlisted to serve is itself being replaced by "smooth space" of an
informationbased economy, and freedom to navigate the channels of
communication without inhibition becomes itself a commodity, then
"the State" is in a precarious situation. The State must become
nomadic, and subject itself to deterritorialization.
War Machine: The "War Machine" is a tool of the nomad through
which capture can be avoided and smooth space preserved. Rather
than the military (which is a State appropriation of the war machine),
the war machine is a collection of nomadwarriors engaged in
resistance to control, war being only a consequence—not the
intended object. The military on the other hand, is an organization
formed by the State formed specifically to wage wars and immobilize
adversaries (which are determined by the State): The question is
therefore less the realization of war than the appropriation of the war
machine. It is at the same time that the State apparatus appropriates
the war machine, subordinates it to its "political" aims, and gives it
war as its direct object. (D&G 420) Unlike the military, the war
machine is not influenced by the economic and political concerns of
the State. The war machine is a "grass roots" affair which bubbles up
from common concerns for freedom to move, and as a result it is part
and parcel of nomadic life.
Oedipus: oedipus complex, based on the pattern of separation from
means of life (the mother) followed by subjection to an external
authority (father, boss, priest, teacher, rock or sports star, politician,
whoever). The Oedipus complex, in other words, results from
capitalist axiomatization before becoming the model of subjectivation
characteristic of the nuclear family. Following re-territorialization,
oedipal re-coding is thus the other major form of social control under
capitalism -- and this includes Freudian psychoanalysis, which by
means of transference merely reproduces the local meanings and
pattern-of- subjectivation established by the nuclear family in an
intimate form of re-coding perfectly suited to (and indeed derived
from) capitalist axiomatization.
Axiomatization: Capital is thus owed an infinite debt, but what is owed
is merely one's work, one's quantified labor-power rather than one's
life; and so capital sits mute on the deposed sovereign's throne,
without offering any stable meaning in return. Indeed, capitalist de-
coding tends instead to systematically strip the halo of meaning from
all aspects of social life (as Marx put it), and organizes society as a
cash nexus for the sake of surplus-accumulation alone rather than in
any meaningful way.
DnG Cap Links
Case Links
General
Modern capitalism thrives on resource accumulation by means of
assigning value to units of the natural world
Rohan D’Souza, Center for World Environmental history, University of
Sussex Energy and Resources Group, University of California,
Berkley “Capitalism’s Ecological Crisis” 2002
One of the most interesting analyses in this regard is advanced by Neil Smith, suggestion that the central questing hinges not on
explaining the extent or limitations of capital’s control or dominance over nature by in understanding the production of nature in the
, capitalism propelled by the dictates of the
image of capital. In other words
accumulation process attempts a qualitative transformation of nature,

which is furthermore generalized on a world scale. In effect,
capitalism’s self-expansion through the appropriation and the
production of surplus value is simultaneously the attempt to
instantiate into the substances of nature and its varied process the
value relation, in which exchange value relation, in which exchange value subjugates use. That is, the
complexity of nature and its innumerable interlinkages are broken
down, dissolved and then refiled into or treated as capitalist
commodities or stock of units of capital. Several recent studies have, in fact, described how
the phenomenon of nature in being recast and compress through technology to
be marched into rhythm with the ineluctable cycles of capitalist’s accumulation.
The 1AC’s call for development creates the ocean as a new space for
neoliberal capitalism
Steinberg 10 [Steinberg (Department of Geography, Royal Holloway
University of London) 10 (Philip E., Sekula, Allan and Noël Burch 2010
The Forgotten Space, reviewed by Philip E. Steinberg
http://societyandspace.com/reviews/film-reviews/sekula/)]
In other words, in the capitalist imagination, the sea is idealized as a flat
surface in which space is abstracted from geophysical reality. As

the sea’s space is reduced to an abstract quantity of distance, or
time, it is constructed as amenable to annihilation by technologies
that enable the compression (or, better yet, the transcendence) of space-time, like the containership. While
this construction of the ocean provides rich material for geographers of capitalism and modernity (e.g. Steinberg 2001), it
provides precious little material for filmmakers. Under capitalism, the ocean is valued only in its (idealized) absence, and
absence is notoriously difficult to film. Thus, as Brett Story, the other geographer who has commented on the film, has noted,
‘he film spends surprisingly little time on actual water’ (Story 2012, page 1576, emphasis added). By my count, only about ten
minutes of the 110-minute film are spent at sea (all on the Hanjin Budapest) and even in this footage the material ocean is not
a force that needs to be reckoned with, except as a source of rust. For viewers who are familiar with Sekula’s book Fish Story,
as well as with his other film The Lottery of the Sea, the relative absence of the ocean in The Forgotten Space is, as Story
suggests, surprising. In contrast with The Forgotten Space, Fish Story begins with a meditation on the ‘crude materiality’ of
the sea (Sekula 1995, page 12) and he reminds the reader throughout the book that the ocean’s materiality
persists despite the best intentions of capital to wash it away. Thus, for instance,
we learn in Fish Story that ‘large-scale material flows remain intractable. Acceleration is not absolute:
the hydrodynamics of large-capacity hulls and the power output of
diesel engines set a limit to the speed of cargo ships not far beyond that of the
first quarter of [the twentieth] century’ (Sekula 1995, page 50). In Fish Story, the ocean is a space of contradictions and a non-
human actor in its own right. However, no such references to the sea’s geophysical materiality and the barriers that this might
pose to its idealization as a friction-free surface of movement appear in The Forgotten Space. Human frictions on the sea
likewise feature in Fish Story: militant seafarers, longshoremen, and mutineers all make appearances in the text. In contrast,
these individuals receive scant attention in The Forgotten Space (a point noted by Story as well), and much of the attention
that they do receive is about their failings. A relatively hopeful account of union organizing in Los Angeles is paired with a
story of labour’s defeat in the face of automation in Rotterdam and that of a faded movement in Hong Kong where the union
the heterotopia of the ship
hall has become a social club for retirees and their widows. For Sekula,
celebrated by Foucault has become a neoliberal dystopia. The

world of containerization is Foucault’s dreaded ‘civilization
without boats, in which dreams have dried up, espionage has taken the place of adventure, and the police have
taken the place of pirates’ (adapted from Foucault 1986, page 27). Echoing Foucault, Sekula asks near the beginning of the
film, ‘Does the anonymity of the box turn the sea of exploit and adventure into a lake of invisible drudgery?’ Although Sekula
the sea is no longer
never answers this question directly, his response would seem to be in the affirmative:
a romantic space of resistance; it has been tamed. Sekula and Burch’s

failure to depict the ocean as a space of dialectical encounters
(whether between humans or among human and non-human elements) reproduces a dematerialization
of the sea that is frequently found in narratives of globalization,

including critical narratives (Steinberg 2013). This leads the filmmakers to
inadvertently reaffirm the capitalist construction of the ocean as an
external space beyond politics. By turning away from the frictions
encountered at sea, Sekula and Birch end up tacitly endorsing the very
‘forgetting’ of the sea promoted by capital, as it subscribes to an
ideology of limitless mobility.
Accidents
The move to stop accidents in the world kills creates a fear of danger
in all of us, moving us into a segmented rigid line of living. This
qyantum dimension of power kills the potential of difference within a
society, constructing Oedipus within us all.
Kuswa 4 – Director of debate (Assistant), Doctor at University of California
(Kevin, “Machinic Rhetoric, Highways and Interpellating Motions,” http://www.rhizomes.net/issue8/kuswa.htm, JCook.)
When have now arrived at the point, following Dunbar, where the highway machine is partly machinic because of its continual series
of explosions. Harnessing energy also promises its leakage [2]. Road accidents and the enormity of tragedy and destruction
associated with the highway machine are the flip side of the practices of circulation. Humans move along the highway, but when that
movement is suddenly and terminally halted, the need has been demonstrated for more security or a higher level of safety. Time also
implies its interruption. The life of circulation is also the lethality of excess speed. The unexpected shock of the accident and the
danger of fatality mark a line of flight in an otherwise consistent subject. The line of flight is also called a "quantum dimension of
power" by Thomas Dumm (1994), a moment in the constitution of subjectivity that transforms fear into disgust. The struggle
between fear and disgust establishes the impact of the fatal driver: driving means death. Thomas Dumm (1994, p139) elaborates on
the impact of the dissolution of the subject: The politics of danger is ubiquitous in modern life. Danger may be conceived as a line
that serves to create and delimit others. It is a technique at work in the processes by which the modern subject is constituted. Yet it
also intrudes into what Deleuze and Guattari refer to as the quantum dimension of power, the area of flows and powers that cannot
be contained by segmentations and lines. In discussing the dangers of the line, they argue, 'The more rigid the segmentarity, the
more reassuring it is for us. That is what fear is, and how it makes us retreat into the first line' ( Thousand
Plateaus , p227). The trajectory that overcoming fear takes is first clarity, then power, then disgust. And disgust concerns
the lines of flight that might be anxiously pursued once one overcomes fear.
Art
First, There is no bare canvas. All art has underlying thoughts,

subjects and clichés. Their static concept of art destroys
therevolutionarypotential of art – It constructs its own internalization
of control through this static notion
Colebrook ‘09. Claire Colebrook. Professor at Edinburgh University.“On the Very Possibility of Queer Theory.”
Deleuze and Queer Theory .Edinburgh University Press, 2009. 22 George Square ISBN: 978 0 7486 3404 0. Pg 21-23. – M.E.
This aesthetics would, in turn, give us a new distinct model of reading. On the critical identity-based model of queer theory,
where the queer self is the de-stabilising repetition of an enabling normativity, we look at the ways in which works of art
introduce a difference or dissimulation in the image of the human. One reading of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream,
for example, might focus on the ways in which the final image of normative heterosexual desire has to go through a certain
detour or deviation in order to arrive at is supposed destined end. Queer reading would attend to all those moments in the text
in which the normal is achieved, produced, effected and also, therefore, exposed as contingent, constituted and open to
change. To a great extent the queer theory industry has been mobilised around a re-reading of the canon's images of het-
erosexual desire to show moments of instability, deviation and mobility. Deleuze, however, offers a quite distinct model of
reading, both of the ¶literary work in Difference and Repetition, and of art in general in The Logic of Sensation and (with Guattari) in
Deleuze describes all art as the
What is Philosophy? In The Logic of Sensation (2003) ¶
repetition of the history of art, but always with a struggle to release
sensations from their subjection to figuration and repetition. There is
no such thing as a bare canvas, for we are already composed and
dominated by cliches. The future can come, not through the assertion
of greater and greater individuality, but only in a destruction of the
personal to release the figure. This would not be the figuration of
some repeatable form, but the delineation or process of differing from
which this or that determined figure is drawn. In Difference and Repetition Deleuze draws
upon Shakespeare's Hamlet and Proust's Remembrance of Things Past to describe the profound syntheses of time that go beyond
the body that is composed of habits, and the self that is composed of memories. The act in Hamlet exists above and beyond
Hamlet's individual existence; it is a pure potentiality, something that he mayor may not live up to, actualise or bring into the present.
The future, or the opening of the new, can come about not through
Hamlet drawing upon himself, his desires or his personal past, but by
living out or allowing that power to differ which exists above and
beyond him: ¶ As for the third time in which the future appears, this
signifies that the event and the act possess a secret coherence which
excludes that of the self; that they turn back against the self which
has become their equal and smash it to pieces, as though the bearer
of the new world were carried away and dispersed by the shock of the
multiplicity to which it gives birth: what the self has become unequal
to is the unequal in itself. In this manner, the I which is fractured according to
the order of time and the Self which is divided according to the
temporal series correspond and find a common descendant in the
man without qualities, without self or I, the 'plebeian' guardian of a
secret, the already-Overman whose scattered members gravitate
around the sublime image. (Deleuze 1994: 112) ¶Here, for Deleuze, the art of theatre is
not about the representation of plots, individuals and desires, but
somehow giving form to a power of the pure past. Beyond the
habitual repetitions which organise a body 'this is what I do' - and
beyond the repetitions that constitute a self - 'I am who I am by being
the same through time' - drama exposes this higher repetition which destroys the
self and its world of co-ordinated actions: 'Drama has but a single form involving all three
repetitions' (Deleuze 1994: 115). The task of art is the presentation of this higher power, and reading the work of art is intuiting this
power of time. In Proust the art of the novelist lies in presenting a self With its habits and recollections, and then presenting the pure
potentiality from which that self was actualised: the past not as it was actually lived and recalled, but as it never was, but only could
be, 'in a splendour which was never lived, like a pure past which finally reveals its double irreducibility to the two presents which it
Against a
telescopes together: the present that it was, but also the present which it could be' (Deleuze 1994: 107).
critical reading, which would look at the ways in which art or literature
queers the pitch of the normal, Deleuze offers a positive reading in
which temporality in its pure state can be intuited and given form as
queer, as a power to create relations, to make a difference, to repeat a
power beyond its actual and already constituted forms.
Buses
Itineraries and buses that travel from one point to another make
striated space.
D'haen et al 05 (Theo, Paul Giles, Djelal Kadir, and Lois Parkinson Zamora. Prof of Modernism at leuven university in
Belgium. “How far is America from here?” PG 622 – 623)
This Tourist map with its suggestion of perspective is reminiscent of

the panoramic view on which Michel de Certeau elaborates in his
influential essay “Walking in the City,” where he describes the
“voluptuous pleasure” of the god like observer who seems to
possess the city and be possessed by it in his gaze from above. In
comparison with non-tourist maps this map demonstrates the citys transformation but by the suggestion of concretion. The inserted
representations of concrete attractions recall images that are already present in the viewers imagine and localize them in the
The attractions rise up from the ground to the viewer as an
topography.
enticing, clear, manageable ensemble. This ensemble negates the

chaos of skyscrapers that block each other from view, in favor of a
bright plane from which single buildings emerge in all visibility.The
selected attractions are connected with red lines— these represent
the itineraries of the sight-seeing buses. The buses themselves are
visible, too, in oversize representations. The vehicles and their marked
itineraries introduce the idea of story into the map, and thus of
narrative. The map does not limit itself to a representation of urban
space as an object of the viewers gaze, but it also produces a space
of agency and experience.This space, however, is subjected to the
same rules as the observed space: even as participants in the urban
web, the tourists remain in possession of the general view that is
guaranteed by the map. The city’s meaning results from the sum of its
attractions. It is not even necessary to “read” the city, since the maps
icons suggest the city imprints itself in its reproduction. Taking up
MacCannell’s metaphor cited above, the buses “weave” the city’s
attractions together into a seemingly closed text. The space herby
represented is a striated space, in which the lines and trajectories of
the new York apple tour are subordinated to the points, the
attractions: “one moves from one point to the next” as Deleuze and
Guattari describe striated space.
Class
First, Questions of class always fail for it operates as a molar

aggregate, we must begin by rethinking desire.
Deleuze and Guattari ’77 (Gilles Deleuze.Activist. Felix Guattari. Psychoanalyst. They are the very
definition of crazy, sexy, cool. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. 1977. ISBN: 0143105825. Pg. 256-257
– A.H.)
The immense accomplishment of Lenin and the Russian Revolution was to have forged a class consciousness consonant with the
objective being or interest of the class, and as a consequence, to have imposed on the capitalist countries a recognition of class
Leninist break did not prevent the resurrection of a State
bipolarity. But this great
capitalism inside socialism itself, any more than it prevented classical

capitalism from getting round the break by continuing its veritable
mole work, always effecting breaks of breaks that allowed it to
integrate into its axiomatic sections of the newly recognized class,
while throwing the uncontrolled revolutionary elements—no more
controlled by official socialism than by capitalism itself—further into
the distance, to the periphery or into enclaves. Thus the only choice
left was between the new terroristic and rigid axiomatic—quickly
saturated—of the socialist State, and the old cynical axiomatic—all
the more dangerous for being flexible and never saturated—of the
capitalist State. But in reality, the most direct question is not that of
knowing whether an industrial society can do without a surplus,
without the absorption of a surplus, without a commodity-exchanging
and planner State, and even without an equivalent of the bourgeoisie: it
is evident both that the answer is no, and that in these terms the question is poorly put. Nor is it a question of
knowing whether or not class consciousness, embodied in a party or

a State, betrays the objective class interest, to which a kind of
potential spontaneity would be ascribed, suffocated by the agents
claiming to represent that interest.Sartre's analysis in Critique de la raison dialec-tique appears to us
profoundly correct where he concludes that there does not existany class spontaneity, but only a"group"
spontaneity: whence the necessity for distinguishing "groups-in-

fusion" from the class, which remains "serial," represented by the
party or the State.93And the two do not exist on the same scale. This is becauseclass interest
remains a function of the large molar aggregates; it merely defines a
collective preconscious that is necessarily represented in a distinct
consciousness that, at this level, does not even present any grounds
for asking whether it betrays or not, alienates or not, deforms or not.
The problem is situated there, between unconscious group desires
and preconscious class interests. It is only starting from this point, as
we shall see, that one is able to pose the questions issuing indirectly
there from, concerning the class preconscious and the representative
forms of class consciousness, and the nature of the interests and the
process of their realization. Reich always comes back to us with his
innocent standards, claiming the rights of a prior distinction between
desire and interest: "The leadership has no task more urgent, besides
that of acquiring a precise understanding of the objective historical
process, than to understand : (a) what are the progressive desires,
ideas and thoughts which are latent in people of different social
strata, occupations, age groups and sexes, and (b) what are the
desires, fears, thoughts and ideas ('traditional bonds') which prevent
the progressive desires, ideas, etc., from developing."9'1 (The
leadership has a tendency rather to reply: when I hear the word
"desire," I pull out my gun.)
Death
The affirmative values life from a point of negation and guilt, every
attempt to save life is an attempt to control it. Prefer our politics of
desire because it starts from a point where death is not an end and
life is never extinguished.
Williams 11(James, Professor of European Philosophy at the University of Dundee “Never Too Late? On the Implications
of Deleuze’s Work on Death for a Deleuzian Moral Philosophy” Edinburgh University Press Ltd, p. 172)
What could have been done differently? What should be learned? How can we salvage a general moral consolation from the
particular disaster, when perhaps even the shared label of “particular” is already a betrayal of the singular events? Is there any
consolation to be drawn from the end, from the choking, terrified, doomed struggle of the beast, perhaps some other rebirth, a
memorial, a celebration of survival and a remembrance of sacrifice? More wisely, and against the corrosion of guilt and what ifs, of
necessary communal self-deception, how can we work together against any repetition? They let it happen again . . . The moral
problem under consideration here is not in any given prescription.“Keep away from the sands.” It is not even in any more abstract
law.“Always act to preserve a fellow beast’s life; right up to the very limit of yours.”It knows almost nothing of calculations and
recipes. “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few . . .”It shies away from the lofty versions of such work on scales,
either (and rightly) calibrated according to lower thresholds, or set within hybridsystems of measurement and assessment. “We must
eradicate poverty first.” “What we need is a non-monetary, non-capital based account of value.” “Calculation is on the rules, not on
The problem is in a prior valuation about life, about

any specific circumstance.”
who and what is worth saving and why. This valuation and its many obscure links to desires,
thoughts and emotions explains the despair when it is too late, the guilt at having failed and the resolution to be ready next time,
We have to know and feel for something

better next time. A valued life has been lost.
worth saving, before debating about how to save and when. We also have to
be aware of the need for preservation, of the finiteness and singularity of what is to be saved. What then to make of a philosophy of
life and death, of life in and through death? What happens when late is never too late, because part of life is never extinguished,
because death is not an end. What happens when life is affirmed in death, despite its consumption of living creatures? Do we then
find reasons not to act, or to temper our acts, because absolute lateness never comes, because any resolution of “never again”
resonates as nonsense in a world where nothing is ever the same again, where it is always too late and still too early in every
passing instant and atom, and hence never too late for this life here? So the cruel demagogue stares at the fading rings and bubbles
on the surface of the pool and tells us that in some sense the beast is not dead. In our grief and remorse we cling to those words
and commit the double violence of trading away the living for some illusion of an afterlife for those who have passed, while betraying
the dead in divining a living image in a terminal event. We project the phantasm of a life after death into the future and turn away
from new living beings, erasing the truth of “too late” in favor of the consolation of “still here, still time.”1
The death that the 1AC fetishizes is a negation of life. Their

problematic notion of death precludes understanding it.
of Deleuze’s Work on Death for a Deleuzian Moral Philosophy” Edinburgh University Press Ltd, p. 177)
The struggle to wage war against war, and to bring death to death, therefore rests on the ideas of the double death and “one dies.”
Particular deaths are transformed through their participation in the multiple minor deaths and attendant creative novelties
accompanying their duration. In place of a final passing away of personal identity, we have myriad impersonal continuities. Yet this
is only under a difficult condition, since this continuity cannot simply be a representation of the death of given identities multiplied at
smaller scales. There would then be a vicious regress in Deleuze’s position, where on closer inspection we would find the difficulty
we hoped to solve but at greater magnification: the multiple ongoing lives are subject to the same obliterating endpoints. This
regression is not Deleuze’s point at all. Instead, what matters is the relation between deaths and not the deaths themselves. Any
continuity is in those relations and in none of the actual deaths. Each death changes those ongoing and continuous relations, but
also, each death is shaped by its relations to all others.These relations must be of a different order than final deaths and
destructions of identified things. There is an afterlife in new and different lives but not through physical remnants,
in a genetic code passed on to descendants, in the exchange of blood through a tiny wound, or in fertile ashes and bursting seeds
scattered among burned-out stumps. Instead, it must pass through something expressed in physical lives
and wounds, in sensations, affects and acts, but not reducible to
them . Deleuze explains this in Difference and Repetition in a paragraph that sets up a connection between death as negativity
in the Freudian death drive and death as productive and life creating in Eros or love.14 Actual death is death as “negation” and
“opposition” (Deleuze 1968a: 148). That is not all it is, though, since death is something that comes from the outside and introduces
something new into the dying thing, in the dying duration. That’s why death takes the form of a problem, as something unknown and
unknowable, rendered through the questions “Where?” and “How?” whose source is “that (non) being that every affirmation is fed
from” (Deleuze 1968a: 148). This non-being isn’t nothingness or a void. It is a positive reality, but one taking a different form than
being or than identified existents.
The affirmative’s concept of death holds no relation to actual death; it

only knows about a death in the future. This is problematic because
their reflection on death induces paralysis and despair about what to
do in the present.
of Deleuze’s Work on Death for a Deleuzian Moral Philosophy” Edinburgh University Press Ltd, p. 177-9)
Deleuze explains this formal difference in relation to time in the second chapter of Difference and Repetition. Actual death takes
placein relation to the present, in a struggle in the present against a limit that “makes everything pass” (Deleuze 1968a: 148).
Impersonal death, or virtual death, the “one dies,” eludes the present and the past.15 Instead, it is always “to come” and as such
has no relation to the dying self, but is rather “the source of a ceaseless multiple adventure in a persisting question” (Deleuze
1968a: 148). This split in times is reproduced in The Logic of Sense in the descriptions of the times of Chronos and Aion, where the
former corresponds to the present that concentrates past and future and makes them pass, and the latter is a time where everything
either has been or is to come, but is never present (Deleuze 1969: 190–4). A good way of understanding Deleuze’s points here is to
focus on the important terms of problem and question, both of which play central roles in Difference and Repetition and The Logic of
Sense. A problem is a network of questions that express a situation incapable of solutions but operative as a driver for action to
as much as reflection on the when and

change that situation in creative and novel ways. Thus,
where of an actual death can induce paralysis and despair when

considered in relation to the identity that must pass away with its
past and future, there is also a desire to affirm life by eluding this
death since it is never finally given in terms of when and where it will
happen . Death is our destiny, but it can be counter-actualized, not in the sense of negated or fled, but changed in its
“When?,” “Where?” and “How?”16 The questions describe a productive problem in relation to death and the death drive because
until actual death arrives, the questions have no fixed answer and therefore open up the possibility of novel acts in relation to death,
underwritten by “non-being” as a condition for the openness of the problem.17 This allows us to understand the difficult phrase cited
earlier. The time of the problem is always “to come” because it is characterized by a lack of definite answers and an open field of
potential connections and relations between past and future – independent of the certainty of the present.18 This leads to an
“adventure” because the way to express this potential is to alter present situations in relation to this open potential: it is a creative
This adventure is “ceaseless”

venture into what is necessarily unknown as actual identity.
because the potential is not extinguished when a particular actual

death arrives . It remains for others as expressed by earlier lives and deaths. It is “multiple” not only due to the
multiplicity of questions making up the problem of death, but also because of the multiplicity of relations reserved as a potential for
Mirroring this ceaselessness and multiplicity, questions

different actual lives.
persist because each time they are answered in a particular death as

“here” “like this” and “now,” they remain as the same questions but
calling for different answers in relation to different adventures for
future lives . The present passes, but the future is always to come.
Democracy
First, Democracy is a guise for despotism. It is cold and calculated

and only exists because we re-presence it.
Murphy ‘05.“Becoming Multitude: Toward a Theory and Practice of Absolute Democracy”.Timothy S. Murphy.Annual
Meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association, Penn State University, March 11-13, 2005.Pgs 1 – 2.Accessed from:
www.faculty.umb.edu/gary_zabel/Courses/.../BecomingMultitude.pdf – M.E. ¶
At the very beginning of their last joint work, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari note that “What is philosophy?” is a question that can only be
posed “late in life, with the arrival of old age and the time for speaking concretely.” 1 Their answer to that belated question is well known:
“philosophy is the art of forming, inventing and fabricating concepts” (WP 2). Apparently the parallel question “What is democracy?” can only
be posed belatedly as well, for despite decades of solo and collaborative work on politics, it is only in the chapter of that book entitled
“Geophilosophy” that Deleuze and Guattari turn their attention to democracy as
an extensive problem.Prior to this, democracy had been addressed either explicitly or implicitly as a subordinate or
epiphenomenal issue, as an adjective that occasionally modified the noun that names the real focus of their political thought: the
State, the despotic agency of overcoding and transcendence.A single example

from Anti-Oedipus suffices to demonstrate this:¶As for democracies, how could one fail to
recognize in them the despot who has become colder and more
hypocritical, more calculating, since he must himself count and code instead of overcoding the accounts? ...The
differences [among historical variants of the State-form] could be determining only if the despotic State were one concrete formation among
the despotic State is the abstraction to be
others, to be treated comparatively. But
realized...only as an abstraction. It assumes its immanent concrete

existence only in the subsequent forms that cause it to return under
other guises and conditions. 2¶This includes the democratic guise,
which does not constitute an escape from despotism but merely its
most elaborate ruse.
Second, Modern democracy with its demands for liberalization and
human rights does not deliver these things. Instead we must think a
new political formation outside of the axiomatic rigidity of modern
capitalism to which democracy is tied.
www.faculty.umb.edu/gary_zabel/Courses/.../BecomingMultitude.pdf – M.E. ¶
Of course Deleuze and Guattari acknowledge that deterritorialization, both capitalist/relative and
revolutionary/philosophical/absolute,must be reterritorialized: “The immense relative deterritorialization of world
capitalism needs to be reterritorialized on the modern national State, which finds an outcome in
democracy,the new society of ‘brothers’, the capitalist version of the society of friends” (WP 98).This accounts
for the functional isomorphism of democratic and other State-forms
within the world market, which is “the only thing that is universal in
capitalism”: different State-forms constitute distinct “models of
realization” of the endlessly additive and blatantly incoherent
axiomatic of capital (WP 106).¶ Like the relative deterritorialization of capital,the absolute
deterritorialization of philosophy is reterritorialized on the modern
democratic State and human rights.But because there is no universal democratic State this movement
implies the particularity of a State, of a right, or of the spirit of a people capable of expressing human rights in ‘its’ State and of outlining the
it is philosophy that is
modern society of brothers. In fact, it is not only the philosopher, as man, who has a nation;
reterritorialized on the national State and the spirit of the people(WP 102).¶
Hence Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of geophilosophy—rooted in Greece, France, England and Germany, perhaps developing in America,
human rights, like the national States that
but emphatically not in Italy. 3 We will return to this exclusion below. Nevertheless,
express them,are merely axioms that “can coexist on the market with many
other axioms, notably those concerning the security of property,

which are unaware of or suspend them even more than they
contradict them”(WP 107).Human rights conceived within this framework
do not give birth to a new people, the States that express them do not
map a new earth, and consequently modern democracy does not
constitute a philosophical concept, even if it does pose a problem. Indeed, Deleuze and Guattari insist that
“this people and earth will not be found in our democracies,” but only
in the thinking of the most aristocratic of philosophers like
Nietzsche(WP 108).
Economy
Economic Growth - Efforts to sustain the post-“recovery” economy
put an ominous new spin on biopolitics, transforming the lives of the
populace into liabilities.
Nadesan 11 [Majia Holmer, Professor of Comm at ASU; “THE BIOPOLITICS OF TRANSACTIONAL C APITALISM,”
MediaTropes Vol III, No 1 (2011) accessed online at http://www.mediatropes.com/index.php/Mediatropes/article/view/15747/12840 -
p. 23-24 //JG
By the spring of 2010, major newspapers, periodicals, and investment websites in the U.S. were calling the end of the recession.
Stock and bond markets “flirted with milestones,” unemployment stabilized, the service sector expanded, and manufacturing
increased. “Recovery,” it seemed, was imminent. This essay examines the biopolitics of recovery in the wake of the disaster
capitalism of the financial meltdown. Thefinancial disaster, it is argued, enabled the types of
structural adjustments previously reserved for developing economies.
The implications for western populations have yet to be fully examined; however, it is clear that twentieth
century social -welfare biopolitics 1 that derived wealth from laboring

populace s have been replaced by new forms of power whose global
circulations and convergences in electronic exchanges exploit wealth
informatically, through devices such as derivatives and mediated
technologies such as high-frequency trading. Labor’s displacement
as an important source of capital accumulation within western
economies problematizes the telos of twentieth century Keynesian social-
welfare biopolitics, which sought to enhance and regulate the
biovitalities of national populations. This essay argues that the convergence of
power in financial services and entities, coupled with the informatic
codification and circulation of wealth, have ominous implications for
western biopolitical relations. Stripped of surplus value within
economic calculi, the lives of the populace are transformed into
liabilities as their resource consumption and effluents threaten the
biosphere. Thus, aggregate consumption is now linked to depleted water tables, dwindling arable lands, and proliferating
green house gasses. Yet, efforts were made to transform even these threats into
digitalized representations enabling wealth accumulation. In concluding, this

essay examines how carbon derivatives trading was used to expropriate wealth from a thanatopolitics of destruction. 2
The flow of wealth is infused with speed and becomes a centrifuge

that colonizes sociality.
Nadesan 11 [Majia Holmer, Professor of Comm at ASU; “THE BIOPOLITICS OF TRANSACTIONAL C APITALISM,”
MediaTropes Vol III, No 1 (2011) accessed online at http://www.mediatropes.com/index.php/Mediatropes/article/view/15747/12840 -
p. 23-24 //JG
wealth has moved centripetally toward elite centers within and

Global
across nations as a result of de-regulation, corporate and government

predation, and securitization (Vrabel, 2010). The potential for wealth to be
digitalized and to circulate instantaneously has facilitated this
centripetal action. The evolving computer -communication networks that
enable this unprecedented accumulation of intangible wealth operate
at unimaginable speeds. Wealth accumulation strategies that exploit
virtual markets have a tendency to colonize all forms of sociality by
attaching quantitative values to social phenomena, thereby enabling
them to be traded in market transactions. So pervasive is this type of commoditization that it has
captured public policy efforts to forestall climate change.
Environment
Just use the Deleuze Environment K – Much better
Gay Rights
First, Gay desire has been commodified by capitalism and the

movement has lost momentum. Micro-politics has the ability to
signify and categorize individuals. We must undo the self by focusing
on desire and deterritorializing through experimentation.
Conley ‘09. Verena Andermatt Conley. “Thirty Six Thousand Forms of Love” Deleuze and Queer Theory . Edinburgh
University Press, 2009. 22 George Square ISBN: 978 0 7486 3404 0. Pg 33-34. – M.E.
, the focus is placed on the micro-politics of desire . Critical of the

For Guattari
language is always shaped by a
emphasis structuralism places on the signifier, he declares that
specific social and political model. The social field is not determined
by an economic infrastructure, nor is the semantic field by a
signifying structure. To analyse and change complex socio-historic
structures one has to put in question myriad forms of power that
control the social fields at all levels. Those in power order the rights
of the person as well as categories of race and sex, and age groups. Yet
even before language, there exists a multitude of micro political levels. This
is why it is all-important for a micro-politics to intervene in power and
change dominant significations(241-2). Micropolitics help transform
sexual minorities as long as one does not distin guish between
objectivity and subjectivity (248). To an interpretation with words,
Guattari opposes experimentation with 'signs, machinic functions,
assemblages of things and people' (248). For Guattari, the undoing of the self
comes with an emphasis on desire, a politics that thinks across
disciplines and a micro-politics that precedes language. A
transformation of homosexuals cannot come about without
simultaneous undoing of state power for which an ongoing
experimentation with people, things and machines is tantamount .¶When
writing about homosexuals Deleuze and Guattari were intensely aware of doing so in a time of what they called a generalised
becoming-minoritarian. Both knew they were writing, as they had argued for subjectivity in general, in a world in ongoing
transformation. Guattari was continually rewriting his texts in order to deterritorialise them according to changing socio-historical
contexts. The world of their published reflections - as we can read in the preface of Michael Moon is no longer ours today. We may
wonder how Deleuze and Guattari would rewrite their notions of becoming as queering today. With an even greater intensification of
capital, most women and gays have bought into capitalism, the supreme order to which, at this point, as Etienne Balibar notes
elsewhere, no organised resistance is possible. Already Guattari showed how many gays constitute themselves as 'corporate
Gay desire - like that of many other groups - has been recuperated by capitalism.
groups'.
It has become a cottage or even a consumer industry. In spite of this
appropriation, a noticeable and ongoing trans formation of sensibility,
desire and intelligence is witnessed due in no small part to micro-
politics. Some of the rhetoric of the FHAR, such as the touting of sexual encounters with Arab boys, or Guattari's romanti -
cisation of street gangs, ruffles sensibilities today. It also strikes a contemporary reader as strange that Deleuze and Guattari
carryon an almost masculinist and homogenising discourse by focusing on homosexuals and pedes exclusively without any mention
of lesbians, bisexuals or transsexuals. In the United States, since the 1970s, that is, since the time when Deleuze and Guattari
significant transformation has taken place both in the
wrote the texts quoted above,
way gays relate to themselves and the way others relate to them.
Psychiatry has modified its stance that treated homosexuality as abnormality; now popular culture displays more of a gay sensibility
With AIDS,
on television, film and video, all the while the demand for rights, though often denied, is never abandoned.
the importance of freeing the energy of desire, of becoming and
reinventing the term through experimentation and the creation of new
assemblages has, if not disappeared, at least lost some of its
momentum.
Second, Identity does not exist, it is a violent attempt at centering a

subject which has never known a center. We should favor the
historical politics of the schizo which claims every name in history as
“I”.
Deleuze and Guattari ’72 (Gilles Deleuze.Smart French Guy. Felix Guattari. Also smart, questionably French.
Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia Volume 1. Originally published in French in 1972. Translated Edition published in
1977. University of Minnesota Press 1983.Thirteenth Edition. ISBN: 978-0-8166-1225-3. Pg. 14-15 -- M.E.)
This is what Klossowski has admirably demonstrated in his commentary on Nietzsche: the presence of the Stimmung as a material
The centrifugal forces do
emotion, constitutive of the most lofty thought and the most acute perception. "
not flee the center forever, but approach it once again, only to retreat
from it yet again: such is the nature of the violent oscillations that
overwhelm an individual so long as he seeks only his own center and
is incapable of seeing the circle of which he himself is a part; for if
these oscillations overwhelm him, it is because each one of them
corresponds to an individual other than the one he believes himself to
be, from the point of view of the unlocatable center. As a result, an identity
is essentially fortuitous, and a series of individualities must be
undergone by each of these oscillations, so that as a consequence
the fortuitousness of this or that particular individuality will render all
of them necessary."20 The forces of attraction and repulsion, of soaring
ascents and plunging falls,produce a series of intensive states based on the
intensity = 0that designates the body without organs ("but what is most unusual is that here
again a new afflux is necessary, merely to signify this absence"21). There is no Nietzsche-the-self,
professor of philology, who suddenly loses his mind and supposedly

identifies with all sorts of strange people; rather, there is the
Nietzschean subject who passes through a series of states, and who
identifies these states with the names of history: "every name in
history is I. . . ."22 The subject spreads itself out along the entire
circumference of the circle, the center of which has been abandoned
by the ego. At the center is the desiring-machine, the celibate
machine of the Eternal Return. A residual subject of the machine,
Nietzsche-as-subject garners a euphoric reward (Voluptas) from everything that this machine turns out, a product that the reader
had thought to be no more than the fragmented oeuvre by Nietzsche. "Nietzsche believes that he is now pursuing, not the
realization of a system, but the application of a program ... in the form of residues of the Nietzschean discourse, which have now
23 It is not a matter of identifying with
become the repertory, so to speak, of his histrionicism."
various historical personages, but rather identifying the names of

history with zones of intensity on the body without organs; and each time
Nietzsche-as-subject exclaims: 'They're me\ So it's me\" No one has ever been as deeply
involved in history as the schizo, or dealt with it in this way. He

consumes all of universal history in one fell swoop. We began by
defining him as Homo natura, and lo and behold, he has turned out to
be Homo historia.This long road that leads from the one to the other stretches from Holderlin to Nietzsche, and the
pace becomes faster and faster. "The euphoria could not be prolonged in Nietzsche for as long a time as the contemplative
alienation of Holderlin. . . . The vision of the world granted to Nietzsche does not inaugurate a more or less regular succession of
landscapes or still lifes, extending over a period of forty years or so; it is, rather, a parody of the process of recollection of an event:
a single actor will play the whole of it in pantomime in the course of a single solemn day—because the whole of it reaches
expression and then disappears once again in the space of just one day—even though it may appear to have taken place between
December 31 and January 6—in a realm above and beyond the usual rational calendar."24
Heidegger
First, Heidegger is wrong about enframing. We have to understand it

as a multiplicity in order to understand global information networks
and societies of control.
William Bogard. 09. “Deleuze and Machines: A Politics of Technology”. Deleuze and New Technology.Deleuze
Connections Series.Edinburg University Press. ISBN: 978 0 7486 3338 8. Editors: Mark Poster and David Savat. Pg. 15. - M.E.
Deleuze is not so much interested in questioning technology,like Heidegger,as in articulating,along with Guattari, a problem
about machines(Guattari 1990).Heidegger's questions lead him to an essence of technology, Enframing, or the potential to
convert all of Dasein into 'standing reserve'(Heidegger 1977: 20).Deleuzeand Guattari's problematisations of machines lead
them, by contrast, to a concept of a multiplicity without an essence -or better, with a 'nomadic' essence1 - a complex
configuration of machinic and enunciative elements calledan 'assemblage'(Deleuze and Guattari 1 987; Deleuze and Pamet 1 987;
DeLanda 2006).2The problem of machines is not Heidegger's question of technology:Is there a possible escape from
Enframing? Can technology save the world before it annihilates it? For Deleuze, there is neither an essential 'saving power' nor a
nihilism of machines.Safety and danger are matters of experimenting with assemblages, with their compositional forms.
Such experiments can either move us forward and add to our joy and connectedness, or send us into a black hole, but
these are always historical problems relative to today. It is not a question of an essence of technology, but ofwhat Deleuze
and Guattari callan abstract machine,a machine immanent in assemblages that both integrates them and opens them to an
outside, to counterforces that break them down.Understanding the production and counter-actualisation of assemblages by
abstract machines is the key to understandingDeleuze's conceptof'societies of control', andhis critique of the power ofglobal
information networks(Deleuze 1 992) .
Highway
The highway is the embodiment of capitalism, codifying and

stratifying modern life. It develops literal pathways for our lives,
creating striated planes for life.
Beginning with the highway machine's movement, Deleuze and Guattari (1987) intervene with a diagram that is indispensable to
any discussion of circulation and modernity. They plot the state's shift from "machinic enslavement" to "social subjection" as the
components of the nation are captured by an organizing apparatus working through capitalism. As Fordism and the energy crisis
demonstrated, machines are tied to nations and states-in this case the highway machine intertwines with America and the United
States government. Capitalism, likewise, is effectuated by a law of states that offers the possibility of a "free" flow of labor and
capital for a group of producers. More generally, we must take into account a 'materialist' determination of the modern State or
nation-state; a group of producers in which labor and capital circulate freely, in other words, in which the homogeneity and
competition of capital is effectuated, in principle without external obstacles. In order to be effectuated, capitalism has always
required there to be a new force and a new law of States, on the level of the flow of labor as on the level of the flow of independent
capital. (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p455) A state, then, is a nation that has been realized through the flow of capital (land) and the
flow of labor (people). When the land and the people are deterritorialized or overcoded through flows of labor and capital, the nation
becomes "the very operation of a collective subjectification, to which the modern State corresponds as a process of subjection"
(Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p456). This does not mean that nations are simply appearances or the consequences of a dominant
ideology. Instead, nations "are the passional and living forms in which the qualitative homogeneity and the quantitative competition
of abstract capital are first realized" (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p456).
Narratives of progress and utopian futures surrounding contruction

of highways are constructed to occupy our cultural imagination. The
control over this imagination allows States to justify war and violence.
Burgess 4 (Helen J, Assistant Professor of English in the Communication and Technology track at University of Maryland,
Baltimore County, “Futurama, Autogeddon: Imagining the Superhighway from Bel Geddes to Ballard” Rhizomes Issue 8 (Spring
2004) JTB)
[1] In 1939, the General Motors Pavilion at the New York World's Fair unveiled "Futurama," Norman Bel Geddes' future vision of
American transportation. Futurama consisted of a scale-model America, including a "City of Tomorrow" and a network of
interconnecting fourteen-lane superhighways. These highways carried upon them ten thousand model cars, which traveled
ceaselessly around the system. Bel Geddes imagined a future in which cars were equipped with radio transceivers to prevent
collision -- the perfect technological fix to provide a safe environment for the burgeoning traffic on American roads. Visitors to the
pavilion left wearing a lapel pin (above), stating "I Have Seen the Future." [2] In this web-essay I argue that Bel Geddes' narrative of
the golden future of the Interstate was haunted from the start by a ghost -- the specter of its own death. By the time the Interstate
was begun, it was already clear that such a project would have massive material effects on both the natural and the socioeconomic
environment. Whole neighborhoods were razed, mountains leveled, wetlands drained, even while the Interstate continued to project
forward into a glowing technological future. The Interstate, from the moment of its conception, attempted to use this future-perfect to
cover over the ghosts it would leave behind, both human and animal -- the destruction of delicate environments, the ever-present
road-kill, the high-speed car smashes. [3] The first section of this essay will investigate optimistic narratives of the highway, using
archival materials from the 1939 World's Fair and the beginning of the Interstate building era in the 1950s. These materials
represent a vision of the future driven by narratives of progress, civic duty and manifest destiny, often commissioned for the purpose
The imagined future represented in such

of fulfilling and inciting a demand for consumer goods.
ephemera suggests a longing for a perfect, utopian future

characterized by technological intervention and social engineering. [4]
But the ghosts always come back. In the second section, I argue that a messy, always-under-construction, polluted highway system,
beaming cheerfully forward into the future, is reflected back to us in the second half of the century as a degraded landscape in J G
Ballard's Crash and The Atrocity Exhibition. In these tales, Bel Geddes' optimistic narrative of the Interstate has collapsed, perhaps
under the force of urban decay, but perhaps also because the Interstate system is unsustainable -- both narratively and ecologically.
The ghosts of the highway call back to us from these future narratives, reminding us that death is just around the next bend.[5]
Jacques Derrida has suggested that ghosts come to talk with us both from the past and the future. Learning to understand these
ghosts of the future-past or the past-future is necessary, he claims, if we wish to take responsibility for future generations: [we must]
learn to live by learning not how to make conversation with the ghost but how to talk with him, with her, how to let them speak or
how to give them back speech, even if it is in oneself, in the other, in the other in oneself: they are always there, specters, even if
they do not exist, even if they are no longer, even if they are not yet. (176) In the case of highways, thus, it is important to
understand the role that ghosts play in our constructions of the past and the future, if we are to learn to take responsibility for their
role in the future. The way we imagine the roads of tomorrow suggests something about the way we value our selves, our
environment, and our technologies -- and suggests something about the way we must act, if we are to have responsibility for our
future selves. [6] The 1939 World's Fair, held on the cleaned-up site of a former ash-dump in Flushing Meadows, New York, set the
stage for a powerful vision of the future. Industrial designer Norman Bel Geddes' model America of 1960 was an immense diorama
stretching over 35,000 square feet; it was housed in the impressively modern General Motors Pavilion. The "Futurama ride" was the
highlight of the Fair, attracting up to 28,000 people a day over the two-year duration of the fair (Corn, 49). According to the
accompanying tour guide, the model consisted of "a half-million buildings and houses -- thousands of miles of multi-lane highways --
more than a million trees -- rivers, lakes and streams -- snow-capped mountains -- rich-flowering countryside -- industrial centers --
college and resort towns -- great, towering cities" ("Futurama," 24). Visitors were seated in a "carry-go-round" consisting of 552
plush chairs, which moved slowly around the sides of the diorama as simulated night fell and the sun rose again. The tour was
narrated by a voice issuing from a sound-box in each chair. [7] Futurama was a part of a larger exhibition offered by General Motors
called "Highways and Horizons." Its purpose was twofold: to offer a model of improved highways of the future (thereby clinching the
The issue
sale of more cars), and to spike consumer confidence more broadly in goods, cars and appliances of the future.
of America's reluctance to be involved in the rapidly escalating war in

Europe was temporarily quashed by visions of a grand, utopian
future of spectacular superhighways, ironically borrowed from
Hitler's Reichsautobahnen (begun in 1933). [8] To help sell its dream of a
mechano-utopian future, General Motors enlisted the popular modern
narrative of progress, arguing that "history shows that the progress
of civilization has run parallel to advancement in transportation"
("Futurama," 2). Even the General Motors Pavilion itself, a white deco-curved giant of a building, featured superhighway-inspired
ramps to allow public entrance. Superhighways, thus, were seen as a symbol of progress, in this case imagined as a road leading
into a bright, utopian future.[9] The movie "To New Horizons," (The Jam, Handy Organization, 1940) commissioned by General
Motors to document its grand exhibition, added visual impetus to the imagined world of tomorrow. In a montage of stock images, the
film announced the coming of the world of tomorrow by tapping into narratives of progress and manifest destiny. The film then went
on to showcase the Futurama model exhibit, showing close-ups of the Futurama diorama in action, and ended with shots of the
popular exhibition building itself, replacing the familiar "the end" with "Without End" to signifying that the future was something to
strive for indefinitely.
HSR
Projects like High Speed Rail massively change the order of power
and control within society, by giving the government control over our
most basic transportation freedoms. While icons of progress and
economic growth justify these mega-projects, States continue to exert
political power over our lives – These icons force us to internalize this
fascim, embedding the Oedipal in our daily lives
Zanon 11(Bruno, Associate professor of urban planning urban sustainability, Department of Civil and Environmental
Engineering, University of Trento, “Infrastructure Network Development, Re-territorialization Processes and Multilevel Territorial
Governance: A Case Study in Northern Italy”, Planning Practice & Research, 26:3, 325-347)
Infrastructure networks play a crucial role in the construction of the

territory because they create connections among places, thus
defining spatial systems in physical and economic as well as political
terms. This means that a change in the configuration of the
infrastructure modifies territorial connections and systems,
challenging the politico-administrative organization. Infrastructure
projects—and in particular mobility networks—therefore constitute a
key issue in the debate and in initiatives aimed at organizing and re-
organizing territories. Decisions concern strategic perspectives as well as engineering problems, imply the interaction among
different administrative levels and a variety of sectoral actions, and involve an array of actors in socio-economic programming and physical planning
procedures. The change in the nature of connections due to technological

innovations, new management responsibilities (the end of public monopolies, in particular)
and theneed to connect different places in a diverse (faster, more
immaterial) way, represents one of the faces of globalization. It has been claimed
that we now live in a ‘space of flows’ rather than in ‘spaces of places’ (Castells, 1996), and new infrastructure projects
undoubtedly perform an important role in such a shift by activating

de-territorialization and re-territorialization processes , which are
changes in the nature and scale of the constituting relations of
territories (Brenner, 1999; Governa & Salone, 2004). This is not only a matter of physical
spatial organization, however; for there are multiple spaces of flows,
which have many dimensions. Blatter (2004, p. 544) stresses the material flows
(‘socio- economic exchanges and ecological interdependencies’)
together with the flows of ideas (‘shared visions, beliefs and
ideologies’), implying that the infrastructure innovates the territory as
well as the society. Material components and immaterial links are equally important. Currently, states,
regions and cities are proposing numerous projects for the
reorganization of infrastructure networks. The reasons can be
summarized in slogans such as ‘be on the map’ (Jensen & Richardson, 2003) and
‘more networks for better accessibility for more GDP’ (Espon, 2004a, p. 466). A
first point to be stressed concerns the role of the infrastructure in
constructing (and transforming) the territory. Territory is a concept
that relies, on the one hand, on the correspondence between space and
government, and, on the other, on the relationships among activities,
functions and places. If the infrastructure constructs the territory, and
if political power traditionally refers to a territory, a change in
networks produces a shock on the polities involved. Moreover, territorial
changes connected with new political conditions (European integration, in particular) give
rise to new connections.Another point regards the change in the
nature of relationships among places, because a ‘space of flows’ may
supersede the traditional ‘space of places’ ‘as the dominant logic for
social organizations and institutions’ (Blatter, 2004, p. 530). It must be stressed, anyway, that
networks cover the entire territory but they do not connect all places
together, so that they differentiate conditions and opportunities. A final point
is related to governance, because the re-scaling process (Brenner, 1999, 2004; Amin, 2002; Gualini, 2006) and the ‘hollowing-out’ of state powers
(Jessop, 1997) ongoing in many countries are related to the new role of the European Union (EU) and to the emergence of regional politico-
administrative levels (MacLeod, 1999) as well as to a new role of market actors. This regards also the re-organization of infrastructure networks and
The activation of a multiplicity

the shift from supply-side infrastructure provision models to demand-sensitive ones.
of institutional and non-institutional actors (agencies, enterprises, etc.) responsible

for the construction of the infrastructure and the management of
services implies the displacement of competencies and
responsibilities that used to be the raison d’etre of local authorities ,
traditionally related to a specific territory and to the provision—within
a monopolistic regime—of services of public interest. Places are therefore taking part in
‘multiple spatialities’ (Amin, 2002) (a regional administration, a river basin, a motorway influence area, an international cooperation network, etc.) and
are involved in diverse decisional processes. This paper focuses on the relationships between the change in the physical territorial organization
connected to infrastructure policies and actions and the evolution of the politico-administrative system from exclusive competencies typical of nested
political administrations to shared responsibilities within a multilevel governance system. The key questions addressed regard whether consolidated
decisional and planning processes are responding to new infrastructure proposals and how innovative concepts, like that of ‘infrastructure platforms’
elaborated in Italy in order to integrate networks within ‘territorial projects’, are operating. The challenge concerns technical issues (better: infrastructure
planning) as well as political ones, because top-down procedures have been replaced by concerted ones, and the federal perspective (devolution of
powers from the state to regions) seems not to be appropriate to address proposals impacting on different jurisdictions. Multilevel governance
procedures have therefore to be activated, taking into consideration that territorial competition must be balanced with territorial cohesion and that new
actors have appeared on the scene. The key research questions are the following: . What is the role of new infrastructure networks in building the
territory within the European framework? . What kind of multilevel governance should be activated? . How can the sustainability (economic, first of all)
of new proposals be addressed? . How can infrastructure proposals be connected with territorial planning and local development? The article develops
a case study regarding a proposal, within the European financial programmes, for a new infrastructure corridor called ‘Ti-Bre’. This stands for ‘Tirreno–
Brennero’, the two areas to be connected, which are contiguous but not efficiently linked. This is therefore a re-territorialization process that enables a
number of considerations to be added to the recent literature on such projects (Fabbro & Mesolella, 2010; Janin Rivolin, 2010). After a methodological
part addressing the role of the infrastructure in constructing the territory, the article develops the case study on the basis of analysis of governmental
documents concerning the ‘infrastructure platforms’ taking into consideration regional plans and programming documents, as well as the diverse
initiatives and projects of the actors involved (cities, agencies and companies). Part of the work was developed within a wider research project that
involved interviews with key informants and whose results have been recently published (Fabbro & Mesolella, 2011). Infrastructure, Networks,
The infrastructure builds the territory by

Territory: Contrasting Visions of Local Development
enabling communication, transport and relationships to take place. It

has been defined a ‘sociotechnical’ construction (Graham & Marvin, 2001), which
means that it cannot be ‘treated as an undifferentiated ‘‘black box’’
marked technology’ (Graham, 2001, p. 340), with the attendant risk of giving rise to a technological determinism, while there is
From roads to canals, railroads,
broad space for political decisions and social interaction.
motorways and information and communications technologies,

networks support human relations of both a material and immaterial
nature . For these reasons, urban technologies have become ‘fetishes’ of the
industrial city (Kaika & Swyngedow, 2000), symbols and icons of progress , although
most networks have disappeared underground, losing part of their
rhetorical power. This role has been recently assumed by other public
works: in particular, high-speed train stations, airports, bridges, and so
forth, all of which tend to have strong images, albeit with different values connected to them. For instance, a much-debated
infrastructure like the major high-speed train line in Italy has given rise to a new identity symbol for the city of Reggio Emilia thanks
to a bridge designed by Santiago Calatrava; whereas in Piedmont the line between Turin and Lyon, in France, has become a
battlefield on which environmentalists and local communities confront the supporters of a European-level project ( Bobbio & Dansero,
the construction of new infrastructure

2008; Janin Rivolin, 2010). There is no doubt that in many cases
lines implies environmental degradation , because they affect delicate

habitats and natural areas. Moreover, ‘large-scale infrastructure works are
seen by many as a form of what could be called ‘‘unreflexive
modernization’’, exclusively aimed at enhancing economic growth’ (van
der Heijden, 2006, p. 24). This view is shared by people in different countries, who
do not necessarily suffer directly from the drawbacks of a specific

project but who take action in the name ‘of what has been called a
‘‘global civil society’’’ increasingly active in a ‘multi-level
environmentalism’ (van der Heijden, 2006). On the other hand, to be noted is a positive view of territorial equipments. These
works structure the urban space, support mobility, provide a healthy living environment or activate cyber-connections. In other words,
networks create interdependencies among places, and ‘these places

may then be considered belonging to one territory’ (Offner, 2000, p. 170). Hence,
‘it is through the networks that territories form a system’ (Offner & Pumain, quoted in
Offner, 2000, p. 170). This happens because connectivity, which is different from proximity (Graham & Marvin, 2001), entails
that places, regardless of their reciprocal distance, form a territory on

the basis of a number of different networks, material and immaterial,
physical or electronic. The effects are not evenly distributed, because transport and communication infrastructures can only
operate when they are organized into networks composed of nodes and lines, which mean places and flows. Distance has
become relative because connections depend on the nature of the

medium and the organization of the network. The result is that places
outside such systems and intermediate spaces can suffer not from
distance but from disconnections (Bobbio & Dansero, 2008). This condition has
been called the ‘tunnel effect’ (Andreu, 1998, quoted in Graham, 2000): territories crossed
by high-level infrastructure lines cannot take advantage of their
physical presence because the service is provided at specific points,
where a ‘pump effect’ (Fabbro & Mesolella, 2010, p. 31) is activated. In
this regard, networks can be seen from two contrasting positions: as
constituting ‘territorial ‘‘selectors’’, which create a dual space:
territories with a service or not, connected or not to the networks . . .’,
or as ‘an instrument of Infrastructure Networks, Re-territorialization and Territorial Governancede-
territorialization’, in that they ‘provide the same service at every point
in the territory’ (Offner, 2000, p. 167). The infrastructure projects currently being debated are promoted under pressures of different
kinds: territorial re-organization at the European level, innovation in management and technology, economic development programmes. In fact, EU
integration processes stimulate new and more efficient connections among places previously separated by physical and political barriers.
Traditional networks tend to be made obsolete by the introduction of

new technologies as well as by the activation of different
management systems . Both can dramatically change the efficiency,
costs, and the accessibility of the services required. More generally, the new
urban forms arising throughout Europe are all dependent on extended
transportation and communication systems: the networked city, the
archipelago, the me ́tapolis (Offner, 2000) as well as the Netzstadt (Oswald & Baccini, 2003) and the extended
urban sprawl characterizing some regions (as the so-called ‘citta` diffusa’ of Veneto), are all
urban forms where mobility channels tend to prevail over places .
Such issues are not only of an engineering kind; they also regard the governance of
processes producing ‘polymorphic geographies’ (Brenner, 2004). From an
economic point of view, networks are investments that define ‘spatial
fixes’ (to use a neo-marxian term: see Harvey, 2001) traditionally provided by the public on a ‘supply-side’ logic. This concept
means that the infrastructure is a fixed factor embedded in the land
that allows other factors (and people and goods as well) to move from
one place to another. The stress is to be placed on both the physical
issues and the socio-economic system related to the structured
space as described by the more recent concept of ‘territorial capital’
(Camagni, 2007; Espon, 2007). The economic effects of infrastructure networks are in
any case difficult to forecast, owing to the complexity of the cause–

effects relationships . New connecting lines may increase the accessibility of peripheral regions but, at the same time, they
can improve connections among stronger areas, enlarging their markets. The lowering of barriers may place weak areas at risk, but it can also
integrate them in a new market for local products (Wegener et al., 2004).
Human Right
First, Democracy by its essence conflicts with minoritarian politics.

We ought to deterritorialize those limits. Calls for human rights
demand the internal criticism of every democracy not just those that
we don't like.
www.faculty.umb.edu/gary_zabel/Courses/.../BecomingMultitude.pdf – M.E.
This harsh judgment on democracy is only slightly tempered in What is Philosophy?, where they note that democratic, dictatorial and
totalitarian States are all “isomorphous with regard to the world market insofar as the latter not only presupposes but produces inequalities of
“democratic States are so bound up with, and
development.” As a result,
compromised by, dictatorial States, that the defense of human rights

must necessarily take up the internal criticism of every democracy”(WP
106). Human rights themselves will be subject to critique below, but for the moment let us remain focused on democracy more
The trouble is that “Democracies are majorities,”thusmolar and
generally.
rigid,andthey obstruct or repel “the becoming [which] is by its nature

that which always eludes the majority”(WP 108).Becoming is singular and
minoritarian,and as suchit is the work of philosophy’s mode of
deterritorialization which “takes the relative deterritorialization of
capital to the absolute; it makes it pass over the plane of immanence
as movement of the infinite and suppresses it as internal limit, turns it
back against itself so as to summon forth a new earth, a new
people”(WP 99).Thissummoning forth that arises from philosophy’s absolute deterritorializationisalso calledutopia
and revolution(WP 100-101).
Identity Politics
First, All politics are queer politics. Butler’s concept of the queer
necessitates hetero-normative practices by defining the queer in
opposition to them. This makes the subject a negative, rather, we
must think of this non-being as positive in order to resist the
bourgeois institutions of marriage and other normative practices. We
must counter-actualize what has emerged and from which we emerge.
Colebrook ‘09. Claire Colebrook. Professor at Edinburgh University.“On the Very Possibility of Queer Theory.”
Deleuze and Queer Theory .Edinburgh University Press, 2009. 22 George Square ISBN: 978 0 7486 3404 0. Pg 19-21. – M.E.
For Butler, an individual

In political terms we can also distinguish iterative and positive repetition.
does not exist ex nihilo but can be a self only through an other which
It repeats and modifies. So, for example, claiming to be a queer subject
might involve laying claim to certain normative prac tices - such as
marriage and gender - which would have the effect both of
normalising the self by subjection to convention and recognition. To
a certain extent all politics is queer politics or the negotiation
between the degrees of repetition to which the self submits and the
amount of deviation or difference from normativity the self can effect.
The queer is negative, defined as the difference from those
conditions of recognition and normativity which both enable and
preclude autonomy. Deleuze offers a quite different ontology and ethics of non-being. We are
mistaken if we think of non-existence as the failure, deviation or
difference from the present and actual. We need to think of non-being
as positive, real and affirmative. Each existing, actualised individual
is therefore the actualisation of a non-being, which is better defined
as '?-being' or as a series of problems. The queer self might be better
thought of as a counteractualisation of the material repetitions that
make up 'man'. We could see marriage in its current bourgeois
normative and heterosexual form as the solution to a certain problem
or question: how the self forms its gender, manages its desires and
property, and organises its child-rearing. But the queer self would
repeat the problems that compose the self: counteractualising the
present by drawing on the pure past of the questions from which we
have emerged. How might a self desire, what might count as an object of one's desire, what relations or events
might the couplings of bodies produce and enable? ¶Thus, whereas Butler's model of theory is
to begin with the subject and then interrogate its conditions of
possibility in the tension between recognition and autonomy,
Deleuze's theory is one of positive intuition. Here, we go beyond
composed selves and problems to the affects and intensities from
which they are organised. For Butler a queer theory is one in which
the conditions of being a subject are essentially queer - one must
claim to speak as a self, but can do so only through an other who is
not oneself. At the same time, the condition for being queer is being a
subject: one must be recognised as having a claim to speak, be and
exist. For Deleuze, the conditions of theory require a going 'beyond'
of the self and the organism. As long as we are concerned with
identity, with the repetition of who we are, we remain within
constituted matter and lived time. To think transcendentally we need
to think the pure form of time and dif ference, the pure intensities
which each present repeats and actualises both in the present and for
all time. For Deleuze, then, the conditions of the queer and the conditions of
the new are the same: to counter-actualise the present, to repeat the
intensities and encounters that have composed us, but not as they
are for us. ¶In quite specific terms this requires a radical and distinct break from
identity politics. As long as ethics is defined as the maintenance of
individuals as they are we restrict the potentiality of life to one of its
constituted forms. Only by thinking intensities beyond the human can
we begin to live ethically. Thus queer politics would involve neither
recognition of the self, nor a refusal of normativity, but the affirmation
of the prepersonal. Rather than assessing political problems according to their meaning and convention - or
the relations that organise certain affects and desires - we need to think desires according to
virtual series, all the encounters that are potential or not yet
actualised. ¶Such a queer politics has two direct consequences. First ,
practically, once we abandon conditions of recognition we can interrogate
a practice according to the potentiality of its encounters. Rather than
seeing gay marriage, trans-gendering or gay parenting as
compromised manoeuvres in which the queer self repeats and
distorts given norms, we need to look at the positivity of each
encounter. How do bodies establish relations in each case, and what powers are opened (or closed) to further
encounters and modifications? Second, aesthetically, against an art of parody or drag that
would repeat the norm in order to de-stabilise it from within, posi tive
repetition and difference make a claim for thinking time in its pure
state, those powers to differ which are pure fragments. Art would not
be the representation or formation of identities but the attempt to
present pure intensities in matter, allowing matter to stand alone or
be liberated from its habitual and human series of recognition. The
sensations presented in art are not those of the lived subject but are
powers to be lived for all time, allowing us to think the power of
perception beyond the selves we already are.
Information Infrastructure
Economies of information are the newest form of insidious control.
Increasing flows of information within communication networks
enable state surveillance and fascism. Discipline requires training and
repetition, but the numerical language of control can be deployed
instantaneously
Bogard 2009 [William, Professor of Sociology, PhD from Colorado State University, (“Deleuze and New Technology”) p.
18-19]
Like Foucault, Deleuze asks how the integration of a form of content and a form of expression is effectuated by an abstract
control is replacing discipline as an
machine. In a well-known essay, Deleuze writes that
abstract machine that invests the entire social field today (Deleuze 1 992 ) .
Although it is also a function of disciplinary assemblages, control as
an abstract machine differs from discipline in many ways. In control
societies, the form of content, the machinic form, is the distributed network,
whose model supplants the Panoptic on as a diagram of control. 6
Distributed networks deterritorialise the disciplinary assemblage.
There is a shift from mastery over visible space to the integrated
management of information, and control operates less through
confinement than through the use of tracking systems that follow you,
so to speak, out the door and into the open. What matters most in these assemblages is not that your body is visible - that is an
already accomplished fact for the most part - but that your information is available and matches a certain pattern or profile.
Matching information, in fact, becomes a precondition for visibility in
control societies, for example, when your racial profile makes you a target of observation by the police (Bogard
1996). The abstract machine of control no longer 'normalises' its object,
as discipline does. Normative information rather is integrated into

numerical codes. 'The numerical language of control', Deleuze writes, 'is
made of codes that mark access to information, or reject it', for example, your
passwords or DNA (Deleuze 1992: 5 ) . Codes are the form of expression or enunciation
in control societies; unlike norms, which demand prolonged training

to instill, codes only require programming and activation .7 The socius, Deleuze
and Guattari write in Anti-Oedipus, is basically an 'encoding machine' :'this is the social machine's
supreme task . . . [to code] women and children, flows of herds and of
seed, sperm flows, flows of shit, menstrual flows: nothing must escape coding' (Deleuze and Guattari
1 9 8 3 : 141-2 ) . Immanent within the socius, however, are 'decoding' machines that carry it away and open it to the outside.
Capital is such a machine. In an interesting analysis, Deleuze and Guattari note that the general business of the pre-capitalist social
machine is to overcode flows of desire. Capital, however, decodes these codes and places them in flux (Marx understood this as
Decoded desire and the
Capital's destruction of the prior mode of production) (Deleuze and Guattari 1 9 8 3 ) .
desire for decoding exist in all societies, even pre-capitalist ones, but
capital turns them into axioms and ends of production. This does not mean codes
do not exist in capitalist societies. In fact they proliferate even more - in the way, for example, fashion codes proliferate through their
continuous decoding, or decoded DNA can be recoded. Capital does not aim to make codes
extinct but to produce fluid codes that adapt to its changing technical
means of control. It does not decode the socius to eliminate social
codes, but to re-engineer them. The following extended passage from Anti-Oedipus is relevant here:
Global networks of communication have replaced borders as the

mechanism for establishing state relationships. Globalization uses
virtual space to reconfigure and strengthen our connection to the
state
Monnier 10 (Christine, “What is Globalization” https://globalsociology.pbworks.com/w/page/14711303/What%20is
%20Globalization)
This convoluted concept simply conveys the idea that, under

conditions of globalization, territory becomes less relevant to human
relations. For instance, thanks to information technology, anyone in
the United States equipped with a computer and an internet
connection can play the stock market in Tokyo, chat online with
friends in Canada, upload or download all sorts of information and
data from any place in the world from other individuals similarly
equipped, as well as watch Al Jazeera (a television network from Qatar, in the Arabic peninsula)
via satellite. Territories and borders have become irrelevant to such
interactions that are therefore global in nature.The process of
deterritorialization is what makes globalization different from any
other processes of social change in human history. David Harvey (1990) described this
process as time-space compression. When one America individual exchanges instant
messages with someone in another country, this instantaneous s

interaction erases distance and occurs as if these two individuals
were in the same place, a virtual space. Time and space have therefore
been compressed through the technological creation of a virtual
space of interaction unaffected by distance. The real physical distance between these two
individuals is covered, literally, in no time. Practically every phenomenon that we can think of has acquired such supraterritorial
(above space) qualities: electronic communications, environmental degradation, terrorism, religious fundamentalism, financial flows,
All these areas of human life are being globalized insofar as
health threats, etc.
they are no longer attached to specific territories but develop and

affect us at a transnational level. The process of globalization, as
deterritorialization, turns the world into a single space.
IR
First, The affirmative’s reliance on static depictions and models of the
world are bankrupt – the world is constantly becoming as opposed to
being—the alt’s stuttering philosophy solves
Owlkoski ‘99 [Dorothea, Gilles Deleuze and the Ruin of Representation, 14-15]
To begin with, there
must be a critique of representation definedprovisionally as the hierarchical
ordering of categories that produces an objectified state of affairs. Further, the task will be to
create an image of difference that sweeps away the metaphysics of being and identity and their
representation, so as to practically and conceptually acknowledge the stuttering practice of an
ontology of becoming. To accomplish this reorientation of thought and practice, I am making use of the philosophical
thought of Gilles Deleuze. I have been reading Deleuze and using his critiques as well as his creative rethinking of philosophy since
my graduate studies. Gradually, I found that my own concerns about philosophy as a regulative practice rather than a creative one
could be concretized and theorized with the help of Deleuze's work, not as a fixed philosophy but as an ongoing practice. Deleuze
has problematized philosophy with a certain conception of the philosopher and philosophy. From its high days as queen of the
sciences, Deleuze pulls philosophy down to the surface. From the depths of materiality and the body, Deleuze brings philosophy up
for air. On the surface between material depths and transcendent heights, Deleuze proposes that philosophy is stuttering.
Stuttering is what happens in language when the language system is in motion, in "perpetual disequilibrium," so that the entire
language system stutters, murmurs, mumbles, and breaks up in a heterogeneity of time and space.49 Without a homogeneous
system, whose terms and relations are constant, to fall back on, language quickly breaks up; it bifurcates because the elements of
its syntax have to respond dynamically to other linguistic elements, creating new linguistic orders. In philosophy, this means
thatthere are no constant terms supplied by a homogeneous system of reference , but rather the
radical insistence that philosophical conceptions do and will vary in every one of their terms,
depending upon the point of view of the philosophy, depending upon the concrete practices
out of which and in terms of which it arises.So there is a sense in which Deleuze, in problematizing
philosophy, is setting it in motion, making no claims about the nature of the world, providing no
taxonomies or hierarchies of its inhabitants, no claims about what is or is not true. When
philosophy no longer erects a new order of fixed thought in the place of the old, then
philosophy has become stuttering. But in order for an ontology of becoming to continue in
disequilibrium, another aspect of practice and thought might need to be called upon; this
aspect of life and thought might be called "spiritual" or simply creative. To find this aspect will
take more than a critique of the metaphysics of being and objectified representation, though
that is where it starts. It will take an investigation into the most profound aspects of
temporalization, life and death, without which no life and no thought becomes . That it is not easy to
characterize this dimension of life and thought goes without saying. It will be a painstaking process to produce this
as ongoing, though many thinkers have tried and just as many have fallen into the numerous systematic and
representational traps laid out by philosophy. So to become engaged with the creative surface
of thought, we will need good guides, guides who cannot lead us anywhere final but who,
through their stuttering process, set time and space in motion so that stuttering differences
can be created from every point of view.
K Affs
First, The aff invents solution to problems within society, not for the
general will but to make these ideas the general belief. This would
turn us into stable and proper subjects. This internalizes us with a
fascism of their solution, embedding the Oedipal in every day of life
Jeffrey A. Bell. ‘09. He tolls for people. “Deleuze and History: Of the Rise and Progress of Philosophical Concepts: Deleuze's
Humean HIstoriography. Chapter 2.Edinburgh University Press. ISBN: 978 0 7486 3609 9. Pg. 65 - 66. - M.E.
Now the historical ontologyI see atworkin Deleuze is quite in line with that of Foucault andHacking, but it
extends the analysis beyond that of examining how the subject is
constituted to seeing how both human and non-human subjects and
entities are constituted. This is already evident in Deleuze’s book on Hume, for although the problems
associated with transcendental empiricism dealt with how a subject is constituted, the constitution of the subject was
inseparable from nonsubjective factors.In fact, it is fair to say, I think, thatDeleuze’s
historical ontology is concerned with how the very subject–object
dichotomy itself is just one of many entities that come to be
constituted, and the double articulation model discussed above
comes then to be an appropriate tool for understanding the
generative processes associated with the emergence of entities
ranging from sedimentary rock to subjects and nation states.6¶ With these
general comments in mind,we canturn now toexamine how a Deleuzian historical
ontology could be used to understand intellectual and cultural
change. To do this, we return again to Hume, for this was equally a concern of Hume’s. We saw earlier how the multiplicity of
ideas is transformed, through a double process, into the impressions of reflection that come to be actualised as beliefs – for
Thissameprocess is at work
example, the belief in causation – that are irreducible to what is actually given.
within socialisation, or what we might call acculturation, though this time the
multiplicity that comes to be transformed into a system or unity is the
multiplicity of partialities, passions and interests,or what Deleuze will call a social
multiplicity in Difference and Repetition (Deleuze 1994: 193). Deleuze is quite clear on this point :‘Partialities or
particular interests cannot be naturally totalised, because they are
mutually exclusive. One can only invent a whole, since the only
invention possible is that of the whole’ (Deleuze 1991: 40). Hume is thus led, for Deleuze, to
understand society as not being founded upon a law that allows us to
escape our nature(à laHobbes), but rather as a series of invented
institutions, inventions that are themselves indistinguishable from
human nature in that they follow from the principles of human
nature:¶ The main idea is this: the essence of society is not the law but rather
the institution . . . institution,unlike the law,is not a limitation[as Hobbes would understand
it]but rather a model of actions, a veritable enterprise, an invented
system of positive means or a positive invention of indirect means.
(Deleuze 1991: 45–6)¶ What such institutions attempt to do, then,is not to function
as representatives of a general interest or a general will, butratherto
operate so as to make ‘the general interest an object of belief’(Deleuze 1991:
51).Such an operation,if successful,will ‘enter the natural constitution of the
mind as a feeling for humanity or as culture’ (Deleuze 1991: 130). And it is
through this constitution or invention of social institutions that the
multiplicity of partialities and interests comes to be transcended by
the feeling for humanity, whereby one becomes a polished, polite and
cultured subject of good breeding.
Ks of Debate
The Affirmative’s use of social relations to criticize debate as
currently practiced suffers from its own dangerous ideology because
its implementation requires one to put on an epistemological
straightjacket. The 1AC’s singular focus and subsequent assertions
of root causes deepens preestablished modes of thinking that rely on
unity and hierarchy.
Deleuze and Guattari 1987 (Gilles and Felix, French writers, philosophers and revolutionaries, Capitalism and
Schizophrenia: A Thousand Plateaus, pg. 14-17)
Thought is not arborescent, and the brain is not a rooted or ramified

matter. What are wrongly called “dendrites” do not assure the connection of neurons in a continuous fabric. The
discontinuity between cells, the role of the axons, the functioning of
the synapses, the existence of synaptic microfissures, the leap each message makes across these fissures, make
the brain a multiplicity immersed in its plane of consistency or
neuroglia, a whole uncertain, probabilistic system (“the uncertain nervous system”). Many people have a
tree growing in their heads, but the brain itself is much more a grass than a tree. “The
axon and the dendrite twist around each other like bindweed around brambles, with synapses at each of the thorns.” The same goes
for memory. Neurologists and psychophysiologists distinguish between long-term memory and short-term memory (on the order of a
minute). The difference between them is not simply quantitative: short-term memory is of the rhizome or diagram type, and long-
Short-term memory is
term memory is arborescent and centralized (imprint, engram, tracing, or photograph).
in no way subject to a law or contiguity or immediacy to its object; it

can act at a distance, come or return a long time after, but always
under conditions of discontinuity, rupture, and multiplicity . Furthermore, the
difference between the two kinds of memory is not that of two temporal modes of apprehending the same thing; they do not grasp
the same thing, memory or idea. The splendor of the short-term Idea: one writes using short-term memory of long-term concepts.
Short-term memory includes forgetting as a process; it merges not
with the instant but instead with the nervous, temporal, and collective
rhizome. Long-term memory (family, race, society, or civilization)
traces and translates, but what it translates continues to act in it, from
a distance, off beat, in an “untimely” way, not instantaneously.¶ The
tree and root inspire a sad image of thought that is forever imitating
the multiple on the basis of a centered or segmented higher unity. If we
consider the set, branches-roots, the trunk plays the role of opposed segment for one of the subsets running from bottom to top: this
Even if
kind of segment is a “link dipole,” in contrast to the “unit dipoles” formed by spokes radiating from a single center.
the links themselves proliferate, as in the radicle system, one can never get
beyond the One-Two, and fake multiplicities. Regenerations,
reproductions, returns, hydras, and medusas do not get us any
further. Arborescent systems are hierarchical systems with centers of
significance and subjectification, central automata like organized memories. In the
corresponding models, an element only receives information from a higher
unit, and only receives a subjective affection along preestablished
paths. This is evident in current problems in information science and computer science, which still cling to the oldest modes of
thought in that they grant all power to a memory or central organ. Pierre Rosenstiehl and Jean Petitot, in a fine article denouncing
accepting the primacy
“the imagery of command trees” (centered systems or hierarchical structures), note that “
of hierarchical structures amounts to giving arborescent structures

privileged status…. The arborescent form admits of topological
explanation…. In a hierarchical system, an individual has only one
active neighbor, his or her hierarchical superior…. The channels of
transmission are preestablished: the arborescent system preexists
the individual, who is integrated into it at an allotted place ” (Significance and
Subjectification). The authors point out that even when one thinks one has reached a
multiplicity, it may be a false one – of what we call the radicle type – because its
ostensibly nonhierarchical presentation or statement in fact only
admits of a totally hierarchical solution. An example is the famous friendship theorem: “If any two
given individuals in a society have precisely one mutual friend, then there exists an individual who is the friend of all the others.”
(Rosenstiehl and Petitot ask who that mutual friend is. Who is “the universal friend in this society of couples: the master, the
confessor, the doctor? These ideas are curiously far removed from the initial axioms.” Who is this friend of humankind? Is it the
philo-sopher as he appears in classical thought, even if he is an aborted unity that makes itself felt only through its absence or
Thusthe authors speak of dictatorship
subjectivity, saying all the while, I know nothing, I am nothing?)
theorems. Such is indeed the principle of roots-trees, or their

outcome: the radicle solution, the structure of Power.
Law
First, When we internalize the law, it acts as a the internalization of
control in our lives, this Oedipalization of control.
Deleuze and Guattari ’72 (Gilles Deleuze.Smart French Guy. Felix Guattari. Also smart, questionably
French. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia Volume 1. Originally published in French in 1972. Translated
Edition published in 1977. University of Minnesota Press 1983.Thirteenth Edition. ISBN: 978-0-8166-1225-3. Pg.
206-207 – M.E.)
It isperhapsat this juncture that the question "What does it mean?"

begins to be heard, and that problems of exegesis prevail over
problems of use and efficacy. The emperor, the god—what did he mean?In place of
segments of the chain that are always detachable, a detached partial
object on which the whole chain depends; in place of a poly vocal
graphism flush with the real, a biunivocalization forming the
transcendent dimension that gives rise to a linearity; in place of
nonsignifying signs that compose the networks of a territorial chain, a
despotic signifier from which all the signs uniformly flow in a
deterritorialized flow of writing. Men haveevenbeen seen drinking this
flow. Andras Zempleni shows how, in certain regions of Senegal, Islam superimposes a plane of subordination on the old plane
of connotation of animist values: "The divine or prophetic word, written or recited, is
the foundation of this universe; the transparence of the animist prayer

yields to the opacity of the rigid Arab verse; speech (fe ver be)
rigidities into formulas whose power is ensured by the truth of the
Revelation and not by a symbolic or incantatory efficacy. . . .The Moslem holy
man's learning refers to a hierarchy of names, verses, numbers, and corresponding beings—and if necessary, the versewill
be placed in a bottle filled with pure water, the verse water will be
drunk, one's body will be rubbed with it, and one's hands will be
washed with it."54 Writing—the first deterritorialized flow, drinkable
on this account: it flows from the despotic signifier.For what is the signifier in the first
instance? What is it in relation to the nonsignifying territorial signs, when it jumps outside their chains and imposes—superimposes
The signifier is the sign that has
—a plane of subordination on their plane of immanent connotation?
become a sign of the sign, the despotic sign having replaced the
territorial sign, having crossed the threshold of deterritorialization;
the signifier is merely the dete rritorialized sign it self. The sign made
letter. Desire no longer dares to desire, having become a desire of
desire, a desire of the despot's desire. The mouth no longer speaks, it
drinks the letter. The eye no longer sees, it reads. The body no longer
allows itself to be engraved like the earth, but prostrates itself before
the engravings of the despot, the region beyond the earth, the new
full body. ¶ No water will ever cleanse the signifier of its imperial
origin:the signifying master or "the master signifier." In vain will the signifier be immersed in
the immanent system of language (fa langue), or be used to clear away
problems of meaning and signification, or be resolved into the
coexistence of phonematic elements, where the signified is no more
than the summary of the respective differential values of these
elements in the relationships among themselves. In vain will the comparison of
language (langage) to exchange and money be pushed to its furthest point, subjecting language to the
paradigms of an active capitalism, for one will never prevent the

signifier from reintroducing its transcendence, and from bearing
witness for a vanished despot who still functions in modern
imperialism.Even when it speaks Swiss or American, linguistics manipulates the shadow of Oriental despotism.
Ferdinand de Saussure does not merely emphasize the following: thatthe arbitrariness of language
establishes its sovereignty, as a servitude or a generalized slavery

visited upon the "masses."It has also been shown that two dimensions exist side by side in Saussure: the
one horizontal, where the signified is reduced to the value of coexisting minimal terms into which the signifier decomposes; but the
other vertical, where the signifier is elevated to the concept corresponding to the acoustic image—that is, to the voice, taken in its
maximum extension, which recomposes the signifier ("value" as the opposite of the coexisting terms, but also the "concept" as the
the signifier appears twice, once in the chain of
opposite of the acoustic image). In short,
elements in relation to which the signified is always a signifier for

another signifier, and a second time in the detached object on which
the whole of the chain depends, and that spreads over the chain the
effects of signification. There is no phonological or even phonetic code operating on the signifier in the first
sense, without an overcoding effected by the signifier itself in the second sense. ¶
Moral Obligation
First, The affs’ dedication to a system of moral codes institute an

internalization of control, forcing us to follow a predescribed pattern
of ethics and rules before we can act and desire
Deleuze and Guattari ’72 (Gilles Deleuze.Smart French Guy. Felix Guattari. Also smart,
questionably French. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia Volume 1. Originally published in French in 1972.
Translated Edition published in 1977. University of Minnesota Press 1983.Thirteenth Edition. ISBN: 978-0-8166-
1225-3. Pg. 192-194 -- M.E.)
The founding of the despotic machineor the barbarian sociuscan be summarized in

the following way: a new alliance and direct filiation. The despot challenges the
lateral alliances and the extended filiations of the old community. He

imposes a new alliance system and places himself in direct filiation
with the deity: the people must follow. A leap into a new alliance, a
break with the ancient filiation—this is expressed in a strange
machine, or rather a machine of the strange whose locus is the
desert, imposing the harshest and the most barren of ordeals, and
attesting to the resistance of an old order as well as to the validation
of the new order. The machine of the strange is botha great paranoiac
machine, since it expresses the struggle with the old system, andalreadyagloriouscelibate machine,insofar as it
exalts the triumph of the new alliance. The despot is the paranoiac: there is no longer any reason to forego such a
statement, once one has freed oneself from the characteristic familialism of the concept of paranoia in psychoanalysis and psychiatry, and provided
new perverse groups spread the

one sees in paranoia a type of investment of a social formation. And
despot's invention (perhaps they even fabricated it for him), broadcast his fame, and impose his power
in the towns they found or conquer. Wherever a despot and his army pass, doctors, priests, scribes, and
officials are part of the procession. It might be said that the ancient complementarity has shifted to
form a new socius: no longer the bush paranoiac and the

encampment or village perverts, but the desert paranoiac and the
town perverts. ¶In theory the despotic barbarian formation has to be
conceived of in terms of an opposition between it and the primitive
territorial machine: the birth of an empire. But in reality one can perceive the movement of this
formation just as well when one empire breaks away from a preceding empire; or even when there arises the dream of a spiritual empire, wherever
It may be that the enterprise is primarily military and

temporal empires fall into decadence.
motivated by conquest, or that it is primarily religious, the military

discipline being converted into internal asceticism and cohesion. It may be
thatthe paranoiachimselfiseithera gentle creature or a raging beast. But we always rediscover
the figures of this paranoiac and his perverts, the conqueror and his elite troops, the despot and his bureaucrats, the holy man and his disciples, the
Moses flees from the Egyptian machine into

anchorite and his monks, Christ and his Saint Paul.
the wilderness and installs his new machine there, a holy ark and a
portable temple, and gives his people a new religious-military organization. In order to summarize Saint John the Baptist's
enterprise, one author declares: "John attacks at its foundation the central doctrine of Judaeism, the doctrine of the alliance with God through a filiation
that goes back to Abraham."42 There is the essential : every time the categories of new alliance
and direct filiation are mobilized, we are talking about the imperial
barbarian formation or the despotic machine.Andthis holds true
whatever the context of this mobilization, whether in a relationship
with preceding empires or not,since throughout these vicissitudes the imperial formation is always defined by a
certain type of code and inscription that is in direct opposition to the primitive territorial codings.The number of elements
in the alliance makes little difference: new alliance and direct filiation
are specific categories that testify to the existence of a new socius,
irreducible to the lateral alliances and the extended filiations that
declined the primitive machine. It is this force of projection that defines paranoia, this strength to start again from
zero, to objectify a complete transformation: the subject leaps outside the intersections of alliance-filiation, installs himself at the limit, at the horizon, in
the desert, the subject of a deterritorialized knowledge that links him directly to God and connects him to the people. For the first time, something has
been withdrawn from life and from the earth that will make it possible to judge life and to survey the earth from above: a first principle of paranoiac
The whole relative play of alliances and filiations is carried to

knowledge.
the absolute in this new alliance and this direct filiation.

Oil Advantages
The oil politics that surround transportation infrastructure represents
state territorial control of space. The state’s relationship to oil allows
it to control the flow of people, goods and information.
Watson 2005 (Janell, Prof. @ Virginia Tech & Editor of Minnesota Review. “Oil Wars, or the Extrastate Conflict ‘Beyond
the Line’: Schmitt’s Nomos, Deleuze’s War Machine, and the New Order of the Earth.” South Atlantic Quarterly 104:2.)
Even more fundamental to spatiality is the world’s reliance on oil for

its energy, especially in transportation. Oil belongs to the spatial
dimension of movement and speed, insofar as it is essential to
transportation, the very technology that allowed Europe to develop the first global order of the earth, and which still
drives the present world order. Indeed, control of terrestrial or maritime space depends
on control of means of movement through space. Schmitt himself recognized the

relevance of the dimension of airspace, added to the global order by the invention of the airplane, especially aerial bombers.
With the dimension of airspace transforming the relation between
land and sea, speed, in effect, became even more important,
increasing the ‘‘velocity of the means of human power, transport, and
information’’ (48). DavidHarvey spells out how the Iraq war fits into a strategy of establishing pro–United States
governments in the Middle East, since, as he puts it, ‘‘whoever controls the Middle East controls the global oil spigot and whoever
Whoever controls the
controls the global oil spigot can control the global economy, at least for the near future.’’ 5
fuel pump controls land, sea, and air, and, for that matter, also
controls the flow of information, for even cyberspace requires power
and transportation. No electricity and no transportation networks
mean no computers and no Internet. No telephones, cinema, or
television, either. Today’s global interstate structure depends on
domination of land, sea, air, and media.
Parody
First, Parody doesn't challenge dominant structures. It only re-
entrenches artwork back into commodification. This internalizes the
control and pursuit of the commodity into everyone.
Roffe ‘06. “Art, Capitalism, Local Struggle: Some Deleuzean Propositions”. Jon Roffe. Drain Magazine. 2006. Accessed
from: http://www.drainmag.com/index_dete.htm. - M.E.
For Deleuze,the initial enemy of art is the cliché:first of all,as the threshold of the average, the conservative and the
territorial.An artwork is a cliché in this sense - in both form and content - insofar as it is a product of the dominant territorial codes, the structure of
our particular societies. These codes are already there, and it is primarily in relation to them that art must first work. In his study of Francis Bacon,
Deleuze discusses some of the manual techniques Bacon uses to break with the cliché, and the links between the cliché and representation and
narrative in painting. Some of these consist of 'pre-pictoral' acts - like the non-representative marks made on the canvas before the work of painting the
Figure begins - the whole process which Deleuze entitles 'diagramming'.[3] Others take the form of the 'asignifying traits' and scrubbed zones that
Bacon applies to the nascent Figure itself.[4] The goal of these actions is to break with the gravity of the cliché. We can see something similar in the
later work of JMW Turner: on the day devoted to varnishing art works for their subsequent exhibition, Turner would in fact paint on the canvas again
, adding paint to the already 'finished' work. These auxiliary marks play an analogous role to the manual treatments of Bacon - interrupting a narrative
or representative clichéd function of a painting, and creating a very different kind of art, an art of force and movement through color, rather than cliché.
[5]¶ However, there is another register to which the cliché belongs - a more problematic one.Even once an artwork breaks free of the gravity
of the territorial cliché, there remains the other subversive movement: that of capitalism, the great equalizer, which threatens
to strip the artwork of its distinctiveness in order to submit it to the commodity form. ¶So,art is threatened on the one hand
by the fall into the orbit of the society in which it is produced, and which precedes it (which are 'always already there'), and also
by the movement of capitalism which strips away the distinctive force of the work and makes it circulate in the cosmos of
the commodity.The two registers of the cliché, orits two faces, are those of the State and of capitalism .[6] There is
nothing to guarantee that escaping one of these registers will imply the same in the other - to the contrary. ¶Clichés are always already on the
canvas, and if the painter is content to transform the cliché, to deform or mutilate it, to manipulate it in every possible way,this
reaction is still too intellectual,too abstract:it allows the cliché to rise again from its ashes, it leaves the painter within the milieu of the
cliché,or else gives him or her no other consolation than parody. [7]¶We know the unforgiving judgement of parodyDeleuze offers in the
course of his commentaries on Spinoza: itcannot provide any real ground for creating new and more affirmative ways of living. [8]
However, his remark about the milieu of the cliché is more important for us here.Unless art attains to something beyond the cliché, there
are no further questions to be posed in terms of the relations between art and capitalism. There are two reasons for this:
first,because the clichéd art-work is already a commodity, a ready-made product, offering no resistance to the capitalist socio-economic
state of affairs; second, since the networkor quiltof clichés that populate the white canvas,the 'silence' before the music, and the blank
pageare always already a part of the social context in which the art work is to be created - that is, capitalist society.Despite appearances,the
canvas is literally a piece of its contemporary social life.
Science
First, Science as productive only when useful precludes nomadic

science—turns case
Deleuze and Guattari ‘80 [Gilles and Felix, “A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia” quals
depend on who they are at the moment, p. 361-364]//NL
.19 The model is a vortical one; it operates in an open space

throughout which things-flows are distributed, rather than plotting out
a closed space for linear and solid things. It is the difference between
a smooth (vectorial, projective, or topological) space and a striated
(metric) space: in the first case "space is occupied without being
counted," and in the second case "space is counted in order to be
occupied."20 4. Finally, the model is problematic, rather than
theorematic: figures are considered only from the viewpoint of the
affections that befall them: sections, ablations, adjunctions,
projections. One does not go by specific differences from a genus to
its species, or by deduction from a stable essence to the properties
deriving from it, but rather from a problem to the accidents that
condition and resolve it. This involves all kinds of deformations,
transmutations, passages to the limit, operations in which each figure
designates an "event" much more than an essence; the square no
longer exists independently of a quadrature, the cube of a cubature,
the straight line of a rectification. Whereas the theorem belongs to the
rational order, the problem is affective and is inseparable from the
metamorphoses, generations, and creations within science itself.
Despite what Gabriel Marcel may say, the problem is not an
"obstacle"; it is the surpassing of the obstacle, a projection, in other
words, a war machine. All of this movement is what royal science is
striving to limit when it reduces as much as possible the range of the
"problem-element" and subordinates it to the "theorem-
element."21This Archimedean science, or this conception of science,
is bound up in an essential way with the war machine: \heproblemata
are the war machine itself and are inseparable from inclined planes,
passages to the limit, vortices, and projections. It would seem that the
war machine is projected into an abstract knowledge formally
different from the one that doubles the State apparatus. It would seem
that a whole nomad science develops eccentrically, one that is very
different from the royal or imperial sciences. Furthermore, this nomad
science is continually "barred,"inhibited, or banned by the demands
and conditions of State science. Archimedes, vanquished by the
Roman State, becomes a symbol.22 The fact is that the two kinds of
science have different modes of formalization, and State science
continually imposes its form of sovereignty on the inventions of
nomad science.State science retains of nomad science only what it
can appropriate; it turns the rest into a set of strictly limited formulas
without any real scientific status, or else simply represses and bans
it. It is as if the "savants" of nomad science were caught between a
rock and a hard place, between the war machine that nourishes and
inspires them and the State that imposes upon them an order of
reasons. The figure of the engineer (in particular the military
engineer), with all its ambivalence, is illustrative of this situation.
Most significant are perhaps borderline phenomena in which nomad
science exerts pressure on State science, and, conversely, State
science appropriates and transforms the elements of nomad science.
Security
Just read the Deleuze/Nietzsche Security K. It’s better, in my opinion.

State
The state underlies all forms of transportation policy, conforming our
minds and lives to allign with the literal stratification of roads. This
creates a internalization of the state and the Oedipal
By merging perspectives on traffic and accidents, we find ourselves approaching modernity from an odd direction: within. Traffic
and commerce (the movement of people and goods) are typically signs of "health" for a community, yet too much traffic is often
cited as an illness that has afflicted society. Too much traffic also risks accidents, spiraling into even greater traffic. The subject-
position of the driver is potentially threatened by the accident, while the subject-position of the traffic manager is perpetually
warding off the accident. Before and after the accident, the movement of bodies takes place in an attempt to govern the "event"
itself. The accident may be an immutable rupture or interruption: a moment when the body can no longer deterritorialize itself
through the micropolitics of highway identities. The human body and institutional bodies are thrust together through the everyday
trauma surrounding road accidents and highway fatalities. Preceding a given accident, which is inevitable but randomly
occurring, an entire assemblage exists to govern safety and security on the road-everything from license requirements (often a
critical passage into maturity or adulthood) to vehicle innovations such as shoulder-belts or non-reflective windshields. Through the
expansion of highways and the proliferation of the automobile, death and life in America have moved precariously close to the side
of the road. The body is already ground-breaking in both everyday and revolutionary ways. The body is organic and machinic as it
moves from one mode to another: by operating the speed and acceleration of a motorized vehicle, by strapping to a chair via a seat
belt, and by obeying or breaking speed limit laws. In sum, we should take the body's relation to the road, the vehicle, and the
accident as crucial sites of modernity's concentrations and movements. A few concepts related to speeds, rates, and modes of
production and transportation will help to link together the highway machine in many ways. Appropriate for the study of speed,
Virilio begins his 1993 article on the accident with an Einstein reference: "Events do not come, they are here" (Virilio, 1993).
Trade
Transportation is the root of capitalist domination in our lives. Modes
of transportation live simultaneously with us, shaping where we go
and what we can do. Roads and modes of travel shape our desires in
a way that is most productive and efficient for business. The
stratification of roads stratifies our lives to live with capitalism,
desiring the repression of desire
A different way for rhetoric emerges through machinic rhetoric as a methodology outside the dichotomizing realm of representation
or globalization. Arguing that the term comes to mean more than this, Tsing (2000, p331) argues: " globalization came
to mean an endorsement of international free trade and the outlawing of protected or public domestic economies." As a metaphor
for globalization, then, the highway machine expanded through the promise of unrestricted mobility and free access, paving over
local "highway markets" and toll-ways in favor of a national (global) machine. Anna Tsing talks about globalization in terms
ofplanetary interconnections, linkages that can further exploitation and inequality as well as linkages that can open up possibilities of
globalist wishes and fantasies. For Tsing (2000, p331), the process of invoking the global turn "is to call attention to the speed and
density of interconnections among people and places." Exactly, for to isolate the driver, the traffic manager, the suburb, or the
American imaginary without diagramming the movements and rates of those people and places is to project an artificial condition of
stasis on top of very transitory events. Circulation itself must share the stage with temporality and spatiality. McKenzie Wark helps to
tie together the motions of the highway machine by defining our terrain as the "place where we sleep, work, or hang-out" (1994, p1).
Similar to Morse's (1990) idea of distraction and "distractedness" as ontology for everyday life, Wark traces events such as the
highway machine to various forms of circulation, but also to the directed movement of people, places, ideas, institutions, and
forces. The drive-ins, quickie marts, truck-stops, and other roadside hang-outs are only one plane of the terrain. Those places are
now being forced to share terrain with the flow and timing of images: We live every day in another terrain, equally familiar: the terrain
created by the television, the telephone, the telecommunications networks crisscrossing the globe...This virtual geography is no
more or less 'real." It is a different kind of perception, of things not bounded by rules of proximity, of "being there." (Wark, 1994, p1)
Urbanism
Urban spaces striate space as a method for organizing capitalist
labor. The ocean is one example of how transportation systems
striate space to direct flows of desire.
Sverrisdottir 2011 (Hildigunnur, Architect and part time lecturer at Iceland Academy of Arts. “The Destination
Within”.Landabrefid (Journal of the Association of Icelandic Geographers) 25)
The French philosopher Gilles Deleuze and psychoanalyst Félix Guattari (1987 [1980]) described and defined space according to
striated space is the organized
two conceptual opposites; the smooth and the striated. In their analysis,
space of, e.g., the city, with systematic planning and a clear
orientational quality, originally grounded on the city-state and further
developed through modern capitalism. The space very much like any
given modern city, the space of a sedentary urbanite, grounded on the wish of the
metropolis to organize and later optimize production, consumption
and service for its own citizens; optimal, visual, completely definable
and measurable. At the opposing end, we have the realm of pure nature,
unaccountable, haptic, vast, and useless as a base of systemization.
This is the space of the ocean or the sand dune in the desert that has its horizons
rearranged every instant by the blow of the winds. Obviously, this is also the realm of the lava field in the fog and the vast glacier, in
This is the realm of intensities, a multi-sensory
the Icelandic context.
experience, not easily rationalized – of feeling the cold, tasting the snow and hearing the silence; a
space of the haptic, bound through the body, multitudes of possibilities with no clear direction, a space of the event (figure 2).
The condition of space being smooth or striated is, however, based on the
subject’s context with the environment. The ocean was striated with
the help of the stars (and later GPS) to control commerce and transport. But
it also refers to logical comprehension, the capabilities of navigation
through whatever field of life. Conversely, the over-striated urban tissue of metropolitan cities can
transform itself into smooth space from the point of view of a visiting outsider. The two opposing concepts of space – the smooth
and the striated – are, however, interdependent and one will always coexist with the other, thus giving meaning to the dynamics of
shifting realms, based on the transcendence of perception of the observer.
Utopianism
Totalitarian control is required to produce “utopian” societies. State
based discipline is justified by a drive to perfect obligations in
transportation and all other areas of life.
Bell 2010 (David, PhD candidate @ Univ. of Nottingham. “Fail Again. Fail Better: Nomadic Utopianism in Deleuze and
Guattari and Yevgeny Zamyatin.” Political Perspectives, 4:1)
utopianism is driven by a desire for perfection (Davis, 1981: 14; Berneri,

Authoritarian
1950: 2). Utopia is conceived of as a static state of perfected being, whilst
utopianism constitutes attempts to realise this state - a movement

from blueprint to perfection. These blueprints are drawn up according
to rationally constructed plans that appeal to abstract principles (Davis,
1981: 102, Popper, 2003: 154, Berneri, 1950: 5) - the application of which, it is hoped, will end result in perfection.
Achieving and maintaining these states of perfection requires strong -
even totalitarian - authority, something Davis makes abundantly clear: ‘the perfection of
utopias must be total and ordered; the totality, ordered and perfect. In order to
achieve this, without denying the nature of man or society, there must be discipline of a
totalitarian kind’ (1981: 39) - an argument supported (from a critical stance) by Popper (2003) and Berneri (1950: 7).
This totalitarianism must extend to the psychological sphere too, for the ability of the individual to think alternatives, let alone attempt
to realise them, represents a challenge to perfection (Davis, 1981: 54, 374) - utopia is ‘static and does not allow its citizens to fight
or even to dream of a better utopia’ (Berneri, 1950: 7). Hence we find Davis arguing that ‘utopia’s greatest enemy is pluralism’
(1981: 382). Such a philosophy is necessarily statist: a large state
apparatus being necessary in order to achieve the levels of control
required. Davis calls this the ‘Leviathanstate’ – a: centralised, bureaucratic, sovereign state
with its impersonal, institutional apparatus… [a] comprehensive, collective state with its
assumption of obligations in every area of human life, from health to

employment, education to transport, defence to entertainment and
leisure… a total and rational social order, of uniformity instead of
diversity, of impersonal, neutrally functioning bureaucracy and of the
comprehensive, the total state (1981: 8-9). He even goes so far as to suggest that utopianism isworth
studying primarily because it was influential in the development of the modern state (1981: 9).
Whiteness Affs
The affirmative fails to exposes the openness of the beings – They fail
to take multiple perspectives towards their issue of oppression – This
embraces that we never may never know capital T truth, because that
truth is dependent on the identity we are constantly shifting through.
It creates more complexities and more truths to be found through the
process
Saldanha ‘6(ArunSaldanha, “Reontologising race: the machinic geography of phenotype”, Environment & Planning (2006)
V.24, pg.9-24.)
Race is completely contingent, but not arbitrary: in hindsight, its differentiations and inequalities can be explained (Winant, 2004). A
process such as race clearly cannot be studied with classical notions of identity, causality, cogito, representation, and reducibility.
As a configuration made viscous by a whole host of processes, race requires genetics and ethnography and economics
and literary theory to be understood. And a critical dialogue between the humanities and the physical sciences will be greatly
facilitated by the nonmodern ontology of complexity theory.¶I discussed several entry points into such a pluralist ontological
understanding of race. One is the phenomenology of race, provided it keeps the focus on embodied, social interaction, in which an
ethics of responsibility follows from sensing the intensities between oneself and others, however distant. Another is the political
appraisal of difference in corporeal feminism. Anthropology is a third entry point, at least if eased from the epistemological and
imperialist straightjackets of modernity. Biology, as inaugurated by Darwin, is a contextual and nuanced way of understanding the
intrinsic vitality of matter. Deleuze's metaphysics of difference and repetition, finally, gives philosophical valence to the scientific
project of understanding the emergence of race and the political project of striving for the freedom of more bodies. ¶Race shows the
openness of the body, the way organisms connect to their environment and establish uneven relationships amongst each other. The
creativity of nature is not good in itself, but it can be made good. The molecular energies of race can be sensed, understood, and
harnessed to crumble the systemic violence currently keeping bodies in place. Hoping for, striving for a thousand tiny races is not
annihilating nature from culture, but on the contrary, immersing oneself in nature's lines of flight. This politics is also not mystical or
anarchistic,it is pragmatic and includes state policy as well as what Deleuze and Guattari call micropolitics. It is first of all empirical:
understand what race is, know its potentialities, try to sense them hiding around you, find out what is keeping them from becoming
actual.¶
Carbon Pipelines
The affirmative’s production-oriented approach is unethical and legitimizes
unending consumption
Lack 2011 [MA in Environmental Politics, MSc in Hydroecology, 25 years of professional work experience, as a geologist and
hydrogeologist, in both public and private sectors, Fellow of the Geological Society
Martin, “What’s wrong with Clean Coal?,” http://lackofenvironment.wordpress.com/category/carbon-capture-and-storage/ ]
The concept of Clean Coal is almost certainly an invention of the marketing departments of coal mining companies
(analagous to “safe cigarettes“). In most cases, coal-burning power stations have already cleaned-up their act as much as they can (as a result of
the 30-yr old UN Convention on Long-Range Transboundary Air Pollution (LRTAP) – which continues to help humanity minimise the effects of
acid rain). Therefore coal cannot be made any cleaner than it already is! Similarly, the
idea of Carbon Capture and Storage
(CCS) is almost certainly a ruse to make the continuance of “business as usual” seem acceptable
and, the truly remarkable thing is that, governments around the world seem to have been duped by it. However, in addition to this, it would be
inherently dangerous because, in order to be an effective mitigation strategy, the burried CO2 must never escape (see my earlier posts ‘The
tough guide to climate denial‘ and ‘Five questions for Chris Huhne‘). Why is this so hard for our politicians to grasp? Why do they continue to
insist that coal-burning power stations are acceptable? When we discovered that airborne asbestos dust was dangerous, we stopped mining it.
When we discovered that inhaling smoke was dangerous, most of us stopped smoking. Now that our governments know (or at least they claim
they know) that CO2 emissions endanger our stable climate, why are they falling over themselves to find ways to permit the continuance of
business as usual? Could it be that, as Hansen suggests, the fossil fuel lobby is just too powerful? But I digress… This week I intend to look at
Coal, Gas, Oil, and the alternatives to fossil fuels, to examine our options. However, my focus today was supposed to be CCS because it is not
a mitigation strategy, it is
not even an attempt to tackle the cause of the problem. On the contrary, it is an
attempt to treat the symptoms; and it is an abdication of our responsibility for causing the
problem. The solution to littering is not to employ more litter-pickers, it is to educate people
to make them better citizens who do not despoil their environment. When the early European settlers of
North America began to move west in search of new lands and new opportunities, a Frontier mentality was understandable. However, to
retain such an attitude today is socially unacceptable and morally irresponsible: When you live in a
wilderness, it is probably safe to treat a passing river as your source of drinking water, washing room, and toilet. However, if you are
unfortunate enough to live in a Mumbai slum, this will almost certainly contribute to causing your premature death. As a parent, I had to learn
to discriminate between childish irresponsibility and disobedience. However, if, as a species,
we go down the CCS route (and/or
pursue many of the other forms of geo-engineering) as a solution, we will be crossing the line from one to the other: That is to
say, now that we know (or at least the vast majority accept that we know) that burning fossil fuels is changing
our global climate, to find ways to excuse our behaviour rather than modify it is no longer
just irresponsible; it is morally reprehensible. It is, as Hansen has said, a gross case of intergenerational injustice.
Climate Change
The plan is a reaffirmation of capitalist logic – its attempt at controlling climate
change through the markets will fail and recreate the problems that create
climate change
Tanur 10 [Daniel , IV Online magazine : IV422 - March 2010, Climate change/16th World Congress Mobilization
for the climate and anti-capitalist strategy http://www.internationalviewpoint.org/spip.php?article1837 accessed
tm)
Capitalist climate policy reinforces the capitalists who are destroying the climate. Thus we can see in action the power of the fossil energy
lobbies and the sectors which are linked to them, such as cars, shipbuilding, aeronautics, petrochemicals and others . This confirms the
Marxist analysis according to which monopolies have the power to slow down the equalization of rates of profit. In the case of fossil fuels, this
power is all the stronger in that it is anchored in the ownership of deposits, mines etc, therefore in ground ren t. The result is laid out before
our eyes: in all countries, climate plans do not represent even half of what would be necessary in terms of reduction of greenhouse gases
emissions. Moreover, these plans are deepening social inequality and are accompanied by a headlong flight into dangerous technologies:
nuclear energy, the massive production of biofuels and the capture and geological sequestration of CO2 (supposed to make coal “clean”). It is
within this general framework that we have to look at the farce of Copenhagen: the ultra-mediatised conference supposed to lead to a new
constraining and ambitious international treaty to take over from the Kyoto Protocol ended in a rout: without targets in hard figures, without
deadlines, without even a reference year from which to measure reductions in emissions. Moreover, Copenhagen could well mark a turn
towards a policy even more dangerous than that of the Protocol. By the agreement they concluded, in fact, the 25 big polluting countries
were largely freed from the scientific pressure of the IPCC and the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities. It was a horse-
traders’ agreement between imperialism and the new rising capitalist powers, who shared out the atmosphere on the backs of the peoples,
the workers and the poor of the entire world. It is very much to be feared that the Cancun Conference in December will confirm this turn. In
that case, on the basis of current national climate plans, we can project a rise in the average surface temperature between 3.2 and 4.9°C in
2100 (compared to the eighteenth century). We should be wary of falling into a catastrophism with eschatological undertones . Some
apocalyptic discourses, indeed, only invoke urgency in order to argue for sacrifices and to conjure away the responsibility of capitalism . But
there is no doubt that a rise in temperature of 4°C would lead to real social and ecological catastrophes. It is a question here of taking the
exact measure of the threat. It is not the future of the planet which is at stake, nor life on Earth, nor even the survival of mankind. Apart from
an asteroid dropping on us, a large-scale nuclear accident is probably the only thing that can threaten the survival of our species. Climate
change, in any case, does not threaten it. But it threatens to seriously worsen the conditions of existence of the 3 billion men and women who
already lack the essentials of life. And it threatens the physical survival of a few hundred millions of them, those who are the least responsible
for global warming.
Disabilities
The aff’s reform will not result in better treatment or more rights for the
disabled-the issue is primarily economic-disabled people are not viewed as
profitable. Even inclusion will fail because the economic system values
production that will always view disabled people as inferior and too costly
Russell 08 [The date is the date last updated, the article did not give a date, the date last updated is 7/24/08]
[Martawrites on the political, social and economic aspects of disablement. Born with an impairment, Russell began writing when her
impairment progressed and she no longer worked in the film industry, Disability and Capitalism,
http://tokyoprogressive.org/~tpgn/index3.files/dencity/capdisabil.html]
Society still perceives disability as a medical matter. That is,

society associates disability with physiological, anatomical, or
mental ìdefectsî and hold these conditions responsible for the disabled personís lack of full participation in
the economic life of our society, rather than viewing their exclusion for what it is -- a matter of hard
constructed socio-economic relations that impose isolation (and poverty) upon disabled people. This
medicalization of disability places the focus on curing the so-called abnormality - the blindness, mobility impairment, deafness, mental or
developmental condition - rather than constructing work environments where one can function with such impairments. In my view, the
economic system can be held primarily responsible for disabling physically and mentally
impaired people. Disablement is a product of the political economy or the interaction
between individuals (labor) and the means of production. In this view, disabled peopleís oppression
can be traced to the restraints imposed by the capitalist system . Those who control the means
of production in our economy impose ìdisabilityî upon those with bodies which have impairments perceived
to cause functional differentials and as such, do not conform to the standard (more exploitable) workerís body. Since passage of the Americans
with Disabilities Act in 1990, for example, business has fought, tooth and nail, integrating disability in the workplace by providing a reasonable
accommodation as required by the ADA. In the first decade of the law, the disabled employment rate has not budged from its pre-civil rights
figure of 70 percent unemployed. Capitalist business accounting practices can be held accountable. Disabled
persons are
isolated and excluded from full participation in work life because business practices foster it. As I have written
previously: ìThe goal of business is to make profits. The basis of capitalist accumulation is the business use of
surplus labor from the work force of skilled labor in a way which generates profits. Typical business accounting
practices weigh the costs of employment against profits to be made. Productive labor, or exploitation of labor, means simply that labor is used
to generate a surplus value based on what business can gain from the worker productivity against what it pays in wages, health care, and
benefits (the standard costs of having an employee). The surplus-value created in production is then appropriated by the capitalist. The worker
receives wages, which in theory, covers socially necessary labor, or what it takes to reproduce labor-power every working day. The employer
will resist any extra-ordinary or nonstandard operation cost. From
a business perspective, the hiring or retaining of a
disabled employee represents nonstandard additional costs when calculated against a companyís bottom line.
[Economist, Richard] Epstein endorses this point of view, stating that employment provisions of the ADA are a ìdisguised subsidyî and that
ìsuccessful enforcement under the guise of ëreasonable accommodationí necessarily impedes the operation and efficiency of firms.î Whether
real or perceived in any given instance, employers continue to express concerns about increased costs in the
form of providing reasonable accommodations, anticipate extra administration costs when hiring nonstandard workers, and speculate that a
disabled employee may increase workerís compensation costs in the future. Employers, if they provide health care insurance at all, anticipate
elevated premium costs for disabled workers. Insurance companies and managed care health networks often exempt ìpre-existingî conditions
from coverage or make other coverage exclusions based on chronic conditions, charging extremely high premiums for the person with a history
of such health care needs. Employers, in turn, tend to look for ways to avoid providing coverage to cut costs. In addition, employers
characteristically assume that they will encounter increased liability and lowered productivity from a disabled worker. Prejudice-based disability
discrimination, resting on employer assumptions that the disabled person cannot do the job or on employer-resistance to hiring a blind, deaf,
mobility or otherwise impaired person just as they might not want to hire blacks or women, undoubtedly contributes significantly to the high
unemployment rate of disabled people. Disabled
workers also face inherent economic discrimination within
the capitalist system, stemming from employersí expectations of encountering additional
nonstandard production costs when hiring a disabled worker as opposed to hiring a worker with no need for special
accommodation, environmental modifications, liability insurance, maximum health care coverage or even health care coverage at all. Using this
analysis, the
prevailing rate of exploitation determines who is "disabled" and who is not.
Disability thus represents a social construct which defines who is offered a job and who is not. An employee
who is too costly (significantly disabled) will not likely become (or remain) an employee at all. Census data
tends to support his view. For working-age persons with no disability the likelihood of having a job is 82.1 percent. For people with a non-severe
disability, the rate is 76.9 percent; the rate drops to 26.1 percent for those with a significant disability.î [ìBacklash, the Political Economy, and
Structural Exclusion,î 21 BERKELEY JOURNAL OF EMPLOYMENT AND LABOR LAW (Feb. 2000) pp 348-349.] The ADA has not ìleveled the playing
fieldî - the goal of most civil rights legislation - by eliminating economic discrimination. In liberal capitalist economies, redistributionist laws
which, if enforced, will cost business are necessarily in tension with business interests, which resist such cost-shifting burdens. This is evidenced
by employers hard resistance to providing reasonable accommodations, the business-biased conservative courts which are consistently ruling
on behalf of employers, not workers with impairments and the persistent high disabled unemployment rate. Capitalists benefit by
not having to employ or retain a worker with an impairment. Therefore many disabled
workers are, and will continue to be, eliminated from mainstream economic activity. So the question becomes
is it possible to reform business practices so that disabled persons are not excluded from the
workforce? Government could offer subsidies to offset business costs to level the playing field. Indeed it has recently passed one such
reform, the Work Incentives Act, a subsidy that will allow disabled workers to retain their public health care by permitting them to buy into
Medicare and Medicaid. But typical of most reforms, this measure falls way short. For example, the buy-in is only for an eight year stretch.
What then? Other dubious subsidies already exist. Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 provides that federally-financed institutions are
required to pay a "fair" or ìcommensurateî wage to disabled workers, but they are not required to meet even minimum wage standards. The
traditional sheltered workshop is the prototype for justifying below-minimum wages for disabled people, based on the theory that such
workers are not able to keep up with the average widget sorter. Any nonprofit employer is allowed to pay subminimum wage to disabled
employees under federal law, if the employer can show that the disabled worker has "reduced productive capacity." 6,300 such U.S. workshops
employ more than 391,000 disabled workers, some paying 20 to 30 percent of the minimum wage; as little as $3.26 an hour and $11 per week.
In reality, workers with disabilities in these workshops know that they are sometimes paid less, not because they lack productive capacity but
because of the nature of segregated employment. Government could pay for disabled workersí reasonable accommodations. Perhaps that
would remove the issue of that added cost from the employerís bottom line and stop some employers from fighting disabled employeesí much
needed accommodations in court. Such reform, however, is not likely to make a difference in any substantive
sense. For one, productivity is the center of capitalist accumulation . Labor is always, a priori, the
retarding factor of productivity because labor can never produce fast enough or equivalently, at a low enough valued rate, to
suit the expectation of an accelerating profit curve. It is likely that impaired persons (due to the reasons explained above)
will always be seen as less than what is desirable to maximize profit. In addition, the put-into-practice theory of a
natural unemployment rate assures that the Federal Reserve will see to it that large numbers of people are kept unemployed to preserve the
ìhealthî of the economy. Disabled persons are traditionally a part of this ìreserve army of labor.î
Globalized Transport (Generic)
Globalized capitalism is driven by new transport expansion.
Chatterjee 2005 ,professors of geography and environment at the Center for Transportation Studies at Boston University. “Economic Consequences of Transport Improvements” A C C E S S, N U M B E R 2 6
http://Www.Uctc.Net/Access/26/Access%2026%20-%2006%20-20Economic%20Consequences%20of%20Transport
,SPRING2005
%20Improvements.Pdf
accessed ac)
Contemporary globalization is driven by a combination of new transport and communication technologies, knowledge-intensive production
technologies, new open-trade institutions, neo-liberal ideologies, and logistical innovations facilitating flows of goods, services, capital, and
knowledge. Global network corporations—the major agents of globalization—simultaneously exploit economies of scale in widening markets and
economies of scope in information, financial, and marketing networks, while maintaining production units in urban regions around the
world to take advantage of lower costs. Global capital thus uses urban regions as organizational structures to enhance returns, while also seeking infrastructure investments that improve accessibility and
knowledge sharing. This explains the rapid growth of multinational firms in large metropolitan corridors surrounding such global cities as London, New York, Tokyo, and Los Angeles. Smaller urban areas, less endowed with global
The ability of a smaller urban region to participate in the global division of labor
accessibility and knowledge, fare differently in the competition for global production locations.
depends on what cost advantages it can offer or what growth strategies it can develop that allow it to export to global markets . The evolution of
globally competitive urban centers shifts important aspects of economic policy to the urban level, with an increasing role for urban economic policy. CO N C L U S I O N S This essay advances two ideas. First, the economic
effects of transport improvements are dependent on the context in which the improvements are made . Economic outcomes vary according to the state of the
preexisting transportation network, the state of economic development, and the nature of competition in the regions. This suggests that economic assessments of transport improvements must
incorporate a broader range of interrelationships and data than are typically reviewed in transportation analyses . Second, economic history teaches that
sustained improvements in transportation, going hand in hand with parallel improvements in information and production technologies and institutional structures, cause structural and developmental
transformations— suggesting that very long-term transport effects are joint consequences of the evolution of transport, information, production, and
institutional structures.
Hegemony
US hegemony is an attempt to forestall the collapse of international capitalism.
Because it’s rooted in the crisis of capitalist accumulation it can never solve
their impacts.
Beams ‘03, Nick member of International Editorial Board and National Secretary of Australian Socialist Equality Party (“The Political
Economy of American Militarism, part 2” July 2, http://www.wsws.org/articles/2003/jul2003/nb-j10.shtml accessed ac)
The immediate impetus for the drive to global domination by the US is rooted in the crisis of capitalist accumulation, expressed
in the persistent downward pressure on the rate of profit and the failure of the most strenuous efforts over the
past 25 years to overcome it. But it is more than this. At the most fundamental level, the eruption of US
imperialism represents a desperate attempt to overcome, albeit in a reactionary manner, the central
contradiction that has bedeviled the capitalist system for the best part of the last century.The US came to
economic and political ascendancy as World War I exploded. The war, as Trotsky analysed, was rooted in the
contradiction between the development of the productive forces on a global scale and the division of the world
among competing great powers. Each of these powers sought to resolve the contradiction by establishing its
own ascendancy, thereby coming into collision with its rivals. The Russian Revolution, conceived of and carried forward as
the first step in the international socialist revolution, was the first attempt of a detachment of the working class to resolve the
contradiction between world economy and the outmoded nation-state framework on a progressive basis. Ultimately, the forces of
capitalism proved too strong and the working class, as a result of a tragic combination of missed opportunities and outright betrayals, was
unable to carry this program forward. But the historical problem that had erupted with such volcanic force—the necessity to reorganise the
globally developed productive forces of mankind on a new and higher foundation, to free them from the destructive fetters of private
property and the nation-state system—did not disappear. It was able to be suppressed for a period. But the very development of capitalist
production itself ensured that it would come to the surface once again, even more explosively than in the past. The US conquest of Iraq
must be placed within this historical and political context. The drive for global domination represents the attempt by American imperialism
to resolve the central contradiction of world capitalism by creating a kind of global American empire , operating according to the rules of
the “free market” interpreted in accordance with the economic needs and interests of US capital, and policed by its military and the
military forces of its allies. This deranged vision of global order was set out by Bush in his address to West Point graduates on June 1, 2002.
The US, he said, now had the best chance since the rise of the nation-state in the seventeenth century to “build a world where great
powers compete in peace instead of prepare for war.” Competition between great nations was inevitable, but war was not. That was
because “America has, and intends to keep, military strengths beyond challenge thereby making the destabilising arms races of other eras
pointless and limiting rivalries to trade and other pursuits of peace.” This proposal to reorganise the world is even more reactionary than
when it was first advanced in 1914. The US push for global domination, driven on as it is by the crisis in the very heart of the
profit system, cannot bring peace, much less prosperity, but only deepening attacks on the world’s people, enforced by military and
dictatorial forms of rule.
Icebreakers
The plan is part of a capitalist drive for control over Arctic resources.
Score 07 [Steve Score, Issue 113, Nov. 2007, Socialism Today, “The scramble for Arctic
resources,”http://www.socialismtoday.org/113/polar.html]
It is certainly true that we are witnessing a new phase in the old imperialist battle between rival national capitalisms. Each
greedy
government strives to grab as much territory, or in this case sea floor, as it can for itself in
order to maximise the profits for its own companies. This is not just happening in the Arctic,
but in all the world’s deep oceans. There is a lot to fight over. According to one estimate, under the Arctic alone there are
25% of the world’s oil reserves, plus gas and many mineral resources. In addition, there are untapped fishing grounds. Given the
political problems for the western capitalist power s in some of the world’s key oil producing areas such as the
Middle East, this potential becomes even more attractive to these governments. All the countries
bordering the Arctic are staking a claim: Denmark (because it possesses Greenland), Finland, Norway, Iceland, Russia,
Canada – and the US (because of Alaska) undoubtedly will do. The UN convention on the Law of the Sea gives nations the right to an
exclusive economic zone (EEZ) which is 200 nautical miles (360 km) from their coastline (including offshore islands). But this zone can be
extended if they can prove the outside limits of their continental shelf extend further. Russia is attempting to prove that an underwater
ridge, the Lomonosov ridge which runs across the Arctic seabed from Siberia to Greenland, is part of its continental shelf. This would open
up a vast area to its control. Other countries are preparing similar claims. The
one group who will not have a say are
the local indigenous peoples of the region. Tension has also been high between the US and Canada
over the Northwest Passage, the channel that links the Atlantic and Pacific oceans running between the North American
continent and the Arctic archipelago of Canadian islands. Permanent ice currently prevents commercial shipping
but, if the ice recedes as a result of global warming, it would become an important trading route. It would
take 7,000 kilometres off the sea journey between Japan and Europe for example. The EU also contests Canada’s sovereignty over it. In an
indication of the level of seriousness of these tensions, Canada has built a military base on Cornwallis Island, a deep-water port near the
These
entrance to the passage, and a fleet of armed patrol ships. This has been backed up with military exercises and rhetoric to match.
national tensions over the exploitation of the oceans and seabed are not just restricted to the
Arctic. The British government is preparing claims to vast areas of the Atlantic Ocean around the
Falklands/Malvinas, Ascension Island and Rockall. Claims will be lodged with the UN Commission on the limits of the continental shelf. If the
government can prove its claims with technical evidence a new continental shelf outer limit can be extended beyond the 200 mile EEZ, up to
350 miles.
For Argentina, this is re-opening the wounds of the Falklands/Malvinas war of 25 years ago, fought between Britain and Argentina. Thatcher’s
main motive in that war was not any concern for the Falkland Islanders themselves, but rather concern for the prestige of British imperialism
the potential for future mineral exploitation was also a
and for her own political position at home. However,
factor. Recent estimates have suggested there are 60 billion barrels of oil under the ocean floor in the region. Former colonial
powers like Britain are quite prepared to use their remaining ‘dependencies’ to grab sea floor
thousands of miles away. Similarly, France has made a claim to the Pacific Ocean around New Caledonia.
In a world where there has been increased rivalry between imperialist powers these conflicts over resources play an important part. The rising
costs of fuel, instability in oil producing regions such as the Middle East, the diminishing reserves of oil and gas in existing fields, and increasing
demand from growing economies such as China, all create a desire by the capitalist powers to search for new sources.
According to The Observer in February 2004, a leaked Pentagon report predicted that "abrupt climate change could bring the planet to the
edge of anarchy as countries develop a nuclear threat to defend and secure dwindling food, water and energy supplies". It quotes the report’s
conclusion that "disruption and conflict will be endemic features of life. Once again, warfare would define human life".
The Ministry of Defence in the UK has launched a climate change study to identify "future security threats". Chief scientific advisor, Roy
Anderson, said: "The MoD regards climate change as a key strategic factor affecting societal stresses and the responses of communities and
nations to those stresses". In the 2003 defence white paper it pointed out that "environmental pressures and increased competition for limited
natural resources may cause tensions and conflict – both within and between states. The UK may not remain immune from such
developments".
Some, such as Scott Borgerson of the US Coastguard Academy, believe there is a way out of the battle for the Arctic. They cite the 1959
Antarctic treaty when agreement was reached between rivals for control of the South Pole. It bans all military and nuclear activity and was
supplemented later with a ban on commercial mining. In reality, however, these rival claims were merely suspended.
The Guardian (17 October) revealed that the British government was also submitting a claim for one million kilometres of Antarctic seabed,
based on the disputed British Antarctic Territory on the Antarctic land mass. Argentina and Chile have overlapping claims for that area and the
Guardian described the claim as "against the spirit of the Antarctic treaty". Undoubtedly, other countries will follow suit with their own claims.
The Antarctic treaty was signed during the ‘cold war’ period when rivalries between capitalist
powers were muted by their common opposition to the Stalinist USSR. If these countries were to reach agreement
over the Antarctic, then Russia needed to be in on the treaty too. Today, after the collapse of Stalinism in
Russia, this pressure to work together no longer exists. Agreement will be much harder to reach.
Under capitalism these conflicts can never be permanently resolved – national capitalist
interests tend to get in the way of international co-operation. Rather than focus on
developing renewable energy sources to combat global warming, there is a scramble for
control of the world’s more marginal reserves of fossil fuels. This instability extends to all
other kinds of resources. They are fighting for control of the deck of the Titanic while the ship threatens to sink! Capitalism
is a continued threat to the world’s environment as well as to the world’s peace and stability.
Internet
Computer technology it facilitates the spread of exploitative information. The
internet obliterates competing narratives, reducing the world to monolithic
capitalism
DiFazio 06 [William, professor of Sociology at St. John's University “Ordinary Poverty: a little food and cold storage,” Temple University
Press, 2006, pg 164]
Computer-aided capitalism meets the postmodern at the point of flexible, just-in-time, post-Fordist production regimes. These production
regimes have been made possible because of the new knowledge-based computer technologies. They depend on the computer
in the same way that Fordist mass production regimes were dependent on the mechanical
technologies of industrial capitalism: the moving assembly line and the enormous factories in
which the mass production of commodities took place. The postmodern is the cultural
sensibility that enframes the commodity production of computer-aided capitalism. This new
form of capitalism enables the commodification of knowledge in endless and instantaneous
simulations. It reduces all signifieds to its free market script. It has annihilated space and
time. Space is transformed into controllable cyberspace , where Wall Street and banks become unnecessary as
physical places and exist only in the ever-increasing power of the World Wide Web. Time is compressed to automatic
turnover in an endless excess or profit. This immediate capitalism no longer has to legitimate
itself because there aren’t any competing grand narratives now that history is obsolete. It sounds
like science fiction, but it has become our world. William Gibson defines it in his science fiction novel Neuromancer: “Cyberspace. A consensual
hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts….A graphic
representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinking complexity. Lines of light ranged on the
nonplace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights receding.”
K Affs / Exploitation
Appealing to the system for an end to exploitation is like having a fox guard a hen
house – rules will be circumvented and used to maintain the legitimacy of the system.
Moody, 2001 Director of a monthly magazine (Kim, “Closing the Door on U.S. Imperialism & Capitalist Globalization” New Politics, Winter 2001 Vol. VIII, Iss. 2; pg. 96 Proquest SW)
It is self-defeating to address the problem of super-exploited labor abroad by calling on the U.S. government or the multilateral institutions it
dominates to protect global labor as the AFL-CIO does. Whether it is through trade sanctions, side-bars tacked on to trade agreements, or even through trade agreements that include labor rights in the text, as
does the new agreement with Jordan, this is a matter of the fox guarding the hen house . In any case, while we support labor and human rights everywhere, opposition to the kinds of
trade agreements that characterize contemporary "open door" imperialism should hardly be abandoned for the promise of paper rights by
powers who show no respect for them at home or abroad. Regardless of intentions, such an approach also underwrites the U.S. role as final arbiter in
world affairs, i.e., as chief justice of the imperial court. While we would support broad multilateral agreements banning sweatshop practices, child labor, etc., unconnected to trade or investment, as the ILO conventions
already do, we should also realize that such agreements and codes generally lack enforcement and that proposing enforcement by the world's greatest
violators (certainly in other people's countries) is shaky ground for improvement. As one U.S. worker told Human Rights Watch about U.S. labor law, "I know the law gives us rights on paper, but
where's the reality?" Enforcement of agreements that include labor rights clauses, like the enforcement of many domestic laws, ultimately comes down to the actions of the
workers and their organizations and allies. Therefore, we should be emphasizing direct solidarity with social and labor movements abroad
whenever possible. There are plenty of examples that show it can make a difference.
Mass Transit
Public transportation infrastructure is inherently neoliberal. They exclude the
working class and minorities
Farmer 2011 Farmer Sociology Dep’t Roosevelt University 2011 Stephanie Uneven public transportation development in neoliberalizing
Chicago, USA Environment and Planning http://envplan.com/epa/fulltext/a43/a43409.pdf, KB
Taken together, Chicago's public transportation system and the unfolding transformations in Chicago's housing market reveal how
neoliberal accumulation is restructuring uneven geographic development and the right to the
city for working people and minorities. Chicago's neoliberal public transit and housing projects may improve
the exchange value of its Central Area real estate, create place-based advantages to lure highly mobile capital and elevate its global-city status
by tying it more closely into global air-transport networks. However, these policies have limited use-value for working-
class and minority residents living outside the privilege d Central Area who endure a transit
system which is unreliable and sluggish for want of access or basic maintenance. I am not suggesting
that the Central Area transit projects are without merit: Chicago needs more transit investment, not less. However, the proposed
allocation of transit investment in the Central Area reflects the interests of growth-machine elites
over and against the interests of the majority of Chicagoans. These trends also demonstrate the
changing social role of public transportation in the neoliberal era. Urban public transit in the USA historically
served as an instrument aimed at industrial development, mitigating labor costs, and ameliorating inequalities (Grengs, 2004; Weiner, 1999).
This share of the social surplus has been redirected to construct premium network transit for
capital and the affluent, thus securing their revanchist rights to the city. In effect, the CTA and the Daley administration's
transportation and housing policies are contributing to the widening inequality gap between
affluent groups and working-class residents, and between Whites and Blacks and Latinos.
Unequal access to transportation resources parallels the broader widening of socioeconomic
inequality in the era of neoliberalism. Therefore, a complete under-standing of growing
inequality and uneven geographic development of the neoliberal accumulation regime should
include a public infrastructure
Morals / ID Politics
The Aff’s moral obligation claims are attempts at a world in which everyone is equal.
This seemingly progressive ideology is the agenda of the dominant class to mask the
root of all oppression.
Degutis 2008
Algirdas Ph. D, Senior Fellow at the Culture, Philosophy and Arts Research Institute (Vilnius, Lithuania), author of three books “Reflections on Western selfdeconstruction: Extinction via Liberal
Openness” Source: Athena: Philosophical Studies (Athena: filosofijos studijos), issue: 3 / 2008, pages: 3151, on www.ceeol.com.
There is a pervasive ideology behind all this that might be dubbed as progressive, compassionate or sentimental liberalism . It is the ideology of
those who perceive the traditional bourgeois society as mired in all kinds of oppressive practices, prejudices and stereotypes. They want the
society to become more caring, more tolerant and more inclusive. Their compassionate efforts are now directed not only at the traditional targets such as the
poor and the sick, but also at children, old people, women, sexual and racial minorities, illegal aliens, exotic cultures, rare animal kinds,
depleting rain forests – an infinite series of both human and non-human beings. All of them are accorded the status of “the downtrodden
and oppressed”, “the weak and voiceless”, a status that allows them to demand remedies from the powerful and guilty ones. “Compassion”
is the battle cry in contemporary Western politics. The compassionate agenda has taken hold of all moral heights and it rules without any serious contenders,
left or right on the political spectrum. Compassion, in this agenda, is not merely a virtue, a supererogatory duty, but a matter of justice, to be implemented with Caesar’s sword. The basic idea is
that the “wretched of the earth” are such through no fault of their own, but because of the society lacking in social justice. The world of the compassionate is morally flat: all people are worthy of equal respect, all beliefs are
The compassionate
equally worthy of attention, all ways of life are equally welcome, all cultures are equally valuable and a barbarian is the man “who believes in barbarism in the first place” (Finkielkraut 1995: 58 ).
liberal is open to everything and “has no enemy other than the man who is not open to everything ” (Bloom 1987: 27). Since for him all people are
basically equal, any factual inequality is a case of remediable injustice as well as an indictment on the society putting up with it. Again, since
for him “people are naturally good and … do evil because of corrupting external influences”, dealing with evil is tantamount to the
elimination of these influences (Kekes 1997: 38). The compassionate liberal conceives his mission as a struggle against any discrimination,
intolerance, inequality, hierarchy and exclusion. Now, since a free society spontaneously evolves all kinds of boundaries, exclusions and hierarchies, he is always hectically busy. He tries to enrich the
poor at the expense of the rich; to equalize men’s and women’s opportunities; to confer children the right to criticize the parents; to introduce race quotas at the universities; to desegregate the schools; to ban homosexuals’
he wants to make the world flat: to put down all natural boundaries, destroy
discrimination in the labor market, to protect the foxes from blood-thirsty hunters, etc., etc. In short,
all hierarchies, traditional mores, manners, ties of loyalty, cultural and ethnic particularity, even national sovereignty. In this he takes the stance of “aggressive
tolerance” towards the dominant ethnicity, culture, tradition, morals and customs – demanding their openness to the outsiders . He wants the entire
world to begin anew at the starting line of equal opportunities. Fearful of the unequal results at the finishing line he must vigilantly watch social developments and be ready to take measures against the recreation of inequalities
He is the driving impetus behind the
and the emergence of new forms of exclusion and discrimination. In short, he is seeping with political energy and is truly an agent of the “permanent revolution”.
“progressive” movements of multiculturalism, feminism, anti-racism, postcolonialism and environmentalism. In these times he is conveniently postmodern: he proclaims the equivalence of all beliefs and values,
while at the same time he denies the legitimacy of the beliefs and values dominant in the West – because of their dominance.
Postmodernists are aptly described by the phrase “philosophers of suspicion”, which Paul Ricoeur used with respect of Marx, Nietzsche and Freud. They share the conviction that
anything said or done in Western societies is mere window-dressing, a camouflage hiding something wrongful or shameful. Wherever they
direct their critical gaze they see domination, oppression and fraud. The social world for them is an arena of incessant struggle in which they
see only the winners and the losers, the oppressors and the oppressed, the manipulators and the manipulated – even when facing
apparently voluntary relations. The social world, as they see it, is a zero sum game: anyone’s gain is someone’s loss. the unquestioned
assumption is that the better off are somehow to blame for the mire into which other parts of humanity can sink and that they should
therefore do something about it.
The archetype of this posturing is Marx’s theory of class antagonism treating the whole history of mankind as the story of the struggle between the exploiters and the exploited. In this
struggle all claims to truth or justice, if put forward by bourgeois “reactionaries”, are mere ploys of the powerful. “Dominant ideas in any
society are always the ideas of the ruling class” is the relativist thesis of The Communist Manifesto. truth and justice can only be accessible to an agent whose
exceptional position allows the transcendence of the struggle. This is the position accorded to the proletariat, the “universal class” of those who have nothing to lose but their chains. By a
revolutionary uprising, the proletariat gains not only its own freedom, but also emancipates humanity from the curse of class antagonism. The revolutionary violence as envisaged by Marx is conceived as a retribution, as a response
of the oppressed to hidden (“structural”) coercion. Although bourgeois societies would not allow open coercion and their citizens are formally free, the facade is fraudulent, since it masks the “exploitation of labor”. The wage
earners, even if voluntarily joining the labor market, are in reality victims of coercion, for the capitalists only pay them the costs of reproducing their labor power and expropriate the rest of the value created. The system of wage
labor is a subtle form of slavery and should be abolished. Only by destroying the system – by abolishing the private ownership of the means of production – the international proletariat can lead humanity to the “realm of
As the proletariat failed to live up to the expectations in the West, “progressive” thinkers began looking for other agents of
freedom”.
emancipation, investing their hopes in the “liberation” movements of women, racial minorities, student rebels (“flower-children”),
homosexuals, and environmentalists, to name but a few. The Marxian proletariat was repeatedly replaced with other agents of change in
the hope that one or another would finally achieve a radical social transformation . After the breakdown of the Marxist theory of labor exploitation, attempts at finding faults with
capitalism continued unabated. The forms of capitalist oppression allegedly discovered by the critics came to be ever more refined. One can mention Gramsci’s theories of hegemony that saw bourgeois oppression buttressed by
Christianity and traditional culture and the Frankfurt school’s attempt to graft Freud on Marxism and to trace the oppressive nature of the bourgeois society to the institution of the family and “the repressive order of procreative
sexuality” (Marcuse). One should also mention the cultural revolution of the 1960’s, with its message that one could be an authentic human only by flouting all of society’s mores. The purpose of the revolution was to become
“unrepressed” by overturning tradition, conceived as an illegitimate means of control and domination.
Natives
Attempts to integrate indigenous populations into capitalism are ethnocidal—
the only way to liberate American Indians is an outright rejection of capitalism
One-Dimensional Society 09 (One-Dimensional Society, “Native American Resistance to Capitalism's Enclosure: The Struggle for
Subsistence and the Commons,” 1-13-09, http://one-dimensional.blogspot.com/2009/01/native-american-resistance-to.html, accessed 7-11-9,
SCL)
For over five-hundred years Native American's have been deemed expendable due to their
'natural' state of existence as wild savages who failed to 'use' the land. Both the landbase and
their way of life was viewed as “open” to colonization – for colonization is both a cultural, political, economic, and
ecological project. The history of the Native American post-contact is not a pretty one nor one that contemporary American's have come to
terms with. Subsequently, it is generally a taboo topic in American society. No accurate history of the conquest and continuing slaughter of the
indigenous is taught in the public education system and most American's celebrate Thanksgiving as part of a nationalist celebration marking the
arrival upon a 'new' world that is only new if one is looking westward. In fact, the history of the indigenous post-contact is one of extreme and
brutal violence, genocide, culturecide and ecocide by euro-americans. In the eyes of the settlers, miners, hunters and the state and Federal
government there was no question as to whether the indigenous needed to go, the question was by what means: disease, war, massacre, or
acculturation. The question was to either kill them outright or civilize them through “killing the indian to save the man.” There
is no
room for the indigenous within euro-american society. Until this is realized no transformative
politics can commence. The genocide, culturecide, and ecocide of the indigenous was
rationalized and legitimated through recourse to religion, racial superiority, civilizing tendencies, notions of progress and
development, [and] private property, and Christianity's quest for dominion over the earth – all of which are encapsulated
under “Manifest Destiny,” the foundation of American colonization.
For this reason, there is no critique of capitalism without a critique of colonialism and therefore no critique of capitalism
without a critique of ecocide, culturecide and genocide; processes that have occurred over the
last five-hundred years and not just in parts of the globe external to the United States. They are omnipresent in the third
world within the north: Indian Country.
There must be a critique of the primitive accumulation of the indigenous within the occupied territory of the United States. There can be no
critique of colonialism without a critique of the enclosure of turtle island and its conversion into a playground for the accumulation of capital.
The indigenous, the last “artifact” of the pre-history of capitalism, have resisted integration into the circuits of
capitalist reproduction for over 500 years and currently display no willingness to succumb or halt that
struggle today. The indigenous reject the death machine of neoliberalism – on both cultural,
political, ecological, economic and spiritual grounds . Instead, they put forth the call “self-determination through
control over our land.” For indigenous survival requires the survival of the landbase. The struggle is not for equality under
colonialism. It is not a struggle for citizenship or sovereignty. It is a struggle against capitalism
and the state. The indigenous struggle in the United States is the struggle for nationhood based on traditional indigenous values of
“freedom, justice, and peace.”
What can be learned from the indigenous struggle is that for the domination of both humans and nature to be annihilated we must restructure
social and ecological relations. In other words, the struggle for the health of the landbase is for the social and ecological liberation from
capitalism, patriarchy, and christianity. At its root, the struggle is over the landbase, over the relationship that humans are going to have with
the landbase. Will it be one that is premised upon domination and control or one based on balance, harmony and reciprocity?
The indigenous struggle of Native Americans is a struggle against the primitive accumulation of
capital and all that that entails – dispossession, enclosure, enclosure, wage-labor, patriarchy,
instrumental rationality, alienation and accumulation. The struggle against primitive accumulation is not just a
social struggle but an ecological struggle, the latter part is often forgotten, ignored, or downplayed.
The indigenous struggle was not merely for autonomy and liberation from domination but for a relation to the landbase that was premised
upon the commons and subsistence. It is a struggle for a way of life premised upon the principles of egalitarianism, reciprocity, and harmony
with all life.
It is the unification of social and ecological that underscores the importance of the indigenous struggle against capitalism for ascertaining
alternatives to industrial capitalist society. The struggle by the indigenous for the commons and subsistence is a struggle for cultural and
It is not a struggle to
biological diversity. Therefore, a struggle for a healthy environment, as their lifeway is dependent on it.
separate people from the land or develop the land for a quick buck, but to preserve both
people and the land forever.
Those who struggle for liberation must be with the indigenous and not against them. The goal
is not to 'civilize' the indigenous. The goal is not to 'develop' the landbase. The struggle is to
embrace attempts to unite social and ecological liberation from capitalism , which do not have to be
invented from scratch, but can be found with the indigenous and their landbased subsistence lifeways. It is high time that those in the
'advanced' north so willing to jump on the global south bandwagon turn inward to aid the colonized within the 'first' world: those in indian
country. There is no justification to ignore the indigenous within the core of capitalism in favor
of those in the periphery. It is high time the left faced up to its historical marginalization of
the indigenous within the occupied territory of the United States . The struggle is to reclaim the land for the
indigenous based upon their own traditional principals. This requires the end of capitalism and the state and the
reimposition of traditional indigenous values based on social and ecological justice; anything
less is unacceptable.
Patriarchy
The focus on patriarchy as the root cause of violence and suffering is incorrect; it
is inherently a hegemonic position resulting from the market’s desire to redirect
blame. Only a critique of Capitalism can addresses these issues
Žižek 2010 (Slavoj Žižek, is a senior researcher at the Institute of Sociology University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, and a professor at
the European Graduate School.[4] He has been a visiting professor at, among others, the University of Chicago, Columbia University, London
Consortium, Princeton University, New York University, The New School, the University of Minnesota, the University of California, Irvine and
the University of Michigan. He is currently the International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities at Birkbeck, University of
London and president of the Society for Theoretical Psychoanalysis, Ljubljana, “Living in the End Times”)
I totally agree with the general principle that "hegemonies

are often represented as minority positions, as
defenses against what are perceived to be hegemonic positions." Today's celebration of
"minorities" and "marginals” is the predominant majority position. But we could add a series of other
examples, such as the neocons who complain about the terrors of liberal political correctness, presenting themselves as protectors of an
take those critics of patriarchy who attack it as if it were still a hegemonic
endangered minority. Or
position, ignoring what Marx and Engels wrote more than 150 years ago, in the first chapter of The Communist Manifesto " The
bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal,
idyllic relations." Such an insight is still ignored by those leftist cultural theorists who focus their
critique on patriarchal ideology and practice. Is it not time to start wondering about the fact that the critique of
patriarchal "phallogocentrism" and so forth was elevated into the main question at the very historical moment-ours-when patriarchy
definitively lost its hegemonic role, when it was progressively swept away by the market individualism of rights? What becomes of patriarchal
family values when a child can sue his parents for neglect and abuse, or when the family and parenthood itself are de jure reduced to a
temporary and dissolvable contract between independent individuals? (And, incidentally, Freud was no less aware of this: for him, the decline
of the Oedipal mode of socialization was the historical condition of the rise of psychoanalysis. 50) In other words, the
critical claim
that patriarchal ideology continued to be the hegemonic ideology is the form of the
hegemonic ideology of our times -its function is to enable us to evade the deadlock of the
hedonistic permissiveness which is actually hegemonic.
Ports
Ports drive industrialization
Salzmann 2012 (Joseph A., a visiting assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, June, 2012, “The Creative Destruction of
the Chicago River Harbor: Spatial and Environmental Dimensions of Industrial Capitalism, 1881-1909”, Project muse)
The Centurion incident showed that technological changes in shipping on the Great Lakes would soon render the Chicago River Harbor's
infrastructure obsolete. In this regard, Chicago was like many port cities throughout North America and Europe. From the 1870s to the 1910s,
port cities on the Atlantic Ocean responded to a process that historian Joseph Konvitz has dubbed the "industrialization of shipping."
Merchant marine fleets employed ever larger vessels with the latest technological
improvements in propulsion, hull design, and superstructure engineering to enable them to move larger cargoes
at greater speeds and at lower unit cost. These developments caused what Konvitz calls the "crises
of Atlantic port cities," as officials responsible for harbor development struggled to
accommodate the larger, more technologically sophisticated ships .25 Chicago's port officials were similarly
challenged to respond to the industrialization of shipping on the Great Lakes. From the 1870s to the 1890s, a combination of
economic forces and federal government policies drove shippers on the Great Lakes to use
ever-larger iron and steel steamships. Prior to 1888, sailboats, not steamships, dominated the Great Lakes trade. Wooden
schooners were, as historian Theodore Karamanski has shown, a critical technology driving the development of the Great Lakes region. But in
the 1870s, many
vessel lines began to commission metal steamships instead of wooden
schooners. The transition from sail to steam was driven, [End Page 241] initially, by the depression of the 1870s. Shipping rates
had fallen, and some vessel lines compensated for the loss of income by using larger metal
steamships that could haul greater cargos in fewer days.
Public Transit
Public transit creates a captive audience that becomes targeted by advertising
Kolhonen 05 (Paul, Finnish architecture professor, “Moving Pictures” http://www.contempaesthetics.org/newvolume/pages/article.php?
articleID=351)
City advertising is mainly for people on the move. Their mobility, combined with advertising, has a major role in forming
the visual cityscape. The positioning advertising in the cities is directly related to the movement of people. Advertisements
are always in places where they have the most viewers, where the most people pass by .
Therefore, different transportation devices and transit spaces linked with traffic are the most sought
after advertising spaces. The same applies to subway stations and bus stops, which seem to
be the only places in the city where people stand with nothing to do but wait and look at the
advertisements. These non-places have become an important setting for contemporary living [6]
and such places are Usually thoroughly covered with advertisements. Sometimes they have no visual character apart from
the one provided by advertisers, and that identity seems to be the same wherever you go in
the world. Advertising is not just limited to the exterior. Advertising inside public
transportation is very cost effective. It is easy to target an advertisement at a person who you
know will be virtually motionless for a long time. A small correctly positioned message will reach a large
audience, who sometimes have no chance to look away.
Private Sector Increase
Increasing use of the private sector for public projects leads to prioritizing the
needs of affluent suburbanites and companies at the expense of the urban poor.
Brenner and Theodore 2010 [Neil Brenner & Nik Theodore Neil Brenner is Professor of Urban Theory at the Harvard Graduate
School of Design (GSD) and the coordinator of the newly founded Urban Theory Lab GSD. He previously served as Professor of Sociology and
Metropolitan Studies, and as an affiliated faculty member of the American Studies Program, at New York University. He holds a Ph.D. in
Political Science from the University of Chicago (1999); an MA in Geography from UCLA (1996); and a BA in Philosophy, Summa Cum Laude,
from Yale College (1991). Nik Theodore is Director of the Center for Urban Economic Development and an Associate Professor in the
Department of Urban Planning and Policy. Prior to joining UIC, he was a 1997-98 Atlantic Fellow in Public Policy based at Manchester University
(UK) and researcher in the Chicago Urban League’s Research & Planning Department (1988-97).] “Neoliberalism and the urban condition” 21
Oct 2010 City: analysis of urban trends, culture, theory, policy, action. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13604810500092106 ]
First, and on the most general level, the preceding articles conceive neoliberalism as a framework that powerfully structures the
parameters for the governance of contemporary urban development —for instance, by defining the
character of “appropriate” policy choices, by constraining democratic participation in political life, by
diffusing dissent and oppositional mobilization, and/or by disseminating new ideological visions of
social and moral order in the city. In each case, the contributions track the discourses, strategies and alliances of political
elites as they advance policy proposals aimed at (re)igniting market-led growth while glossing over the socially regressive outcomes that are
the frequent by-products of such initiatives. From this perspective, neoliberalism is identified primarily with supralocal forces— for instance,
new forms of capital accumulation or new regimes of state power—but the latter are understood to have enveloped cities within an
increasingly market-dominated governance regime. The contributors elaborate this perspective in a number of ways. For instance, in their
wide-ranging case study, Roger Keil and Julie-Anne Boudreau draw attention to the neoliberalization of municipal governance in the Toronto
city-region in the aftermath of the 1980s economic downturn and the restructuring of Canadian intergovernmental relations. They document
the rescaling of metropolitan governance that has accompanied federal devolution, regional institution building, and the resultant reshuffling of
political alliances at the local level. They show that, ironically, despite strident anti-statist rhetoric among many national, regional and local
political elites, an activist, market-driven form of statecraft has been consolidated in Toronto. Just as crucially, Keil and Boudreau outline a
variety of regulatory failures and political struggles that have emerged in the wake of these political and institutional transformations.
According to Keil and Boudreau, rather than resolving basic problems of urban governance in the Toronto metropolitan region,
neoliberalization projects have triggered new forms of elite strategizing and popular resistance in key regulatory arenas such as economic
development, environmental policy and transportation policy. Neoliberalization thus reconstitutes the terrain of political-economic governance
—and social struggle—in the urban region as a whole. Meanwhile, in his study of mass transit infrastructure investment in Vancouver, Matti
Siemiatycki examines the character of public planning processes in a political
setting that has embraced an enhanced
role for private sector actors in (formally) public-sector mega projects. Grounded in claims of
private-sector efficiency and enforced through national, provincial, and local fiscal policies, the promotion of private-
sector initiative has led to a loss of transparency within the policymaking process. The prioritization of
private sector involvement has become entrenched institutionally as public-private partnerships have been elevated
in local political discourse to a type of “best practice” in urban governance. Yet, as Siemiatycki
demonstrates, the shifting spending priorities associated with these newly consolidated public-private
partnerships are likely to result in chronic underinvestment in the services upon which most low-
income commuters are dependent. Relatedly, Joe Grengs studies the evolution of mass transit policy in the United States,
focusing specifically on policy change and social struggle in the Los Angeles metropolitan area. Grengs argues that mass transit policy in Los
Angeles is abdicating its traditional role as a redistributive mechanism due to at least two trends—first, a shrinking public sector under
conditions of national and state-level neoliberalism; and second, a shift in policy priorities that systematically neglects the needs of low income,
transit-dependent residents. Within this neoliberalizing policy landscape, Grengs argues, funding
for public services needed by
poor, central-city residents is being reduced in favor of transit spending intended to ameliorate
the traffic congestion and air pollution generated by affluent suburban commuters . In this sense, as
both Siemiatycki and Grengs indicate, neoliberalism is generating new forms of empowerment and
disempowerment within a key sphere of urban governance.
Rail
Railway expansion is the expansion of capitalist markets
Clarke 2010 [“The Crisis of Fordism and the Crisis of Capitalism”, Simon, Department of Sociology, University of Warwick,
http://homepages.warwick.ac.uk/~syrbe/pubs/telos.pdf, 11-25-2010]
The impact of the development of commercial road transport was at least as signicant as the development of the private motor car. The
growth of the railways had been an enormously powerful and pervasive lever of the
concentration and centralisation of capital, not only in railways and the directly associated
industries, but also in industries as varied as banking and nance, steel and coal, commodity
dealing and wholesale and retail trade. This was not only an e ect of the concentration and centralisation of railway capital,
but also because of the rigidity of the railway system. The railways had opened the mass market, but had
enormously narrowed and concentrated the channels of access to that market. The
concentration and centralization of capital in a whole range of consumer goods industries had
led to competition based on the dierentiation of homogeneous products and on the industrial processing
of raw materials to provide a rapidly widening range of consumer goods, but at the same
time the rigidity of railway transport conned such opportunities to the largest corporations,
while restricting the distribution of their products. The development of road transport
overcame this barriers, both extending the distribution of the new range of consumption
goods, and providing smaller producers with access to the new mass markets
Railroad
The rail system is rooted in capitalist exploitation.
Marrs 2008 (Aaron W., on the editorial staff at the Office of the Historian, United States Department of State, Ph.D. from the University of South Carolina, “Roads and Time Consciousness in the Antebellum
South”, Enterprise and Society, Muse)
Business and economic historians have contributed substantially to our understanding of "clock consciousness." Most famously, E. P. Thompson argued in 1967 that industrial capitalism—not agriculture—introduced this
2 3
consciousness, which valued punctuality and regularity. In agricultural employment or fishing, tasks "seem to disclose themselves by the logic of need," instead of being linked to clock time. The introduction of the clock
4
"time-measurement" was a "means of labour exploitation." Workers performed tasks not on the basis of need, but with
routinized labor. Moreover,
unstinting regularity under the eye of a manager armed with a watch. Industrial workers fought "not against time, but about it."5 To demand
a ten-hour day is to accept the manager's desire for time management and discipline . In antebellum America, free-wage laborers experienced the time
discipline Thompson described. While the transition was not a monolithic one, managers adopted "the notion of time as a measured commodity in the employment transaction," and in so doing used time as a regulatory and
6
disciplining device. As valuable as Thompson's insights have been, the experience of the SCRR forces us to revise Thompson's argument in two important ways. First, its location in the South takes us to a region not characterized
by industrial capitalism. Although advancements in time management and movements toward precision have been closely indexed to free-wage labor and industrial capitalism, the South's comparative lack of industry did not mean
7
that time did [End Page 435] not have signal importance to southerners as well. As Mark M. Smith has demonstrated, examining time-consciousness in the South lets us see how the South modernized on its own terms.
Southern planters "wanted to be perceived as modern, and they wanted to make money," but they did not want to challenge the regional social order, or "invit[e] the
8
dangerous democratic tendencies associated with modernization into their society." Planters demonstrated their facility in co-opting the aspects of modernity that they
desired while avoiding larger social implications by adapting the time techniques of northern factories to their own plantation management,
while remaining steadfastly opposed to free wage labor. Since much of the southern labor on railroads was being exploited by virtue of workers' enslavement,
examining a southern railroad allows us to move beyond Thompson's conception of time management as labor exploitation . Pushing his insight
beyond the realm of the worker and boss, we can use time to examine how early corporations interacted with the communities they served. Railroad companies soon discovered that they could
not simply dictate time at their pleasure. Instead, debates about time and the railroad were about power within the communities in which
railroads operated. Time had to be negotiated with a wide range of partners in order for the railroad to function.
Rap
The most compelling trend is hip hop is corporatization. Corporations want to
make money off of the Gangsta culture. Also, there’s a double bind- either their
movement will make it big, get commodified, and lose sight of the cause like
Cyprus Hill or they won’t become popular enough to effectuate change
Arnold 2010 [Eric, organic intellectual, Journalist, 9/13/10, “Why We Need (Real) Gangsta Rap Right
Now”,http://colorlines.com/archives/2010/09/why_we_need_real_gangsta_rap_right_now.html, MH]
Meanwhile, the main profiteers from the genre’s enduring commercial success have been white
record label executives. And as the economic viability of gangsta rap has increased, the
amount of sociopolitical commentary in it conspicuously decreased.
On its 1992 debut, Cypress Hill rapped about police terrorism on “Pigs.” But after selling double
platinum and crossing over to white audiences, the group’s message shifted from justice to
self-medication through weed. Its members became “Insane in the Brain”—and sold even more records. Nestled among tracks
on Dr. Dre’s “The Chronic” was “The Day the Niggaz Took Over,” a fiery commentary on race, rebellion
and reaction to police abuse. Six years later, Dr. Dre’s follow-up, “Chronic 2001,” riffed on
adultery, ecstasy use, and car bombs, yet was completely devoid of political sentiment. In
1994, Ice Cube responded to the acquittal of the officers who beat Rodney King with “We Had to Tear
This Motherfucker Up”; a decade later, the same guy who once defiantly declared, “fuck the police/comin’
straight from the underground” starred in the forgettable family comedy “Are We There Yet?” The
notion of Ice-T playing a TV cop or Ice Cube acting in a remake of a Cary Grant film wouldn’t
be so hard to stomach had other street-credible artists taken up their spots on the political
front lines. But the last truly socially-conscious hip-hop album to earn gold certification—500,000 units sold—may have been Mos Def’s
“Black on Both Sides” in 2000, a far cry from the heady days of 1988 to 1991, when Public Enemy and BDP totaled three platinum and three
gold albums cumulatively. Ifhip-hop once stood at the forefront of the fight for social justice, post-
millennial gangstas like Jay-Z, Game and 50 Cent see themselves as CEOs. In the last decade,
the biggest nationwide trend in rap—besides corporate shilling—has been the emergence of
thugged out, materialistic and apolitical Southern artists like 3-6 Mafia, who garnered an Oscar for 2005’s “Hard
Out Here for a Pimp,” and Young Jeezy, whose company is called “Corporate Thugs Entertainment.”
Still, even in an era of corporate thuggin’, activism among rap artists persists, quiet as it’s kept .
There was Jay-Z’s endorsement of Barack Obama, David Banner’s response to Hurricane Katrina and Bun B’s involvement in Haitian earthquake
relief and immigration issues. Master P, Big Boi and Xzibit were all outspoken about the BP oil spill. The
important difference is
that mainstream rappers who speak out nowadays do so outside of the recording studio.
Why is this? Besides the fact that major record labels have convinced the rest of us that
political rap doesn’t sell, even hip hop media, it seems, would rather cover T.I.’s latest arrest
than focus on injustice. In 2008, Papoose and Game were among the many rappers who recorded tributes to Sean Bell, only to be
dissed by hip-hop website XXL.com, which complained, “Bell has become a marketing tool.” An actual example of gangsta-
ness being used as a marketing tool might be Reebok’s ill-conceived and thankfully abandoned “9 Shots”
campaign for their G-Unit clothing line—an attempt to brand 50 Cent’s bullet wounds. Perhaps Reebok should
instead issued a limited-edition Aiyana Stanley-Jones sneaker. Or instead of “Lollipop,” Lil Wayne’s number one hit
could be a song about the New Orleans police who murdered Katrina refugees and then tried
to cover it up. Some smaller artists are defying industry and media indifference to the tragic
reality of police violence. After Oscar Grant was killed by a BART police officer on New Year’s Day 2009, within a day, rapper
Mistah F.A.B. and singer Jennifer Johns recorded an Internet-only tribute, entitled “My Life.” Within a month, several other Bay Area
underground artists, including AP.9, Ise Lyfe and Beeda Weeda followed suit with their own Grant tributes .
Not a single upper-
echelon rapper has seen fit to address the situation in rhyme, however. Likewise, the Stanley-
Jones shooting resulted in very few peeps from Motor City emcees, gangsta or otherwise—a
notable exception being “R.I.P. Aiyana Jones,” by Silo Sh3llz, who openly questioned why the
rap community had remained silent over the senseless killing of a 7-year-old girl. At this
writing, the video had received just 350 views on YouTube, while the idiotic, cliched
“ShawtBusShawty” has clocked over 5 million views.
Reform
The affirmative’s participation in the process of reforming capital without
changing its basic structure allows everyone to feel as though they are ‘doing
something’ when in fact, nothing structural is ever changing at all – only specific
manifestations. Actions that seem like ‘a step in the right direction’ are nothing
more than a placebo.
Weeks, and Maurel ‘99
(“Voyages Across the Web of Time; Angkarn, Nietzsche and Temporal Colonization, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, September 1st, 1999 )
Angkarn is referring here to a repetition of sounds, a cyclicity which may or may not impede progression. When this structural metaphor is
transferred to contemporary social, political and economic domains, it is readily conceptualized as an inertia or resistance to change,
particularly in a culture such as Thailand's, acutely conscious of its dramatic shift from rural cycles to the linearity of "progressive" urban
development. However, while we would not defend the kind of nostalgia Angkarn does indeed occasionally indulge in, it appears that the
question of time and its relationship to progress has, like everything else, become peculiarly complex in the context of a globalizing free market
that imposes a seemingly ineluctable momentum. [11] Recent problematics of time and movement in the West, which has undergone the
transition from agrarian to technological free market more gradually and yet no less profoundly, increasingly force analysis outside the
dichotomy of present versus past tense, the dynamic versus the static. Ben Agger, for example, in elaborating his theory of "fast capitalism"
observes that an obsession, an intoxication with rapid movement and transformation for its own sake may actually undermine progress by
rendering considered resistance impossible: "My problem is how the world stays the same. It does so by changing -- deepening ideology,
moronizing everyday life, suppressing critique." [12] The French philosopher of postmodemity Jean Baudrillard has likewise discerned a
paradoxically conservative effect in the culture of speed, of "movement for movement's sake".
Roads
Roads are arranged based on class distinctions – only those on the lower spectrum
experiences ecological damage.
Parenti 2011 (Michael, PhD in political science from Yale, one of the nations’ leading political analysts, “Profit Pathology and Disposable Planet”, Michael Parenti political archive,
http://www.michaelparenti.org/capitalism%20apocalypse.html)
Isn't ecological disaster a threat to the health and survival of corporate plutocrats just as it is to us ordinary citizens? We can understand why the corporate rich might want to destroy public housing, public education, Social
Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Such cutbacks would bring us closer to a free market society devoid of the publicly-funded "socialistic" human services that the ideological reactionaries detest. And such cuts would not deprive
the superrich and their families of anything. The superrich have more than sufficient private wealth to procure whatever services and protections they need for themselves. But the environment is a different story, is it not?
Don't wealthy reactionaries and their corporate lobbyists inhabit the same polluted planet as everyone else, eat the same chemicalized
food, and breathe the same toxified air? In fact, they do not live exactly as everyone else. They experience a different class reality, often
residing in places where the air is markedly better than in low and middle income areas. They have access to food that is organically raised
and specially transported and prepared. The nation's toxic dumps and freeways usually are not situated in or near their swanky
neighborhoods. In fact, the superrich do not live in neighborhoods as such. They usually reside on landed estates with plenty of wooded
areas, streams, meadows, and only a few well-monitored access roads. Pesticide sprays are not poured over their trees and gardens. Clear cutting does not desolate their ranches,
estates, family forests, lakes, and prime vacation spots. Still, should they not fear the threat of an ecological apocalypse brought on by global warming? Do they want to see life on Earth, including their own lives, destroyed? In the
What is now at stake for them is something
long run they indeed will be sealing their own doom along with everyone else's. However, like us all, they live not in the long run but in the here and now.
more proximate and more urgent than global ecology; it is global profits. The fate of the biosphere seems like a remote abstraction
compared to the fate of one's immediate--and enormous--investments . With their eye on the bottom line, big business leaders know that every dollar a company spends on oddball
things like environmental protection is one less dollar in earnings. Moving away from fossil fuels and toward solar, wind, and tidal energy could help avert ecological disaster, but six of the world's ten top industrial corporations are
involved primarily in the production of oil, gasoline, and motor vehicles. Fossil fuel pollution brings billions of dollars in returns. Ecologically sustainable forms of production threaten to compromise such profits, the big producers
Immediate gain for oneself is a far more compelling consideration than a future loss shared by the general public. Every time you
are convinced.
drive your car, you are putting your immediate need to get somewhere ahead of the collective need to avoid poisoning the air we all breath.
So with the big players: the social cost of turning a forest into a wasteland weighs little against the immense and immediate profit that
comes from harvesting the timber and walking away with a neat bundle of cash . And it can always be rationalized away: there are lots of other forests for people to visit, they don't
need this one; society needs the timber; lumberjacks need the jobs, and so on.
Single Issue
It is the type of movement you participate in that is the problem. Single-issue
movements are easily appropriated by the political system, failing to cause any
institutional change. By depriving the harms of their Universal aspect, you
doom your protest to impotence.
Zizek ‘97, (Zižek is a senior researcher at the Institute of Sociology University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, and a professor at the European Graduate
School.[4] He has been a visiting professor at, among others, the University of Chicago, Columbia University, London Consortium, Princeton
University, New York University, The New School, the University of Minnesota, the University of California, Irvine and the University of
Michigan. He is currently the International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities at Birkbeck, University of London and president
of the Society for Theoretical Psychoanalysis, Ljubljana, Senior Researcher at Ljubjana, 1997, (“Repeating Lenin”, www.lacan.com/replenin)
Today, we already can discern the signs of a kind of general unease - recall the series of events usually listed under the name of "Seattle." The
10 years honeymoon of the triumphant global capitalism is over, the long-overdue "seven years itch" is here - witness the panicky reactions of
the big media, which - from the Time magazine to CNN - all of a sudden started to warn about the Marxists manipulating the crowd of the
"honest" protesters. The problem is now the strictly Leninist one - how to ACTUALIZE the media's accusations: how to invent the organizational
structure which will confer on this unrest the FORM of the universal political demand. Otherwise, the momentum will be lost, and what will
remain is the marginal disturbance, perhaps organized as a new Greenpeace, with certain efficiency, but also strictly limited goals, marketing
strategy, etc. In other words, the key "Leninist" lesson today is: politics without the organizational FORM of the party is politics without politics,
so the answer to those who want just the (quite adequately named) "New SOCIAL Movements" is the same as the answer of the Jacobins to the
Girondin compromisers: "You want revolution without a revolution!" Today's blockade is that there are two ways open for the socio-political
engagement: either play the game of the system, engage in the "long march through the institutions," or get active in new social movements,
from feminism through ecology to anti-racism. And, again, the limit of these movements is that they are not POLITICAL in the sense of the
Universal Singular: they are "one issue movements" which lack the dimension of the universalit y, i.e. they do not relate to the social TOTALITY.
Here, Lenin's reproach to liberals is crucial: they only EXPLOIT the working classes' discontent to strengthen their position vis-a-vis the
conservatives, instead of identifying with it to the end.52 Is this also not the case with today's Left liberals? They like to evoke racism, ecology,
workers' grievances, etc., to score points over the conservatives WITHOUT ENDANGERING THE SYSTEM . Recall how, in Seattle, Bill Clinton
himself deftly referred to the protesters on the streets outside, reminding the gathered leaders inside the guarded palaces that they should
listen to the message of the demonstrators (the message which, of course, Clinton interpreted, depriving it of its subversive sting attributed to
the dangerous extremists introducing chaos and violence into the majority of peaceful protesters). It's the same with all New Social
Movements, up to the Zapatistas in Chiapas: the systemic politics is always ready to "listen to their demands," depriving them of their proper
political sting. The system is by definition ecumenical, open, tolerant, ready to "listen" to all - even if one insist on one's demands, they are
deprived of their universal political sting by the very form of negotiation. The true Third Way we have to look for is this third way between the
institutionalized parliamentary politics and the new social movements.
States
Even if it is not directly identified with it, the state acts as the key catalyst to
capitalism – it manages, consolidates, and protects it with any means necessary
Harman 06 (Chris, editor of International Socialism Journal and, before that, of Socialist Worker, and a leading figure in the Socialist
Workers Party, September 26th, 2006, “The state and capitalism today”, http://www.isj.org.uk/?id=234)
The state may be a structure that developed historically to provide the political prerequisites
for capitalist production—to protect capitalist property, to police the dealings of different
members of the ruling class with each other, to provide certain services which are essential
for the reproduction of the system, and to carry through such reforms as are necessary to
make other sections of society accept capitalist rule —but it is not to be identified with the system itself. This view of
the state claims to be based on the Communist Manifesto: ‘The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common
affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.’ But its origins do not lie in Marx himself so much as in the classical economists who preceded him: in the
Communist Manifesto Marx simply takes their insistence on the need for a minimalist, ‘nightwatchman’ state and draws out its class character.
Nevertheless it is the view that is to be found in most modern academic Marxism. So, for instance, it was to be found on both sides of the
debate which took place in New Left Review between Ralph Miliband and Nicos Poulantzas.2 Miliband argued what has been called the
‘instrumental’ view of the
state: it was tied to the capitalist class because its leading personnel came
from the same milieu as the owners of private capital .3 Poulantzas argued that this was to see a
merely contingent relationship between the state and capitalism, to see the state’s character
as depending simply on who manned its top structures . He argued what has been called the ‘functional’ view:
the state has to fulfil the needs of the society of which it is part; since this is a capitalist
society it is necessarily a capitalist state. The state is , as Poulantzas puts it, ‘a condensate of class
forces’, and the forces it ‘condenses’ are capitalist forces.
Advantage Links
China Threat
The China threat is a manifestation of a structural issue with capital –
commodification leads to antagonistic excess that we cannot deal with – this
produces a form of scholarship based upon fear politics which allows capital to
subtly operate
Zizek 99 [Slavoj Zizek, Slavoj, Žižek is a senior researcher at the Institute of Sociology University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, and a professor at
the European Graduate School.[4] He has been a visiting professor at, among others, the University of Chicago, Columbia University, London
London and president of the Society for Theoretical Psychoanalysis, Ljubljana, The Ticklish Subject: The absent centre of political ontology,
1999, pg. 353-359]
The big news of today’s post-political age of the ‘end of ideology’ is thus the radical depoliticization of the sphere of the economy: the way the
economy functions (the need to cut social welfare, etc.) is accepted as a simple insight into the objective state of things. However, as long as
this fundamental depoliticization of the economic sphere is accepted, all the talk about active citizenship, about public discussion leading to
responsible collective decisions, and so on, will remain limited to the ‘cultural’ issues of religious, sexual, ethnic and other way-of-life
differences, without actually encroaching upon the level at which long-term decisions that affect us all are made. In short, the
only way
effectively to bring about a society in which risky long-term decisions would ensue from
public debate involving all concerned is some kind of radical limitation of Capital’s freedom ,
the subordination of the process of production to social control — the radical repoliticization of the economy. That is to say: if the problem with
today’s post-politics (‘administration of social affairs’) is that it increasingly undermines the possibility of a proper political act, this undermining
is directly due to the depoliticization of economics, to the common acceptance of Capital and market mechanisms as neutral tools/ procedures
to be exploited. We can now see why today’s post-politics cannot attain the properly political dimension of universality: because it silently
precludes the sphere of economy from politicization. The domain of global capitalist market relations is the Other Scene of the so-called
repoliticization of civil society advocated by the partisans of ‘identity politics’ and other postmodern forms of politicization: all the talk about
new forms of politics bursting out all over, focused on particular issues (gay rights, ecology, ethnic minorities...), all this incessant activity of
fluid, shifting identities, of building multiple ad hoc coalitions, and so on, has something inauthentic about it, and ultimately resembles the
obsessional neurotic who talks all the time and is otherwise frantically active precisely in order to ensure that something — what really matters
— will not be disturbed, that it will remain immobilized.35 So, instead of celebrating the new freedoms and responsibilities brought about by
the ‘second modernity’, it is much more crucial to focus on what remains the same in this global fluidity and reflexivity, on what serves as the
very motor of this fluidity: the inexorable logic of Capital. The
spectral presence of Capital is the figure of the big Other which
not only remains operative when all the traditional embodi ments of the symbolic big Other
disintegrate, but even directly causes this disintegration: far from being confronted with the
abyss of their freedom — that is, laden with the burden of responsibility that cannot be alleviated by the helping hand of Tradition
or Nature — today’s subject is perhaps more than ever caught in an inexorable compulsion that effectively runs his life. The irony of history is
that, in the Eastern European ex-Communist countries, the ‘reformed’ Communists were the first to learn this lesson. Why did many of them
return to power via free elections in the mid 1990s? This very return offers the ultimate proof that these states have in fact entered capitalism.
That is to say: what do ex-Communists stand for today? Due to their privileged links with the newly emerging capitalists (mostly members of
the old nomenklatura ‘privatizing’ the companies they once ran), they are first and foremost the party of big Capital; furthermore, to erase the
traces of their brief but none the less rather traumatic experience with politically active civil society, they as a rule ferociously advocate a quick
deideologization, a retreat from active civil society engagement into passive, apolitical consumerism — the very two features which
characterize contemporary capitalism. So dissidents are astonished to discover that they played the role of ‘vanishing mediators’ on the way
from socialism to capitalism, in which the same class as before rules under a new guise. It is therefore wrong to claim that the ex-Communists’
return to power shows how people are disappointed by capitalism and long for the old socialist security — in a kind of Hegelian ‘negation of
negation’, it is only with the ex-Communists’ return to power that socialism was effectively negated — that is to say, what the political analysts
(mis)perceive as ‘disappointment with capitalism’ is in fact disappointment with the ethico-political enthusiasm for which there is no place in
‘normal’ capitalism.36 We should thus reassert the old Marxist critique of ‘reification’: today, emphasizing the depoliticized ‘objective’
economic logic against allegedly ‘outdated’ forms of ideological passions is the predominant ideological form, since ideology is always self-
referential, that is, it always defines itself through a distance towards an Other dismissed and denounced as ‘ideological’.~~ For that precise
reason — because the depoliticized economy is the disavowed fundamental fantasy’ of postmodern politics — a properly political act would
necessarily entail the repoliticization of the economy: within a given situation, a gesture counts as an act only in so far as it disturbs (‘traverses’)
its fundamental fantasy. In so far as today’s moderate Left, from Blair to Clinton, fully accepts this depoliticization, we are witnessing a strange
reversal of roles: the only serious political force which continues to question the unrestrained rule of the market is the populist extreme Right
(Buchanan in the USA; Le Pen in France). ‘When Wall Street reacted negatively to a fall in the unemployment rate, the only one to make the
obvious point that what is good for Capital is obviously not what is good for the majority of the population was Buchanan. In contrast to the old
wisdom according to which the extreme Right openly says what the moderate Right secretly thinks, but doesn’t dare say in public (the open
assertion of racism, of the need for strong authority and the cultural hegemony of ‘Western values’, etc.), we are therefore approaching a
situation in which the extreme Right openly says what the moderate Left secretly thinks, but doesn’t dare say in public (the necessity to curb
the freedom of Capital). One should also not forget that today’s rightist survivalist militias often look like a caricaturized version of the extreme
militant leftist splinter groups of the l960s: in both cases we are dealing with radical anti-institutional logic — that is, the ultimate enemy is the
repressive State apparatus (the FBI, the Army, the judicial system) which threatens the group’s very survival, and the group is organized as a
tight disciplined body in order to be able to withstand this pressure. The exact counterpoint to this is a Leftist like Pierre Bourdieu, who defends
the idea of a unified Europe as a strong ‘social state’, guaranteeing the minimum of social rights and welfare against the onslaught of
globalization: it is difficult to abstain from irony when one sees a radical Leftist raising barriers against the corrosive global power of Capital, so
fervently celebrated by Marx. So, again, it is as if the roles are reversed today: Leftists support a strong State as the last guarantee of social and
civil liberties against Capital; while Rightists demonize the State and its apparatuses as the ultimate terrorist machine. Of course, one should
fully acknowledge the tremendous liberating impact of the postmodern politicization of domains which were hitherto considered apolitical
(feminism, gay and lesbian politics, ecology, ethnic and other so-called minority issues): the fact that these issues not only became perceived as
inherently political but also gave birth to new forms of political subjectivization thoroughly reshaped our entire political and cultural landscape.
So the point is not to play down this tremendous advance in favour of the return to some new version of so-called economic essentialism; the
point is, rather, that the depoliticization of the economy generates the populist New Right with its Moral Majority ideology, which today is the
main obstacle to the realization of the very (feminist, ecological...) demands on which postmodern forms of political subjectivization focus. In
short, I am pleading for a ‘return to the primacy of the economy’ not to the detriment of the issues raised by postmodern forms of
politicization, but precisely in order to create the conditions for the more effective realization of feminist, ecological, and so on, demands. A
further indicator of the necessity for some kind of politicization of the economy is the overtly ‘irrational’ prospect of concentrating quasi-
monopolistic power in the hands of a single individual or corporation, like Rupert Murdoch or Bill Gates. If the next decade brings the unifica-
tion of the multitude of communicative media in a single apparatus reuniting the features of interactive computer, TV, video- and audio-phone,
video and CD player, and if Microsoft actually succeeds in becoming the quasi-monopolistic owner of this new universal medium, controlling
not only the language used in it but also the conditions of its application, then we obviously approach the absurd situation in which a single
agent, exempt from public control, will in effect dominate the basic communicational structure of our lives and will thus, in a way, be stronger
than any government. This opens up the prospect of paranoiac scenarios: since the digital language we shall all use will none the less be man-
made, constructed by programmers, is it not possible to imagine the corporation that owns it ins.talling in it some special secret program
ingredient which will enable it to control us, or a virus which the corporation can trigger, and thus bring our communication to a halt? When
biogenetic corporations assert their ownership of our genes through patenting them, they also give rise to a similar paradox of owning the
innermost parts of our body, so that we are already owned by a corporation without even being aware of it. The prospect we are confronting is
thus that both the communicational network we use and the genetic language we are made of will be owned and controlled by corporations (or
even a corporation) out of public control. Again, does not the very absurdity of this prospect — the private control of the very public base of
our communication and reproduction, the very network of our social being — impose a kind of socialization as the only solution? In other
words, is not the impact of the so-called information revolution on capitalism the ultimate exemplification of the old Marxian thesis that ‘at a
certain stage of their development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production, or —
what is but a legal expression of the same thing — with the property relations within which they have been at work hitherto’?3~ Do not the two
phenomena we have mentioned (the unpredictable global consequences of decisions made by private companies; the patent absurdity of
owning’ a person’s genome or the media individuals use for communication), to which one should add at least the antagonism contained in the
notion of owning (scientific) knowledge (since knowledge is by nature neutral to its propagation, that is, it is not worn out by its spread and
universal use), explain why today’s capitalism has to resort to more and more absurd strategies to sustain the economy of scarcity in the sphere
of information, and thus to contain within the frame of private property and market relations the demon it has unleashed (say, by inventing
ever new modes of preventing the free copying of digitalized information)? In short, does not the prospect of the informational ‘global village’
signal the end of market relations (which are by definition, based on the logic of scarcity), at least in the sphere of digitalized information? After
the demise of Socialism, the ultimate fear of Western capitalism is that another nation or ethnic group will beat the West on its own capitalist
terms, combining the productivity of capitalism with a form of social mores foreign to us in the West: in the l970s, the object of fear and
fascination was Japan; while now, after a short interlude of fascination with SouthEast Asia, attention
is focusing more and
more on China as the next superpower, combining capitalism with the Communist political
structure. Such fears ultimately give rise to purely phantasmic formations, like the image of
China surpassing the West in productivity while retaining its authoritarian sociopolitical
structure — one is tempted to designate this phantasmic combination the ‘Asiatic mode of
capitalist production’. Against these fears, one should emphasize that China will , sooner or later,
pay the price for the unbridled development of capitalism in new forms of social unrest and
instability: the ‘winning formula’ of combining capitalism with the Asiatic ‘closed’ ethical
community life-world is doomed to explode. Now, more than ever, one should reassert Marx’s old formula that the limit
of capitalism is Capital itself: the danger to Western capitalism comes not from outside, from the
Chinese or some other monster beating us at our own game while depriving us of Western
liberal individualism, but from the inherent limit of its own process of colonizing ever new (not
only geographic but also cultural, psychic, etc.) domains, of eroding the last resistant spheres of non-reflected
substantial being, which has to end in some kind of implosion, when Capital will no longer
have any substantial content outside itself to feed on. 39 One should take Marx’s metaphor of
Capital as a vampire-like entity literally: it needs some kind of pre-reflexive ‘natural
productivity’ (talents in different domains of art, inventors in science, etc.) in order to feed on its own blood, and
thus to reproduce itself — when the circle closes itself, when reflexivity becomes thoroughly universal, the whole system is
threatened. Another sign which points in this direction is how, in the sphere of what Adorno and Horkheimer called Kulturindustrie, the
desubstantialization and/or reflexivity of the production process has reached a level that threatens the whole system with global implosion.
Even in high art, the recent fashion for exhibitions in which ‘everything is permitted’ and can pass as an art object, up to mutilated animal
bodies, betrays this desperate need of cultural Capital to colonize and include in its circuit even the most extreme and pathological strata of
human subjectivity. Paradoxically — and not without irony — the first musical trend which was in a way ‘fabricated’, exploited for a short time
and very soon forgotten, since it lacked the musical substance to survive and attain the status of ‘classics’ like the early rock of the Beatles and
Rolling Stones, was none other than punk, which simultaneously marked the strongest intrusion of violent working-class protest into
mainstream pop culture — in a kind of mocking version of the Hegelian infinite judgement, in which opposites directly coincide, the raw energy
of social protest coincided with the new level of commercial prefabrication which, as it were, creates the object it sells out of itself, with no
need for some ‘natural talent’ to emerge and be subsequently exploited, like Baron Munchhausen saving himself from the swamp by pulling
himself up by his own hairs. Do we not encounter the same logic in politics, where the point is less and less to follow a coherent global
programme but, rather, to try to guess, by means of opinion polls, ‘what the people want’, and offer them that? Even in theory, doesn’t the
same hold for cultural studies in the Anglo-Saxon domain, or for the very theory of the risk society?40 Theorists are less and less involved in
substantial theoretical work, restraining themselves to writing short ‘interventions’ which mostly display their anxiety to follow the latest
theoretical trends (in feminism, for example, perspicacious theorists soon realized that radical social constructionism —gender as
pefformatively enacted, and so on — is out; that people are getting tired of it; so they start to rediscover psychoanalysis, the Unconscious; in
postcolonial studies, the latest trend is to oppose multiculturalism as a false solution .. .). The point is thus not simply that cultural studies or
risk society theory is insufficient on account of its content: an
inherent commodification is discernible in the very
form of the social mode of functioning of what are supposed to be the latest forms of the
American or European academic Left. This reflexivity, which is also a crucial part of the ‘second modernity,’ is what the
theorists of the reflexive risk society tend to leave out of consideration.41
Competitiveness
Competitiveness promotes neoliberalism and results in environmental damage,
and turns itself
Bristow 2010[Bristow (School of City & Regional Planning, Cardiff University) 10
(Gillian, Resilient regions: re-‘place’ing regional competitiveness, Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society 2010, 3, 153–167)]
The placelessness of the competitiveness discourse also has other significant implications—implications which directly threaten the resilience of
regions. The discourse of de-contextualised competitiveness
fails to address the question of sustainability or
the environmental costs of globally mobile firms and resources (Bristow and Wells, 2005; Hudson, 2008a). In
fact, the pursuit of this notion of competitiveness works to constrain the possibility of developing more positive policies in relation to the
environment. As Purcell (2009, 145) observes, “a polity that values the environment, for example, might feel it cannot make a strong
environmental policy (e.g. signing on to Kyoto) because it would make the area less competitive. The
neoliberal claim is that
competition is a question of life and death”. Regions feel they must be competitive or die. Strategies based on
more sustainable development approaches then look very optional in the face of the
competitive and global struggle for survival. This reflects the economically reductionist
conception of development that lies at the heart of the competitiveness discourse . The discourse
focuses on the narrowly microeconomic and emphasises the efficiency of individual firms. It also views the production process in a linear
fashion whereby ‘end of pipe’ wastes are ultimately to be disposed of as ‘externalities’ (Hudson, 2005). Similarly, the
discourse
defines the ‘environment’ in terms of the microeconomic business environment, thus
ignoring the broader ecological and material limits and capacities of a region. This creates
short-termist, growth-first approaches to development creating scenarios whereby a region becomes competitive
today by depleting and denuding its physical environment, thereby limiting its competitiveness
for tomorrow (Bristow and Wells, 2005). However, when production processes and economies are understood as broader systems
based on material transformations and flows, the imperative to consider the unavoidable impacts of these processes
becomes much more apparent as does their grounding in place . Place specificities become critical because the
very possibilities of specific sorts of production and economic forms in places necessarily depend upon the sorts of material configurations that
can be captured and held. Each particular regional environment “is itself a product of successive layers of material transformations, that both
enables new forms of transformation and is itself continuously transformed by this process” (Hudson, 2008a, 171). This implies that more
contextualised approaches to competitiveness might, in part at least, address some of the more negative consequences for resilience wrought
by dominant placeless approaches. It is the placelessness of the particular discourse of competitiveness that has been constructed that is the
main problem, not competition or ‘competitive’ (i.e. successful) economic activity per se. It is to questions of how resilience can be progressed
through policy action and strategies that this paper now turns.
Democracy
Attempts to spread democracy create worse forms of democracy that
encourage the inequalities of capitalism
Cox, Ikenberry, and Igonuchi, 2k (Michael, professor in the Dept. of International Politics in the Univ. of Wales, Aberystwyth,
John, professor of polisci @ Univ. Pennsylvania, Takashi, former senior vice-rector of UN university, Professor of political science at the institute
of oriental culture in the univ. of Tokyo., “American Democracy Promotion”, pg. 327, VR)
Rather than promoting an ideal world of justice and democracy, neoliberal economic
globalization (NLEG) is facilitating the emergence of an historic malaise in global capitalism, perhaps even an
‘historic reversal’ of capitalist civilization when judged in terms of social progress. Increasing inequality, social
polarization, and the concentration of wealth in a few hands accompany this formal
democracy. This ‘New Hellenism’ might be better understood through an historical analogy with the long death agony of democracy in
classical Graeco-Roman civilization, in which democracy was slowly stripped of its meaningful substance
through a process of concentration of economic power and increased exploitation of labour.
The historic malaise of global capitalism is now so pronounced that someone like George Soros could recently predict that, if left unchecked,
Although US foreign policy has long
the global crisis of 1997-9 would bring the complete disintegration of the system.
made rhetorical claims to democracy as a universal value and goal, American power was
deeply compromised with authoritarian and dictatorial governments around the world. The
relationship between domestic capitalism and democracy may have been fairly positive in the
US, but the relationships among US capitalism, US power and democracy abroad have been
contradictory. President Bill Clinton was the champion of a new US foreign policy which emphasized the global benefits of democracy
and free trade. When visiting the states of Central America in March 1999, Clinton delivered an unexpected apology for US sponsored terror
and repression during the last four decades, which he called a ‘dark and painful period’. He pledged that the US ‘must not repeat’ such a
American states have been formal and ‘low intensity’ democracies,
mistake. For the past decade Central
but the people of the region are still mired in the same miseries of extreme debt, poverty and
inequality. The same elites remain in power. For example, Arena, the far-right party in El Salvador associated with the
death squads of the Reagan period, has held power throughout the period of low-intensity democracy and was easily re-elected to power in the
same month that Clinton delivered his historic apology. Meanwhile, as the president promised ‘springtimes of renewal’, a billion dollars of
disaster aid for the region was being held up in the US Congress, US trade policies threatened local grain producers while protecting US
markets, and tens of thousands of Central American refugees who fled from the US-Sponsored wars and terrorism of the 1980s were being
threatened with deportation. Such are the vicissitudes of globalization and democracy where the pursuit of power and national interest remain
the primary concerns.
Econ Collapse
Rhetoric of economic collapse snowballs into a politics of crisis in which
capitalism is the only hope for survival
Zizek 97 [Slavoj, Žižek is a senior researcher at the Institute of Sociology University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, and a professor at the European
Graduate School.[4] He has been a visiting professor at, among others, the University of Chicago, Columbia University, London
London and president of the Society for Theoretical Psychoanalysis, Ljubljana, “Multiculturalism, or, the cultural logic of multinational
capitalism,” New Left Review # 224 p. 34-35)
So, back to the recent Labour victory, one can see how it not only involved a hegemonic reappropriation of a series of motifs which were
usually inscribed into the Conservative field—family values, law and order, individual responsibility; the Labour ideological offensive also
separated these motifs from the obscene phantasmatic subtext which sustained them in the Conservative field—in which ‘toughness on crime’
and ‘individual responsibility’ subtly referred to brutal egotism, to the disdain for victims, and other ‘basic instincts’. The problem, however, is
that the New Labour strategy involved its own ‘message between the lines’: we fully accept the logic of Capital, we will not mess about with it .
Today, financial crisis is a permanent state of things the reference to which legitimizes the demands to cut social spending, health care, support
of culture and scientific research, in short, the dismantling of the welfare state. Is, however, this permanent crisis really an objective feature of
our socio-economic life? Is it not rather one of the effects of the shift of balance in the ‘class struggle’ towards Capital, resulting from the
growing role of new technologies as well as from the direct internationalization of Capital and the co-dependent diminished role of the Nation-
State which was further able to impose certain minimal requirements and limitations to exploitation? In other words, the crisis is an ‘objective
fact’ if and only if one accepts in advance as an unquestionable premise the inherent logic of Capital—as more and more left-wing or liberal
parties have done. We are thus witnessing the uncanny spectacle of social-democratic parties which came to power with the between-the-lines
message to Capital ‘we will do the necessary job for you in an even more efficient and painless way than the conservatives’. The problem, of
course, is that, in today’s global socio-political circumstances, it is practically impossible effectively to call into question the logic of Capital: even
a modest social-democratic attempt to redistribute wealth beyond the limit acceptable to the Capital ‘effectively’ leads to economic crisis,
inflation, a fall in revenues and so on. Nevertheless, one should always bear in mind how the connection between ‘cause’ (rising social
expenditure) and ‘effect’ (economic crisis) is not a direct objective causal one: it is always-already embedded in a situation of social antagonism
and struggle. The fact that, if one does not obey the limits set by Capital, a crisis ‘really follows’, in no way ‘proves’ that the necessity of these
limits is an objective necessity of economic life. It should rather be conceived as a proof of the privileged position Capital holds in the
economic and political struggle, as in the situation where a stronger partner threatens that if you do X, you will be punished by Y, and then,
upon your doing X, Y effectively ensues.
Econ Expansion
The US economy is used in an imperialist manner to take over other economies
Hardt and Negri 2000 [Michael Hardt, PhD In Comparitive Literature from U Washington and Antonio Negri, Professor @ U of Paris,
2000 and Italian Marxist sociologist and political philosopher. “Empire, pg 264-265]
As the global confluence of struggles undermined the capitalist and imperialist capacities of discipline, the
economic order that
had dominated the globe for almost thirty years, the Golden Age of U.S. hegemony and
capitalist growth, began to unravel. The form and substance of the capitalist management of international development for
the postwar period were dictated at the conference at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, in 1944.[8] The Bretton Woods system was based on
three fundamental elements. Its first characteristic was the
comprehensive economic hegemony of the United
States over all the nonsocialist countries. This hegemony was secured through the strategic
choice of a liberal development based on relatively free trade and moreover by maintaining
gold (of which the United States possessed about one third of the world total) as the guarantee of the power of the
dollar. The dollar was "as good as gold." Second, the system demanded the agreement for monetary
stabilization between the United States and the other dominant capitalist countries (first Europe
then Japan) over the traditional territories of European imperialisms , which had been dominated previously by
the British pound and the French franc. Reform in the dominant capitalist countries could thus be financed by a surplus of exports to the United
States and guaranteed by the monetary system of the dollar. Finally, Bretton Woods dictated the establishment of a quasi-
imperialist relationship of the United States over all the subordinate nonsocialist countries.
Economic development within the United States and stabilization and reform in Europe and
Japan were all guaranteed by the United States insofar as it accumulated imperialist
superprofits through its relationship to the subordinate countries. The system of U.S.
monetary hegemony was a fundamentally new arrangement because, whereas the control of previous
international monetary systems (notably the British) had been firmly in the hands of private bankers and financiers , Bretton Woods
gave control to a series of governmental and regulatory organizations, including the International
Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and ultimately the U.S. Federal Reserve.[9] Bretton Woods might thus be understood as the monetary and
financial face of the hegemony of the New Deal model over the global capitalist economy. The Keynesian and pseudo-imperialist mechanisms
of Bretton Woods eventually went into crisis when the continuity of the workers' struggles in the United States, Europe, and Japan raised the
costs of stabilization and reformism, and when anti-imperialist and anticapitalist struggles in subordinate countries began to undermine the
extraction of superprofits.[10]
Econ Growth
Any reform or attempt at making growth sustainable is bound to fail – the point
of their type of counter-measure to the ecological crisis is not to fundamentally
change growth’s relation to ecology, but to pave the way for more growth in the
future. That strategy ensures that collapse is inevitable.
Joel Kovel, Professor of Social Studies at Bard College, 2002,
(The Enemy of Nature, p. 22-24)
Since Plato at least, people have been observing the potential for deleterious environmental effects, and since the publication of George Perkins Marsh’s Man and
Nature in 1864, the possibility of systemic ecological damage has been raised. Marsh, however, was a visionary, and it took another century for the grim possibility
of global ecosystemic decay to enter the general consciousness and become a concern of elites. In 1970, the notion of the ‘limits to growth’ entered the collective
vocabulary, to be joined as time went on by other buzzwords such as ‘sustainability’ and ‘throughput’ .7 For a time it seemed as if humanity had
awakened to its own harmfulness. But then something strange happened. Even as the vocabulary of ecological concern
proliferated, along with a large bureaucratic apparatus, non-governmental as well as governmental, for putting it into effect, a shift occurred
and the notion of ‘limits to growth’ became passé. Where once not so very long ago there was substantial concern that some
combination of rising population and industrial expansion would overwhelm the earth with catastrophic
consequences for civilization, today thoughts of the kind are distinctly unfashionable, even if not entirely
extinguished. What is odd is that, as we have already seen, ‘growth’, whether of population or industrial output,
certainly did not slacken in this period. The latter is especially troubling, inasmuch as population, however unacceptably large it may be, shows signs of levelling across most of
the world (even reaching zero or slightly negative levels in Japan and some Western European countries, and rather precipitous declines in the former Soviet bloc). Nothing of the sort can be
said about the other kind of growth, that pertaining to industrial output or production in general, however this may be measured.8 According to the Worldwatch Institute, a mainstream organ-
ization charged with monitoring the world’s ecology, the global economy increased from $2.3 trillion in 1900, to $20 trillion in 8990 and an astounding $39 trillion in 1998. To quote, the
‘growth in economic output in just three years — from 1995 to 1998 — exceeded that during the 10,000 years from the beginning of agriculture until 1990. And growth of the global economy
in i997 alone easily exceeded that during the seventeenth century’9 This is consistent with the fact that world trade has increased by a factor of 15 over the past four decades, all of which
The Malthusian principle
lends support to the prediction, made in 1997, that gross world product will double within the next 20 years, that is, to some $80 trillion dollars.
that population will increase exponentially —a crude reduction of conscious creatures to machines obeying the
rules of elementary algebra — has now been empirically as well as theoretically demolished. If there is to be a fatally
destabilizing exponential increase of load, it will come in the economic sphere. This is certified by the figures just given, and, more significantly, by the
value accorded them in established channels of opinion. We can easily imagine the horror and outrage with which an announcement that population would double
in the next 20 years would be greeted. A similar claim made for economic activity however, not only evades criticism but is greeted as though a sign of the Second
Coming. Predictions of growth may or may not turn out to be on schedule. In fact, they got slowed a bit by the Asian financial meltdowns that began even as they
were announced, and all the vagaries of the global economy will play a role in their realization. What matters, however, is that the
world is run by those
who see limits to growth as anathema. The scenario of ecological collapse holds, in essence, that the cumulative effects
of growth eventually overwhelm the integrity of ecosystems on a world scale, leading to a cascading series of shocks . Just how the blows
will fall is impossible to tell with any precision, although a number of useful computer models have been
assembled. In general terms, we would anticipate interacting calamities that invade and rupture the core material
substrata of civilization — food, water, air, habitat, bodily health. Already each of these physical substrata is under stress, and the logic of the crisis
dictates that these stresses will increase. Other shocks and perturbations are likely to ensue as resource depletion supervenes for example, in the supply of
petroleum, which is expected to begin levelling off and then decline after the next ten years.’2 Or some unforeseen economic shock will topple the balance: perhaps
climatic catastrophes will trigger a collapse of the $2 trillion global insurance industry, with, as Jeremy Leggett has noted, ‘knock-on economic consequences which
are completely ignored in most analyses of climate change’.’3 Perhaps famines will incite wars in which rogue nuclear powers will launch their reign of terror.
Perhaps a similar fate will come through the eruption of as yet unforeseen global pandemics, such as the return of smallpox, currently considered to be within the
range of possibilities open to terrorist groups. Or perhaps a sudden break-up of the Antarctic ice shelf will cause seas to suddenly rise by several metres, displacing
hundreds of millions and precipitating yet more violent climatic changes. Or perhaps nothing so dramatic will take place, but only a slow and steady deterioration in
ecosystems, associated with a rise in authoritarianism. The apocalyptic scenarios now so commonly making the rounds of films, best-selling novels, comic books,
computer games and television are not so much harbingers of the future as inchoate renderings of the present ecological crisis. With terror in the air, these mass
fantasies can become the logos of a new order of fascism — a fascism that, in the name of making the planet habitable, only aggravates the crisis as it further
disintegrates human ecologies. Or maybe things will work out and we will all muddle through somehow. The notion of limits to growth may have been shelved, but
the system has not been sleeping. A vast complex of recuperative measures has been installed in its place, remedies that seek to restore ecological balance without
threatening the main economic engines. Given the skill and resources devoted to the project, there is bound to be some good news to report. What is at issue,
however, is adequacy: whether all the pollution controls, efficiencies, trading of credits, resource substitutions, information-rich com-
modities, engineered biological products, ‘green business’ and the like can compensate for retaining a system whose very
heartbeat is growth without boundaries. Remember, the point of all these counter-measures is not just to protect against ecological
breakdown, but to bring on line new sources of growth. This raises the spectre of a world like a gigantic Potemkin village,
where a green and orderly facade conceals and reassures, while accelerated breakdown takes place behind its
walls.
Energy
Incentives for solving for energy problems inevitably rely on capitalist logic,
reinforcing the system. This environmental reformism masks the root cause of
ecological harm, turning the case.
Townsend 08 [Terry Townsend, Managing Editor, Climate and Capitalism, 2008, “Individual Versus Social Solutions to Global Warming,”
http://climateandcapitalism.com/?p=399]
The main “solutions” being offered by the capitalist class , its politicians and the corporate-dominated mass media
— and endorsed by some key peak environmental organizations — are consciously designed to shift the
responsibility for, and the major costs of, addressing global warming away from the most polluting
corporations and to preserve the basic structure and mechanisms of Western capitalist
economies. They are also designed to delay the necessary political, economic and social changes for as long as possible, and to keep them
to the minimum that are compatible (in their assessment) with both the survival of capitalist society and ameliorating the worst of climate
change. This is why major-party politicians and the corporate media — and again unfortunately some peak environment groups – do not place
serious demands on big business, but endorse — even celebrate — big business’ preferred measures of emissions trading, “green” taxes,
carbon offsetting projects in the Third World and capitalism-friendly publicly subsidized techno-fixes such as so-called clean coal and agro-fuels.
These false “solutions” are not only inadequate, they are counterproductive. However, since other
speakers and workshops will be focusing on those, I’ll concentrate on another of the establishment’s favoured — and ultimately also
counterproductive — “solution” — one that is intertwined with the others. The push for all individuals to voluntarily consume a little less, and
“buy green” whenever they can. That the answer to global warming is for all of “us” — consumers, workers, residents, pensioners — to
voluntarily change our wasteful behaviour. Despite its benign aura of commonsense advice, this is a massive ideological campaign to drive
home to “us” that it is ordinary working people who are ultimately to blame for climate change, and that it is “us who must pay for its solution.
It is part of the ruling class’ overall offensive to shift the blame and cost of addressing global
warming away from itself and its intrinsically environmentally destructive economic and
social system. As one commentator aptly noted in the usually system-friendly Grist e-zine “every time an activist or
politician hectors the public to voluntarily reach for a new [fluro] bulb or spend extra on a Prius,
Exxon Mobil heaves a big sigh of relief,” because it diverts people’s attention from what is
really necessary to address the crisis, and from who is really responsible. Death by a thousand tips
Another radical commentator, George Marshall, has described this ideological offensive as “death [by] a thousand tips.” He is referring to the
literally tens of thousands of newspaper articles and web pages that, after having outlined the severe crisis we face and the sharply diminishing
time society has to respond, direct the reader to a snappy, upbeat sidebar or list entitled “10 easy tips to save the planet” or some variation
thereof. The same sort of lists have been the core of government-sponsored campaigns across the globe, including Australia. Standard items
include “change your light globes,” “turn off unnecessary lights,” “don’t leave your appliances on stand-by,” “adjust your thermostats,” recycle,
compost, drive a fuel-efficient car, or drive less. Yet extremely rarely do these helpful hints mention political action, let alone make concrete
demands on governments or business. On the odd occasion they do, it is vague and tokenistic – and tacked onto the end of the list. Of course,
there is a place for action by individuals, and it should not be discouraged. It does make sense in terms of saving energy and water, reducing
waste and saving money. Educating and facilitating such behaviour on a mass scale is a significant part of what is needed to halt global
warming. But such
suggestions should not be counterposed to, or used to drown out calls for, the
urgent need for mass political action to force the necessary cuts to emission demanded by
the science. And they should not be cynically presented, as they are by the corporate media and capitalist politicians, as the way to save
the planet. In Britain, the government spent £22 million on a “Do your bit” campaign and had to admit that it produced no measurable change
in personal habits. A poll in 2007 indicated that this campaign had miseducated people, with more than 40% saying that recycling household
waste — which would result in a relatively small reduction of emissions — was the most important thing they could do. Only 10% nominated
the far more effective regular use of public transport. That £22 million would have been better spent to organize a movement to demand an
end to the massive and wasteful packaging and advertising industries, or the mass expansion of public transport. In Ireland, faced with
greenhouse gas emissions that have increased 25% since 1990, the government’s response was to launch a multimillion euro “The Power on
One” campaign, which provides — yes, you guessed it — “10 top tips” to “make a difference.” Among the revolutionary actions suggested
were: don’t overfill your kettle, but fill your dishwasher before use, and unplug your mobile phone charger. As George Marshall quips, all “that
sounds much nicer than curtailing road building or industrial growth. They are not called èasy tips’ for nothing.” On October 15, the UN
Environment Program organised a “Blog Action Day” in which some 15,000 blog sites offered more “tips” to web surfers, from the inevitable
changing light globes to one of Copyblogger.com’s “tiny actions [that] can save the world”: quit your job requiring a long commute and start up
a home-based business! Copyblogger’s not alone in making “tips” that are simply beyond the means of most debt-strapped working people in
these days of widespread “mortgage stress” and rising interest rates. Common “tips” include buying more expensive hybrid cars and building
architect-designed “carbon neutral” houses. Blaming working people All such campaigns are premised on blaming working people for global
warming. But as Dave Holmes, a veteran Australian socialist, points out in the latest Green Left Weekly, what
real choice to do the
mass of ordinary people have: “the source of our current crisis is quite specific: it is the
operations of modern capitalism. The drive for profits by the giant corporations has been relentless and has been pursued in
complete disregard of any impact on the environment. “The fundamental conditions under which we live — how
we generate our power, how we get around, how our food is grown , etc. — are not decided by
us but rather by the big corporations that control society’s means of production. Without the
rule of corporate capital we could set in place radically different and ecologically sustainable
arrangements. “For example, the cars which most of us use are a significant source of greenhouse gas emissions…The favouring
of private motor vehicles over public transport hasn’t come about because we are innately a
society of petrol-heads but is a consequence of the deliberate policies of a succession of
capitalist governments loyally protecting the interests of their big business masters. The auto
industry and its associated sectors make up a very large part of each national capitalist economy.” However well intentioned, appeals to people
to change their individual habits bring trivial results when measured against the problem, and if not coupled to the much more urgent task of
politically mobilizing to demand serious government action to immediately reduce and rapidly halt greenhouse gas emissions, it derails mass
concern about global warming from taking a political road. The Earth Hour Greenwash It also sells the damaging lie that “clean,” “green,”
“natural” and “organic” commodities are the answer, when they are fundamentally no better for the planet than any other over-produced
commodities under capitalism. It plays into the hands of the mega-financed “Greenwashing” by corporations and governments of an
unsustainable economic system. If anything sums up this sort of operation, it was the massively publicized “Earth Hour” on March 29. The
brainchild in 2007 of the World Wildlife Fund, Fairfax newspapers and the Leo Burnett advertising agency, Earth Hour declares on its website:
“Created to take a stand against the greatest threat our planet has ever faced, Earth Hour uses the simple action of turning off the lights for one
hour to deliver a powerful message about the need for action on global warming.” But you will search in vain for any demands for political
action, just boilerplate “tips.” It states: “Earth Hour is the highlight of a major campaign to encourage businesses, communities and individuals
to take the simple steps needed to cut their emissions on an ongoing basis. It is about simple changes that will collectively make a difference —
from businesses turning off their lights when their offices are empty to households turning off appliances rather than leaving them on standby.”
There was more of the same in the 40-page, full-colour Earth Hour Magazine that was distributed “free” (free that is if you don’t consider the
small forest and who knows how many tonnes of CO2 that were expended in its production and distribution) with the approximate 211,000
copies of the Sydney Morning Herald on March 17. Only one article, by Tim Flannery, made any serious attempt to point out the vested
interests that need to be tackled and raised the issues of inadequate public transport, stopping new coal plants and setting adequate emission-
reduction targets by 2050. But his contribution was buried under an avalanche of yet more regurgitated “tips,” feel-good stories and gumph
such as this: “Many governments and communities have already made big changes to reduce emissions. The use of solar and wind power is on
the increase. Other renewable energy sources are being investigated. Millions of dollars are being spent exploring ways to bury carbon dioxide
or to produce cleaner coal. But more needs to be done and politicians need to be brave enough to make tough decisions. If those politicians
know that a couple of million people in their homeland have joined Earth Hour, they can be confident that the people will support the hard
decisions and will applaud leaders who have the will to act.” Don’t expect Fairfax to support “hard decisions” that impact on the big end of
town, though. “Hard decisions” is code for making you and me pay higher bills. The supplement was festooned with full-page ads by electricity
suppliers such as EnergyAustralia, Integral Energy and Country Energy — the ones that hawk all that coal power — car companies such as
Toyota, Fiat and Hyundai (Volvo waited for 8-page post-Earth Hour “Souvenir edition” Sydney Morning Herald), and even Cascade beer (100%
Carbon Offset!). Corporate and government “greenwashing” was the central goal of the pre-hour hullabaloo. For all the talk of millions of
Australians taking part, almost the sole yardstick of the night’s success was on corporate office blocks and huge neon advertising signs in the
CBD switching off. The participation of major publicly owned landmarks is really what made the impact. Which begs the question, why aren’t all
these lights and signs switched off every night? Fossil fuel giant AGL loaned the giant WWF-logoed hot air balloon, which sailed over several
capital cities beforehand, producing an estimated 378 kilograms of CO2 an hour. That’s the same AGL that is a shareholder in Victoria’s largest
brown coal mine. Richard Branson gave his grin of approval, ever keen to “offset” the impact of his fleet of 38 747s. BP — the world’s third
largest global energy company — also promised to turn off all its “non-essential lighting.” Let’s not mention that BP was named one of the “ten
worst corporations” in both 2001 and 2005 based on its environmental and human rights records. Or that it is busy trying to mine the ultra-
polluting tar sands oil in Canada. McDonald’s turned off it Golden Arches for an hour nationally! So the literally millions on tonnes of useless
packaging produced by this lot, not to mention the clearing of Amazonian rainforest for beef for Maccas, is forgiven. Not surprisingly, Channel
Nine’s support did not extend to urging people to switch of the tellie or to refusing to air the ads of CO2 polluters. Behind the scenes,
advertising industry magazine Campaign Brief in league with the SMH offered an incentive to copywriters who “demonstrate the most effective
and/or inspirational way to leverage Earth Hour 2008” — two return trips to Cannes in France! And last but certainly not least, the eco-friendly
Department of Defence signed up to participate in Earth Hour. Federal Labor defence minister Joel Fitzgibbon announced: “Defence takes its
obligations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions seriously and will have over 1330 buildings across Australia participating in Earth Hour.” The
minister of war also reported that the department had launched the Combat Climate Change initiative (clever pun) to provide information and
“tips” to defence staff in the “workplace” and home to reduce energy use. Here’s a “tip” Joel: get all troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan, and
end all support for those wars for US imperialist control of energy sources. In the end, despite the hype and PR, the results were hardly
impressive. In the hour, electricity consumption across whole city and the Illawarra dropped just 2-3%, while in the CBD it was just over 8%.
Nationwide figures put the drop at 3.6%. Based on a survey of 3000, WWF claimed 59% of Sydneysiders took part — a figure that doesn’t gel
with the marginal power drop, if simply turning off lights is the way forward. Anyway, it seems that the WWF and Fairfax were not going to let
their advertisers down and were going to declare the night a success whatever the result. The Online Fairfax-owned Brisbane Times reported
that “Brisbane made history this evening with the city’s first official Earth Hour going off without a hitch. Kellie Caught, of Earth Hour organiser
World Wildlife Fund, said she was thrilled with the response.” Only problem was, this was published on March 28, 26 hours before Earth Hour
had even taken place! The last word on Earth Hour should go to Jimmy Yan, a member of the Glen Waverley Secondary College Eco-Committee,
whose excellent critique was carried on the committee’s blog: “Earth Hour rests on the assumption that the environmental movement can
make any real progress without looking at the deeper social and political institutions and systems within our society that cause our
environmental problems, one of them being a system that seeks to accumulate as much profit as possible for the sake of more accumulation
and more competition irrespective of the human, environmental and social cost. Our environmental problems become another commodity that
is bought and sold on the market … “Ultimately, events like Earth Hour … rest on the idea that we can trust and work with those responsible for
environmental destruction without holding them accountable for their crimes and the assumption that ordinary people are too stupid and
naive to go beyond just turning off their lights for one hour.” Mass movement needed We have to convince millions of people and build a mass
movement for emission-reductions that genuinely address the real problem. For Australia, that’s at least 90% by 2030 — not Labor’s anaemic
60% by 2050. A movement that demands that governments impose far-reaching measures that force giant industrial polluters to rapidly and
massively slash their emissions, at the risk of massive fines. And if they refuse, they should be nationalized and run in the interests of the
workers and consumers. All public subsidies and tax concessions for the giant fossil fuel industries and resource corporations — which amount
to billions — should be redirected to research the development of publicly owned renewable energy sources. We could help ordinary people
implement individual actions, by supplying free or at a massive subsidy to all households solar waters heaters and water tanks. There should be
a massive reorganization of society to move away from private-car-based transportation to free and frequent mass public transport, and,
redesign our cities to put people’s homes close to work and shops. We need to think about ways of linking these wider demands with our more
immediate campaigns, for example as we fight to stop the Tasmanian pulp mill, oppose power privatization, end coal and uranium mining, and
to stop the building of new freeways and toll roads, we have to also convince people that the workings of capitalism itself is both responsible
for the crisis and also the main obstacle to its solution. The real source of the problem Through struggles for immediate and broader demands,
masses of people can come to understand that the source of the problem lies with capitalism itself. The scientific analysis of capitalism first
made by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, illustrates how, despite the assertions of many environmental movement theorists over the years,
Marxism not only provides essential insights into the fundamental cause of the environmental crisis, but also offers a political guide to its
solution. Capitalism’s fundamentally anti-ecological trait is captured by Marx’s analysis of the working of capitalism. Capitalists
buy or
produce commodities only in order to sell them for a profit, and then buy or produce yet
more to sell more again. There is no end to the process. Competition between capitalists
ensures that each one must continue to increase their production of commodities and
continue to expand in order to survive. Production tends to expand exponentially until
interrupted by crises (depressions and wars) and it is this dynamic at the very core of capitalism that
places enormous, unsustainable pressure on the environment. Capitalism is a system that
pursues growth for its own sake, whatever the consequences. This is why all schemes based on the hope of a no-growth, slow-
growth or a sustainable-growth forms of capitalism are pipe dreams. As too are strategies based on a critical mass of individual consumers
deciding to go “green” in order to reform the system. People are not “consumers” by nature. A multi-billion-dollar capitalist industry called
advertising constantly plays with our minds to convince us that happiness comes only through buying more and more “stuff,” to keep up with
endless wasteful fads, fashions, upgrades, new models and built-in obsolescence. The desire for destructive and/or pointless goods is
manufactured along with them. In 2008, an estimated $750 billion will be spent on corporate advertising and public relations in the US alone. In
Australia, such spending is now well in excess of $12 billion a year. Manyin the environmental movement argue that
with the right mix of taxes, incentives and regulations, everybody could be winners. Big
business would have cheaper, more efficient production techniques, and therefore be more
profitable, and consumers would have more environment-friendly products and energy
sources. In a rational society, such innovations would lower the overall environmental impact of production. Unfortunately, we
don’t live in a rational society. Any energy and money savings made through efficiency are
used to make and sell more commodities, cheaper than their competitors. Capitalism
approaches technology — in the production process or in the final product — in the same way as it does
everything else. What will generate the most profits? Whether it is efficient, clean, safe, environmentally benign or
rational has little to do with it. The technologies that could tackle global warming have long existed. Even though research into them has been
massively underfunded, renewable energy sources are today competitive with coal and nuclear power (if the negative social and environmental
costs are factored in). Public transport systems have been around since the late 1800s. Fundamental to capitalism’s development has been its
power to shift the cost of its ecological and social vandalism onto society as whole. More
profits can accrue if the big
capitalists don’t have to bother themselves with the elimination, neutralization or recycling
of industrial wastes. It’s much cheaper to pour toxic waste into the air or the nearest river.
Rather than pay for the real costs of production, society as a whole subsidizes corporate profit-making by cleaning up some of the mess or
suffering the environmental and/or health costs. Or the whole messy business can simply be exported to the Third World. It is becoming
abundantly clear that the Earth cannot sustain this system’s plundering and poisoning
without the humanity sooner or later experiencing a complete ecological catastrophe. To
have any chance of preventing this, within the 10- to 30-year window that we have in relation to global warming,
humanity must take conscious, rational control of its interactions with the planet and its
ecological processes, in ways that capitalism is inherently incapable of doing.
Ethics
A new ethical system is simply a mask for capitalism
Zizek 08[Slavoj, Žižek is a senior researcher at the Institute of Sociology University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, and a professor at the European
London and president of the Society for Theoretical Psychoanalysis, Ljubljana “Violence”, 2008, Spencer]
And what if this is true in a much more radical way than may at first appear? What if the true evil of our societies is not
their capitalist dynamics as such, but our attempts to extricate ourselves from them-all the while
profiting-by carving out self-enclosed communal spaces, from "gated communities" to
exclusive racial or religious groups? That is to say, is the point of The Village not precisely to demonstrate that today, a return
to an authentic community in which speech still directly expresses true emotions- the village of the socialist Utopia-is a
fake which can only be staged as a spectacle for the very rich? The exemplary figures of evil today are
not ordinary consumers who pollute the environment and live in a violent world of disintegrating social links, but those who, while
fully engaged in creating conditions for such universal devastation and pollution, buy their
way out of their own activity, living in gated communities, eating organic food, taking holidays in wildlife preserves, and so on.
Freedom and Mobility (Best Generic)
Capitalism and transport are intrinsically related – free mobility exists in the acts of
consumption of the privileged class while immobility corresponds with the coerced
and restricted movements of the oppressed.
Seiler 2009 [Cotten, Associate professor of American studies at Dickinson College, “Republic of Drivers : A Cultural History of Automobility in America” pg 22-23]
Mobility’s status as a right— liberalism’s conceptual stock in trade— also owes to capitalism. Raymond Williams historicized mobility as “essentially an impulse formed in the breakdown and
dissolution of older and smaller kinds of settlement and productive labor.” 22 Inasmuch as capitalism has depended upon the availability of a large pool of labor willing to
move across distances small and great, mobility has been extolled culturally as a salutary and enriching characteristic . Indeed, capitalism communicates its
ethos using tropes of motion, as in the capitalist who “hustles” for profit and cultivates the image of himself as a “mover” (an image that, as Benjamin Franklin pointed out, is itself a form of capital). Acts of
production, consumption, and commodification—even the worker’s alienation of her labor power and her sale of it— are ultimately acts of
transport. Mobility is ostensibly a universal right; yet it has been and remains a perquisite of social, political, and economic power, insofar as its true goal is “not movement as such; it is access to people and facilities.” 23 As
Mark Simpson points out, “To the extent that mobility is not so much a common resource as a social and material resource crucial to the production and reproduction . . . of national, raced, engendered, classed subjectivities, it
becomes the locus of contest.” 24 The volitional mobility of the knight-errant, pilgrim, entrepreneur, or tourist—“someone who has the security and privilege to move about
in relatively unconstrained ways”— throws into relief the unsanctioned motion of vagrants or tramps (those in possession of the volatile, expansive subjectivity the historian
Patricia Fumerton distinguishes as “unsettled”), the coerced mobility of the nomad, undocumented worker, or refugee (as in the forced removal of Native Americans), and the
circumscribed mobility of the disabled, racial others (as in the Black Codes and Jim Crow statutes), the poor, and women. 25 As a component of male prerogative, mobility has traditionally
depended, Leed and others have observed, on “the sessility of women.” 26 Scholars such as Clifford, Doreen Massey, Janet Wolff, Annette Kolodny, and Sidonie Smith have further explored mobility as a
deeply gendered practice and form of capital, asking how and why, in Smith’s words, “‘ the traveler’ has remained endurably ‘masculine’” and “modes of motion [are]
identified with masculine competencies.”
Hegemony
US hegemony is an attempt to forestall the collapse of international capitalism.
Beams 03[Nick Beams, member of International Editorial Board and National Secretary of Australian Socialist Equality Party, 2003, “The
Political Economy of American Militarism, part 2” July 2, http://www.wsws.org/articles/2003/jul2003/nb-j10.shtml accessed ac)]
The immediate impetus for the

drive to global domination by the US is rooted in the crisis of capitalist
accumulation, expressed in the persistent downward pressure on the rate of profit and the
failure of the most strenuous efforts over the past 25 years to overcome it. But it is more than this. At
the most fundamental level, the eruption of US imperialism represents a desperate attempt to overcome, albeit in a reactionary manner, the
central contradiction that has bedeviled the capitalist system for the best part of the last century. The
US came to economic and
political ascendancy as World War I exploded. The war , as Trotsky analysed, was rooted in the
contradiction between the development of the productive forces on a global scale and the
division of the world among competing great powers. Each of these powers sought to resolve
the contradiction by establishing its own ascendancy, thereby coming into collision with its
rivals. The Russian Revolution, conceived of and carried forward as the first step in the international socialist revolution, was the first
attempt of a detachment of the working class to resolve the contradiction between world economy and the outmoded nation-state framework
on a progressive basis. Ultimately, the forces of capitalism proved too strong and the working class, as a result of a tragic combination of missed
opportunities and outright betrayals, was unable to carry this program forward. But the historical problem that had erupted with such volcanic
force—the necessity to reorganise the globally developed productive forces of mankind on a new and higher foundation, to free them from the
destructive fetters of private property and the nation-state system—did not disappear. It was able to be suppressed for a period. But the very
development of capitalist production itself ensured that it would come to the surface once again, even more explosively than in the past. The
US conquest of Iraq must be placed within this historical and political context. The
drive for global domination represents
the attempt by American imperialism to resolve the central contradiction of world capitalism
by creating a kind of global American empire, operating according to the rules of the “free
market” interpreted in accordance with the economic needs and interests of US capital, and
policed by its military and the military forces of its allies. This deranged vision of global order was set out by Bush
in his address to West Point graduates on June 1, 2002. The US, he said, now had the best chance since the rise of the nation-state in the
seventeenth century to “build a world where great powers compete in peace instead of prepare for war.” Competition between great nations
was inevitable, but war was not. That was because “America has, and intends to keep, military strengths beyond challenge thereby making the
destabilising arms races of other eras pointless and limiting rivalries to trade and other pursuits of peace.” This proposal to reorganise the world
is even more reactionary than when it was first advanced in 1914. The
US push for global domination, driven on as it
is by the crisis in the very heart of the profit system, cannot bring peace, much less
prosperity, but only deepening attacks on the world’s people, enforced by military and
dictatorial forms of rule.
Homeland Security
Homeland security breeds corporations and a consumerist society that
reinforces states power
Passavant 05 (Paul, Assistant professor of political science at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, “The Strong Neo-liberal State: Crime,
Consumption, Governance”, Muse, VR)
With homeland security fed to the consumer capitalist machine, capitalist markets
themselves reconfigure to profit from this, thereby helping to institutionalize this neo-liberal
security state. September 11th has been functional for consumer capitalism because it has
enabled the creation of new markets and differentiated commodities and services. 91 State and
local governments can subscribe to the Homeland Security Funding Report to get up to date on money available for homeland security
programs.92 Businesses can buy manuals to learn how to become "Patriot Act" compliant. Not
only has the war on terrorism created new markets, but the availability of government
money for state and local governments and private government contractors means that
governments and businesses will become dependent, to varying degrees, on the homeland
security regime.93 This money will shape which capacities for government will be developed,
it will stimulate demand for increased funding for these security-oriented programs , it will thus stimulate and
institutionalize a discourse of homeland security to further access to these monies, and this
economy of homeland security will become resistant to change through the production of
stakeholders -- those who hold a financial stake in this institutional arrangement and thus
will resist efforts to diminish its funding or do away with it .94 According to Business Week, government and
private-sector security spending together are expected to reach between $130 to $180 billion a year by 2010, up from $65 billion in 2003. A 13-
stock index of publicly traded homeland security companies increased 20 percent during the first six months of 2004. One reason for this is the
increase in government contracts for homeland security purposes. For example, the DHS budget for fiscal year 2005 is $40.7 billion, an increase
of over ten percent from the previous year's resource level. While its past budgets have been devoted to personnel -- like airport security -- it is
expected that future money will go increasingly to the development of anti-terror tools, which will mean data mining, surveillance, and
identity/ identification technologies, for instance.95 One of the biggest CDBs, Choicepoint, claims to have contracts with at least 35 government
agencies. According to the ACLU, it has an $8 million contract with the DOJ that allows FBI agents to utilize its database of personal information
on individuals. It has similar contracts with the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), the U.S. Marshal Service (USMS), the Internal Revenue
Service (IRS), Immigration Services, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF). Another CDB, Seisint, has received more than $9
million from the DOJ and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to provide commercial data to the MATRIX program. 96 The homeland
security budget has been described as a "jump ball" and a "feeding frenzy." Compared to Defense, where the major DOD players and contracts
are largely known and established, homeland security is still "very much in the formative stages, with the real activity further down the pike,"
according to Northrop's vice president for homeland security.97 The state interest in security is coming to shape the market and its
commodities. Because of the huge increase in subpoenas served on ISPs, Cisco systems has developed a more efficient "lawful interception"
capability, which it will embed in its products to facilitate ISPs' compliance with police requests.98 In fact, due to the huge increase in
governmental use of CDBs, these companies are "actually creating and reshaping their products to meet the needs of government security
agencies," according to the ACLU.99 One company, Database Technologies, offers an automatic 33 percent discount on its services to law
enforcement agencies.100 According to a GAO report, representatives of air traveler groups see in the TSA's Registered Traveler program
commercial opportunities. These groups anticipate that they will not only provide "registered travelers with discounts" at travel-related
businesses, but that they also envision "extensive marketing uses for data collected on registered travelers" by selling it to travel-related
businesses.101 And the software giant Oracle has offered to develop the software for a national identification card free of charge, seeing a
Unfortunately, the so-called "war on
significant potential for profit simply in the maintenance of the system.102
terror" evinces a similar logic with the massive growth in the use of private military
contractors, most notably in the war on Iraq.103 Today, ours is a society defined in part by
the governmentality of background checks, a governmentality enhanced by consumer
capitalism. Indeed, Choicepoint now offers "check-in-a-box" software through Sam's Club stores for $39.77. This product contains a CD-
ROM that allows users to tap Choicepoint's online databases, giving small businesses and other users the same opportunity to perform
background checks on its employees or job candidates or whoever as larger firms have enjoyed (small business has been somewhat behind the
curve on background checks -- only 69 percent, compared with 80 percent of larger firms, currently perform such checks). Choicepoint also
sells background checks to jobseekers through Yahoo's HotJobs.com online employment board so that jobseekers can internalize the gaze of
background checks, see themselves as their prospective employers see them, and govern their selves accordingly. Completing the circle, one
must be a member of Sam's Club to use Choicepoint's product, so that profiles can be created of those who consume this commodified form of
surveillance.104 While much has been written about the various mechanisms that the USA PATRIOT Act and other legislation
provides for coercing obedience to state interests, the extent to which "business and government have become allies" is perhaps the most
Recognizing the opportunity presented by the
notable aspect of the contemporary neo-liberal state formation.105
anniversary of September 11th, a variety of products were developed the release of which
were timed to coincide with this date and to take advantage of the holiday shopping season.
Indeed, multiple video games utilizing post-September 11th themes were released during this period, including PlayStation2's "Conflict: Desert
By
Storm II -- Back to Baghdad," a simulation for computer gamers that preceded the real event it simulated by five months.106
mobilizing the nation to become good consumers and to go shopping in the wake of
September 11th, Bush has calling into being a certain type of active subject -- the consumer --
that is useful for not only the present mode of capitalism but also for reproducing state
power. By purchasing these commodities and by multiplying their presence on our bodies, in our living spaces, in the stores, and in our
everyday lives, consumers not only extend the present state of being financially, they create a visual culture that manifests support for the
The present state of homeland security, then, creates a political
present state of affairs and its projects.107
rationality that influences the development of certain state capacities over others. In a
remarkable alliance between business and government, the market shapes its products to
state purchasing of security in order to take advantage of government contracts. Indeed, in so
far as we are governed by a mentality of security and background checks, a market in
addition to the state is developing for these commodities. With the security industry
becoming an increasingly substantial industry, the power of those who hold a financial stake
in this state formation also increases. The neo-liberal state of homeland security is becoming
more and more entrenched as an economic demand is produced for this state and its
largesse.
Human Rights
Human rights rhetoric just masks the ruling power structures.
Wilkie 02
(Rob, Judith Butler's "Guantánamo Bay": A Marxist Critique, THE RED CRITIQUE, May, 2002
http://www.redcritique.org/MayJune02/printversions/ judithbutlersguantanamobayprint.htm)-mikee
In her essay, "Guantánamo Limbo", (The Nation, April 1, 2002), Judith Butler argues for the development of
a more "nuanced" and
"ethical" theory of international human rights. "Nuanced" and "ethical" are code words on the
contemporary academic left for a subtle form of opportunism that textualizes the existing
conditions and demonstrates their intricate layeredness but after many interpretive twists
arrives at a verdict that legitimizes the ruling power structures in a new rhetoric . Judith Butler has not
only mastered this technique, but has helped popularize it into a new form of red-baiting against those who dare to question the priority of
rhetoric over class (a questioning she rejects out-of-hand as "left conservatism").
An endorsement of universal human rights lets global capital accelerate, the

plan is the wrong focus, we must struggle for class consciousness.
Wilkie 02
(Rob, Judith Butler's "Guantánamo Bay": A Marxist Critique, THE RED CRITIQUE, May, 2002
http://www.redcritique.org/MayJune02/printversions/ judithbutlersguantanamobayprint.htm)-mikee
Butler's "conclusion" (never mind that such conclusion is obtained by discursive violence that fixes the meaning of the "non-nomadic",
"nation-",) that the
Geneva accords and the repressive actions of the Bush administration are merely
two articulations of the same interests is justified as an enlightened, "left complexity". Her argument
is, however, an instance of left intellectuals (following the example of Antonio Negri and others) providing a
progressive alibi for imperialism—an alibi which "subtly" (and to the relief of the powerful) renders the line between
oppressors and oppressed in a constant state of "limbo" and indeterminacy. Declaring as "outdated" and "unfashionable" political binaries such
as "rich" and "poor", "North" and "South", "democracy" and "fascism", "socialism" and "capitalism",… post-political theorists such as
Butler instead posit that, given the inevitability of the domination of global capital, political oscillation
represents the only freedom from dogmatism. By obscuring the class interests behind the Bush
administration's attack on democracy and, instead, turning the issue of democracy from the
struggle for economic justice to the impossibility of textual representation , Butler erases the
basis for collective political praxis and, in its place, substitutes a "fluctuating" and "flexible" post-politics that, not accidentally,
always reiterates in a culturally radical idiom the clichés of the powerful.
Butler's call for a

"post-national" politics repeats, in a post-bureaucratic language, the policies of the
G-8, which favor a world-without-borders in which capital can travel without any restrictions .
"Guantánamo Limbo" normalizes social contradictions and states that the U.S. attack on
Afghanistan is not an effect of competing class interests (over who will own, control, and profit from the natural and
social resources in the Middle East and central Asia), but rather the after-effect of outdated discourses and fixed ideas. In other words, there
would be a more "just" war in Afghanistan if the combatants were just recognized as "combatants".
The idea of the state sponsored human rights is a mask for capitalistic
domination
Tumino 02 (Stephen, “Contesting the Empire-al Imaginary: The Truth of Democracy as Class” The Red Critique May/June 2002
http://www.redcritique.org/MayJune02/contestingtheempirealimaginary.htm)
The "moral" story about protecting human rights is told to cover up the material truth about
democracy being the freedom to exploit others for profit. The story is needed to alibi the
regime of wage-labor and capital as a fact of nature. In other words, it portrays the normal daily
exploitation of labor under capitalism as the free expression of human nature in comparison
with which its everyday brutality is made to appear "extreme" and "irrational" rather than a
socially necessary consequence of private property. The representation of capitalism as natural is of course not
natural at all but historical: it is needed now to manufacture consensus that capitalism cannot be changed at a time when it is obvious that the
material conditions already exist to abolish class inequality. As Venezuela shows,
it is obvious that what stands in the way
of a regime directed toward meeting people's needs, which is what Chavez represents, is not a
lack of respect for human rights by immoral and corrupt people of the South, but the need of
big business for a bigger share of the world market. It was the US oil giants represented by the Bush regime,
supported by the trade union bureaucracy in this country, that aided the counter-revolutionary coup in Venezuela (e.g., by fomenting the oil
workers strike as the core of a "civil society" movement that tried to abolish the popular social reforms of the Chavez government ).
It is for
profit not democracy that the US supported the reactionary coup to overthrow Chavez (not just in
words but with financial aid, military weapons and advisors as the British Guardian has reported); it is for profit and not for
democracy that the US supports Israel and is currently colonizing Afghanistan as preparation for
taking Iraq.
Hunger
Activist approaches to solving hunger only open up the space for global
capitalism ignoring the cause of unbalanced food distribution is the private
ownership over the means of production
DeFazio 03 [(Kimberly, Spring, MA SUNY Binghamton University. Cultural studies and Marxism, “The Imperialism of "Eating Well"”,
http://www.redcritique.org/Spring2003/theimperialismofeatingwell.htm, VR)]
In comparison to the "high theory" of Derrida and the out and out cynicism of Edkins, activist
approaches to hunger can
seem almost radical. After all, whereas Derrida and Edkins are satisfied with merely symbolic responses to hunger, activists
argue for the need for objective redistribution of food surpluses. A case in point is Francis Moore Lappé and
Joseph Collins' text, "Beyond the Hunger Myth: What can we do?". Lappé is widely known for her writings on hunger, food and diet, and the
idea that we can change our own practices, as well as the world's, by changing what and how we eat, a philosophy perhaps most famously
elaborated in her 1971 book Diet for a Small Planet. In the more recent "Beyond the Hunger Myth: What can we do?" Lappé and Collins critique
sees hunger as the effect of "natural" causes about which people can do
the dominant thinking that
very little, and instead insist that hunger is the effect of social practices and thus can be
changed. "Since hunger results from human choices, not inexorable natural forces, the goal of
ending hunger is obtainable. It is no more utopian than the goal of abolishing slavery was not all that long ago" (402). They point
to the overwhelming surplus food and waste that exist amid desperate want, and argue for the need for "real change" (408) to address these
relations. However, what they mean by "real"
change required to put an end to hunger is really only a more
ethical capitalism which attaches more "responsibility" to private ownership of farmland, and
encourages more "personal" responsibility (local participation) among citizens. They thus stress the
effectivity of local participation in such activities as community groups, soup kitchens and
churches which distribute food surpluses to the hungry, as well as writing letters to editors
and government representatives, investing in companies and institutions that "support our
values" (404) and boycotting companies whose products are harmful to people. These are the
kinds of activities, they suggest, that can help lead to a wider distribution of "purchasing
power" among people so that they can better meet their own basic needs. But "purchasing power" is a function of
class. It depends on one's relation to the means of production. If one owns the means of
production as corporations do, one can force others to work and make "purchases" through
the exploitation of their labor. If one does not own the means of production, one can only
make "purchases" by selling one's labor. The less one's wages (if one is able to find a job at all), the less one is able to
purchase. This is the fundamental class relation in capitalism —between owners and workers—and it is the
cause of the growing numbers of hungry people in the world. Inequality under capitalism is
the direct result of private ownership of the means of production. Inequality in access to food
results from the concentration of the means of food production by capitalists who produce
food for profit, not social need. Without changing private property relations, the purchasing power of the capitalists relative to
workers will continue grow. The focus on "purchasing power" and its "expansion" turns the matter of
hunger into an issue of increasing avenues of consumption that blurs the class antagonism
between owners and workers, and thus provides an argument for extending the very system
that produces hunger to begin with. It is for this reason that the local activism Lappé and Collins promote will have little
effect on hunger, at best, and will ultimately support further cuts in food support, at worst.
Job Creation
Transportation industry is direct alienation of the worker from their labor, it is
intrinsically capitalist
Worker’s Bush Telegraph 2011[“Railways and Capitalism” http://workersbushtelegraph.com.au/2011/03/22/railways-and-
capitalism/ accessed ac, Worker’s Bush Telegraph, News Source dedicated to workers, 3-22-11]
Just like workers in other industries, workers

in the transport industry take part in the production of
commodities. We produce what Marx calls a ‘useful effect’. The ‘useful effect’ of the
transport industry is the actual moving of goods and people from one place to another. Raw
materials move from the mines to the ports and factories, finished products are transported to and from the markets, workers are brought
from their homes to the work-places. The movement of commodities (the result of the work of transport workers) adds value to the various
commodities being moved – the greater the distance, the greater the value added: … the
use-value of things has no
existence except in consumption, and this may necessitate a change of place on the part of
the product, in other words, it may require the additional process of production of the
transportation industry. The productive capital invested in this industry adds value to the
transported products, partly by transferring value to the transported products from the
means of transportation [i.e., the using-up and 'wear and tear' of rails, roads, engines etc.], partly by adding value through labour-
power used in transportation [i.e., the using-up and 'wear and tear' of shunters, drivers, signalmen, etc]. This last-named addition of value
consists, as it does in all capitalist production, of a reproduction of wages and of surplus-value. Look at the production of a Ford motor car. It is
the product of the collective labour of thousands of men and women. They work on the production lines and in the offices of factories at
Broadmeadows and Geelong, in the rubber mills and glass-works, and also in the transport industry – carrying raw materials, components and
finished parts from one plant to another. However, both the
car and the profits from its future sales are owned
by a small group of share-holders in the U.S.A. This is the contradiction of capitalism – production is
carried out collectively by thousands of workers who do not own what they produce. They are
paid a wage which represents the amount necessary to keep the worker and the family from week to week, but no more than that. The
products, like the factories, are owned by a small handful of people. In Australia, these people are mainly U.S., British and Japanese monopoly
capitalists.
Jobs New Tech
New transportation infrastructure reconstructs space to make labor more
mobile – but behind this need for labor flexibility is the endless demand of
capital to subject more and more workers to exploitation under the guise of
new jobs
Feldman 77 [Associate Professor of Community Planning – U of Rhode Island. Marshall. “A CONTRIBUTION TO THE CRITIQUE OF URBAN
POLITICAl ECONOMY: THE JOURNEY TO WORK.” Antipode Volume 9, Issue 2, pages 30–50, September 1977
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-8330.1977.tb00709.x/abstract]
Transit provides another hidden form of social expense. To the extent that the "flight to the suburbs" represents a reaction to the social malaise
which affects the poorest segments of the central city, transit substitutes for the social expense of controlling this malaise. Physical isolation
allows for a lower level of expenditures on police, welfare, etc. than would be necessary in a more accessible spatial structure. Such physical
isolation and unequal access provides a graphic illustration of the inequities of capitalist development (National Advisory Commission on Civil
Dis- orders 1968: 242-7). Uneven development of the working class leads to the uneven ability to
consume transit. Certain groups become "transit-poor" and are unable to afford the
subsistence level of transit. Inasmuch as the state provides transit, the state loses legitimacy often to the extent that no
consensus on transit policy can be achieved. Hence various token policies aimed at correcting some of the
more flagrant inequities are adopted(22). Sophisticated strategies of social control include
increased access, especially to employment, for the "transit- poor" as an important component (ibid.:
392- 3). As well-intentioned as these policies might be, they are ideological because they make a
number of unfounded assumptions about the role of transit (Campbell and Burkhead ' op.cit.: 203;
Gakenheimer op.cit.: 487-9; Marando 1974: 158; Ornati 1969). First, they assume that transportation will lead to
employment and, presumably, employment to higher income. Both income and employment
are assumed to be "good things" when, in reality, they need not be. If the job is harmful or
degrading, the worker may be better off on public assistance (23). Furthermore, unless there
are job vacancies, increased access will, at best, result in displacing previously employed
workers. Access, per se, cannot create jobs (Hutchinson 1974: 93). Unless increased production pays for the costs of increased access,
improved transportation results in a net loss to society(24). At best, transportation redistributes income among workers. Related to this is the
fact that most discussions of the subject have largely been concerned with empirical data. As Masters (1974: 506) points out, a major change
such as full employment for central city blacks could hardly be expected to occur without a major change in the structure of such empirical
data. All discussions of the subject assume that there is no essential reason why a large portion of thin society must be poor --i.e., that the poor
somehow "fit' in a larger scheme of things.Marginal corrective policies assume that societal forces will not
compensate for any changes in the status quo. These discussions of policy perform important
an ideological function, however. On the one hand, they make it seem as if “something is
being done.” So that the state appears as an unbiased actor dealing with urban inequality. At the same time, these
policies focus attention on a limited range of issues which then seem to be the basis of all
political differences. Questions outside the range of this debate are never even considered.
There are two effects. First, inasmuch as the framework of decisions is taken as a given, factors
potentially subject to conscious change appear to be unquestionable, unchangeable, and not
really the products of human actions. For example, the very existence of the journey-to-work and employment as wage
labor are such factors. Second, inasmuch as these policies constrain political debate to a discussion of
different means for achieving equality of incomes from wage labor for the purpose of
consumption of commodities, they make other notions of human purpose appear utopian,
irresponsible, and unthinkable. In this sense, these policies create what appears as a de facto
ideological consensus on the purpose and meaning of human existence. Whatever the
policy's professed purpose, its effect is to legitimize the overall framework of capitalist
development. This ideological function is aided when the failure of the policies is ascribed to national psychological traits(25) and
evokes cynicism towards further political action. In sum, transit serves a not-so-subtle function of social control. In this sense, transit may be
called a form of social expense. This function is manifested by overtly repressive aspects of transit such as transit police, as well as the more
subtle social control achieved by spatial isolation. The social expense aspect of transit is also manifested in its "social welfare" role both as a
form of access to employment and social services, and as a direct source of "make-work" employment. Additionally, policies directed
at partial solutions to transit inequities serve an important ideological function of
maintaining hegemony.
Poverty
Economic inequality is inevitable under capitalism.
Lazzaro 2011 [Lazzaro, Joseph. 2011, Editor of International Business Times, International Business Times]
Roubini, a New York University professor who four years ago accurately forecast the global financial crisis, said the current global economic
system -- capitalism -- will remain in its current crisis, a crisis that economist Karl Marx predicted more than a century
ago, until major systemic reforms are implemented. Roubini said social unrest and demonstrations are all being driven by the same thing, a
crisis period for capitalism itself. The current crisis is the global economy's most serious crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s -- and it
was triggered by financial intermediation run amok and a destructive redistribution of income and wealth, from labor to capital. The
nations that have recently seen social unrest and political demonstrations "are all driven by
the same issues and tensions: growing inequality, poverty, unemployment, and hopelessness.
Even the world's middle classes are feeling the squeeze of falling incomes and opportunities, "
Roubini said."While these protests have no unified theme, they express in different ways the serious concerns of the world's working and
middle classes about their prospects in the face of the growing concentration of power among economic, financial, and political elites," Roubini
wrote in an op-ed column for Reuters."The
causes of their concern are clear enough: High unemployment
and underemployment in advanced and emerging economies; inadequate skills and
education for young people and workers to compete in a globalized world; resentment
against corruption, including legalized forms like lobbying; and a sharp rise in income and
wealth inequality in advanced and fast-growing emerging-market economies."Corporations
in advanced economies are now cutting jobs due to inadequate final demand , Roubini said, but
cutting jobs weakens final demand further because it reduces labor income and demand. The
result? Free markets don't generate enough final demand , Roubini said. In the United States, for example,
slashing labor costs has sharply cut labor income as a percentage of gross domestic product. With credit exhausted, the effects on demand of
decades of redistribution of income and wealth -- from labor to capital, from poor to rich, and from households to corporations -- have become
severe.
Power Relations
Their attempt to reframe power relations remains structured by capitalism –
absent the alternative, critical struggles are merely redefinitions of the
imaginary beneath which lurks the corruption of capital
Zizek 97 [Slavoj Žižek is a senior researcher at the Institute of Sociology University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, and a professor at the European
Graduate School.[4] He has been a visiting professor at, among others, the University of Chicago, Columbia University, London Consortium,
Princeton University, New York University, The New School, the University of Minnesota, the University of California, Irvine and the University
of Michigan. He is currently the International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities at Birkbeck, University of London and
president of the Society for Theoretical Psychoanalysis, Ljubljana, Senior Researcher, Institute for Social Studies, Ljubljana, 1997,
“Multiculturalism, or, the Cultural Logic of Multinational Capitalism.”]
What these leftist advocates of populism fail to perceive is that today’s populism, far from presenting a threat to
global capitalism, remains its inherent product. Paradoxically, today’s true conservatives are rather
the leftist ‘critical theorists’ who reject liberal multiculturalism as well as fundamentalist populism, those who clearly perceive
the complicity between global capitalism and ethnic fundamentalism. They point towards the third domain which belongs neither to
global market-society nor to the new forms of ethnic fundamentalism: the domain of the political, the public space of civil society, of
active responsible citizenship—the fight for human rights, ecology and so forth. However, the problem is that this
very form of political space is more and more threatened by the onslaught of globalization; consequently, one cannot simply return to it or
revitalize it. To avoid a misunderstanding: our point is not the old ‘economic essentialist’ one according to which, in the case of England today,
the Labour victory really did not change anything—and as such is even more dangerous than continuing Tory rule, since it gave rise to the
misleading impression that there was a change. There are a lot of things the Labour government can achieve; it can contribute a lot to the
passage from traditional English parochial jingoism to a more ‘enlightened’ liberal democracy with a much stronger element of social solidarity
(from health care to education), to the respect for human rights (in its diverse forms, from women’s rights to the rights of ethnic groups); one
should use the Labour victory as an incentive to revitalize the diverse forms of the struggle for égaliberté. (With the Socialist electoral victory in
France, the situation is even more ambiguous, since Jospin’s programme does contain some elements of a direct confrontation with the logic of
capital.) Even when the change is not substantial but a mere semblance of a new beginning, the
very fact that a situation is perceived by the majority of the population as a ‘new beginning’
opens up the space for important ideological and political rearticulations—as we have already seen, the
fundamental lesson of the dialectic of ideology is that appearances do matter. Nonetheless, the post-Nation-State logic of
capital remains the Real which lurks in the background , while all three main leftist reactions to the process of
globalization—liberal multiculturalism; the attempt to embrace populism by way of discerning, beneath its fundamentalist appearance, the
resistance against ‘instrumental reason’; the attempt to keep open the space of the political—seem inappropriate. Although the last approach
is based on the correct insight about the complicity between multiculturalism and fundamentalism, it
avoids the crucial
question: how are we to reinvent political space in today’s conditions of globalization? The
politicization of the series of particular struggles which leaves intact the global process of
capital is clearly not sufficient. What this means is that one should reject the opposition which, within the frame of late capitalist
liberal democracy, imposes itself as the main axis of ideological struggle: the tension between ‘open’ post-ideological universalist liberal
tolerance and the particularist ‘new fundamentalisms’. Against the liberal centre which presents itself as neutral and post-ideological, relying
on the rule of the Law, one should reassert the old leftist motif of the necessity to suspend the neutral space of Law.
Racism
Racism marks people for exploitation and capitalism accordingly generates an
ideological defense to normalize that exploitation. Eliminating race oppression
requires an attack on capital.
Young 06 [Young, assistant professor of English at the University of Alabama, 2006 (Robert, Red Critique, “Putting Materialism Back into
Race Theory,” Winter/Spring, http://www.redcritique.org/WinterSpring2006/puttingmaterialismbackintoracetheory.htm)]
My project situates race in relation to the international division of labor. Race

emerges historically and within specific
political-economic coordinates. These coordinates link the logic of race to the logic of
capitalist exploitation. In other words, race is implicated in the historic and ongoing (class) struggle
to determine the ratio of surplus value. For me then, race signals a marking for exploitation, and
this economic assignment, in turn, generates an accompanying ideological machinery to
justify and increase that exploitation. Any understanding of this economic assignment, which represents an historically
objective positionality, has been removed from the contemporary intellectual scene. Race represents not just a cultural or political
category as many critics attest to, but it represents an historic apparatus for the production, maintenance, and legitimation of the
inequalities of wage-labor. Similar to other modes of social difference, like gender and
sexuality, race participates in naturalizing asymmetrical social relations.
Speed
Speed justifies the expansion of markets and the circulation of capital
Goldman et al 05 [Robert Goldman is a Professor of Sociology at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon. My work focuses on the
political economy of commodity signs from its inception early in the 20th century to its position today in the current stage of global capitalism;
Stephen Papson teaches sociology at St. Lawrence University in Canton, New York; Noah Kersey received his BA in sociology and anthropology
from Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon in 2001; “Speed: Through, Across, and In — The Landscapes of Capital;” Issue 1.1 of Fast
Capitalism, a journal devoted to analyzing the impact of information and communication technologies on self, society and culture in the 21st
century. bridges the social sciences and the humanities. welcomes disciplinary and interdisciplinary work; 2005; www.fastcapitalism.com]
In the discourse of corporate advertising, the subject of real time comes up in relation to various agendas: 1) general issues of competition in
the marketplace, where speed becomes its own justification and where faster to market means more
profits; 2) the immediacy of computerized stock trading brings the promise of lower costs and
premise of fairer exchanges 3) organizing complex and far-flung divisions of labor within a globally
extensive corporate world; 4) being able to monitor sales and inventory supplies on a daily and
even hourly basis in order to control costs and integrate systems management ; 5) the video
simulacrum where time-space compression is achieved via the magic of cameras and computers. A 2001 IBM ad addresses the rationale of "real
time" directly as a matter of profit imperatives. IBM's spokesman situates the question of real time in an ominous and menacing tone: Here
the hegemony of real time is presented as a hostile necessity, as a fait accompli driven by
inexorable market forces that cannot be resisted or debated. A meta-narrative of speed
weaves itself into narrative assumptions regarding competitive markets. The voracious and
the insatiable appetites of market growth demand greater speed in the circulation of Capital.
The forces of capital driven markets are also likened to the laws of nature—"Time waits for
no man or woman or business . . . everything faster. Products to market, ideas to profits." The IBM ad unfolds this
way, offering an almost structural-Marxian interpretation of how the underlying forces of capitalism become more
and more determinant in the decisions and choices that actors must make. Here we have the
contradictions of capital circulation—as capital matures and there is greater competition and
profit margins grow thinner, then being able to do things faster makes a lot of sense—faster
to market brings with it competitive advantage and offsets the tendency for the rate of profit
to decline. But going faster carries its own price, it takes competition into the realm of
circulation time. But panic marketing offers a quick way out—"powerful software" (scientific magic) can tame the imperatives of
market speed by controlling real time—the absolute present.
Standard of Living
Increasing the standards of living create complacency within the capitalist
system, killing resistance and turning the case
Marcuse 64 (Herbert, a German Jewish philosopher, sociologist and political theorist, associated with the Frankfurt School of critical
theory. Active in the United States after 1934, his intellectual concerns were the dehumanizing effects of capitalism and modern technology.
Celebrated as the "Father of the New Left,"[1] his best known works are Eros and Civilization (1955) andOne-Dimensional Man (1964). His
Marxist scholarship inspired many radical intellectuals and political activists in the 1960s and '70s, both in the U.S. and internationally. “One
Dimensional Man,” Routedlege, 1964)
To the degree to which freedom from want, the concrete substance of all freedom, is becoming a real possibility, the liberties which pertain to
a state of lower productivity are losing their former content. Independenceof thought, autonomy, and the right to
political opposition are being deprived of their basic critical function in a society which seems
increasingly capable of satisfying the needs of the individuals through the way in which it is
organized. Such a society may justly demand acceptance of its principles and institutions, and
reduce the opposition to the discussion and promotion of alternative policies within the
status quo. In this respect, it seems to make little difference whether the increasing satisfaction of
needs is accomplished by an authoritarian or a non-authoritarian system. Under the
conditions of a rising standard of living, non-conformity with the system itself appears to be
socially useless, and the more so when it entails tangible economic and political disadvantages and threatens the
operation of the whole. Indeed, at least in so far as the necessities of life are involved, there seems to be no reason why the
production and distribution of goods and devices should proceed through the competitive concurrence of individual liberties.
Stimulus
Keynesian stimulus does nothing but solidify the status quo and support the
control of corporations – it’s a tactic to preserve and legitimate existing
structures of economics
Wright 99 [Erik Olin Wright, professor of sociology at University of Wisconsin – Madison, “Alternative Perspectives in Marxist Theory of
Accumulation and Crisis,” Critical Sociology 25,2/3, March, 1999]
Contradiction of legitimation and accumulation: The state does not serve the function merely of facilitating accumulation through demand
maintenance; the state also serves a vital legitimation function in capitalist society which helps to
stabilize and reproduce the class structure as a whole. The legitimation function directs
much state activity toward co-opting potential sources of popular discontent by
attempting to transform political demands into economic demands. The expansion of
Keynesian programs beginning in the 1930’s created a perfect political climate for dramatically
expanding such legitimating state expenditures. For a long time it appeared that the state could kill two functional
birds with one economic-policy stone. The difficulty, however, is that once a demand on the state to provide some social
service or to meet some social need is granted and becomes institutionalized, it becomes viewed as a right. There
is a certain logic to legitimation which decrees that the political apparatus gets progressively diminishing
returns in added legitimation for a given program over time. Once a program becomes seen as a right the continuation of that
program adds little to the legitimacy of the state, whereas a cutback in the program would constitute a source of delegitimation. There is thus
not only a tendency for programs once established to continue, but also a constant pressure for programs to expand, regardless of the
requirements of the accumulation process. The hypothesis can therefore be advanced that, once Keynesian demand maintenance programs
become bound up with the legitimation functions of the state, there is a tendency for unproductive spending to rise more rapidly than the
systemic requirements for realization of surplus value might dictate. b) Military Keynesianism and productivity: The particular institutional
form that much Keynesian spending takes— specifically the system of state contracting known as the military-industrial complex—tends not
only to absorb surplus but also to put a considerable damper on the subsequent development of productivity (except for occasional
technological “spin-offs” from military research and development). Corporations who are major suppliers of military hardware are
guaranteed a given profit rate by the state (especially in cost-plus contracts) and are thus under relatively little pressure to introduce
inexpensive, efficient innovations into their production processes. Since for most military production there are only one or two potential
suppliers, and since the criterion for awarding contracts generally has little to do with the efficiency of the corporation, military
Keynesianism tends generally to reduce the average level of productivity in the economy. c) The weakening of mechanisms of crisis
management: The usual scenario for crisis and recovery is for the least productive capitals to be wiped out, capital to be devaluated, and
conditions for profitable accumulation to be restored. The growth of monopoly capital, and especially of the
dominant role
of the state in regulating the economy, tends to weaken seriously this restorative
mechanism. This is most obvious in the case of corporations which become locked into
production for the state. In part because of the personal ties between the corporate elite and
the state apparatus (especially in the military-industrial nexus), and in part because of the social dislocation that would result
from the bankruptcy of a major monopoly corporation, the state finds it very difficult to abandon a corporation, even as that
the state is also forced to underwrite the low productivity of
corporation’s productivity declines. But
many other sectors of the economy, simply in order to avoid major disruptions of the economy (the
railroads are a good example). The upshot of these contradictions in the role of the state is as follows: although Keynesian
policies originally emerged in an effort to cope with the problem of excessive surplus —as
portrayed in the underconsumptionist model—, the policies in the end recreated the image of crisis held by the
organic-composition-of-capital model—inadequate levels of surplus value—while simultaneously undermining the
restorative mechanisms in the economy. That is, in spite of the necessity for waste in a period of monopoly capital,
there is a tendency for the level of waste (i.e., unproductive spending) to expand more rapidly than the
capacity of the system to produce waste (i.e., the rate of increase in productivity). Because the crisis-solving
mechanisms are partially blocked, the result is chronic inflation combined with relatively high levels of unemployment, or what has come
to be called “stagnation.”4
Symbolic Violence
The focus on specific identifiable acts of violence, ignores the systemic violence
that is the underlying issue, capitalism cannot be effectively addressed if we
focus on symbolic violence
Žižek 08 (Slavoj Žižek, is a senior researcher at the Institute of Sociology University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, and a professor at the European
London and president of the Society for Theoretical Psychoanalysis, Ljubljana “Violenece : Six sideways Reflections”)
If there is a unifying thesis that runs through the bric-a-brac of reflections on violence that follow, it is that a similar paradox holds true for
violence. At the forefront of our minds, the obvious signals of violence are acts of crime and terror, civil
unrest, international conflict. But we should learn to step back, to disentangle ourselves from the
fascinating lure of this directly visible “subjective” violence, violence performed by a clearly
identifiable agent. We need to perceive the contours of the background which generates such
outbursts. A step back enables us to identify a violence that sustains our very efforts to fight
violence and to promote tolerance. This is the starting point, perhaps even the axiom , of the present
book: subjective violence is just the most visible portion of a triumvirate that also includes two objective kinds of violence. First, there is a
“symbolic” violence embodied in language and its forms, what Heidegger would call “our house of being.” As we shall see later, this
violence is not only at work in the obvious—and extensively studied—cases of incitement and of the relations of
social domination reproduced in our habitual speech forms: there is a more fundamental form of violence still that pertains to language as such,
to its imposition of a certain universe of meaning. Second, there is what I call “systemic” violence, or the often
catastrophic consequences of the smooth functioning of our economic and political systems. The
catch is that subjective and objective violence cannot be perceived from the same standpoint :
subjective violence is experienced as such against the background of a non-violent zero level . It is
seen as a perturbation of the “normal,” peaceful state of things. However, o bjective violence is precisely the violence
inherent to this “normal” state of things. Objective violence is invisible since it sustains the very
zero-level standard against which we perceive something as subjectively violent. Systemic violence is
thus something like the notorious “dark matter” of physics, the counterpart to an all-too- visible subjective violence. It may be invisible, but it
has to be taken into account if one is to make sense of what otherwise seem to be “irrational”
explosions of subjective violence. When the media bombard us with those “humanitarian crises” which seem constantly to pop
up all over the world, one should always bear in mind that a particular crisis only explodes into media visibility as the result of a complex
struggle. Properly humanitarian considerations as a rule play a less important role here than cultural, ideologico-political, and economic
considerations. The cover story of Time magazine on 5 June 2006, for example, was “The Deadliest War in the World.” This offered detailed
documentation on how around 4 million people died in the Democratic Republic of Congo as the result of political violence over the last
decade. None of the usual humanitarian uproar followed, just a couple of readers’ letters—as if some kind of filtering mechanism blocked this
news from achieving its full impact in our symbolic space. To put it cynically, Time picked the wrong victim in the struggle for hegemony in
suffering. It should have stuck to the list of usual suspects: Muslim women and their plight, or the families of 9/11 victims and how they have
coped with their losses. The Congo today has effectively re-emerged as a Conradean “heart of darkness.” No one dares to confront it head on.
The death of a West Bank Palestinian child, not to mention an Israeli or an American, is mediatically worth thousands of times more than the
death of a nameless Congolese. Do we need further proof that the humanitarian sense of urgency is mediated, indeed overdetermined, by
clear political considerations? And what are these considerations? To answer this, we need to step back and take a look from a different
position. When the U.S. media reproached the public in foreign countries for not displaying enough sympathy for the victims of the 9/11
attacks, one was tempted to answer them in the words Robespierre addressed to those who complained about the innocent victims of
revolutionary terror: “Stop shaking the tyrant’s bloody robe in my face, or I will believe that you wish to put Rome in chains.”1 Instead of
confronting violence directly, the present book casts six sideways glances. There are reasons for looking at the problem of violence awry. My
underlying premise is that there
is something inherently mystifying in a direct confrontation with it: the
overpowering horror of violent acts and empathy with the victims inexorably function as a lure
which prevents us from thinking. A dispassionate conceptual development of the typology of
violence must by definition ignore its traumatic impact. Yet there is a sense in which a cold analysis of violence
somehow reproduces and participates in its horror. A distinction needs to be made, as well, between (factual)
truth and truthfulness: what renders a report of a raped woman (or any other narrative of a trauma) truthful is its very factual
unreliability, its confusion, its inconsistency. If the victim were able to report on her painful and humiliating experience in a clear manner, with
all the data arranged in a consistent order, this very quality would make us suspicious of its truth. The problem here is part of the solution: the
very factual deficiencies of the traumatised subject’s report on her experience bear witness to the truthfulness of her report, since they signal
that the reported content “contaminated” the manner of reporting it. The same holds, of course, for the so-called unreliability of the verbal
reports of Holocaust survivors: the witness able to offer a clear narrative of his camp experience would disqualify himself by virtue of that
clarity.2 The only appropriate approach to my subject thus seems to be one which permits variations on violence kept at a distance out of
respect towards its victims.
Terrorism
Policy to prevent terrorism obscures the role global capital has in both carrying
out imperial policies as well as mystifying the role the US plays in constructing
danger
Zizek 02 [Slavoj, Žižek is a senior researcher at the Institute of Sociology University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, and a professor at the European
London and president of the Society for Theoretical Psychoanalysis, Ljubljana, 2002, Revolution at the Gates, p. 234-36]
Along the same lines, Rightist commentators like George Will also immediately proclaimed the end of the American “holiday from history” —
the impact of reality shattering the isolated tower of the liberal tolerant attitude and the Cultural Studies focus on textuality. Now, we are
forced to strike back, to deal with real enemies in the real world. . . . Whom, however, do we strike at? Whatever the response, it will
never hit the right target, bringing us full satisfaction. The ridicule of America attacking Afghanistan cannot fail to strike us: if the
greatest power in the world destroys one of the world’s poorest countries, in which peasants barely survive on barren hills, will this not be the
ultimate case of impotent acting out? In many ways Afghanistan is an ideal target: a country that is already reduced to rubble, with no
infrastructure, repeatedly destroyed by war for the last two decades ... we
cannot avoid the surmise that the choice of
Afghanistan will also be determined by economic considerations: is it not best procedure to act out one’s
anger at a country for which no one cares, and where there is nothing to destroy? Unfortunately, the choice of Afghanistan recalls the anecdote
about the madman who searches for a lost key beneath a streetlamp; asked why there, when he lost the key in a dark corner somewhere, he
answers: “But it’s easier to search under strong light!” Is it not the ultimate irony that the whole of Kabul already looks like downtown
To succumb to the urge to act and retaliate means precisely to avoid confronting the true
Manhattan?
dimensions of what occurred on 11 September — it means an act whose true aim is to lull us into
the secure conviction that nothing has really changed. The true long-term threats are further acts
of mass terror in comparison with which the memory of the WTC collapse will pale — acts that are less spectacular, but much more
horrifying. What about bacteriological warfare, what about the use of lethal gas, what about the prospect of DNA terrorism (developing poisons
which will affect only people who share a determinate genome)? In this new warfare, the agents claim their acts less and less publicly: not only
are “terrorists” themselves no longer eager to claim responsibility for their acts (even the notorious Al Qaida did not explicitly appropriate the
11 September attacks, not to mention the mystery about the origins of the anthrax letters); “ antiterrorist” state measures
themselves are draped in a shroud of secrecy ; all this constitutes an ideal breeding ground for conspiracy theories and
generalized social paranoia. And is not the obverse of this paranoiac omnipresence of the invisible war its desubstantialization? So, again, just
as we drink beer without alcohol or coffee without caffeine, we are now getting war deprived of its substance — a virtual war fought behind
computer screens, a war experienced by its participants as a video game, a war with no casualties (on our side, at least). With the spread of the
anthrax panic in October 2001, the West got the first taste of this new “invisible” warfare in which — an aspect we should always bear in mind
— we, ordinary citizens, are, with regard to information about what is going on, totally at the mercy of the authorities: we see and hear
nothing; all we know comes from the official media. A superpower bombing a desolate desert country and, at the same time, hostage to
invisible bacteria — this, not the WTC explosions, is the first image of twenty-first-century warfare. Instead of a quick acting-out, we should
confront these difficult questions: what will “war” mean in the twenty-first century? Who will “they” be, if they are, clearly, neither states nor
criminal gangs? Here I cannot resist the temptation to recall the Freudian opposition of the public Law and its obscene superego double: along
the same lines, are not “international terrorist organizations” the obscene double of the big multinational corporations — the ultimate
rhizomatic machine, omnipresent, yet with no clear territorial base? Are they not the form in which nationalist and/or religious
“fundamentalism” accommodated itself to global capitalism? Do they not embody the ultimate contradiction, with their particular! exclusive
content and their global dynamic functioning? For this reason, the fashionable notion of the “clash of civilizations” must be thoroughly rejected:
what we are witnessing today, rather, are clashes within each civilization. A brief look at the comparative history of Islam and Christianity tells
us that the “human rights record” of Islam (to use an anachronistic term) is much better than that of Christianity: in past centuries, Islam was
significantly more tolerant towards other religions than Christianity. It is also time to remember that it was through the Arabs that, in the
Middle Ages, we in Western Europe regained access to our Ancient Greek legacy. While I do not in any way excuse today’s horrific acts, these
facts none the less clearly demonstrate that we are dealing not with a feature inscribed into Islam “as such”, but with the outcome of modern
sociopolitical conditions. If
we look more closely, what is this “clash of civilizations” really about? Are
not all real-life “clashes” clearly related to global capitalism? The Muslim “fundamentalist”
target is not only global capitalism’s corrosive impact on social life, but also the corrupt
“traditionalist” regimes in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and so on. The most horrifying slaughters (those in Rwanda,
not only took place — and are taking place — within the same “civilization”,
Congo, and Sierra Leone)
but are also clearly related to the interplay of global economic interests. Even in the few cases which
would vaguely fit the definition of the “clash of civilisations” (Bosnia and Kosovo, southern Sudan, etc.), the shadow of other interests is easily
discernible. A suitable dose of “economic reductionism” would therefore be appropriate here : instead of
the endless analyses of how Islamic “fundamentalism” is intolerant towards our liberal societies, and other “clash-of-civilization” topics, we
should refocus our attention on the economic background of the conflict — the clash of
economic interests, and of the geopolitical interests of the United States itself (how to retain
privileged links both with Israel and with conservative Arab regimes like those of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait).
White Supremacy
The Focus on White Supremacy fragments resistance struggles preventing real
gains and distracts from the root of the issue: Capitalism
Darder and Torres 99 (Darder Prof of Education at Claremont, & Torres, (Prof of Public Policy and Comp Latino Studies at CSU-Long
Beach, 1999 Antonia and Rodolfo, “Shattering the Race Lens, from Critical Ethnicity” pgs. 184-185)
What seems apparent in hooks's explanation is both her belief in the existence of a White ideology that has Black people as
its primary object (albeit her mention of "people of color") and the reification of skin color as the most active determinant of social relations
between Black and White populations. Consequently, the
persistence of such notions of racialized exploitation
and domination mistakenly privileges one particular form of racism, while it ignores the
historical and contemporary oppression of populations who have been treated as distinct and
inferior "races" without the necessary reference to skin color . Moreover, "White supremacy"
arguments analytically essentialize Black/White relations by inferring that the inevitability of skin
color ensures the reproduction of racism in the post-colonial world , where White people predominantly
associate Black people with inferiority. Inherent in this perspective is the failure to recognize the precolonial origins of racism which were
structured within the interior of Europe by the development of nation-states and capitalist relations of production. "The dichotomous
categories of Blacks as victims, and Whites as perpetrators of racism, tend to homogenize the objects of racism, without paying attention to the
different experience of men and women, of different social classes and ethnicity."~~ As such there is little room to link, with equal legitimacy,
the continuing struggles against racism of Jews, Gypsies, the Irish, immigrant workers, refugees, and other racialized populations of the world
(including Africans racialized by Africans) to the struggle of African Americans in the United States. Hence, theories of racism that are founded
upon the racialized idea of White supremacy adhere rigidly to a "race relations paradigm." As such, these theories anchor racialized inequality
to the alleged "nature" of White people and the psychological influence of White ideology on both Whites and Blacks, rather than to
the complex nature of historically constituted social relations of power and their material consequences. In
light of this, hooks's preference for White supremacy represents a perspective that , despite its oppositional intent and
popularity among many activists and scholars in the field, still fails to critically advance our understanding of the
debilitating structures of capitalism and the nature of class formations within a racialized
world. More specifically, what we argue here is that the struggle against racism and class inequality cannot be
founded on either academic or popularized notions of "race" or White supremacy , notions that
ultimately reify and "project a 'phantom objectivity,' an autonomy that seems so strictly rational and all-embracing as to conceal every trace of
its fundamental nature
Rather than working to invert racist notions of racialized inferiority, anti-
racist scholars and activists should seek to develop a critical theory of racism to confront the
fundamental nature and consequences of structural inequalities as reproduced by the
historical processes of racialization in U.S. society and around the globe.." 33
Extra Cap Links (Policy)
Generic
Privatization
Subsidization and deregulation transfer power into diffuse and
complex forms while reintegrating the state into global economies
driven by profit and social normalization
Picciotto ’11 Sol Picciotto, “International Transformations of the Capitalist State,” Antipode, vol. 43, issue 1, pp. 87-107,
January 2011, DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-8330.2010.00812.x
Privatization appeared to be part of a wider move away from state-centered direction of the economy, especially as it was powered
by anti-statist ideas and accompanied by much talk of deregulation and free markets. In fact, this movement was not initially
ideologically driven, but generally began as pragmatic reforms (by political parties of the right and sometimes also the left), and only
subsequently became articulated as broader systemic projects to “roll back the state” (Feigenbaum, Henig and Hamnett 1998). The
outcome generally has been the decentralization of operational responsibility for a wide range of activities to cadres of managers.
Although privatization is often justified in terms of shifting of risk, the importance of collective and infrastructural services in practice
has meant a continuing role for the state in providing subsidies and acting as lender of last resort. State regulation also has often
very direct effects on profitability through: regulated pricing of utilities such as electricity and water; the granting or withholding of
intellectual property and other property rights; approval or disapproval of oligopolistic positions and practices; public approval and
procurement, for example, of military equipment and pharmaceutical drugs; regulatory obligations for matters such as environmental
protection, and various forms of tax breaks and subsidies.2 Thus, privatization did not substantially reduce the importance of the
state, but instead entailed changes in its form, with a shift to indirect provision of services within a regulatory framework
(Feigenbaum, Henig and Hamnett 1998; Vogel 1996). It has been the increased demands being made on the state which have
resulted in its fragmentation, as regulatory functions have increasingly been delegated to public bodies or agencies with a status
semi-autonomous from central government. Such agencies are generally not formally part of the government, and may be
constituted as private organizations, with a mandate either laid down by public law or by private legal forms such as contract, or a
mixture of the two. These bodies themselves may deploy a greater variety of forms and techniques of regulation. In the USA, which
had almost no state ownership and a long tradition of regulation by independent agencies, there was some criticism of “command
and control” forms of regulation for being excessively legalistic and adversarial (Bardach and Kagan 1982), leading to new debates
and theories about regulation and its design (eg Noll 1985). This has spread to other countries (notably Australia), and generated
debates about new approaches to “smart regulation” (Gunningham and Grabosky 1998). These build on the seminal work of Ayres
and Braithwaite who argued that business regulation should be viewed as an interactive process, involving both firms themselves
and civil society actors, with the “big stick” of the state being a last resort (Ayres and Braithwaite 1992). The character of regulation
has significantly changed, away from the top-down hierarchical model of state command, towards more fluid, often fragmented, and
interactive or “reflexive” processes. This involves a mixture of legal forms, both public and private, and an interplay between state
and private ordering. Thus, a private legal form such as a contract can be used as a tool to achieve both managerial and policy
objectives, either when private firms are entrusted to deliver public services, such as refuse collection or hospital cleaning, or even
entirely within the public sector if quasi-markets are introduced (Vincent-Jones 1999). This is not to say that such adaptations are
successful. Contracts provide flexibility, but private contract law does not easily accommodate and may undermine the public
interest safeguards developed by public or administrative law (Freeman 2000). On the other hand, public bureaucracies find it hard
to achieve genuine responsiveness to individual citizens, although they have tried to do so by adopting a managerial culture of
service delivery (corporate plans, customer charters, performance targets, etc). Hence, some authors have argued that traditional
administrative law approaches should be modified to find new ways of applying public norms to private actors (Aman 2002;
Freeman 2003). From this broader perspective of regulation it can be seen that “private” economic actors also may take on a
regulatory role. This may occur if the state adopts a policy of “deregulation”, leaving a void which may be filled by a non-state actor.
Thus, private bodies may themselves assume tasks which are of a public character, or entail provision of “public goods”. The role of
private entities may even extend to controlling public as well as private activities (Scott 2002), for example bond rating agencies
(which classify state as well as corporate debt), and technical standards compliance certification institutions, both of which assess
public as well as private entities.
The aff guides the state’s retreat towards a governmental society of

complex interconnecting modes of discipline shielded by
technocratic knowledge
Picciotto ’11 Sol Picciotto, “International Transformations of the Capitalist State,” Antipode, vol. 43, issue 1, pp. 87-107,
January 2011, DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-8330.2010.00812.x
The so-called “retreat of the state” left a gap which was quickly filled by new corporatist institutions and techniques of regulation. In
place of administration based on close social ties within closed corporate state bureaucracies, new types of formalized regulation
have emerged. But state restructuring has stumbled through an often bewildering variety of experiments, with many dramatic
failures and few clear successes.3 These developments have been seen as a shift from the Keynesian welfare state to a “new
regulatory state” better able to deal with the “risk society” (Braithwaite 2000). Thus, the state having failed to deliver on expectations
raised by state-centric models now has a new role of trying to maintain coherence via steering, since roles previously considered as
those of government have been recast as societal problems concerning a variety of actors (Kooiman 1993; Pierre 2000). Influential
ideologists have argued for a redefinition of the role of government, to separate “steering” from “rowing’: politicians should define
aims and targets but subcontract delivery, which should be competitive and aim to meet the needs of customers (Osborne and
Gabler 1992). More critically, followers of Foucault have argued that the state is a “mythical abstraction”, without either the unity or
functionality attributed to it, and suggested a broader understanding of “governmentality” as involving “a proliferation of a whole
range of apparatuses pertaining to government and a complex body of knowledges and ‘know-how’ about government” (Rose and
Miller 1992:175). In this light, the shift from welfarism to neoliberalism means, according to Rose and Miller, that: private enterprise
is opened, in so many ways, to the action at a distance mechanisms that have proliferated in advanced liberal democracies, with the
rise of managers as an intermediary between expert knowledge, economic policy and business decisions (1992:200). The
disintegration of hierarchical bureaucratic structures in both the public and private sectors can be seen as a shift in modes of social
control towards more dispersed and internalized disciplinary forms, “from the cage to the gaze” (Reed 1999). From a broader
Marxist perspective, the shift towards new forms of governance may be seen as rooted in the transition from the Fordist model of
industrial capitalism based on the mass worker, to a late-capitalist high-technology economy and knowledge society. In many ways
this entails new processes of socialization of economic activity and de-commodification, as production is increasingly immaterial and
much more directly social (Hardt and Negri 2000, 2005). Thus, there has been a shift to “lifestyle” products and the “services”
economy. The increased importance of intangibles and services means that the product of labor is no longer physically
commodified, creating new tensions both for the appropriation of surplus value in production, and its valorization in circulation. At the
same time, this has entailed pressures towards re-commodification, as seen in the very concept of the sale of “services”, as well as
the increased emphasis on intangible property, or intellectual property rights (IPRs), ranging through trademarks, copyright, patents,
and other proprietary rights over information and culture. While this re-commodification and re-individualization may re-establish the
conditions for production and circulation based on exchange, it also requires dense institutional networks to manage the flows of
information and remuneration. These institutions and networks are generally of a hybrid public–private character, for example the
Rights Remuneration Organizations (RROs) that license activities such as the public playing of music, or the networks of peer-
production based on “bazaar governance” regulating open-source software and other types of knowledge products (Benkler 2002;
Hope 2008; von Hippel 2005). These changes have led to increasingly formalized regulatory arrangements, generally based on a
fragmented but loosely coordinated “epistemic community” of regulators, whose mainly private negotiations with corporate
managers are periodically brought to public attention by a drama or crisis. It has proved very difficult to design an adequate
institutional framework enabling public debate of key issues such as the extent of public service obligations and the proper scope of
competition, due to the substantial reliance on technocratic legitimation. In sectors such as telecommunications, key issues arise
such as interconnection rights and the funding of new investment in networks. In the case of the railways in the UK, the public
regulator–private operator split broke down due to the crisis over safety standards dramatized by successive rail crashes in 2000–
2001, leading to the establishment of a new type of body in Network Rail. This is a “public interest company” supposed to “operate
on a sound commercial basis”, with instead of shareholders, members representing both the rail industry and the public interest.
Hegemony
Imperialism is necessitated by the growth imperative—hegemony
conceals the worst of socioeconomic exploitation and justifies
constant interventionism
Meszaros ‘7 Istvan Meszaros, Hungarian Marxist philosopher and Professor Emeritus at U. Sussex. “The Only Viable
Economy,” Monthly Review, 2007 http://www.monthlyreview.org/0407meszaros.htm
The quixotic advocacy of freezing production at the level attained in the early 1970s was trying to camouflage, with vacuous pseudo-
scientific model-mongering pioneered at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the ruthlessly enforced actual power relations of
U.S. dominated postwar imperialism. That variety of imperialism was, of course, very different from its earlier form known to Lenin.
For in Lenin's lifetime at least half a dozen significant imperialist powers were competing for the rewards of their real and/or hoped
for conquests. And even in the 1930s Hitler was still willing to share the fruits of violently redefined imperialism with Japan and
Mussolini's Italy. In our time, by contrast, we have to face up to the reality -- and the lethal dangers -- arising from global hegemonic
imperialism, with the United States as its overwhelmingly dominant power. 7 In contrast to even Hitler, the United States as the
single hegemon is quite unwilling to share global domination with any rival. And that is not simply on account of political/military
contingencies. The problems are much deeper. They assert themselves through the ever-aggravating contradictions of the capital
system's deepening structural crisis. U.S. dominated global hegemonic imperialism is an -- ultimately futile -- attempt to devise a
solution to that crisis through the most brutal and violent rule over the rest of the world, enforced with or without the help of slavishly
"willing allies," now through a succession of genocidal wars. Ever since the 1970s the United States has been sinking ever deeper
into catastrophic indebtedness. The fantasy solution publicly proclaimed by several U.S. presidents was "to grow out of it." And the
result: the diametrical opposite, in the form of astronomical and still growing indebtedness. Accordingly, the United States must
grab to itself, by any means at its disposal, including the most violent military aggression, whenever required for this purpose,
everything it can, through the transfer of the fruits of capitalist growth -- thanks to the global socioeconomic and political/military
domination of the United States -- from everywhere in the world. Could then any sane person imagine, no matter how well armored
by his or her callous contempt for "the shibboleth of equality," that U.S. dominated global hegemonic imperialism would take
seriously even for a moment the panacea of "no growth"? Only the worst kind of bad faith could suggest such ideas, no matter how
pretentiously packaged in the hypocritical concern over "the Predicament of Mankind." For a variety of reasons there can be no
question about the importance of growth both in the present and in the future. But to say so must go with a proper examination of
the concept of growth not only as we know it up to the present, but also as we can envisage its sustainability in the future. Our
siding with the need for growth cannot be in favor of unqualified growth. The tendentiously avoided real question is: what kind of
growth is both feasible today, in contrast to dangerously wasteful and even crippling capitalist growth visible all around us? For
growth must be also positively sustainable in the future on a long-term basis.
Terrorism
Their terrorism impact is academic orthodoxy designed to conceal
ongoing structural and imperial violence undertaken by capitalistic
powers
Bayo ’12 Ogunrotifa Ayodeji Bayo, “PUTTING HISTORICAL MATERIALISM INTO TERRORISM STUDIES,” International
Journal of Current Research, vol. 4, issue 04, pp. 227-235, April 2012, http://www.journalcra.com/sites/default/files/1859_0.pdf
In terrorism studies, two major theoretical schools havedominated the intellectual terrain of the discipline—Orthodox/Mainstream
tradition and Critical theories. Plethoras of terrorism studies that adopt orthodox approach have beeninfluenced by mainstream
social sciences, which posits thatthere is independent existence to social phenomenon and themeaning they elicit (Bunyavejchewin,
The argumentof orthodox theorists is that ‘a contextual
2010:4).
consideration is not related to socio-political actors and contexts’ (ibid).

This ontological position which was termed objectivism by (Grix2002:177) followed the Emile Durkheim’s positivistic idea of social
The tradition of
fact that tend to believe that terrorists will exist ‘outthere’ no matter what the historical context may be.
mainstream social sciences where social phenomenon are treated as

‘objective’ science (objectivism)stems from the positivist ontology which
emphasizes the existence of an existing project or social reality and such reality should be
understood in terms of data and fact using method of natural science (such as data
collection, theoretical deduction and statistical analysis which
stresses value free approach) drives orthodox ontological position in terrorism studies, and further
influence its epistemological andmethodological outlook. Mainstream terrorism approaches such
as realism and liberalism believe that state has amonopoly on the

legitimate use of force and that terrorism are carried out by non-state
actors only (Blakeley, 2009). This orthodoxy view rejects state terrorism and
posits that state is legitimate and ‘terrorists’ are illegitimate social
formation.This reflects in Bruce Hoffman’s definition of terrorism as an‘acts perpetuated by a sub-national or non-state
The obvious reality in orthodox approach is to ensure that
entity’(Hoffman 1998).
western state terrorism is off the agenda and subtly defines terrorism
in a way that delegitimizes opposition to the interestand power of the
West while legitimising the Western power’s own political violence
(Herring 2008: 22). Since the orthodox approach focus solely on the illegal
non-state actors terrorizing legitimate state, the approach helps to provide cover
andlegitimation for the so-called American and British war on terror in
Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan and Yemen, which uses dangerous
counter terrorist tactics, military intervention, andregime change
couple with tactic support and assistance toauthoritarian regimes (allies) of
Bahrain, Israel and Saudi Arabia. It can thus be concluded that the ontological,epistemological and
methodological foundation of orthodox approach do not question the existing social and powerrelations but help to sustain and
maintain the existinginstitutional and power-relational status quo by confrontingany destabilising pressures within the international
system.
Terrorism is an ideological label designed to stifle radical thought –
its invocation powers limitless imperial violence
ICL ‘6 “The "War on Terror" and the Imperialist World Order” International Communist League, 11/24/2006, http://www.icl-
fi.org/english/wv/881/terrorism.html
The Bush administration, supported by the Democrats in Congress,
seized on the grief, anger and fear over the September 11 attacks on the World Trade
Center and the Pentagon to mobilize popular support for new military adventures
abroad and intensified repression domestically. The torture chambers of

Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib and Bagram; the rape and massacre of Iraqi
villagers by U.S. troops in Haditha—such are the real meaning of the
so-called “global war on terror.” On the home front, this “war,” initially directed
mainly against immigrants from Muslim countries, has brought
wholesale attacks against the rights of black people and the
population as a whole. The Democrats gave Bush & Co. a blank check for the invasion of Afghanistan
and largely supported the war against Iraq. Now they have recaptured Congress largely by
promoting themselves as better able than the beleaguered

Republicans to carry out the “war on terror,” calling for an “exit strategy” in order to cut U.S.
imperialism’s losses in Iraq. Extricating military forces from the Iraq quagmire could allow the U.S. and NATO to augment their
forces in Afghanistan. It would also give Washington more flexibility in pursuing its threats against both neocolonial Iran and the
North Korean deformed workers state, and to pursue as well the imperialists’ strategic goal of capitalist counterrevolution in China.
The September 11 attacks gave the U.S. rulers further fuel for their
drive to label as “terrorists” all those who oppose their marauding
around the globe and their trampling upon immigrants, black people
and all working people at home. Former Homeland Security chief Tom Ridge warned
West Coast ILWU longshoremen in 2002 that a port strike would be treated as
a threat to “national security.” And a former U.S. secretary of education

in the Bush administration called a major teachers union a “terrorist
organization.” In Britain and elsewhere around the world, capitalist governments have followed Washington’s lead by
implementing their own draconian new laws and further clamping down on immigrant populations. Those who
administer the capitalist system, which has long ceased to play any
progressive role, perpetrate mass terror and wanton, barbaric and
premeditated slaughter on a ghastly scale. The unspeakable crimes
against humanity that are synonymous with U.S. imperialism—from the A-
bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the Second World War to the

carpet bombing of Vietnam in the 1960s and ’70s—are intrinsic to the
epoch of capitalism in its grotesque death agony . No less so are the
brutal workings of capitalist “democracy” at home, from the killing of
strikers and the pounding attacks on workers’ wages and living
standards to the cop terror and mass poverty of the ghettos and
barrios. We abhor the organized violence employed by the capitalist rulers in defense of their obscene profits. But Marxists
are not pacifists. We understand that force is and has always been the midwife of revolutionary social transformation. All history
demonstrates that those who rule class societies do not give up their power without bitter struggle. It will take nothing less than a
series of thoroughgoing socialist revolutions to sweep away the capitalist-imperialist world order, the most murderous system of
exploitation in human history. Nearly a century ago, Leon Trotsky, who would go on to become, along with V.I. Lenin, a central
leader of the October Revolution of 1917, wrote in a 1911 article for the Austrian Social Democracy’s Der Kampf, reprinted in
Our
English in Intercontinental Press (6 August 1973) under the headline, “The Marxist Position on Individual Terrorism”: “
class enemies are in the habit of complaining about our terrorism. What
they mean by this is rather unclear. They would like to label all the activities of the
proletariat directed against the class enemy’s interests as terrorism.

The strike, in their eyes, is the principal method of terrorism. The threat of a
strike, the organization of strike pickets, an economic boycott of a slave-driving boss, a moral boycott of a traitor from our own ranks
If terrorism is understood in this way as any
—all this and much more they call terrorism.
action inspiring fear in, or doing harm to, the enemy, then of course
the entire class struggle is nothing but terrorism. And the only question
remaining is whether the bourgeois politicians have the right to pour
out their floods of moral indignation about proletarian terrorism when
their entire state apparatus with its laws, police, and army is nothing
but an apparatus for capitalist terror!” Today, it is urgently necessary for
the proletariat internationally to fight against every imperialist military
adventure , every attempt to bolster capitalist repression in the name
of the “war on terror.” This fight must include combatting the
bourgeoisie’s lying equation of class and social struggle with criminal
terrorist acts, for which an examination of terrorism both in its current context and in its historical development is
necessary.
Threats of terrorism reinvigorate nationalism at the expense of class

consciousness and further the US imperial machine, causing even
more terrorism
The attack on the World Trade Center using two hijacked passenger jets was a criminal act in which several thousand people—
white, black, Latino and foreign-born working people of many nationalities—were indiscriminately murdered. A third airliner went
down in Pennsylvania, killing all aboard, and a fourth hit the Pentagon, killing 125 in addition to the passengers and crew.
Unlike the World Trade Center, the Pentagon is the command and
administrative center of the U.S. imperialist military, and being a
military installation, the possibility of getting hit comes with the
territory. That fact does not make the attack an “anti-imperialist” act, nor does it change the fact that terrorism almost always
gets innocent people—in this case passengers on the plane as well as maintenance workers, janitors and secretaries at the
The Pentagon, however, directs a military machine that deals out
Pentagon.
death and terror on a scale worlds beyond what the Islamic

fundamentalists of Al Qaeda are capable of. The Pentagon is at the
pinnacle of a set of institutions based on armed force—the military,
the police, the courts and the prisons—that constitute the core of the
U.S. capitalist state. The purpose of the bourgeois state is to defend
by means of organized violence the political rule, property and global
interests of a small layer of capitalists whose wealth derives from the
exploitation of the working class at home and abroad. We noted in “Bush, the
Democrats and the London ‘Terror’ Scare” (WV No. 875, 1 September) that “ the terrorist followers of
Osama bin Laden—Washington’s Frankenstein’s monster—and the

like are responding in their own distorted way to the ravages of U.S.
imperialism.” Terrorist acts such as the September 11 attacks represent the weak striking out at the strong. Nonetheless,
America’s imperialist rulers waved the World Trade Center atrocity as
a bloody shirt to further the lie of “national unity”—the notion that the
exploited and oppressed have a common cause with their exploiters
and oppressors. As a Spartacist League/U.S. Political Bureau statement issued the day after the attack stressed:
“Those who perpetrated this horrific attack (and there is no evidence at all as to who that was) embrace the same mentality as the
racist rulers of America—identifying the working masses with their capitalist exploiters and oppressors!” (“The World Trade Center
Attack,” WV No. 764, 14 September 2001).
Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand is the worst
Zizek ‘9 Slavoj Zizek, critique guy, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, 2009, p. 30-31
Parenthetically, one of the weird consequences of the financial meltdown and the measures taken to counteract it was a revival of
interest in the work of Ayn Rand, the closest one can get to an ideologist of the "greed is good" form of radical capitalism. The sales
of Rand's magnum opus, Atlas Shrugged, exploded again. One suggested reason for this success was that the Obama
administration's support for beleaguered banks smacks of tyrannical socialism, forcing the strong and successful to prop up the
weak, feckless and incompetent. "The current economic strategy is right out of Atlas Shrugged:' the commentator Stephen Moore
wrote recently in Wall Street Journal. "The more incompetent you are in business, the more handouts the politicians will bestow on
you:" 7 According to some reports, there are already signs that the scenario described in Atlas Shrugged-of creative capitalists
themselves going on strike-is actually coming about. According to John Campbell, a Republican congressman: "The achievers are
going on strike. I'm seeing, at a small level, a kind of protest from the people who create jobs . . . who are pulling back from their
ambitions because they see how they'll be punished for them:'18 The absurdity of this reaction lies in the fact that it totally misreads
the situation: most of the bail-out money is going in gigantic sums to precisely those Randian deregulated "titans" who failed in their
"creative" schemes and thereby brought about the downward spiral. It is not the great creative geniuses who are now helping out
lazy ordinary people, it is rather the ordinary taxpayers who are helping out the failed "creative geniuses :' One need simply recall
that the ideologico-political father of the long economic process which resulted in the meltdown is the aforementioned Alan
Greenspan, a card- carrying Randian "objectivist:'
Economics
Economics – 1NC
Economics eradicates socio-historical analysis by reducing complex
productive relations to rational-choice theory and mathematical
models—this causes constant crisis—the entire system is
unredeemable
Fine and Milonakis ’11 Ben Fine, SOAS, University of London, Dimitris Milonakis, University of Crete, “‘Useless
but True’: Economic Crisis and the Peculiarities of Economic Science,” Historical Materialism 19.2 (2011) pp. 3-31
in science, when some rare event occurs which has a major
Generally,
impact, a ‘black swan’, in Taleb’s terminology,7 which was not predicted by the current state-of-the-art scientific tools, or some new
evidence is discovered which cannot be explained by these tools,
representing an ‘anomaly’, in Kuhnian terminology, then the scientific field may be
shaken and new proposals, tools, theories, etc. are put forward to
explain the hitherto inexplicable event or new evidence. One could name countless
examples from the history of science. Just a couple will suffice. Take the example of oceanography. On New Year’s Day in 1995, the Draupner oil-rig radar-sensor in the North
Sea recorded, for the first time in history, a giant wave 26 metres in height which, until then, according to all scientific knowledge based on the linear models in use, was thought
practically impossible. According to the bell-shaped curves derived from this model, an unusual event, a so-to-speak freak-wave of, say, 30 metres in height, could only occur
once every 10,000 years. This new discovery caused an upheaval in oceanography with some scientists turning to the strange world of quantum-mechanics to find part of the
explanation to the riddle of the existence of monster waves.8 Similarly, when, back in the 1960s, neuroscientists discovered that if some parts of the brain failed, then
sometimes other parts can take over their functions, the scientific community was shaken and a new theory, neuroplasticity, was developed to cope with these new findings.9
A huge wave has hit the

Now, the recent economic crisis does represent a huge anomaly with respect to all existing mainstream-theories.
world-economy, a crisis that was thought impossible by (and still denied by some)
mainstream-economic theorising based mostly on mathematical
modelling and the twin assumptions of representative rational agents
and the efficient-market hypothesis.10 The Gaussian bell-shaped
curves used by economists and based on these assumptions
preclude the possibility of such an event taking place. Not only was
the crisis not predicted (nor could it have been by these models), but, after the event, no
explanation remains possible within mainstream-neoclassical
economics other than as what might be termed the inefficient-market
hypothesis. So, will there be a similar freak-wave effect in economic
science? On top of the (epistemological) differences involved
between these (natural) sciences and economics, there is another big
difference. All the events mentioned above, which caused the upheaval in the
respective sciences, refer to newly-available evidence. What is remarkable, in the
case of our scientific field, is that the occurrence of big crises and deep
recessions (unlike the freak-waves of the deep ocean) are not a newly-observed phenomenon. As is
well-known, similar crises have hit the world-economy in the 1870s, the 1930s
and the 1970s. As for more-restricted financial crises, recent

economic history is full of such cases.11 Indeed, unlike the physical
sciences, economics is dominated by such rare and extreme events.12
What is astonishing is that the sector most prone to such phenomena , viz. the financial
sector, has until recently, and to some extent even now, been considered by mainstream-
financial economists as the Mecca of rationality and market-
efficiency. In the past similar, significant events have proved to be the midwives of important developments in economic science, like the birth of Keynes’s
General Theory following the Great Depression of the 1930s. Will something similar happen this time around? Richard Posner of the University of Chicago and, until recently, a
staunch supporter of the neoliberal Chicago school, but now turned Keynesian, thinks so. According to him, what is happening in economics following the crisis is reminiscent of
‘what happened to cosmology after Edwin Hubble discovered that the universe was expanding, and was much larger than scientists believed. The profession fell into turmoil,
just before the crisis

with some physicists sticking to existing theories, while others came up with the big bang theory’.13 As Krugman has said,
erupted economists ‘were congratulating themselves over the

success of their field’.14 After all, this was the era of ‘great moderation’ – ‘the substantial decline in economic volatility’ – that the chairman of
the Federal Reserve Board, Ben Bernanke, has partly attributed to ‘improved performance of macroeconomic policies’.15 This was also the era of
the emerging consensus in macroeconomics. A consensus based on the most-

horrendously unrealistic assumptions of the representative agent
holding rational expectations and the market-efficiency hypothesis. As
Greenspan himself has admitted, all of this collapsed in September 2008. Before coming to current theoretical developments, let us first take a look at what happened back in
the thirties. Although the interwar-period was an era of pluralism in economics, with different schools of thought using vastly different types of organon and with different
conceptual frameworks flourishing, for the whole period until the 1929 Wall Street crash, the view that was dominant within ‘neoclassical’ economics was that markets are
efficient, and, if left alone, they would tend to get back to full-employment equilibrium. The result of these beliefs was that, after the 1929 crash, the market was left on its own to
cope with the consequences of the crisis. The ensuing deepest crisis and depression of the twentieth century shook the credibility of neoclassical theory and the belief in the
self-regulating abilities of the market almost beyond repair. This whole intellectual edifice collapsed after the 1929 crash. Or so it seemed at the time. The theoretical gap was
filled by John Maynard Keynes’s General Theory. This is one instance for which it can safely be said that the dramatic changes in the economic sphere brought about significant
changes in economic thought. Keynes’s aim was to save capitalism from its own excesses, putting as his central goal the achievement of full employment. Another reason why
Keynes’s work had the potential for a revolutionary-scientific paradigm-shift à la Kuhn was that, despite its weaknesses, the changes it could potentially bring about were
changes from without, in the sense that it broke with neoclassical economics in important and radical ways. Firstly, he got rid of the individualistic, utilitarian overtones of
neoclassical economics as well as the representative individual. Secondly, he denounced the self-equilibrating tendency of the economy through the concepts of ‘deficient
demand’ and ‘unemployment equilibrium’. Third, he placed emphasis on the role of systemic uncertainty. These are certainly radical innovations. But did they revolutionise
economics? Although Keynes’s work did have a significant effect policy-wise, at least for the period 1945–70, its revolutionary effects on economic science in the longer run are
more questionable, and certainly limited. As far as economic policy is concerned, Keynes’s new ideas did gain considerable currency after World-War Two. ‘The Beveridge
Report of 1942 in Great Britain and the Employment Act of 1946 in the United States provided blueprints for government involvement in the macroeconomy along Keynesian
lines’.16 For a couple of decades after the publication of the General Theory, Keynesian economics was considered work at the edge.17 Even then, however, Keynesian
economics was already something different from Keynes’s own economics. In the longer term, however, and contrary to conventional wisdom, the impact of Keynes’s
just after
economics on economic theory has been even more limited, especially in relation to Keynes’s own methodology and theoretical frame. For,
Keynes’s book appeared, another process was set in motion. It was

associated with the increasing mathematisation, axiomatisation and
formalisation of economics which was boosted by the Great
Depression and also, as Mirowski has shown, by the War through the militarisation
of scientific research it brought about, leading to the development of
advanced mathematical tools, what later became known as
operations-research, but also artificial intelligence and information-
theory. These were then applied to economics, leading to a new
economic methodology.18 Deduction and mathematical modelling
gradually gained the upper hand at the expense of other modes of
analysis and reasoning. This process of formalisation and
mathematisation has as a prerequisite the , at least implicit, if
putative, excision of the social and the historical element from
economic theorising, as manifested in the transition from political
economy to economics, leading to an almost brand-new scientific
body totally detached from its historical and social setting. In other words, the aim was
the construction of a universally-valid theoretical corpus irrespective of the social and the historical. Nowhere is this detachment more apparent than in the tendency of the
financial sector nowadays to hire physics- and mathematics-graduates, totally innocent of the actual workings of the economy, what the Wall Street Journal reporter Scott
Patterson has called in his recent book ‘the quants’, where he describes ‘how the new breed of math whizzes conquered Wall Street and nearly destroyed it’.19 As Greenspan
himself has said in his testimony in front of the US-Congress a month after the financial crash of September 2008, it was the failure to properly price such risky assets that
precipitated the crisis. In recent decades, a vast risk management and pricing system has evolved, combining the best insights of mathematicians and finance experts supported
by major advances in computer and communications technology. . . . This modern risk management paradigm held sway for decades. The whole intellectual edifice collapsed in
the summer of last year.20 This process of formalisation has created a whole generation of so-called idiot savants, scientists with excellent technical skills but without true
knowledge of the functioning of the economy. As Taleb puts it, these scholars ‘resemble Locke’s definition of a madman: someone “reasoning correctly from erroneous
Premises” ‘.21 This problem was raised dramatically in a study by Klamer and Colander of the five most-distinguished doctoral programmes in economics in American
universities, based upon questionnaires given to Ph.D.-candidates to answer, and interviews with them. One of the conclusions of the research is stunning. Of those questioned,
only 3.4 per cent thought that knowledge about the real economy was very important for success in the doctorate-programme, while 57 per cent thought that excellence in
mathematics to be very important. In other words, the students thought that knowledge of techniques and not of the real economy was the basic prerequisite for success in their
doctorate-programme.22 The sickness of modern economics has been the subject of increasing attack by a series of leading mainstream-economists from before the crisis.
Even Milton Friedman deplored the way in which, ‘economics has become increasingly an arcane branch of mathematics rather than dealing with economic problems’.23
Similarly Buiter, writing after the crisis, talks about ‘the unfortunate uselessness of most “state of the art” academic monetary economics’,24 and, for Paul Krugman, ‘the
economics profession went astray because economists, as a group, mistook beauty, clad in impressive looking mathematics, for truth. . . . The central cause of the profession’s
failure was the desire for an all-encompassing, intellectually elegant approach that also gave economists a chance to show off their mathematical prowess’.25 What is amazing
is that these last words come from one of the main practitioners of the economics he is criticising and after he had himself been amply rewarded with a Nobel Prize for this.
What is even more amazing is that Krugman had already tried to make a mockery of this fatal tendency in economics early on in 1978 when he wrote a sarcastic article entitled
‘The Theory of Interstellar Trade’. In his abstract we read: This paper extends interplanetary trade theory to an interstellar setting. It is chiefly concerned with the following
question: how should interest charges on goods in transit be computed when the goods travel at close to the speed of light? This is a problem because the time taken in transit
will appear less to an observer travelling with the goods than to a stationary observer. A solution is derived from economic theory, and two useless but true theorems are
proved.26 ‘Useless but true’: in these three words of Krugman can be found what is essentially wrong with modern economics: it is all about theoretical exercises, mostly taking
a mathematical form, which may be valid mathematically, although the analytical robustness of some of these models is also questionable, but useless in any other sense and
empty of any practical relevance. This is the problem of formalism in economics, the triumph of form over substance. 27 The seeds of the appearance and further development
The explicit attempt since then has been to

of this tendency within economic science go back to the marginalist revolution.
transform economics into a ‘rigorous’ science on a par with positive

sciences and devoid of any normative statements or value-judgments.
This was done partly by borrowing tools and concepts such as
equilibrium and optimisation from the physical sciences, particularly,
to begin with, from static mechanics, and then subsequently from
thermodynamics. ‘The pure science of economics’, says Walras, one of the protagonists of the marginalist revolution, ‘is a science that resembles the
physico-mathematical sciences in every respect’.28 And, what is more, ‘the scholar has the right to pursue science for its own sake’, equating geometry with economics in this
respect.29 Such formalism did not become dominant within the profession until after the Second World-War. It was given a new impetus by the works of Hicks’s Value and
Capital, and Samuelson’s Foundations of Economic Analysis, culminating in the mathematical proof for the existence of equilibrium by Arrow and Debreu in 1954.30 Since then,
the Samuelsonian tool of constrained optimisation borrowed from thermodynamics became the symbol of the new formalist era, accompanied by Americanisation and
Concomitant with
standardisation of the discipline, a truly Fordist intellectualism in which you can have any economics as long as it is neoclassical.
this formalisation-process is a newly-acquired self-confidence of the

practitioners of this method which was translated into a superiority-
syndrome vis-a-vis the other social sciences, as exemplified by the process of Gary-Becker-style Chicago
economics-imperialism, or, in other words, the process of colonisation of other social sciences using the so-called ‘economic method’ to analyse all social phenomena.31 This
process of formalisation and homogenisation of economics reached a climax approaching near-total dominance in the 1970s. This was also the time that heterodox approaches
in economics made a more dynamic appearance and heterodox institutions proliferated following the radicalisation brought about by the Vietnam War, and the developments
inside the profession.32 Following the formalist revolution of the 1950s, only those aspects of Keynes’s thought which could be modelled were incorporated into what came to
be known as the ‘neoclassical synthesis’. The subsumption of Keynes’s thought to the formalist revolution, starting with Hicks’s IS/LM-formulation33 just one year after the
publication of Keynes’s General Theory, meant that all novel and radical aspects of his thought were either left out altogether or else reformulated in mathematical or
diagrammatical form, beyond recognition. This gave rise to what has variously been called ‘bastard Keynesianism’ by Joan Robinson, or ‘hydraulic Keynesianism’.34 As
Skidelsky puts it, ‘Keynes imposed himself on the profession by a series of profound insights into human behaviour which fitted the turbulence of his times. But these were never
– could never be – properly integrated into the core of the discipline, which expelled them as soon as it conveniently could’.35 Substantively, then, Keynes could be thought of
as the first major victim of the formalist revolution. So much so, that the one Keynesian school which adhered most closely to Keynes’s own core-principles and concepts is
This process of
nowadays classified as heterodox and suffers the same fate from mainstream-economists as any other heterodox school.
subsumption, which culminated in the ‘microfoundations of

macroeconomics’ project, coupled with the monetarist and, later on,
new classical counter-revolution in macroeconomics, propelled by
the stagflation-crisis of the 1970s, led within macroeconomics to the
elimination of Keynes’s economics and its transformation into the
new Keynesianism of microeconomic market-imperfections, and
eventually to the almost-total eclipse of macroeconomics as a distinct
field vis-a-vis microeconomics.36 The fate of Keynesianism was described vividly and ironically by Nobel laureate Robert Lucas
in 1980, when he remarked that ‘One cannot find good, over-forty economists who identify themselves or their work as “Keynesian”. . . . At research seminars, people don’t take
Keynesian theorising seriously any more; the audience starts to whisper and giggle to one another’.37 This is the economics of the neoliberal era of Reagan and Thatcher,
It signifies a return to the pre-

based on the twin assumptions of rational expectations and the efficient-market hypothesis.
Keynes era, the virtual world of the economist’s imagination,

inhabited by perfectly rational and egotistic human beings, forming
rational expectations about the future and exchanging their products
in perfectly competitive markets, a virtual world marred only by
random shocks and, of course, far-from-random government. The
same fate as Keynesianism faced any other attempt at providing a
different mode of analysis, so much so that, in our own day, anything
that cannot be modelled is not considered as economics and left out
of consideration altogether. This total lack of tolerance is another
basic attribute of present-day economics, alongside a frighteningly
intellectually-barbaric treatment of the history of economic thought
and of methodology within the discipline. Not only is mainstream-
neoclassical economics intolerant of alternatives. It exhibits the same
indifference towards any criticism, even internal criticisms that derive
from within its own ranks. Some devastating such criticisms have been, for example,
the so-called Cambridge Capital-Controversy of the 1960s, which brought
into question the validity of the concept of aggregate capital; and the
Sonnenschein-Mantel-Debreu (SMD for short) impossibility-theorem developed
in the 1970s, which showed that aggregate excess-demands were
arbitrary and that there can be no determinateness of general
equilibrium. All this led Christopher Bliss to declare that ‘the near emptiness of general equilibrium theory is a theorem of the theory’.38 What was the result?
Mainstream-economics simply carried on regardless, as if these
critiques had never taken place. As Rizvi puts it, ‘very few troublesome parts of the theory have been thoroughly eliminated:
social welfare functions, well-behaved aggregate demands, and Nash equilibria remain prominent in the textbooks’.39 Thus, whilst orthodoxy
prides itself on its rigour and as a science, in part in light of its

commitment to mathematical reasoning, that reasoning always takes
second place if its results are unpalatable. Other causes of
mainstream-arrogance and intransigence are the institutional
monopoly enjoyed by the elite of the profession over the positions in
top universities and academic journals, attracting the lion’s share of
funding, occupying central public positions and being awarded 90 per
cent of Nobel prizes in economics. In this respect, this year’s award of the Nobel prize is a scandal. As Varoufakis puts it,
Imagine a world ravaged by a plague, and suppose that the year’s
Nobel Prize for Medicine is awarded to researchers whose whole
career is based on the assumption that plagues are impossible. The world would
have been outraged. That is precisely how we should feel about yesterday’s announcement of the recipients of the 2010 Nobel Prize. . . . Interestingly, these three fine
mathematical economists have one thing in common, other than their work on labor markets: in their voluminous theoretical output on unemployment and the like, there is not a
To this
smidgeon of a hint, of a mention, of an economic crisis which may boost unemployment in every sector and for all types of workers. Not one!40
should be added the direct vested interests of many academics,

especially in the financial sector, a feature that was exacerbated during the financialisation-era. Philip Mirowski asks:41 Does
anyone care that Martin Feldstein was on the board of AIG in the run up to its
disastrous failure? Or that Paul Krugman once consulted for Enron (and got radicalised after the
New York Times made him foreswear such perks)? Is anyone curious about the tangled history of funding and organisation of the Chicago School of Economics? Does anyone
Summers worked for numerous hedge funds and investment

care that Larry
firms before they had to be rescued by an administration that

included . . . Larry Summers? All of this Charles Ferguson highlights as ‘the convergence of academic economics, Wall Street and
political power’, not least through his stunning film on the financial crisis and economists.42 Neoliberalism, financialisation and the growing power and influence of the financial
it is the very
sector that these have brought about all played an important role in the latest developments in economic science. Deep down, however,
nature of the system and the ideological need for its justification that
lies behind this type of theory. As Georg Lukacs has said, ‘[t]he capitalist process of
rationalisation based on private economic calculation requires that
every manifestation of life shall exhibit [an] interaction between
details which are subject to laws and a totality ruled by chance . It
presupposes a society so structured’.43 Hence the conceptualisation of
the current crisis as a chance-occurrence, a black swan, that could
not be predicted and, once there, cannot be explained other than as a chance-occurrence intractable by scientific knowledge. In short, the
interests of the capitalist system, and of finance in particular, not only
dominate economic discourse, but the latter also dysfunctionally
suffers the orthodoxy that it deserves, the mindless pursuit of
financial stability on the basis of models of both the more-or-less-
perfect-market hypothesis and of the moreor- less perfectly-rational
individual. So what are the chances that this time it will be different as far as the impact of the global crisis on economic science is concerned? The picture we
have drawn so far of the state of our science does not leave much room for optimism. Despite some heavy criticism coming mostly, but not exclusively, from the Keynesian and
neo-Keynesian camps (including Krugman, Stiglitz, and Skidelsky, but also the Chicago economist Richard Posner), the reactions so far do not lend themselves to much
optimism. For Chicago economists like Eugene Fama (the main modern exponent of efficient-market theory) and John Cochrane, it is business as usual. As Fama puts it, We
don’t know what causes recessions. Now I’m not a macroeconomist so I don’t feel bad about that. (Laughs) We’ve never known. . . . Economics is not very good at explaining
swings in economic activity.44 Fama and mainstream-economics, then, cannot explain crises, so we might just as well pretend that they do not exist. If this is not a direct
confession of the total intellectual bankruptcy of Chicago-style mainstream-economics, then what is? And for Cochrane, talking after the crisis, ‘rational expectations and
efficient markets theories are both consistent with big price crashes. . . . What [the] efficient markets [hypothesis] says is that prices today contain the available information about
the future’.45 So all the information about the future is available and yet crises are not just unpredictable from within this model, they simply cannot happen, just like giant waves
within the linear models of wave-formation. For others, at least willing to recognise that something more by way of explanation is required, we need better models that would
either take into account market-imperfections like the ‘New Keynesians’,46 or market-dynamics through the use of a ‘different type of mathematics’ or other sophisticated
models coming from engineering, computing or physics,47 much like what happened in wave-theory and oceanography following the discovery of giant waves and the adoption
of models from quantum-mechanics. Thus, for Solow, there are other traditions in economics which include ‘various market frictions and imperfections like rigid prices and
wages, asymmetries of information, time lags, and so on’ which provide better ways of doing macroeconomics.48 A more genuine return to Keynes is the third escape-route.
This is done mostly by emphasising some aspect of Keynes’s economics which has been totally forgotten by mainstream-economics. The aspect most commonly chosen is
radical uncertainty and the animal-spirits of capitalism associated with it.49 This, especially in the case of Akerlof and Shiller, is associated with the behavioural school in
economics, which seeks the explanation of economic phenomena by delving deeper into the psyche of individuals. The emphasis here is laid on the psychological and even
‘irrational’ factors influencing human behaviour, such as confidence, fairness, corruption, money-illusion, etc., which are seen as the ‘ultimate drivers of the economy’.50 Of
these factors, only the role of confidence in the economy has anything to do with Keynes’s work. The usual story is that uncertainty causes sharp changes in expectations and
confidence, which cause major changes in share-prices, bringing about sharp alterations in consumption, investment and employment. What is not explained, however, is the
source of this uncertainty and the epistemological foundations of such ‘irrational’ behaviour, both of which must be sought in the structural characteristics of the capitalist system
which, however, are systematically and suspiciously absent from all of these accounts. Behavioural economics has been one of the main new research-projects within
mainstream-economics in recent years. Other new research-programmes include (classical, behavioural, evolutionary) game-theory, experimental economics, evolutionary
economics, agent-based complexity-theory and neuroeconomics. The appearance of these new research-programmes has led commentators such as Colander and Davis to
talk about the ‘death of neoclassical economics’ and the transition from the era of neoclassical dominance to mainstream pluralism.51 This transition was made possible,
according to Colander, Holt and Rosser,52 by new technology and especially developments in computing which allowed for the use of more complex models. And, although it
was brought about by cumulative-evolutionary changes rather than a sudden paradigm-shift, the end-result will be no less revolutionary in its effects. One common element in
these new research-programmes is that they all originate from fields outside of
economics, such as mathematics (gametheory), psychology (behavioural economics), neo-
Darwinian biology (evolutionary economics), neuroscience (neuroeconomics), while the
experimental method has long been applied in the natural and
physical sciences. This process of importation of methods and concepts from other sciences has been called ‘inverse imperialism’, and has led Davis
to the conclusion that they represent ‘genuinely different approaches’.53 But does this amount to true scientific
pluralism? The answer is no. The reason is that, despite their different outlooks,
all of these approaches have two things in common: first, their
adherence to axiomatic model-building as their preferred
methodological approach and, second, their focus on the individual .54
Indeed Colander, following Solow and Niehans, defines modern or, as he calls it, ‘New-Millennium Economics’, not in terms of its content but its method: ‘the modeling approach
All of the new research-programmes

to problems’, he says, ‘is the central problem of modern economics’.55
mentioned above then share a common language, so to speak, which is none other than that of
formalism. The formalist revolution, then, reigns supreme, even in this
supposedly post-neoclassical, ‘mainstream-pluralist’ era, and, other differences apart,
keeps itself in line with it. Indicative of this is that, in their book, The Changing Face of Economics, Colander et al. have interviewed eleven ‘cutting-edge economists’, as they
call them, coming mostly from the ranks of the ‘inside-the-mainstream’ heterodoxy-group.56 Nine of them do highly technical model-building work. Generally, this is true for both
pure-theory models and applied-policy models. The old distinction between the science of economics (theoretical economics) and the art of economics (applied economics) has
disappeared under the impact of the formalist dmodelling method. Indeed, modern economics is defined by little else. This also applies to new fields of research such as
evolutionary game-theory and experimental economics which, in other respects, may deviate from neoclassical economics, but not from the use of highly technical model-
building.57 What modern orthodox economists fail to understand is that

what is at fault is not some specific assumption or characteristic of
the models used, but the method of deductive-mathematical
modelling itself. In addition to their universalistic nature and lack of
historical specificity, the method of mathematical-deductive
reasoning, as Lawson has shown, presupposes, first, a closed system in which event-
regularities or correlations, ‘that connect events standing in causal
sequence, in order to deduce that this event happened because of, or
followed from, that event’58 occur, and, second, the isolated-individual
agent.59 Because of the erroneous character of both of these
presuppositions as far as social and economic phenomena are
concerned, mathematical modelling is inappropriate as a leading, let
alone an exclusive tool for the analysis of such phenomena. To
axiomatic model-building should also be added another attribute which most (but not all) of these new
approaches share with neoclassical economics: methodological individualism and the emphasis
on the individual.60 Where does all this leave the issue of pluralism? It means that all approaches and
schools that do not accept technical model-building as their method
of analysis simply do not get a hearing and are left out of the picture
altogether, being considered unacceptable as scholarly economics. As Colander et al. themselves admit, the elite of the profession is open-minded to new
ideas, but closed-minded to alternative methods and approaches. ‘If it’s not modeled, it’s not economics’.61 This, however, is not true scientific pluralism, ‘a genuinely
pluralistic environment’, in Davis’s words,62 but rather what might be called ‘conditional’ or ‘pseudo-’ pluralism and, as such, is no pluralism at all.
Be that as it may, this transition has brought with it a move away from the ‘holy trinity’ of neoclassical economics – rationality, efficiency and equilibrium – to a more eclectic holy
trinity – purposeful behaviour, enlightened self-interest and multiple equilibria.63 According to new findings coming from experimental and behavioural economics, the famous
homo economicus of the economist’s imagination is passé. It has been shown experimentally and theoretically that individual behaviour is subject to cognitive and emotional
constraints, and new, pro-social elements with regard to human behaviour, such as fairness, reciprocity, altruism, etc., have forcefully entered the picture, making individuals
more humane and less like the robotic entities implied by homo economicus.64
Economics – 2NC
Neoclassical economics is built on ideological denial of its own
theoretical shortcomings—this indicts 100% of their methodology—
extend Fine and Milonakis
Mathematical-deductive reasoning as ‘economic science’
models exchange as governed by universal laws ruled by pure
chance, as if social relations emerge out of nothing. Denies all
other modes of reasoning as ‘unscientific’ or ‘non-economic’ to
avoid the tough questions
Denies systemic crises—plays off recessions as unpredictable
‘black swans’ despite their historical regularity as an ideological
play to maintain inequality
Economic theory is structured to conceal basic structural problems
and doesn’t spill over to effective policy or market stability
Fine and Milonakis ’11 Ben Fine, SOAS, University of London, Dimitris Milonakis, University of Crete, “‘Useless
but True’: Economic Crisis and the Peculiarities of Economic Science,” Historical Materialism 19.2 (2011) pp. 3-31
This process of formalisation and mathematisation has as a prerequisite the, at least implicit, if putative, excision of the social and
the historical element from economic theorising, as manifested in the transition from political economy to economics, leading to an
the aim was the
almost brand-new scientific body totally detached from its historical and social setting. In other words,
construction of a universally-valid theoretical corpus irrespective of

the social and the historical. Nowhere is this detachment more
apparent than in the tendency of the financial sector nowadays to hire
physics- and mathematics-graduates, totally innocent of the actual
workings of the economy, what the Wall Street Journal reporter Scott Patterson has called in his recent book
‘the quants’, where he describes ‘how the new breed of math whizzes conquered Wall Street and nearly destroyed it’.19 As
Greenspan himself has said in his testimony in front of the US-Congress a month after the financial crash of September 2008, it was
the failure to properly price such risky assets that precipitated the crisis. In recent decades, a vast risk management and pricing
system has evolved, combining the best insights of mathematicians and finance experts supported by major advances in computer
and communications technology. . . . This modern risk management paradigm held sway for decades. The whole intellectual edifice
formalisation has created a whole
collapsed in the summer of last year.20 This process of
generation of so-called idiot savants, scientists with excellent

technical skills but without true knowledge of the functioning of the
economy. As Taleb puts it, these scholars ‘resemble Locke’s definition of a
madman: someone “reasoning correctly from erroneous Premises” ‘.21
This problem was raised dramatically in a study by Klamer and Colander of the five
most-distinguished doctoral programmes in economics in American

universities, based upon questionnaires given to Ph.D.-candidates to answer, and interviews with them. One of the
conclusions of the research is stunning. Of those questioned, only 3.4 per cent thought that knowledge about the real economy was
very important for success in the doctorate-programme, while 57 per cent thought that excellence in mathematics to be very
students thought that knowledge of techniques and
important. In other words, the
not of the real economy was the basic prerequisite for success in
their doctorate-programme.22 The sickness of modern economics has been the subject of increasing attack
by a series of leading mainstream-economists from before the crisis. Even Milton Friedman deplored the way in which,
economics has become increasingly an arcane branch of
‘
mathematics rather than dealing with economic problems’.23 Similarly Buiter,

writing after the crisis, talks about ‘the unfortunate uselessness of most “state of the art” academic monetary economics’,24 and, for
Paul Krugman, ‘the economics profession went astray because economists, as a group, mistook beauty, clad in impressive looking
The central cause of the profession’s failure was the
mathematics, for truth. . . .
desire for an all-encompassing, intellectually elegant approach that

also gave economists a chance to show off their mathematical
prowess’.25 What is amazing is that these last words come from one of the main practitioners of the economics he is
criticising and after he had himself been amply rewarded with a Nobel Prize for this. What is even more amazing is that Krugman
had already tried to make a mockery of this fatal tendency in economics early on in 1978 when he wrote a sarcastic article entitled
‘The Theory of Interstellar Trade’. In his abstract we read: This paper extends interplanetary trade theory to an interstellar setting. It
is chiefly concerned with the following question: how should interest charges on goods in transit be computed when the goods travel
at close to the speed of light? This is a problem because the time taken in transit will appear less to an observer travelling with the
goods than to a stationary observer. A solution is derived from economic theory, and two useless but true theorems are proved.26
‘Useless but true’: in these three words of Krugman can be found
what is essentially wrong with modern economics: it is all about
theoretical exercises, mostly taking a mathematical form, which may
be valid mathematically, although the analytical robustness of some
of these models is also questionable, but useless in any other sense
and empty of any practical relevance. This is the problem of
formalism in economics, the triumph of form over substance.
Sociological incentives create systemic ignorance of the economy’s
true nature – leads to serial policy failure and kills value to life
Konczal ’13 Mike Konczal, “How to Waste a Crisis,” The New Inquiry, 11/26/2013, http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/how-
to-waste-a-crisis/
The second half of Never Let a Serious Crisis, on the economics profession, will be familiar to those who have watched
economists squirm in films like Inside Job. Their projects of ignoring any possibilities
that an unchecked financial sector could do anything but help the
economy while collecting generous paychecks imploded alongside
the rampant fraud and panic of the financial crisis. Pointing out the sheer corruption of
the economics field’s elite is a worthy use of anyone’s time, but Mirowski is hunting bigger game. He wants to argue that the
entire edifice of post–World War II orthodox economics policy is

incapable of governing the economy without producing perennial
crashes and human misery. But he never makes the case directly, perhaps because he has no path out of
the dire situation he seeks to prove. According to Mirowski, there was a moment after the 2008
crash when the economics profession could have performed some

rigorous self-criticism and made an honest assessment of what had
gone wrong. But the proposed technocratic fixes — addressing the “efficient markets
hypothesis” in finance, adding so-called bounded rationality to microeconomic models to make them “behavioral,” and adding
were particularly ineffective in

various bells and whistles to macroeconomic models —
reforming or even clarifying what is going on in financial markets . And the

various “explanations” of the crisis that were brought up for debate in
mainstream publications and through a network of economic policy
“experts” ended up not serving any notion of scientific inquiry but
instead were means of deflecting, confusing, and delaying any
progress toward uncovering truth or consensus. So how did the economists get away?
According to Mirowski, they are protected through a web of prestige that stretches
across the academy to quasi-accountable offices of the government

like the Federal Reserve, as well as the network of policy think tanks
that provide so-called expertise. This miasma of prestige has become
too important to the actual logic of financial capitalism at this moment — elite
economics dominates all these important international institutions,
and there’s been a subtle wagon-circling at that level. Thus, like the
banks, economists themselves are too big to fail .
Economics
Neoclassical economics is designed to hide material contradictions—
pretty math models and abstract ‘rational choice’ presuppose an
impossible growth without limit, making crisis inevitable
Foster and McChesney ’12 John Bellamy Foster, professor of sociology at University of Oregon, and Robert
W. McChesney, Gutgsell Endowed Professor of Communication, University of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign, “The Endless Crisis,”
Monthly Review, May 2012, vol. 64, issue 1, pp. 1-28
Although the tendency to stagnation or a long period of anemic growth is increasingly recognized even within the economic
mainstream as a major issue, broad historical and theoretical understandings of this and its relation to capitalist development are
lacking within establishment circles. The reason for this we believe can be traced to the fact that neoclassical economists and
mainstream social science generally have long abandoned any meaningful historical analysis. Their abstract models, geared more
to legitimizing the system than to understanding its laws of motion, have become increasingly other-worldly—constructed around
such unreal assumptions as perfect and pure competition, perfect information, perfect rationality (or rational expectations), and the
market efficiency hypothesis. The elegant mathematical models developed on the basis of these rarefied constructions often have
more to do with beauty in the sense of ideal perfection, than with the messy world of material reality. The results therefore are about
as relevant to today’s reality as the medieval debates on the number of angels that could fit on the end of a pin were to theirs. This
is an economics that has gone the way of stark idealism—removed altogether from material conditions. As Krugman put it, “the
economics profession went astray because economists, as a group, mistook beauty, clad in impressive-looking mathematics, for
truth.”11 John Kenneth Galbraith, in The Economics of Innocent Fraud, provided a still stronger condemnation of prevailing
economic and social science, arguing that in recent decades the system itself had been fraudulently “renamed” from capitalism to
“the market system.” The advantage of the latter term from an establishment perspective was: “ There was no adverse history here,
in fact no history at all. It would have been hard, indeed, to find a more meaningless designation—this is a reason for the choice….
So it is of the market system we teach the young…. No individual or firm is thus dominant. No economic power is evoked. There is
nothing here from Marx or Engels. There is only the impersonal market, a not wholly innocent fraud.” Along with this, “the phrase
‘monopoly capitalism,’ once in common use,” Galbraith charged, “has been dropped from the academic and political lexicon.”
Perhaps worst of all, the growing likelihood of a severe crisis and a long-term slowdown in the economy was systematically hidden
from view by this fraudulent displacement of the very idea of capitalism (and even of the corporate system).12 The continuing
influence of Galbraith’s “economics of innocent fraud” and the absurd results it generates can be seen in a 2010 speech by
Bernanke at Princeton, entitled “Implications of the Financial Crisis for Economics.” The primary reason the “standard
[macroeconomic] models” had failed to see the Great Financial Crisis coming, Bernanke admitted, was that these models “were
designed for…non-crisis periods” only. In other words, the conventional models employed by orthodox economists were constructed
(intentionally or unintentionally) so as to exclude the very possibility of a major crisis or a long-term period of deepening economic
stagnation. As long as economic growth appeared robust, Bernanke told his listeners, the models proved “quite useful.” The
problem, then, he insisted, was not so much that the models on which economic analysis and policy were based were “irrelevant or
at least significantly flawed.” Rather the bursting of the financial bubble and the subsequent crisis represented events that were
not supposed to happen , and that the models were never meant to explain.13 This is similar to a
meteorologist who has constructed a model that predicts perpetual sunny days interrupted by the occasional minor shower and
when the big storm comes claims in the model’s defense that it was never intended to account for the possibility of such unlikely and
unforeseen events.14 All of this points to the lack within mainstream economics and social science of a reasoned historical
interpretation. “Most of the fundamental errors committed in economic analysis,” Joseph Schumpeter wrote in his History of
Economic Analysis, “are due to lack of historical experience” or historical understanding. For Schumpeter, this contrasts sharply with
the approach of Marx, who “was the first economist of top rank to see and to teach systematically how economic theory may be
turned into historical analysis and how the historical narrative may be turned into histoire raisonnée.”15 Today conventional social
scientists have all too often become narrow specialists or technicians concerned with one little corner of reality—or worse still,
developers of models that in their extreme abstraction fall prey to Whitehead’s fallacy of misplaced concreteness.16 They seldom
recognize the importance of the old Hegelian adage that “the truth is the whole”—and hence can only be understood genetically in
its process of becoming.17 These self-imposed blinders of mainstream social science were dramatically evident in the failure of
economics and social science generally to recognize even the possibility of economic and social catastrophe in today’s capitalism.
In his presidential address to the American Economic Association in 2003, Robert Lucas flatly declared that the “central problem of
depression prevention has been solved.” The idea that the economy was now free of major crisis tendencies, due to the advent of
new, improved monetary policies, became the conventional macroeconomic wisdom— referred to by none other than Bernanke in
2004 as the coming of the Great Moderation.18 Yet, it took only a few years for the bursting of the housing bubble to prove how
illusory these notions of the end of history were.
Neoclassical abstractions of the ‘rational chooser’ obscures

questions of monopolization and power, removing itself from
historical study into the veils of free market ideology
Foster ’12 John Bellamy Foster, professor of sociology at the University of Oregon, “A Missing Chapter of Monopoly Capital
- Introduction to Baran and Sweezy’s “Some Theoretical Implications,” Monthly Review, July 2012, Vol. 64, Issue 3, pp. 3-23
“Some Theoretical Implications” commenced with a critique of bourgeois economics for its escape from reality. This was attributed
not simply to subjective factors but to the growth of monopoly capitalism itself. Marx had attributed the shift to apologetics in
bourgeois economics beginning in the 1830s to the bourgeois conquest of the state and the increasing polarization between the
capitalist class and the working class. Baran and Sweezy, however, argued that Marx was looking at the precursors of what was to
prove to be a larger development. The real shift towards apologetics associated with the rise of marginalist economics, they
claimed, could be seen as emerging beginning in the 1870s. This was related to the transition of the capitalist system from a
relatively progressive competitive stage to a retrograde monopoly stage. The contradiction between the growing potential to meet
human needs through the development of the forces of production and the actual stagnation in the relations of production of the
monopoly capitalist system engendered an impasse that was ever more irrational and destructive. As Baran had written in The
Political Economy of Growth, “And yet such is the dialectic of the historical process that within the framework of monopoly capitalism
the most abominable, the most destructive features of the capitalist order become the very foundations of its continuing existence—
just as slavery was the conditio sine qua non of its emergence.” 10 Hence in the monopoly stage the “commitment” of the
economics discipline “to defend a retrograde system,” Baran and Sweezy argued in “Some Theoretical Implications,” became “an
insuperable obstacle to rational thought.” This meant that all systematic consideration of the emergence of monopoly capital even as
to its existence, let alone its causal consequences, was necessarily placed out of bounds for liberal economics. If, as Marx said, the
“nectar of progress” was drunk from the “skulls of the slain,” these skulls had, arguably, mounted even faster under monopoly
capitalism than in the period of capitalism’s “greatest rapacity.” Bourgeois thought in general, they explained, had historically relied
on the notion of the autonomous individual. Drawing on C.B. Macpherson’s recently published Political Theory of Possessive
Individualism, Baran (in his final revisions to the chapter) pointed to how this outlook arose in the early bourgeois revolution in the
work of figures like Hobbes, Locke, Hume, and Voltaire. The notion of the autonomous individual driven by acquisitive appetites was
crucial in the attempt to justify a society that purported to develop in service of the needs and wants of the individual. Such a
justification naturally demanded that the economy and society not be seen as governing the individual, determining the consumer’s
“revealed preferences,” since in that case it would constitute a circular argument, undermining its apologetic purpose. Yet, circularity
of this sort was impossible to avoid in a system of apologetics that had entirely severed its last remaining links to realism—
propounding the notion of consumer sovereignty under conditions of monopoly capitalism where corporations artificially generated
wants. In fact, so absurd did the concept of the autonomous individual as the basis of the structure of the modern economy become
under monopoly capitalism, Baran and Sweezy argued, that bourgeois economics was forced to go even further down the road to
make-believe and substitute the notion of the “rational” individual, whose actual existence is regarded ex hypothesi as irrelevant.
Evermore far-fetched and extreme notions of “rationalization” as the basis for economic models were the result. In the work of Lionel
Robbins at the London School of Economics (a close associate of Hayek and a forerunner of neoliberalism) and George Stigler (of
the Chicago School) all historical specificity of economics was cast out and it was reformulated as a permanent, transhistorical set of
relations based on abstract rationality. In this approach, Baran and Sweezy insisted, the individual was simply a monad of “rational
behavior,” representing an “absolute standard of perfection independent of time and space.” In this way they anticipated nearly half
a century ago the extreme shift of orthodox economics towards what was to be called “rational expectations” or what John Cassidy
has aptly dubbed “rational irrationality.” 11 No longer trying to maintain even a remote relation to reality in the age of monopoly
capital, bourgeois economics chose rationalized irrealism, the philosophy of the self-regulating market, backed up by evermore
arcane economic models. Having declared reality irrelevant, orthodox economists not ineffectively carried out their role of defending
a system that, on anything remotely like realistic assumptions, was clearly and irredeemably flawed. A case in point is Stigler’s
contention that “The professional study of economics makes one politically conservative”—a proposition that, as one mainstream
economist has recently indicated, “could be translated as saying that acquiring the intellectual values of a professional economist
(valuing rigorous theory based on precise assumptions about rational individuals who compete with each other)” leads to
“conclusions that are favourable to free markets.”12 The verdict here, however, is contained in the unrealistic assumptions
themselves—a circular reasoning that deliberately excludes all meaningful questions of class, power, inequality, monopoly, the
state, historical change, uncertainty, etc. It was the virtue of Baran and Sweezy’s critique to show almost five decades ago that this
was the absurd result toward which economic orthodoxy was headed, as a result of its own apologetic logic in an age of increasing
irrationality. The result was the impending collapse of any meaningful holistic perspective within orthodox economics, even as its
knowledge of some of the more technical aspects of the economic process continued to expand. Such prevailing notions as
consumer sovereignty, the rationality of production, a smooth-operating price mechanism, the functionality of profits, the centrality of
investment, the possibility for meaningful social reform, etc., all crumbled, along with the belief in competition itself, with the advent
of the monopoly capitalist order.
Economic Crisis
Crisis periods are necessitated by capitalism—but wealth
accumulation and environmental destruction continue unfettered
Kovel ‘2 Joel Kovel, Professor of Social Studies at Bard College, 2002, The Enemy of Nature, p. 142-44
There are crises within capitalism, which both generates them and is dependent upon them. Crises are ruptures in the accumulation
process, causing the wheel to slow, but also stimulating new turns; they take many shapes and have long or short cycles, and many
intricate effects upon ecologies. A recession may reduce demand and so take some of the load off resources; recovery may
increase this demand, but also occur with greater efficiency, hence also reduce the load. Thus economic crises condition the
ecological crisis, but have no necessary effect on it. There is no singular generalization that covers all cases. James O’Connor
summarizes the complexity: Capitalist accumulation normally causes ecological crisis of certain types; economic crisis is associated
with partly different and partly similar ecological problems of different severity; external barriers to capital in the form of scarce
resources, urban space, healthy and disciplined wage labour, and other conditions of production may have the effect of raising costs
and threatening profits; and finally, environmental and other social movements defending conditions of life, forests, soil quality,
amenities, health conditions urban space, and so on, may also raise costs and make capital less flexible.34 But capital gets nature
whether on its way up or its way down. In the USA, the boom-boom Clinton years witnessed grotesque increases in matters such as
the sowing of the ecosphere with toxic chemicals,35 while the sharp downturn that accompanied the George W Bush presidency
was immediately met by rejection of the Kyoto protocols. From the standpoint of ecosystems, the phase of the business cycle is
considerably less relevant, then, than the fact of the business cycle, and the wanton economic system it expresses. Economic
problems interact with ecological problems, while ecological problems (including the effects of ecological movements) interact with
economic problems. This is all at the level of the trees. For the forest, meanwhile, we see the effects on the planetary ecology
caused by the growth of the system as a whole. Here the dark angel is the thermodynamic lax where mounting entropy appears as
ecosystemic decay. The immediate impacts of this on life are what energize the resistance embodied in the environmental and
ecological movements. Meanwhile, the economy goes on along its growth-intoxicated way, immune to the effects of ecosystem
breakdown on accumulation, and blindly careening toward the abyss. The conclusion must be that irrespective of the particulars of
one economic interaction or another, the system as a whole is causing irreparable damage to its ecological foundations, and that it
does so precisely as it grows. And since the one underlying feature of all aspects of capital is the relentless pressure to grow, we
are obliged to bring down the capitalist system as a whole and replace it with an ecologically viable alternative, if we want to save
our species along with numberless others.
Keynesian Economics – 1NC
Keynesian policies distract the public from the problems of the
economy by giving the cutthroat nature of capitalist politics a
compassionate face
Wolff ’11 Richard D. Wolff, Professor of Economics Emeritus, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and currently a Visiting
Professor in the Graduate Program in International Affairs of the New School University in New York, “The Keynesian Revival: A
Marxian Critique,” Alternate Routes, Vol 22 (2011), http://www.alternateroutes.ca/index.php/ar/article/view/14420
Besides their secondary role, Keynesian policies also serve an important diversionary function. Governments appear to be working
mightily to “overcome the economic crisis” by implementing those policies with great fanfare. They thereby distract publics from yet
another repetition of the normal capitalist’s cyclical downturn. Exploding national debts, like other Keynesian policy programs
constitute an elaborate diversionary political theater. As capitalist crises deepen and last, politicians of most persuasions
increasingly express concern, compassion, and/or anger about mass unemployment, home foreclosures, bankruptcies, poverty, etc.
They engage in heavily publicized debates and legislative contests over the appropriate monetary, fiscal, regulatory, subsidy,
bailout, capital control, and private-enterprise- take-over policies to be executed by the state. These theatrics usually absorb the
political energies of many left and right forces that might otherwise, separately or together, make the capitalist system itself the
object of opposition, struggle, and transformation. Left-tilting inflections of Keynesian policies often include, for example, direct state
subsidies to or hiring’s of un/underemployed workers, controls over private investment flows, and enterprise nationalizations. Right-
tilting inflections often include, for example, restrictions on immigration, reduced taxes on small businesses, and spending on
business-friendly infrastructure construction.
Keynesian Economics – 2NC
Stimulus lets capitalism pretend to care about crises to subvert
revolutionary energy—extend Wolff—Congressional debates are
political theater to divide the working class over economic particulars
to stifle social change—the plan is another Obama appeal for
“change” to cover up massive corporate bailouts and cyclical crises
Keynesian Economics
Snowballing gaps between labor productivity and real wages have
persisted consistently through Keynesians and Hayekians alike
—‘progressive’ stimulus measures protect the ruling class, not the
workers
Indeed, the relatively laissez-faire period before the 1930s saw productivity and real wages rise more or less together, whereas
productivity rose somewhat faster than real wages during the 1930s when Keynesian policies were imposed. However, in the
second half of the 1960s into the 1970s, during a second spurt of Keynesian policies (Johnson’s “Great Society”, etc.), productivity
rose much faster than real wages. Then, driving home the irrelevance of Keynesian policies to the productivity- real wage relation,
the extreme laissez-faire, neoliberal undoing of Keynesian policies after 1980 then saw the last century’s most unequal of
productivity to real wage ratios. The end of World War I marks the beginning of a near century of capitalist growth in the US
(notwithstanding the Great Depression’s impact) that saw a self-reinforcing divergence between what workers produced for their
employers (productivity) and what they were paid by their employers for doing so (real wages). Capitalist cycles punctuated but did
not basically alter that growth pattern.3 Keynesian policies punctuated but did not basically alter the cycles, let alone the growth
pattern. For the working classes, the alternation between laissez-faire and Keynesian policy regimes made little discernible
difference in the long-run relationship between labour productivity and real wages. Put otherwise, both regimes could and did
facilitate growing gaps between productivity and wages over the last half century, much as earlier both regimes facilitated minimal
gaps between them. In rough terms, the productivity of labor exceeded the real wage in 1890, the base year used to compute Figure
1 above. That is, in Marxian terms, workers produced a surplus for their employers already then. Thereafter, that surplus grew both
absolutely and relative to real wages. Measured in value terms, the Marxian metric, the rate of exploitation rose as US capitalism
prospered across its cycles. Alternations between Keynesian and laissez-faire policy regimes, like the accompanying oscillations of
theoretical hegemony between neoclassical and Keynesian economics, were secondary side shows to the main event of rising
exploitation. If workers in the US hoped that supporting the Keynesian policies of Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon and
others would alter their basic positions inside US capitalism, they were disappointed. Notwithstanding their rising real wages from
the 1940s to the 1970s and all sorts of political and cultural obfuscations (about everyone being “middle class” or the US being a
“people’s capitalism”), the workers lived in the growing gap between their real incomes and the wealth of those who took the lions’
share of the surpluses they delivered to employers. Their accumulating disappointment helps to explain some periodic disaffection
of workers from the Democrats. After real wages stopped rising in the late 1970s, workers increasingly defected even to clearly pro-
business Republicans (Greenberg,1996).
Keynesian Economics – FW
Try or die—wealth centralization and social crises have grown
throughout both Democratic and Republican administrations—prefer
Marxian economics
This Marxian theory begins from the historical observations summarized in this paper’s first paragraph.6 Keynesian policies have
not overcome the capitalist system’s inherent instabilities. Nor have Keynesian economists seriously measured, let alone found
ways to eliminate, the vast and long-lasting social costs of that instability. As we now live through the second great crisis of
capitalism in 75 years, we do know that its global social costs are again immense. Between the end of the Great Depression and the
onset of today’s crisis, the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) counts an additional eleven “business cycle downturns”
that also generated large social costs (NBER, 2008). So many large and small crises underscore Marxian theory’s advocacy of
changing the economic system as a solution for such crises, rather than repeated oscillations between neoclassical (private) and
Keynesian (state or state-interventionist) forms of capitalism. Modern society can do better than capitalism. From the standpoint of
this Marxian theory, the failures of Keynesian policies— and the Keynesian economics that rationalize them—flow from their neglect
of the micro-dimensions of capitalism. In short, the unattended contributor to capitalist instability is the relationship inside enterprises
between the workers who produce the surpluses and the employers (e.g. corporate boards of directors) who appropriate and
distribute those surpluses.7 Because Keynesian policies impose costs and constraints on employers in their exploitative relations
with workers and in their competitive struggles within and across industries, those employers have great incentives to evade,
weaken or end those Keynesian policies. Because employers appropriate the surpluses (and hence the profits) of enterprise, they
dispose of the resources needed to respond positively to those incentives. That is what happened to Roosevelt’s 1930s New Deal
and what has more recently been happening to much of western European social democracy (Clayton & Ponstusson, 1998). In both
cases, the employers used the surpluses appropriated from their employees to move their societies back toward a laissez-faire
policy regime as soon as they secured the political conditions enabling them to do so.8 Macro-level efforts to control and constrain
capitalism’s instability failed because of the capitalists’ continued appropriation and politically effective distributions of the surpluses
produced inside enterprises. Marxian theory emphasizes how employers’ decisions about distributing the surpluses are significantly
influenced by the struggles between producers and appropriators of surpluses inside capitalist enterprises as well as by the
competitive struggles among them. Hence Marxian theory suggests the internal transformation of enterprise structures. Instead of
their typical capitalist structures that split employers from employees, a post-capitalist structure would position workers as,
collectively, their enterprise’s own board of directors—i.e. Marx’s “associated workers.” The era of capitalist employers (e.g.,
corporate boards selected by and responsible to major private shareholders) would then have come to an historic end. The capitalist
class structure of production would have been superseded by such a collectivization of surplus appropriation inside enterprises
(Wolff, 2010). For example, consider enterprises newly structured such that the workers produce outputs in the usual way Mondays
through Thursdays, but on Fridays, assembled in both plenaries and subgroups, they make decisions previously taken by boards of
directors selected by (major) shareholders. That is, the workers democratically decide what, where, and how to produce and how to
distribute their realized surpluses. They decide when and how to expand and contract. But they do not do that alone. They enter into
co-respective power-sharing agreements with the local and regional communities where their physical production facilities are
located. The workers participate in the residential communities’ decision-making processes and vice-versa.9 Such a micro-based
level of socialism becomes the necessary new complement to the classic macro-level socialisms that stressed socialization of
means of production and planning over markets. Indeed, the micro- and macro-levels of socialism would then support and, just as
importantly, constrain one another. Macro-level property socialization and economic planning would emerge from and be
accountable to the micro-level collectives appropriating the enterprise-level surpluses they would use to enforce that accountability.
At the same time, the micro-level enterprise collectives would have their production and distribution decisions constrained by the
macrolevel (social) needs, priorities, and planning mechanisms (possibly co-existing with market mechanisms). This micro-level
socialism supports genuine democracy inside each enterprise. It also creates the parallel economic partner for democratic political
institutions in residential communities. Democratic collectivities inside enterprises and their residential community counterparts
would henceforth together reach their interdependent decisions. Likewise, they would share their interdependence with macro-level
institutions, both economic and political. Today’s reviving Keynesianism once again largely ignores the micro-level issues raised in
and by the Marxian criticism and alternative briefly sketched above. Most Keynesian programs now aimed to end the economic
crisis, if they actually restabilized contemporary capitalism, would thereby initiate their own demise. That is, they would then repeat
the historical pattern of oscillating back to a laissez-faire capitalism. The Marxian alternative program that included the micro-level
transformation of production sketched above would break, finally, from the repeated oscillations between private and state-
interventionist capitalisms and the unnecessary social costs of capitalism’s instability.
Keynesian Economics – AT: Perm
The aff only delays the inevitable—Marxism alone is the sole viable
alternative
Workers Power ’12 “Keynesianism provides no solution to the crisis of capitalism,” Workers Power, 6/12/2012,
http://www.workerspower.net/keynesianism-provides-no-solution-to-the-crisis-of-capitalism
The massive state interventions have only served to delay the inevitable corrective devaluation. Today our choices are couched in
terms of a choice between neo-liberal austerity and, increasingly, Keynesian delay tactics. Neither provides credible solutions for the
millions who continue to suffer from what is fast becoming the worst economic crisis in history. For Marxists, there is a solution, one
that is not based on the countless failed experiments that seek to rationalize a market based on the atomized self-interest of the
profit-motive. Rather it is based on the destruction of this system and its replacement with a more advanced economic model – one
directed by the masses of workers and oppressed and decided according to the needs of the people. This system, socialism, is the
only one that can banish the recurring human catastrophe brought by each capitalist crisis to the history books.
Our approach is completely at odds with even radical Keynesianism—

Obama’s spent millions just to keep huge corporations and bankers
afloat—their economics omits systemic exploitation
Left Keynesians typically want larger, more extensive, and more intrusive state intervention into the private economy. They seek
state seizures of private enterprises when their demise threatens broad economic collapse (sometimes referred to as corporations
“too big to fail”). They particularly favor state controls over investment and other capital flows, domestically and internationally, to
limit and prevent those flows’ otherwise destabilizing effects. Many left Keynesians share the Green Keynesians’ goals and thus
offer them an alternative political deal. Instead of allying with the socially prevalent, rather moderate Keynesians, the Green
Keynesians are invited to see better chances of realizing their environmental goals with left Keynesian policies in command. Left-
right divisions among Green Keynesians are now shaping who among them allies with whom. The furthest left Keynesians advocate
the most intrusive state interventions. Many of them refer to such interventions as key parts of a transition to what they sometimes
call socialism. Allied with other kinds of socialists, including some Marxists, the far left Keynesians seek to expand state intervention
to include officials permanently replacing share-holder elected corporate boards of directors and officials permanently controlling or
even replacing markets (with more or less central planning of the distribution of resources and products). For them, those two
permanent replacements define socialism.4 Whether and to what extent any interpretation of Keynesian economics can now
displace the last 30 years’ hegemony of neoclassical economics will depend on all the economic, political and cultural processes
shaping the contesting protagonists of both paradigms. Those processes will simultaneously over-determine the outcome of
disputes among alternative interpretations of Keynesian economics.5 Meanwhile and contrary to notions that neoclassical versus
Keynesian economics encompasses the total range of possible economic theory, the Marxian alternatives offer something different
from both of them. One particular Marxian approach does not ally with any variant of Keynesian economics; it stresses its
differences from all of them. I want to develop that approach briefly here by noting first that it rejects the Keynesians’ nearly
exclusive focus on the macro-level of the economy. This Marxian theory goes well beyond state regulation, controls, and ownership
of capitalist enterprises (versus their private counterparts) and likewise beyond planning (versus markets). The hallmark of this
Marxian theory is an explicit micro-focus drawn from Marx’s critique of the class structure of production.
Keynesian Economics – No Solvency
Keynesian stimulus only postpones crisis by inducing temporary,
unstable fixes to structural economic problems—this just buys time
for more exploitation
In the modern history of capitalism, Keynesian counter-recessionary policies (broadly defined) have failed in two major ways. First,
those policies have not consistently succeeded as means to end capitalism’s cyclical downturns. They failed, for example, to extract
the US from the Great Depression of the 1930s. As this is written, their effectiveness in today’s global capitalist crisis is
questionable. Second, the promise that has almost always accompanied each application of Keynesian policies everywhere—that it
would also prevent future economic downturns—has never yet been kept. The Keynesian policies have included varying mixtures of
monetary (easing) and fiscal (expansionary) policies and market regulations (especially in finance). They have sometimes included
controls on capital flows as well as subsidies, bailouts, and outright nationalizations of private enterprises. Different combinations of
these components characterize Keynesian policies in different countries and at different historical moments. The chief means that
actually ended capitalism’s downturns have been declines in the following: productive laborers’ real wages, finished product
inventories, means of production prices, and the associated costs of securing profits (managers and other non-productive workers’
wages and operating budgets, taxes, access to credit, rents, etc.). Once those declines sufficed to reach certain thresholds,
capitalists could see profit possibilities and so resumed productive investment. That generated more or less “recovery” via multiplier
and accelerator effects particular to each place and time. In short, capitalism is a systematically unstable economic system whose
cycles are basic features of its normal functioning. Keynesian policies have never basically altered that systemic instability.
Keynesian policies, I propose to argue, have largely provided quite secondary supports to the normal functioning of capitalist cycles.
They marginally moderate the cycles’ amplitude and duration. They temporarily impose both costs and constraints on the profit-
seeking activities of corporate boards of directors. In these ways, Keynesian policies successfully buy both political space and time
for the capitalist cycle to run through its usual downward phase. In the current global capitalist crisis, massive Keynesian deficit
spending, as well as credit-market bailouts have generated huge increases in many capitalist countries’ national debts. Lenders
eventually balk at further loans to the most over-indebted nations, demanding that they raise taxes and/or cut spending to qualify for
more loans. If and when that proves politically impossible for lenders to impose on borrowing nations, multilateral agencies offer less
onerous terms for loan assistance but with the same demand for austerity conditions. Those conditions—conveniently imposed by
others and not the national government—all serve to drive down wages and other costs of business and so once again set the stage
for the usual capitalist cycle.
Energy
Energy – 1NC
Capitalist energy production reduces dynamic environments to pure
exchange value to increase exploitation and accumulation
Clark and York ‘8 Brett Clark, assistant professor of sociology at North Carolina State University, and Richard York,
coeditor of Organization & Environment and associate professor of sociology at the University of Oregon, “Rifts and Shifts: Getting
to the Root of Environmental Crises,” Monthly Review, Vol. 60, Issue 06, November 2008
The development of energy production technologies provides one of the best examples of rifts and shifts, as technological fixes to
energy problems create new ecological crises in the attempt to alleviate old ones. Biomass, particularly wood, has, of course, been
one of the primary energy sources humans have depended on throughout their history. The development of more energy intensive
processes, such as the smelting of metals, was, therefore, connected with greater pressure on forests, as trees were fed to the fires.
By the time the Industrial Revolution began to emerge in Europe, vast regions of the continent had already been deforested,
particularly in areas close to major sites of production, and much of this deforestation was driven by the demand for fuel. As
industrialization advanced, new sources of power were desired to fuel the machines that allowed for production to take place on a
growing scale. Whole forests could be devoured at an unprecedented rate, making wood ever more scarce. The tension between
the desire of the capitalist owners of the new industrial technologies for expanding the accumulation of capital and the biophysical
limits of Earth were apparent from the start of the Industrial Revolution. However, capitalists did not concern themselves with the
internal contradictions of capitalism, except insofar as they were barriers to be transcended. Thus, efforts to achieve what we would
today call sustainability were not even considered by the elite. Rather, coal (and subsequently other fossil fuels) quickly became the
standard fuel of industry, temporarily sidestepping the fuelwood crisis (although forests continued to fall due to the many demands
placed on them) but laying the foundations for our current global climate change crisis by dramatically increasing the emission of
carbon dioxide.16 The pattern has remained similar to how it was in the early years of the Industrial Revolution. Oil was quickly
added to coal as a fuel source and a variety of other energy sources were increasingly exploited. Among these was hydropower, the
generation of which requires damming rivers, and thus destroying aquatic ecosystems. For example, the expansion of hydropower
over the twentieth century in the U.S. Pacific Northwest was the primary force leading to the widespread depletion and extinction of
salmon runs. Nuclear power was, of course, the most controversial addition to the power mix. Despite initial claims that it would
provide clean, unlimited power that would be too cheap to meter, it proved to be an expensive, risky power source that produced
long-lived highly radioactive waste for which safe long-term storage sites have been nearly impossible to develop. Now, in the
twenty-first century, with global climate change finally being recognized by the elite as a serious problem, the proposed solutions
are, as we would expect, to shift the problem from one form of energy to a new form of energy. Nuclear power, despite its drop in
popularity toward the end of the last century, due to high costs and widespread public opposition, is now very much back on the
agenda, with new promises of how the new nuclear plants are safer—never mind the issue of radioactive waste. We are also
regaled with promises of agrofuels, ironically bringing us back to the pre-coal energy crisis. Recent scientific reports note that
growing crops for agrofuel to feed cars may actually increase the carbon emitted into the atmosphere.17 But even this ignores the
fact that the production of agrofuel would be based on unsustainable agricultural practices that demand massive inputs of fertilizers
and would only further the depletion of soil nutrients, bringing us back to the metabolic rift that Marx originally addressed. Two
recent examples of technical approaches to mitigating climate change are particularly illustrative of how technological optimism
distracts us from the political-economic sources of our environmental problems. Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen, who admirably played
a central role in identifying and analyzing human-generated ozone depletion in the stratosphere, recently argued that climate
change can be avoided by injecting sulfur particles into the stratosphere to increase the albedo of the Earth, and thus reflect more of
the sun’s energy back into space, which would counter the warming stemming from rising concentrations of greenhouse gases.
Although no doubt offered sincerely and out of desperation stemming from the failure of those in power adequately to address the
mounting climate crisis, the technical framing of the climate change issue makes it easy for political and business leaders to avoid
addressing greenhouse gas emissions, since they can claim that technical fixes make it unnecessary to take action to preserve
forests and curtail the burning of fossil fuels. Engineering the atmosphere on this scale is likely to have many far-reaching
consequences (acid rain being only the most obvious), many of which have not been anticipated. In a similar vein, well-known
physicist Freeman Dyson recently suggested that we can avoid global climate change by replacing one-quarter of the world’s forests
with genetically engineered carbon-eating trees. The ecological consequences of such an action would likely be extraordinary. Both
of these so-called solutions avoid addressing the dynamics of an economic system that is largely structured around burning fossil
fuels, that must constantly renew itself on a larger scale, and that runs roughshod over nature. Often techno-solutions are proposed
in a manner that suggests they are completely removed from the world as it operates. The irony is that such narrowly conceived
“solutions” would only serve as a means to prop up the very forces driving ecological degradation, allowing those forces to continue
to operate, as they create additional ecological rifts.18
Energy – 2NC
More energy is the wrong approach—extend Clark and York—
capital’s profit imperative discourages long term solutions in favor of
quick returns which accumulates and magnifies the risk of ecological
catastrophe—ideological bias makes effective response to
environmental issues impossible within the system’s coordinates
because there is a structural incentive to produce disasters in need of
cleanup and tech innovation
Energy
Energy is the essential driver of capitalist accumulation—fortifying
corporate stocks cheapens production, offloading the costs onto
those least capable of coping with them
ICC ’11 “Nuclear energy, capitalism and communism,” International Communist Current, 8/16/2011,
http://en.internationalism.org/wr/347/nuclear
The industrial revolution was also a revolution in energy, in the utilisation of energy sources that allowed society to go beyond the
boundaries imposed by the ‘organic economy’ that relied on the seasonal growth of natural sources of energy to meet most of its
needs. However, the industrial revolution predates the large scale use of coal that is synonymous with it and it is in the changed
relations of production, in the emergence of the bourgeoisie as a class, that the impetus for the development of the technology to
extract and utilise the latter lies.[7] Just as the first days of capitalism saw a more systematic and extensive use of the existing
means of production, so it made use of the existing sources of energy and pushed them to their limits. In the organic economy that
existed from the Neolithic revolution until the widespread adoption of coal during the industrial revolution, human power, animal
power and wood were the main sources of energy. In 1561- 70 they made up 22.8%, 32.4% and 33.0% respectively of the energy
consumed in England and Wales. Wind and water power made up scarcely more than 1% combined while coal accounted for
10.6%.[8] The abundance of wood in Europe gave it an advantage over societies where it was scarce, but the development of
production drained these supplies and impeded growth. Thus in 1717 a blast furnace in Wales was not fired until four years after
construction when enough wood and charcoal had been accumulated and subsequently could only operate for an average of fifteen
weeks a year for the same reason.[9] Before the 18th century it has been calculated that an average blast furnace working two
years on and two years off required 2,000 hectares of forest.[10] In South Wales, subsequently famous of its coal mining, the first
stages of the industrial revolution witnessed the development of ironworks and led to the deforestation of the valleys that had once
been densely wooded. The growth of demand for wood led to price increases and shortages that affected the poor most of all. In
parts of France there was insufficient wood to fire the bread ovens and in others it was reported that “the poor do without fires.”[11]
The limits to production imposed by the organic economy can also be seen by calculating the amount of timber that would have
been required to match subsequent consumption of energy from coal. Wood is not as efficient a source of energy as coal: two tons
of wood are required to produce the same energy as a ton of coal and 30 tons to produce a ton of iron. An acre of managed
woodland can produce about the equivalent energy to one ton of coal in a year. In 1750 4,515,000 tons of coal were produced in
England and Wales. To produce the equivalent amount of energy using timber would have taken 4.3 million acres, or 13% of the
land surface of the two countries. In 1800 coal production was 13,045,000 tons requiring 35% of the land surface (11.2 million
acres). Half a century later production had risen to 65,050,000 tons, requiring no less than 150% of the land (48.1 million acres).[12]
One of the keys to Britain’s rise to world dominance was that it had coal reserves that were accessible using the existing technology.
This created the momentum to develop the means of production to allow the extraction of coal from deeper levels. Coal and Oil: The
foundations of Industrial Capitalism Prior to the widespread use of coal the energy available was essentially determined by the
amount of the sun’s energy that was converted to plant growth through photosynthesis. This included the production of foodstuffs for
animals and humans and of timber. This natural cycle seemed to impose an insurmountable limit to the amount of muscular and
thermal energy that could be utilised and thus to the level of production and the wealth of society. Poverty and widespread misery
seemed eternal, unalterable, facts of life. The large scale extraction of coal and subsequently oil broke this barrier by allowing
access to the earth’s energy stores, to the product of the photosynthesis of past millennia.[13] The 19th century and the first part of
the 20th were dominated by the use of coal. The advance of the industrial revolution is often measured in the tons of coal mined, the
tons of iron produced and the miles of railway line laid. We have given some indication of the first of these above, but It can also be
measured in the changing patterns of energy use and in the amount of energy used per head. We noted above that in 1560 coal
accounted for just over 10.6% of the energy consumed in England and Wales. By 1850 this figure had increased to 92%.[14] Coal
was initially used to replace wood in industries such as smelting, pottery and brewing that required large amounts of heat, and it only
gradually affected the actual organisation of production and directly increased productivity. Static steam engines were initially
developed to pump water from mines, which, although inefficient, allowed coal and other resources, such as tin in Cornwall, to be
mined from previously inaccessible depths. Subsequently engines were adapted to drive machines, notably in the cotton industry,
and as means of transport. Total energy consumption increased progressively throughout the industrial revolution. Total
consumption in England and Wales in 1850 was 28 times as great as in 1560. In part this was accounted for by the substantial
growth in population that took place during this period but the real scale of the increase is shown by the fact that consumption per
head went up fivefold.[15] The oil industry gradually developed during the 20th century, with significant developments in production
techniques and the scale of production taking place in the inter-war years. By 1929 the trade in oil had grown to $1,170m, with the
main exporters being the US Venezuela and the Netherlands Antilles, although refineries were also established during this period in
Bahrain and Saudi Arabia by the US and in Iraq and Lebanon by British and European enterprises.[16] However, it was only after
the Second World War that oil came to dominate energy production, accounting for 46.1% of total world energy production in 1973,
although by 2008 this had fallen to 33.2%.[17] The increasing use of energy has been a feature of industrialisation around the world.
It expresses not only the increase in scale of production and the impact of rising population, but also the development of productivity
with the increase in the quantity of the means of production, including energy, that each worker is able to set in motion. This trend
has continued today: between 1973 and 2008 total energy consumption increased by 80%.[18] The revolution in the form and
quantity of energy available to humanity underpinned the industrial revolution and opened the door from the realm of want to that of
plenty. But this revolution was driven by the development of capitalism whose purpose is not the satisfaction of human needs but
the increase of capital based on the appropriation of surplus value produced by an exploited working class. Energy is used to drive
the development of productivity but it is also a cost of production. It is part of the constant capital alongside raw materials, machines
and factories and, as such, tends to increase in relation to the variable capital that is the source of capitalism’s profits. It is this that
dictates capitalism’s attitude to energy. Capitalism has no regard for the use of energy, for the destruction of finite resources, other
than as a cost of production. Increased productivity tends to require increased energy, so the capitalists (other than those in the oil
industry) are driven to try and reduce the cost of this energy. On the one hand this results in the profligate use of energy for irrational
ends, such as transporting similar commodities back and forth across the world and the ceaseless multiplication of commodities that
meet no real human need but serve only as a means to extract and realise surplus value. On the other, it leads to the denial of
access to energy and to the products of energy for millions of humans who lack the money to be of interest to the capitalists. This is
illustrated in Nigeria where Shell pumps out billions of dollars worth of oil while the local people go without or risk their lives by trying
to illegally tap the oil from the pipeline. The price is also paid by those working in the energy industries in lives lost and bodies
maimed or poisoned and by the environment and all that lives in it, from the polluted, toxic waters of the Thames that characterised
19th century London to the warming of the globe that threatens the future of humanity today.
Energy – Alt Solvency
Prior critique of market ideology is the only ecologically and socially
sustainable solution to energy production
Williams ’12 Chris Williams, professor of physics and chemistry at Pace University and chair of the science department at
Packer Collegiate Institute, author of Ecology and Socialism: Solutions to Capitalist Ecological Crisis, “Capitalism's disastrous
priorities,” Socialist Worker, 7/12/2012, http://socialistworker.org/2012/07/12/capitalisms-disastrous-priorities
Five years ago, the great leftist social and ecological thinker and activist Barry Commoner was asked in a New York Times interview
whether the environmentalists who have now turned to nuclear power as an answer to global warming had a point. He answered:
No. This is a good example of shortsighted environmentalism. It superficially makes sense to say, “Here’s a way of producing
energy without carbon dioxide.” But every activity that increases the amount of radioactivity to which we are exposed is idiotic. There
has to be a life-and-death reason to do it. I mean, we haven’t solved the problem of waste yet. We still have used fuel sitting all over
the place. I think the fact that some people who have established a reputation as environmentalists have adopted this is appalling.
Third, within capitalism, there are certain essential economic activities which need to be thought of as they were before the
acceleration of the capitalist orthodoxy of deregulation and privatization that occurred with the birth of neoliberalism 30 years ago–
before the drive for privatization that necessitated the evisceration of the organized power of the working class, as the balance of
class forces was forcibly tilted toward the corporations and away from us. There were certain activities where we are not seen as
customers for a commodity that we buy from a for-profit corporation, but rather as citizens, with a right to a service from the
government that we elect to represent our interests. Examples of such essential services are the provision of education, access to
water, health care, a pension, public transportation–the most basic attributes for a productive and healthy life and a functioning
society. This idea must also extend to the provision of electricity–not just because it is fundamental to the way we live, but, just as
importantly, for ecological reasons. We need to conserve electricity and energy use in general and set up systems to ensure that
there is a nationally organized program to do so. However, that will never happen with electricity production when the utilities are
privately owned. Private electric utilities make more money the more electricity they sell us. So having consumers use less would be
counter-productive and irrational from a corporate perspective. If they’re regulated and offered incentives to sell us less, they just
charge more for each individual unit and pass the costs on. Furthermore, corporations are always going to spend as little as they
can get away with on infrastructure, safety and maintenance, as illustrated to a horrific extent by the nuclear catastrophe in Japan.
Sustainable energy consumption is not a problem this debate should

try to resolve—instead, our task is to identify the origins of ecological
devastation to unleash alternative political imaginations
Wallis ’10 Victor Wallis, teaches in the Liberal Arts department at the Berklee College of Music and is the managing editor
of Socialism and Democracy, “Beyond ‘Green Capitalism’,” Monthly Review, February 2010, Vol. 61, Issue 9, p. 32-48
The desirability of shifting to certain inexhaustible or renewable energy sources is obvious. What is not so widely recognized,
however, is that these sources too have their costs—in terms of installation, collection, maintenance, and transmission—and that
therefore none of them , despite whatever abundance may characterize their occurrence in nature, can offer unlimited
accessibility for energy supply.10 Some of the alternative sources, such as hydrogen and biomass, themselves require significant if
not prohibitive energy inputs. Biomass (burning biological materials as fuel) also threatens to reduce the land-area available for
growing food. Hydrogen, for its part, carries the danger of leakage and of rising to the stratosphere, where it could destroy the ozone
layer. Tapping geothermal energy can, in certain regions, risk provoking seismic disturbances; in addition, there may be high costs
associated with the depth of requisite drilling, and the emerging heat may be dissipated in various ways. Wind energy, despite its
clear positive potential, is limited by materials and space requirements, as well as by the irregularity of its source in many locations.
Tidal power is more continuous than wind energy, but in addition to the high installation cost of its requisite barrages or underwater
turbines, it poses—as do wind turbines—certain dangers for resident or migrant wildlife. Solar energy, finally, is extraordinarily
promising in direct localized applications, but for power generation on a large scale, it would risk impinging on space required for
other purposes. As for solar collectors situated in otherwise unused desert regions, their dust-free maintenance in such sites would
require the long-distance trans-shipment of vast quantities of water. All these technologies, with the partial exception of biomass,
avoid adding to the net concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The same might perhaps be said of nuclear power,
provided that, as the more up-to-date versions promise, it does not entail further largescale mining and refinement of fissionable
material. Nuclear power has other problematic implications, however, beyond its daunting startup costs in both time and money.
Even if we were to suppose— as is further claimed—that the problem of waste has been minimized via repeated re-use (until there
is hardly any radioactive material left) and that the dangers of a Chernobyl-type disaster or of vulnerability to military attack have
been addressed by engineering improvements,11 there still remains the fact that nuclear power is linked to the potential for making
bombs, and no disarmament process is underway. The imperialist governments will therefore not allow nuclear power to be
distributed on a scale sufficient to match the potential global demand for it. The longer-term ecological and political desideratum
would not be to undo such restrictions, but rather to impose them on the imperialist powers themselves, as part of a full-scale
conversion process. The upshot of all these considerations is that the question of how to supply the world’s currently growing energy
demand without continuing recourse to carbon dioxide-producing fossil fuels—coal, oil, and natural gas—has not yet been solved. In
view of the problems associated with all the alternative energy sources, a radical and comprehensive
reconsideration of the demand side of this equation would seem to be called for. This is the essence of
the socialist response: while encouraging the use of various safe-energy alternatives, it can accept the fact that these alternatives
are ultimately limited in their total power-generating capacity, and therefore that the world’s aggregate energy consumption will
actually have to be reduced. Once this is understood, one can then focus on the interrelated issues of how to identify and prioritize
real needs, and how to correspondingly reorganize society in such a way as to assure everyone’s well-being. This is beyond the
purview of capitalist thought, whatever its level of awareness of the environmental danger.
Even if we can’t establish what a future communism will look like,

critique matters for the environment because it identifies social traits
to shoot for in revolution
Magdoff ’12 Fred Magdoff, Professor emeritus of plant and soil science at the Unviersity of Vermont, “Harmony and
Ecological Civilization,” Monthly Review, June 2012, Vol. 64, Issue 2, p. 1-9
It is certain that there is no way to reach a truly harmonious civilization with an economic system in which decisions are made by
private individuals based on how much capital will be accumulated as well as personal greed and consumerism. In such a society
“[s]ocial relations became but reflections of the dominating force of society’s capitalist economics.”6 Hierarchical class structures are
solidified—with workers (blue and white collar), small business owners (this includes farmers and craftspeople working on their own
or in small units), and owners and managers of large businesses. The relationship of a worker to a business manager or owner
reflects differences of wealth and power in the workplace and in the world outside. And the worker and the boss have differing
interests. The boss is trying to maximize profits while the worker is trying to get more income and better working conditions.
Because of the motive force of capitalism and the procedures, practices, and approaches embedded in its DNA, there is no way to
reform or modify the system to accomplish the goals of sustainability, harmony, or ecological civilization. Capitalism, in
its very essence, is anti-sustainability , anti-harmony, and anti-ecology. For Marx capitalism
generated an “irreparable rift” in the metabolism of nature and society, requiring the “restoration” of this basic metabolism essential
to life—a restoration that necessitated a more harmonious social order beyond capitalism.7 No one can predict the details of any
future civilization. But, to be ecological and socially sustainable—basic requirements for harmonious society—an economy will need
to have the sole purpose of satisfying basic human material and nonmaterial needs (which, of course, includes a healthy
ecosystem) for all people. As with many pre-capitalist societies, economics will need to be submerged within human relationships
and must be under control of the people. An ecological or harmonious civilization, a truly sustainable and ecologically sound society,
will need to have certain basic characteristics. It will need to stop economic growth after basic human needs are satisfied. It will also
need to promote, encourage, and reward the positive human traits of cooperation, sharing, empathy, and reciprocity. And it must
operate with respect for, and care of, the environment— locally, regionally, and globally. There are people who believe that nature
has rights of its own and that “mother earth” (or Pachamama, in the language of the people of the Andes in South America) should
be respected and cared for just because it is right and ethical to do so. But even taking an anthropocentric view, it is to the direct
benefit of humans and their societies to create and maintain biological and habitat diversity and functioning, essential to a thriving
ecosystem. In order to live healthy, satisfied, and happy lives now and for generations to come people need clean water and air,
healthy and productive soils, wise and careful use of renewable and nonrenewable resources. Degraded ecosystems need to be
regenerated. Humans need places to see and enjoy the natural world— parks, forests, swamps, lakes. When people understand
nature’s beauty and importance for their existence, they live emotionally richer lives and are connected to the natural world on a
deep emotional level. There has even been a term coined for describing children that do not experience the natural world regularly
(and in industrialized wealthy countries this may include the majority)—“nature-deficit disorder.” Although some children do adapt to
being mostly indoors and relating with the world primarily through electronic gadgets, there are many that suffer the consequences
ranging from a lack of vitamin D to depressed immune systems (more likely to be sick) to behavioral problems such as
aggressiveness.8 Because our lives are so dependent on healthy local, regional, and world ecosystems, protecting and
regenerating the environment must be a goal of a society that seeks harmony in the broadest sense.
Energy Efficiency – 1NC
Efficiency increases energy consumption because price decreases
yield higher demand—this is essential to capitalist growth
Foster et al. ’10 John Bellamy Foster, professor of sociology at University of Oregon, Brett Clark, assistant professor of
sociology at North Carolina State University, and Richard York, associate professor of sociology at University of Oregon, “Capitalism
and the Curse of Energy Efficiency,” Monthly Review, November 2010, Vol. 62, Issue 6, pp. 1-12
The Jevons Paradox is the product of a capitalist economic system that is unable to conserve on a macro scale, geared, as it is, to
maximizing the throughput of energy and materials from resource tap to final waste sink. Energy savings in such a system tend to
be used as a means for further development of the economic order, generating what Alfred Lotka called the “maximum energy flux,”
rather than minimum energy production.34 The deemphasis on absolute (as opposed to relative) energy conservation is built into
the nature and logic of capitalism as a system unreservedly devoted to the gods of production and profit. As Marx put it:
“Accumulate, accumulate! That is Moses and the prophets!”35 Seen in the context of a capitalist society, the Jevons Paradox
therefore demonstrates the fallacy of current notions that the environmental problems facing society can be solved by purely
technological means. Mainstream environmental economists often refer to “dematerialization,” or the “decoupling” of economic
growth, from consumption of greater energy and resources. Growth in energy efficiency is often taken as a concrete indication that
the environmental problem is being solved. Yet savings in materials and energy, in the context of a given process of production, as
we have seen, are nothing new; they are part of the everyday history of capitalist development.36 Each new steam engine, as
Jevons emphasized, was more efficient than the one before. “Raw materials-savings processes,” environmental sociologist Stephen
Bunker noted, “are older than the Industrial Revolution, and they have been dynamic throughout the history of capitalism.” Any
notion that reduction in material throughput, per unit of national income, is a new phenomenon is therefore “profoundly
ahistorical.”37 What is neglected, then, in simplistic notions that increased energy efficiency normally leads to increased energy
savings overall, is the reality of the Jevons Paradox relationship—through which energy savings are used to promote new capital
formation and the proliferation of commodities, demanding ever greater resources. Rather than an anomaly, the rule that efficiency
increases energy and material use is integral to the “regime of capital” itself.38 As stated in The Weight of Nations, an important
empirical study of material outflows in recent decades in five industrial nations (Austria, Germany, the Netherlands, the United
States, and Japan): “Efficiency gains brought by technology and new management practices have been offset by [increases in] the
scale of economic growth.”39
Energy Efficiency – 2NC
Increasing effectiveness of energy production is unsustainable—
Jevons’ Paradox says the aff magnifies material accumulation and
energy demand because commodity prices drop—that’s Foster. Any
savings go straight into the ruling class’s bank accounts.
Means the aff doesn’t solve because demand keeps pace with
efficiency improvements – their tech is a drop in the bucket to
capital’s tendancy towards total self destruction
We control empirics – Jevon’s Paradox explains coal growth
But there is one aspect of Jevons’s argument—the Jevons Paradox itself—that continues to be considered one of the pioneering
insights in ecological economics.8 In chapter 7 of The Coal Question, entitled “Of the Economy of Fuel,” Jevons responded to the
common notion that, since “the falling supply of coal will be met by new modes of using it efficiently and economically,” there was no
problem of supply, and that, indeed, “the amount of useful work got out of coal may be made to increase manifold, while the amount
Jevons contended that
of coal consumed is stationary or diminishing.” In sharp opposition to this,
increased efficiency in the use of coal as an energy source only

generated increased demand for that resource, not decreased
demand, as one might expect. This was because improvement in
efficiency led to further economic expansion. “It is wholly a confusion of ideas,” he wrote,
“to suppose that the economical use of fuel is equivalent to a diminished consumption. The very contrary is the truth. As a rule,
new modes of economy will lead to an increase of consumption
according to a principle recognised in many parallel instances….The
same principles apply, with even greater force and distinctness, to the
use of such a general agent as coal. It is the very economy of its use
which leads to its extensive consumption.”9 “Nor is it difficult,” Jevons wrote, “to see how this
paradox arises.” Every new technological innovation in the production of
steam engines, he pointed out in a detailed description of the steam engine’s evolution, had resulted in a
more thermodynamically efficient engine. And each new, improved
engine had resulted in an increased use of coal. The Savery engine,
one of the earlier steam engines, he pointed out, was so inefficient
that “practically, the cost of working kept it from coming into use; it
consumed no coal, because its rate of consumption was too high.”10
Succeeding models that were more efficient, such as Watt’s famous
engine, led to higher and higher demand for coal with each
successive improvement. “Every such improvement of the engine, when effected, does but accelerate anew
the consumption of coal. Every branch of manufacture receives a fresh impulse—hand labour is still further replaced by mechanical
labour, and greatly extended works can be undertaken which were not commercially possible by the use of the more costly steam-
power.”11 Although Jevons thought that this paradox was one that applied to numerous cases, his focus in The Coal Question was
entirely on coal as a “general agent” of industrialization and a spur to investment goods industries. The power of coal to stimulate
economic advance, its accelerated use, despite advances in efficiency, and the severity of the effects to be expected from the
decline in its availability, were all due to its dual role as the necessary fuel for the modern steam engine and as the basis for blast
furnace technology. In the mid-nineteenth century, coal was the key material input for blast furnaces in the smelting of iron—the
crucial industrial product and the foundation of industrial dominance.12 It was by virtue of its greater development in this area, as
Greater efficiency
“the workshop of the world,” that Britain accounted for about half of world output of iron in 1870.13
in the use of coal thus translated into a greater capacity to produce

iron and expand industry in general, leading to spiraling demand for
coal. As Jevons put it: If the quantity of coal used in a blast-furnace, for instance, be diminished in comparison with the yield, the
profits of the trade will increase, new capital will be attracted, the price of pig-iron will fall, but the demand for it [will] increase; and
eventually the greater number of furnaces will more than make up for the diminished consumption of each. And if such is not always
the result within a single branch, it must be remembered that the progress of any branch of manufacture excites a new activity in
most other branches, and leads indirectly, if not directly, to increased inroads upon our seams of coal.14 What made this argument
in Jevons’s day that
so powerful at the time was that it seemed immediately obvious to everyone
industrial development depended on the capacity to expand iron

production cheaply. This meant that a reduction in the quantity of coal
needed in a blast furnace would immediately translate into an
expansion of industrial production, industrial capacity, and the ability
to capture more of the world market—hence more demand for coal. The
tonnage of coal consumption by the iron and steel industries of Britain in 1869, 32 million tons, exceeded the combined amount
used in both general manufactures, 28 million tons, and railroads, 2 million tons.15 This was the age of capital and the age of
Output of coal and
industry, in which industrial power was measured in terms of coal and pig iron production.
iron in Britain increased basically in tandem in this period, both

tripling between 1830 and 1860.16 As Jevons himself put it: “Next after coal…iron is the material basis of
our power. It is the bone and sinews of our laboring system. Political writers have correctly treated the invention of the coal-blast
furnace as that which has most contributed to our material wealth….The production of iron, the material of all our machinery, is the
none of Jevons’s readers could fail to
best measure of our wealth and power.”17 Hence
perceive the multiplier effects on industry of an improvement in

efficiency in the use of coal, or the “increased inroads” upon “seams
of coal” that this would tend to generate. “Economy,” he concluded,
“multiplies the value and efficiency of our chief material; it indefinitely
increases our wealth and means of subsistence, and leads to an

extension of our population, works, and commerce, which is
gratifying to the present, but must lead to an earlier end.”18
As well as oil
The Jevons Paradox was forgotten in the heyday of the age of petroleum during the first three-quarters of the
twentieth century, but reappeared in the 1970s due to increasing concerns over
resource scarcity associated with the Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth analysis,
heightened by the oil-energy crisis of 1973-74. As energy efficiency
measures were introduced, economists became concerned with their
effectiveness. This led to the resurrection, at the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s, of the general
question posed by the Jevons Paradox, in the form of what was called the “rebound effect.” This was the fairly straightforward notion
engineering efficiency gains normally led to a decrease in the
that
effective price of a commodity, thereby generating increased demand,

so that the gains in efficiency did not produce a decrease in
consumption to an equal extent. The Jevons Paradox has often been relegated to a more extreme
version of the rebound effect, in which there is a backfire, or a rebound of more than 100 percent of “engineering
savings,” resulting in an increase rather than decrease in the consumption of a given

resource.30
Resource Shortages
Resource shortages are a structural necessity of capital—they
conceal systemic exploitation
Magdoff ’13 Fred Magdoff, “Global Resource Depletion,” Monthly Review, vol. 64, issue 8, January 2013,
http://monthlyreview.org/2013/01/01/global-resource-depletion
The general problem of rapid resource depletion that occurs in the
poor countries of the world is frequently a result of foreign
exploitation and not because of a country’s growing population. The exploitation of the Democratic Republic of the
Congo’s natural resources by shady means—“opaque deals to acquire prime mining assets”—organized through shell companies
by British and Israeli capital is an example of what can happen.15 As Duke University ecologist John Terborgh described following a
trip to a small African nation: Everywhere I went, foreign commercial interests were exploiting resources after signing contracts with
the autocratic government. Prodigious logs, four and five feet in diameter, were coming out of the virgin forest, oil and natural gas
were being exported from the coastal region, offshore fishing rights had been sold to foreign interests, and exploration for oil and
minerals was under way in the interior. The exploitation of resources in North America during the five-hundred-year post-discovery
era followed a typical sequence—fish, furs, game, timber, farming virgin soils—but because of the hugely expanded scale of today’s
economy and the availability of myriad sophisticated technologies, exploitation of all the resources in poor developing countries now
goes on at the same time. In a few years, the resources of this African country and others like it will be sucked dry. And what then?
The people there are currently enjoying an illusion of prosperity, but it is only an illusion, for they are not preparing themselves for
resource problems—both renewable and
anything else. And neither are we.16 Thus,
nonrenewable—are real and are only going to get worse under the
current political-economic system. Everywhere both renewable and
nonrenewable resources are being used unsustainably by the above
criteria. In some countries the high population relative to agricultural
land and the lack of dependable quantities of exports to purchase
food internationally creates a very precarious situation. However, the
general resource depletion and ecological problems—at the global
scale, as well as within most countries and regions—are primarily the
result of the way capitalism functions and economic decisions are
made. Central to this is the continuing exploitation of the resources of
the poor countries by corporations and private capital. Maximizing
short-term profits trumps all other concerns. What happens as
resources are in the process of being ruined or depleted? There is a
scramble, frequently violent, for control of remaining resources. But
what will happen, what is the “game plan,” after even the hard to
reach, expensive, and ecologically damaging deposits are fully
depleted? Capital has only one answer to such questions, the same as the one attributed to Louis XV of France: “Après
moi, le deluge.” What other conceivable response could it give?
Oil/Hydrocarbons
Cheap oil is the dream of capitalist economy—permits unchallenged
environmental abuse to fuel expanded growth
Szeman ’13 Imre Szeman, “What the frack? Combustible water and other late capitalist novelties,” Radical Philosophy
177, January/February 2013, http://www.radicalphilosophy.com/commentary/what-the-frack
There is a reason why oil gets the lion’s share of attention when it comes to the global game of petrocarbon extraction. Through the
oil is the blood that
multiple products into which oil is refined, most important of which are gasoline and diesel,
animates the body of capitalism. It is a substance necessary for

economies to keep operating and profits accruing, which is why
access to it fuels so many geopolitical struggles around the globe.
The atrocities committed by major oil companies almost everywhere
they have set foot – of which spills such as BP’s recent debacle in the
Gulf of Mexico are but the tip of the iceberg – draw public attention to
the consequences of living in oil societies, and so too to the full scale
of our dependence on the substance. And whether or not we believe tales of peak oil, as oil
gets harder to access and in shorter supply and so more expensive,
the extent to which oil and capitalism are tied together cannot help
but make us sit up and pay attention. Economist Jeff Rubin has recently argued that
the unprecedentedly high price of oil over the past decade is the
primary reason why economies around the world have found it
difficult to recover from the 2008 crash.1 While the current price of around US$90
per barrel is well below its recent peak of $147 in July 2008, it is still exponentially higher than the
average $2 per barrel at which oil was priced during capital’s massive
expansionary phase from the 1920s to the 1970s – a virtually free form
of energy with an extraordinarily high ratio of energy returned on
energy invested.
Funding big oil is basically funneling money straight into climate
change denialism propaganda
Farley ’12 John W. Farley, teaches physics at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, “Petroleum and Propaganda,” Monthly
Review, May 2012, Vol. 64, Issue 1, pp. 40-53
James Powell was inspired to write this important new book because of a remarkable paradox: among climate scientists, there is a
near-unanimous consensus that global warming is occurring now, is largely manmade, and will cause very severe environmental
problems if humanity continues business as usual. However, among the lay public the picture is much more mixed: only about half
of the U.S. public agrees with the climate scientists. Why the enormous discrepancy? Powell argues that “in the denial of global
warming, we are witnessing the most vicious, and so far most successful, attack on science in history.” Although Powell himself is
not a climate science researcher, he has an appropriate background to understand the field: he holds a doctorate in geochemistry
from MIT and became a geology professor, teaching at Oberlin College for over twenty years. He has been a college president at
three institutions, and served for a dozen years on the National Science Board. Powell’s book is a sharp attack on the global-
warming denial “industry,” a network comprised of corporate funding, think tanks, popularizers, and propagandists, who all work with
a compliant mass media. Corporate Funders Powell details the support of ExxonMobil for denialism, but omits the combative Koch
brothers, owners of Koch Energy, the world’s largest privately held energy company. ExxonMobil is the biggest funder of global-
warming denialism, spending nearly $16 million on more than forty organizations over the period 1998–2005. Powell also mentions
in passing funding by ideological conservative foundations, motivated by opposition to government regulation of the economy. Think
Tanks Chapter nine describes “Toxic Tanks”—think tanks that promote global-warming denial. These toxic tanks have swell-
sounding names (e.g., “Frontiers of Freedom”) that do not hint they are climate-change deniers. Powell describes in detail four (out
of a much larger number) of these fossil-fuel-company-funded think tanks. 1. The now-defunct Global Climate Coalition (GCC)
included Exxon- Mobil, Amoco, Chevron, American Petroleum Institute, Shell, Texaco, U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Chrysler,
General Motors, Ford, and the American Forest and Paper Association. The GCC, established in 1989, operated from the offices of
the National Association of Manufacturing. The GCC hired a PR firm which produced a video to combat the 1997 Kyoto Protocol.
However, some of its member companies left the GCC; they thought it too risky to be publicly identified with global-warming denial,
and feared the fate of Big Tobacco; it had ended up losing lawsuits for health-care costs of smokers, ultimately settling for damages
of $251 billion. Beset by the defections, the GCC disbanded in 2001. During its lifetime, the GCC established a research arm, the
Science and Technology Assessment Committee, which was staffed by industry scientists. A committee led by Mobil Oil chemical
engineer L. C. Bernstein produced a confidential 1995 report which was circulated to the members of GCC: oil and coal companies,
electric utilities, attorneys, National Mining Association, etc. In a stunning admission, the Bernstein Report concluded that “the
scientific basis for the greenhouse effect and the potential impact of human emissions of greenhouse gases such as CO2 on climate
is well established and cannot be denied.” The report knocked down one of the most popular contrarian arguments: that global
warming could be attributed to changes in the Sun’s brightness. In opposition to the contrarian view, the Bernstein Report stated
that changes in the brightness of the Sun were too small by at least a factor of five to cause the temperature change observed in the
last 120 years. It pointed out that the deniers had no alternative theory of their own, saying “The contrarian theories raise interesting
questions about our total understanding of climate processes, but they do not offer convincing arguments against the conventional
model of greenhouse gas emission-induced climate change.” Thus, while the oil companies and their hired hands were proclaiming
in public that global warming was not caused by burning fossil fuels, their own scientists were saying exactly the opposite in private.
If you have never heard of the Bernstein Report, you have lots of company. It did not surface until 2007, a dozen years after it was
written, during a discovery process in a California court proceeding. 2. Another ExxonMobil-funded think tank discussed by Powell is
the Chicago-based Heartland Institute, which originated as a Libertarian propaganda outfit supported by Big Tobacco. The manager
for industry affairs for Philip Morris, Roy E. Marden, served for years on the Heartland board of directors. The Heartland Institute
raised $676,500 from ExxonMobil between 1996 and 2006; after 2006 Heartland stopped identifying their contributors. The institute
published a slim booklet, The Skeptic’s Handbook, whose publication costs were paid by “an anonymous donor,” and whose author,
“Joanna Nova,” is a pseudonym. Vast numbers of the handbook were distributed for free—and in total over 150,000 copies have
been distributed in fifteen languages. The recipients include 850 journalists, 26,000 schools, and 19,000 leaders and politicians. The
largest single recipients are black churches (over 25,000 copies) and trustees at colleges and universities (over 20,000 copies). In
addition, over 60,000 free copies have been downloaded from their website. In February 2012, too late for inclusion in Powell’s
book, confidential documents from the Heartland Institute were leaked to bloggers. Damaging revelations included the identification
of some corporate funders of Heartland: Microsoft, tobacco giant Altria, the pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline, and the General
Motors Foundation. The documents describe payments by Heartland to some contrarian scientists: for example, Craig Idso, head of
an organization of climate change deniers in Arizona, was receiving over $139,000 annually. The documents also describe
Heartland’s plans for a “Global Warming Curriculum for K-12 Classrooms,” and the planned “curriculum that shows that the topic of
climate change is controversial and uncertain—two key points that are effective at dissuading teachers from teaching science.”
Oil Independence
Ideologies of energy independence fuel a “petro machismo” in which
oil access provides the backbone for new violent reassertions of
American military power
Klare ’13 Michael T. Klare is a professor of peace and conflict studies at Hampshire College, “The Latest News in Fossil Fuel
Addiction,” Tom’s Dispatch, 10/15/2013, http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175760/tomgram%3A_michael_klare
%2C_the_latest_news_in_fossil_fuel_addiction
The new energy euphoria is also fueling a growing sense that the
American superpower, whose influence has recently seemed to be on
the wane, may soon acquire fresh geopolitical clout through its
mastery of the latest energy technologies. “America’s new energy
posture allows us to engage from a position of greater strength,” crowed
National Security Adviser Tom Donilon in an April address at Columbia University. Increased domestic energy output, he explained,
will help reduce U.S. vulnerability to global supply disruptions and price hikes. “It also affords us a stronger hand in pursuing and
A new elite consensus is forming around the

implementing our international security goals.”
strategic advantages of expanded oil and gas production. In particular, this

outlook holds that the U.S. is benefiting from substantially reduced oil
imports from the Middle East by eliminating a dependency that has
led to several disastrous interventions in that region and exposed the country to
periodic disruptions in oil deliveries, starting with the Arab oil embargo of 1973-74. “The shift in oil
sources means the global supply system will become more resilient, our energy supplies will become more secure, and the nation
will have more flexibility in dealing with crises,” Yergin wrote in the Wall Street Journal. This turnaround, he and other experts claim,
is what allowed Washington to adopt a tougher stance with Tehran in negotiations over Iran’s nuclear enrichment program. With the
U.S. less dependent on Middle Eastern oil, so goes the argument, American leaders need not fear Iranian threats to disrupt the flow
of oil through the Persian Gulf to international markets. “The substantial increase in oil production in the United States,” Donilon
declared in April, is what allowed Washington to impose tough sanctions on Iranian oil “while minimizing the burdens on the rest of
A stance of what could be called petro machismo is growing in

the world.”
Washington, underlying such initiatives as the president’s widely

ballyhooed policy announcement of a “pivot” from the Middle East to
Asia (still largely words backed by only the most modest of actions) and efforts to constrain
Russia’s international influence. Ever since Vladimir Putin assumed
the presidency of that country, Moscow has sought to sway the
behavior of its former Warsaw Pact allies and the former republics of
the Soviet Union by exploiting its dominant energy role in the region.
It offered cheap natural gas to governments willing to follow its policy
dictates, while threatening to cut off supplies to those that weren’t.
Now, some American strategists hope to reduce Russia’s clout by
helping friendly nations like Poland and the Baltic states develop their
own shale gas reserves and build LNG terminals. These would allow
them to import gas from “friendly” states, including the U.S. (once its LNG
export capacities are expanded). “If we can export some natural gas to Europe and to Japan and other Asian nations,” Karen
Moreau suggested in February, “we strengthen our relationships and influence in those places -- and perhaps reduce the influence
of other producers such as Russia.” The crucial issue is this: if American elites continue to believe
that increased oil and gas production will provide the U.S. with a
strategic advantage, Washington will be tempted to exercise a
“stronger hand” when pursuing its “international security goals.” The
result will undoubtedly be heightened international friction and
discord .
Offshore Drilling
Their shift to offshore drilling represents the introduction of the age
of unconventional oil – growing demand and diminishing supply
incentivizes increasingly risky extraction efforts – and magnifies
global warming and resource wars
Klare ’13 Michael T. Klare is a professor of peace and conflict studies at Hampshire College, “The Third Carbon Age,” Tom
Dispatch, 8/8/2013, http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175734/
The explosive growth of automotive and aviation travel, the
suburbanization of significant parts of the planet, the mechanization
of agriculture and warfare, the global supremacy of the United States,
and the onset of climate change: these were the hallmarks of the
exploitation of conventional petroleum. At present, most of the world’s oil is still obtained from a
few hundred giant onshore fields in Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Russia, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, the United States, and
Venezuela, among other countries; some additional oil is acquired from offshore fields in the North Sea, the Gulf of Guinea, and the
Gulf of Mexico. This oil comes out of the ground in liquid form and requires relatively little processing before being refined into
commercial fuels. But such conventional oil is disappearing . According to the IEA, the major
fields that currently provide the lion’s share of global petroleum will
lose two-thirds of their production over the next 25 years, with their net output
plunging from 68 million barrels per day in 2009 to a mere 26 million barrels in 2035. The IEA assures us that
new oil will be found to replace those lost supplies, but most of this
will be of an unconventional nature. In the coming decades, unconventional oils will account for a
growing share of the global petroleum inventory, eventually becoming our main source of supply. The same is true for natural gas,
the second most important source of world energy. The global supply of conventional gas, like conventional oil, is shrinking, and we
are becoming increasingly dependent on unconventional sources of supply -- especially from the Arctic, the deep oceans, and shale
rock via hydraulic fracturing. In certain ways, unconventional hydrocarbons are akin to conventional fuels. Both are largely
composed of hydrogen and carbon, and can be burned to produce heat and energy. But in time the differences between them will
Unconventional fuels -- especially heavy oils and tar sands -- tend
make an ever-greater difference to us.
to possess a higher proportion of carbon to hydrogen than

conventional oil, and so release more carbon dioxide when burned .
Arctic and deep-offshore oil require more energy to extract, and so
produce higher carbon emissions in their very production. “Many new
breeds of petroleum fuels are nothing like conventional oil,” Deborah Gordon, a
specialist on the topic at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, wrote in 2012. “Unconventional oils tend to be heavy,
complex, carbon laden, and locked up deep in the earth, tightly trapped between or bound to sand, tar, and rock.” By far the
most worrisome consequence of the distinctive nature of
unconventional fuels is their extreme impact on the environment.
Because they are often characterized by higher ratios of carbon to
hydrogen, and generally require more energy to extract and be
converted into usable materials, they produce more carbon dioxide
emissions per unit of energy released. In addition, the process that produces shale gas, hailed as
a “clean” fossil fuel, is believed by many scientists to cause widespread releases of methane, a particularly potent greenhouse gas.
as the consumption of fossil fuels grows, increasing, not
All of this means that,
decreasing, amounts of CO2 and methane will be released into the

atmosphere and, instead of slowing, global warming will speed up .
And here’s another problem associated with the third carbon age: the production of unconventional oil and gas turns out to require
vast amounts of water -- for fracking operations, to extract tar sands and extra-heavy oil, and to facilitate the transport and refining of
such fuels. This is producing a growing threat of water contamination, especially in areas of intense fracking and tar sands
production, along with competition over access to water supplies among drillers, farmers, municipal water authorities, and others. As
Along
climate change intensifies, drought will become the norm in many areas and so this competition will only grow fiercer.
with these and other environmental impacts, the transition from

conventional to unconventional fuels will have economic and
geopolitical consequences hard to fully assess at this moment. As a start,
the exploitation of unconventional oil and gas reserves from
previously inaccessible regions involves the introduction of novel
production technologies, including deep-sea and Arctic drilling , hydro-fracking, and
tar-sands upgrading. One result has been a shakeup in the global energy industry, with the emergence of innovative companies
possessing the skills and determination to exploit the new unconventional resources -- much as occurred during the early years of
the petroleum era when new firms arose to exploit the world’s oil reserves. This has been especially evident in the development of
breakthrough technologies in this field were devised
shale oil and gas. In many cases, the
and deployed by smaller, risk-taking firms like Cabot Oil and Gas, Devon Energy Corporation,
Mitchell Energy and Development Corporation, and XTO Energy. These and similar companies pioneered the use of hydro-fracking
to extract oil and gas from shale formations in Arkansas, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, and Texas, and later sparked a stampede by
larger energy firms to obtain stakes of their own in these areas. To augment those stakes, the giant firms are gobbling up many of
the smaller and mid-sized ones. Among the most conspicuous takeovers was ExxonMobil’s 2009 purchase of XTO for $41 billion.
That deal highlights an especially worrisome feature of this new era:
the deployment of massive funds by giant energy firms and their
financial backers to acquire stakes in the production of
unconventional forms of oil and gas -- in amounts far exceeding
comparable investments in either conventional hydrocarbons or
renewable energy. It’s clear that, for these companies, unconventional energy is the next big thing
and, as among the most profitable firms in history, they are prepared to spend astronomical
sums to ensure that they continue to be so. If this means investment

in renewable energy is shortchanged, so be it. “Without a concerted policymaking effort” to
favor the development of renewables, Carnegie’s Gordon warns, future investments in the energy field “will likely continue to flow
there will be an increasingly

disproportionately toward unconventional oil.” In other words,
entrenched institutional bias among energy firms, banks, lending

agencies, and governments toward next-generation fossil-fuel
production, only increasing the difficulty of establishing national and
international curbs on carbon emissions. This is evident, for example,
in the Obama administration’s undiminished support for deep-
offshore drilling and shale gas development, despite its purported commitment to
reduce carbon emissions. It is likewise evident in the growing international interest in the development of
shale and heavy-oil reserves, even as fresh investment in green energy is being cut back. As in the environmental and economic
fields, the transition from conventional to unconventional oil and gas will have a substantial, if still largely undefined, impact on
political and military affairs. U.S. and Canadian companies are playing a decisive role in the development of many of the vital new
unconventional fossil-fuel technologies; in addition, some of the world’s largest unconventional oil and gas reserves are located in
North America. The effect of this is to bolster U.S. global power at the expense of rival energy producers like Russia and Venezuela,
which face rising competition from North American companies, and energy-importing states like China and India, which lack the
resources and technology to produce unconventional fuels. At the same time, Washington appears more inclined to counter the rise
of China by seeking to dominate the global sea lanes and bolster its military ties with regional allies like Australia, India, Japan, the
Philippines, and South Korea. Many factors are contributing to this strategic shift, but from their statements it is clear enough that
top American officials see it as stemming in significant part from America’s growing self-sufficiency in energy production and its early
mastery of the latest production technologies. “America’s new energy posture allows us to engage [the world] from a position of
greater strength,” National Security Advisor Tom Donilon asserted in an April speech at Columbia University. “Increasing U.S.
energy supplies act as a cushion that helps reduce our vulnerability to global supply disruptions [and] affords us a stronger hand in
For the time being, the U.S. leaders
pursuing and implementing our international security goals.”
can afford to boast of their “stronger hand” in world affairs, as no

other country possesses the capabilities to exploit unconventional
resources on such a large scale. By seeking to extract geopolitical
benefits from a growing world reliance on such fuels, however, Washington inevitably
invites countermoves of various sorts. Rival powers, fearful and resentful of
its geopolitical assertiveness, will bolster their capacity to resist
American power -- a trend already evident in China’s accelerating
naval and missile buildup. At the same time, other states will seek to develop
their own capacity to exploit unconventional resources in what might
be considered a fossil-fuels version of an arms race. This will require
considerable effort, but such resources are widely distributed across
the planet and in time other major producers of unconventional fuels
are bound to emerge, challenging America’s advantage in this realm (even as they
increase the staying power and global destructiveness of the third age of carbon). Sooner or later, much of international relations will
revolve around these issues.
Nuclear Power – 1NC
Nuclear power is a capitalist shell game to trick massive subsidies
out of the government and sustain imperial domination
ICC ’11 “Nuclear energy, capitalism and communism,” International Communist Current, 8/16/2011,
http://en.internationalism.org/wr/347/nuclear
The potential to use nuclear fission or fusion to produce power has been known about for around a century but it was only after the
Second World War that it was actually realised. Thus, while its general context is that outlined above, the specific context is the
post-war situation dominated by the rivalry between the USA and USSR and the nuclear arms race that resulted. The development
of nuclear power is thus not only inextricably linked to that of nuclear weapons but was arguably a smokescreen for the latter. In the
early 1950s the American government was concerned about the public’s response to the danger of the nuclear arsenal it was
assembling and the strategy of first strike that was being propounded. It’s response was to organise a campaign known as
Operation Candor to win the public over through adverts across the media (including comic books) and a series of speeches by
President Eisenhower that culminated in the announcement at the UN General Assembly of the ‘Atoms for Peace’ programme to
“encourage world-wide investigation into the most effective peacetime uses of fissionable materials.”[19] The plan included sharing
information and resources, and the US and USSR jointly creating an international stockpile of fissionable material. In the years that
followed the arms race went on unabated and nuclear weapons spread to other powers, often under the guise of a civilian nuclear
power programme, as in Israel and India. The initial reactors produced large quantities of material for nuclear weapons and small
amounts of very expensive electricity. The sharing of nuclear knowledge became part of global imperialist struggles; thus in the late
1950s Britain secretly supplied Israel with heavy water for the reactor it was building with French assistance.[20] Despite talk about
energy too cheap to meter, nuclear power has never fulfilled this promise and has relied on state support to cover its real cost. Even
where private companies build and run plants there are usually large open or hidden subsidies. For example privatisation of the
nuclear industry in Britain failed when Thatcher attempted it in the 1980s because private capital identified there were unquantifiable
costs and risks. It was only in 1996, when the ageing Magnox reactors that would soon need decommissioning were excluded from
the deal that private investors were prepared to buy British Energy at a knockdown price of £2bn. Six years later the company had
to be bailed out with a £10bn government loan.[21] While advocates of nuclear energy today argue that it is cheaper than other
sources this remains a questionable assertion. In 2005 the World Nuclear Association, stated that “In most industrialized countries
today, new nuclear power plants offer the most economical way to generate base-load electricity even without consideration of the
geopolitical and environmental advantages that nuclear energy confers” and published a range of data to support the claim that
construction, financing, operating and waste and decommissioning costs have all reduced.[22] Between 1973 and 2008 the
proportion of energy from nuclear reactors grew from 0.9% of the global total to 5.8%.[23] A report published in 2009, commissioned
by the German Federal Government,[24] makes a far more critical evaluation of the economics of nuclear power and questions the
idea that there is a nuclear renaissance underway. The report points out that the number of reactors has fallen over the last few
years in contrast to the widespread forecasts of increases in both reactors and the power produced. The increase in the amount of
power generated that has taken place during this period is the result of upgrading the existing reactors and extending their
operational life. It goes on to argue that there is a lot of uncertainty about the reactors currently described as being ‘under
construction’, with a number having been in this position for over 20 years. The number under construction has fallen from the peak
of over 200 in 1980 to below 50 in 2006. As regards the economics of nuclear power, the report points to the high level of
uncertainty in all areas including financing, construction, operation and decommissioning. It shows that the state remains central to
all nuclear projects, regardless of who they are formally owned and operated by. One aspect of this is the various forms of subsidy
provided by the state to support capital costs, waste management and plant closure and price support. Another has been the
necessity for the state to limit the liability of the industry in order for the private sector to accept the risks. Thus in 1957 the US
government stepped in when insurance companies refused to agree insurance because they were unable to quantify the risk.[25]
Today it is estimated that “In general national limits are in the order of a few hundred million Euro, less than 10% of the cost of
building a plant and far less than the cost of the Chernobyl accident.”[26] The dangers of nuclear energy are as fiercely debated as
the costs and the scientific evidence seems to be very variable. This is particularly the case with the Chernobyl disaster where the
estimates of the deaths that resulted vary widely. A World Health Organisation Report found that 47 the 134 emergency workers
initially involved had died as a result of contamination by 2004[27] and estimated that there would be just under 9,000 excess
deaths from cancer as a result of the disaster.[28] A report by Russian scientists published in the Annals of the New York Academy
of Sciences estimated that from the date of the accident until 2006 some 985,000 additional deaths had resulted from the accident
from cancer and a range of other diseases.[29] For those without specialist medical and scientific knowledge this is difficult to
unravel, but what is less questionable is the massive level of secrecy and falsification that runs from the decision by the British
government to withhold publication of the report into one of the first accidents in the industry at Windscale in 1957 to Fukishima
today where the true scale of the disaster only emerged slowly. Returning to Chernobyl, the Russian government did not report the
accident for several days, leaving the local population to continue living and working amidst the radiation. But it was not only Russia.
The French government minimised the radiation levels reaching the country[30] and told its population that the radiation cloud that
spread across the whole of Europe had not passed over France![31] Meanwhile the British government reassured the country that
there was no risk to health, reporting levels of radiation that were forty times lower than they actually were[32], and then quarantined
hundreds of farms. As late as 2007 374 farms in Britain still remained under the special control scheme.[33] Nuclear energy is being
pushed by various governments as a ‘green’ solution to the problems associated with fossil fuels. This is largely a
smokescreen to hide the real motives, which are concerns about the possible exhaustion of oil, the increasing price of
oil and the risks associated with a dependence on energy resources outside the state’s control. This green facade is slipping as the
economic crisis leads states to return to coal[34] and to push down the costs of exploiting new sources of oil, much of which is
physically hard to access, or requires processes that pollute and despoil the environment, such as coal-tar sands. Energy supplies
have also been a factor in the imperialist struggles over recent years and it seems likely that this may increase in the period ahead.
Nuclear energy then comes back to where it started as a source of fissile material and a cover for weapons programmes .
Nuclear Power – 2NC
Nuclear is an essential nexus of capitalist exploitation and ecological
devastation—that’s ICC—subsidies ensure increasing profit margins
of corporations, allowing for lax safety measures to cut costs.
Nuclear is an ideological smokescreen deploying technocratic
discourses to conceal environmental costs of waste, heat, and
weaponization.
Nuclear Power
The 1AC is propaganda for nuclear corporations—nuclear fission is a
terrible idea within a society which encourages private profit before
social benefit
As of May, the people of Japan celebrated the shutdown of the last of the 54 Japanese reactors, even as there were no power cuts.
Our power defeated the nuclear power! People’s joy was short-lived, however. Despite the “setback” of the Fukushima nuclear
disaster–which should now surely be described at the very least as a disaster-waiting-to-happen, nuclear corporations are not
throwing in the towel and admitting that nuclear power has got to go. Through a carefully orchestrated media campaign of fear-
mongering based on the threat of power cuts and government announcements about the dangers that a lack of electricity poses to
Japan’s fragile economy, they have managed to successfully argue for the restart of reactors in the Western industrial region around
Osaka. In a rare televised appeal to the Japanese public, the new Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda, who is entirely pro-nuclear, made
the case for the necessary restarts. However, in another new piece of evidence that should halt all talk of restarts, the NAIIC report
notes that it cannot say whether the earthquake itself–not the tsunami–was partly responsible for the reactor meltdowns. This finding
invalidates the “stress tests” that the nuclear plants have undergone to show they are safe to operate–because those tests were
based on the assumption that it was only the tsunami, not the earthquake, which caused the structural problems and loss of power
at the plant. Meanwhile, a separate government panel of experts has declared that, based on what happened with the tsunami from
the March 11 earthquake, tsunamis of 112 feet in height are possible along the Pacific coast. Every single one of Japan’s 54 nuclear
reactors is situated along the coast! The tsunami that overwhelmed the Fukushima-Daiichi plant and swept away entire villages in
the area, causing 19,000 deaths, was 45 feet high, less than half of what the panel now predicts as possible. A 2003 report had put
the maximum size of a tsunami in the area at 60 feet, but clearly, a 45-foot wave can overwhelm coastal defenses and inundate
nuclear plants such as the one at Fukushima-Daiichi, which was only prepared for a 20-foot-high wave. - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - -
THE ONLY rational answer is to permanently shut down all the reactors, break apart and dismantle the nuclear corporations as
threats to public health, take further measures to conserve electricity and speed up the program of building the infrastructure
necessary for a clean energy economy. However, there are a few broader conclusions to draw from this report and the litany of
similar cases of accidents such as the BP spill, where the corporate drive for profit is like an unstoppable tsunami that tolerates all
manner of evasions and cutbacks regarding health and safety measures. First, this is not about a few bad apples or irresponsible,
corrupt people. This is about how capitalism operates . How else does one explain the need for every
single area of capital accumulation–from the nuclear industry, to oil and gas, to pharmaceuticals to food production–to have
independent regulators preventing the corporations from doing what they are primed to do: make profit at all costs? If the regulators
are in the pockets of the corporations that bestride the planet as unaccountable behemoths with their colossal economies, often
larger than most individual states, all hell breaks loose. Second, whatever those deluded environmentalists who are pro-nuclear
think, there is no scenario in which a sane person can be pro-nuclear when the nuke plants are operating within a social system that
has no ethical, social, ecological or moral concerns, and drives the individuals who run the system into immoral actions. The only
thing crazier than boiling water by splitting atoms is boiling water by splitting atoms in a social system driven by profit.
Nuclear Power – Impact Calc
Nuclear development within capitalism makes a dozen Fukushimas
inevitable—market incentives push firms to cut corners and spread
propaganda, and for regulators to look the other way—turns and
outweighs the case
THEY MAY not live in castles anymore, but the glass-plated skyscrapers that tower over the great cities of the world, in faceless anonymity, still signify
the imperious domain of the ruling elite. It is these places, not the featureless depths of the earth’s roiling crust, which were the decisive cause of
the triple nuclear meltdowns at the Fukushima-Daiichi plant on March 11, 2011. An independent report by the Fukushima Nuclear
Accident Independent Investigation Commission (NAIIC), the first independent investigation committee authorized by the Japanese
Diet (parliament) in its 66-year history, was released to both houses of the Diet on July 5. The chairman of the report begins with zero
equivocation as to the ultimate cause of the nuclear meltdowns, which are still preventing tens of thousands of people from returning to their homes–
returns that, for many, are likely never to come: The earthquake and tsunami of March 11, 2011 were natural disasters of a magnitude that shocked the
entire world. Although triggered by these cataclysmic events, the subsequent accident at the Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear power plant cannot
be regarded as a natural disaster. It was a profoundly manmade disaster–that could and should have been foreseen and prevented.
And its effects could have been mitigated by a more effective human response. HOW COULD such a “profoundly manmade
disaster” have come to pass? According to the report, a multitude of errors, “willful negligence” and a “reluctance to question authority”
led to nuclear power becoming “an unstoppable force, immune to scrutiny by civil society. Its regulation was entrusted to the same
government bureaucracy responsible for its promotion.” It sounds all too eerily familiar to anyone who has spent time investigating
the U.S. nuclear regulatory body, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), and the collusion between the NRC and U.S. nuclear
corporations. In a line that must indubitably stoke the anger and sorrow of all those made homeless, all those who have lost their livelihoods and all
those tens of thousands more who now are left to agonize over radioactive contamination for themselves and their children for decades to come, the
report states, “The direct causes of the accident were all foreseeable prior to March 11, 2011.” In other words, contrary to all the talk from governments
around the world and nuclear apologists of the left and right about “an unforeseeable event,” the nuclear meltdowns, with all their untold and long-
term consequences for the physical and mental health of the people of the region, were entirely preventable if the corporation which operated
the plants, the Tokyo Electrical Power Company (TEPCO), or the government bodies charged with regulating the nuclear industry, NISA
and METI, had taken the appropriate safety precautions: The operator (TEPCO), the regulatory bodies (NISA and NSC) and the government
body promoting the nuclear power industry (METI), all failed to correctly develop the most basic safety requirements–such as assessing the probability
of damage, preparing for containing collateral damage from such a disaster, and developing evacuation plans for the public in the case of a serious
radiation release. The report notes that these organizations had known of the inability of the reactors to withstand such an earthquake and tsunami
since 2006. It recommends across-the-board, substantive reforms to all aspects of nuclear regulation, the operation of the plants, the legal framework
within which they operate and the emergency response, evacuation and disaster preparedness plans, all of which were found wanting. It warns that
these must not be cosmetic name changes or simply shifts of personnel but a root-and-branch reordering of priorities and fundamental reforms as
government regulators and the corporation as organizations all failed to protect the public, as is their legal duty: There were many opportunities for
NISA, NSC and TEPCO to take measures that would have prevented the accident, but they did not do so. They either intentionally
postponed putting safety measures in place, or made decisions based on their organization’s self interest– not in the interest of
public safety. In an echo of the BP Gulf oil spill of 2010, where it was found that BP had no viable emergency response plan, “TEPCO’s manual for
emergency response to a severe accident was completely ineffective, and the measures it specified did not function.” In yet another similarity with the
BP disaster, where U.S. government regulators were found to have been having sex and drug parties with BP officials, the report speaks of “a cozy
relationship between the operators, the regulators and academic scholars that can only be described as totally inappropriate.” HOWEVER,
FUNDAMENTAL reform to the nuclear industry, and TEPCO in particular, is looking less likely without a further outpouring of national protest, the likes
of which Japan has not seen in decades. This is because TEPCO is a giant corporation with a stranglehold on electricity production and much else.
According to the New York Times, “Thanks to a virtual monopoly and a murky electricity pricing system, it has become one of the biggest sources of
loosely regulated cash for politicians, bureaucrats and businessmen, who have repaid Tepco with unquestioning support and with the type of lax
oversight that contributed to the nuclear crisis.” TEPCO had net income (i.e. profits) of $1.7 billion in 2009 through its corporate affiliates and ownership
of 192 electricity plants that produce up to one-third of the electricity in Japan. Overall, Japanese people pay twice as much for electricity as do those in
the US. TEPCO, therefore, justifies yet more daylight robbery through ongoing bank bailouts, apparently another corporation “too big to fail,” in the
current neoliberal jargon. Amazingly, TEPCO is pushing to restart some of its own reactors despite the widely held belief, now well documented in the
government’s independent report, that the corporation was largely to blame for the disaster. Meanwhile, TEPCO, in its own report on the accident,
exonerated itself, citing instead the size of the tsunami and government blunders as the causes of the meltdowns. Conversely–not to mention much
more believably–the authors of the NAIIC report conclude that the accident was “manmade”: The TEPCO Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant accident
was the result of collusion between the government, the regulators and TEPCO, and the lack of governance by said parties. They effectively betrayed
the nation’s right to be safe from nuclear accidents. Therefore, we conclude that the accident was clearly “manmade.” Some people–a lot of people–
should be going to jail. Betrayal of the people and their right to be free of radioactive contamination, particularly a people that has already suffered the
horror of atomic weapons used against its civilian population, is unconscionable. What could have driven these decisions taken by so many people in
all these different organizations? Led them to behave in such a criminally irresponsible manner? Ultimately, we get to the heart of the matter: “As the
nuclear power business became less profitable over the years, TEPCO’s management began to put more emphasis on cost cutting and increasing
Japan’s reliance on nuclear power.” Put another way, the decisions taken were dictated by the prime directive of capitalism: make profits at
all costs, grow by any means necessary. Cut whatever corners you need to, bribe and cajole whoever is necessary, denigrate and
belittle those who oppose you– there is no higher power to which you will answer other than the
God of Profit . This is the iron law of capital accumulation. The consequences of those decisions, taken in the faraway,
plush boardrooms of the nuclear corporations, and the lack of credible government information since the disaster, have now created
widespread fear among the people, the disbanding of families, and the destruction of their livelihoods in Fukushima prefecture . As
the report lays out: They continue to face grave concerns, including the health effects of radiation exposure, displacement, the
dissolution of families, disruption of their lives and lifestyles and the contamination of vast areas of the environment. There is no
foreseeable end to the decontamination and restoration activities that are essential for rebuilding communities. What an
utterly appalling way to make electricity. No foreseeable end to decontamination and restoration
activities. Even without considering the issue of nuclear waste, the staggering cost of building and operating nuclear plants, or the
umbilical cord that indelibly connects the nuclear power industry to the nuclear weapons and defense industry, can anyone honestly
say that as a highly technological society, we have no better alternatives to generating electricity than operating nuclear power
stations?
Biofuels
Biofuels are a capitalist quick-fix that magnify social inequality and
sustain corporate exploitation – causes extinction – Marxism is the
only way out
Sison ‘9 Jose Maria Sison, Chairperson of the International League of People’s Struggle, “End Monopoly Capitalism to Arrest
Climate Change,” The Marxist-Leninist, 12/9/2009, http://marxistleninist.wordpress.com/2009/12/09/jose-maria-sison-end-monopoly-
capitalism-to-arrest-climate-change/#more-4110
The people of the world face today global poverty, economic wars and
environmental crises. They are confronted by an escalating, more
rapacious and vicious campaign of plunder by monopoly capitalism.
This aggravates the already devastated and polluted natural
environment. The massive dumping of greenhouse gases (GHG) in the
atmosphere by the operations of monopoly capitalist firms in the energy industries,
manufacturing, transportation, industrial agriculture, mining, construction,
etc. is now generating climatic changes that are causing massive
devastation and loss of human lives around the world. The
unprecedented rise in GHG emissions coincided with the onset of the
capitalist system at the industrial revolution and its attendant intensive use of
machines, fossil fuels for transportation and energy. The anarchic,
wasteful and pollutive capitalist production for profit has put our
world into the brink of destruction . Under a system where profit is the
primary objective of social production, the environment and our
ecosystems are reduced to being a source of raw materials and
dumping grounds for wasters. Plunder and pollution of the environment have made victims of poor
communities many times over. These are the same communities that are also the most vulnerable to environmental backlashes,
which come in the form of floods, droughts and other occurrences triggered or heightened by the prevailing imbalances in the
ecosystem. Women and children shoulder the greater cost of these circumstances because of wider risks to their health, and added
The trend of rapid environmental
complications to their productive and reproductive functions.
changes both at the global and national level is expected to bring

about even more massive devastation and loss of human lives in the
future. It is clear from the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report, and
subsequent studies, that warming of the climate system is unequivocal, as is now evident from observations of increases in global
average air and ocean temperatures, widespread melting of snow and ice, and rising global average sea levels. The
increase in global surface temperature has made the past decade and
a half the warmest years since the 1850s. An increase of 0.75 degrees
Celsius in the past century was observed over the world. Rates of sea
level increase have leaped from an average of 1.8 mm annually (from
1961) to 3.1 mm/yr (from 1996). The rate of shrinking of ice cover in the Arctic was observed to be 2.7 %
per decade, which more than double in summer to 7.4 %. Recently, the Northwest passage was clear throughout the Arctic circle.
Increased incidence of intense tropical cyclones and sea level rise has been observed putting coastal areas at risk. The climate has
It was clear in
been altered by changes in greenhouse gases (GHGs), aerosols, land-cover and solar radiation input.
the Nobel Prize winning report of the IPCC that GHGs have increased
due to human activities with an increase of 70% in the last 3 decades.
CO2 emissions have increased 80% in the same period. While global warming has
already brought extreme impacts on livelihood and survival, especially on vulnerable communities, “free market”
globalization policies have opened up the rest of the world to the

unhampered entry, control and exploitation of raw natural resources
and of people by monopoly capitalist banks and firms. Atrocious campaigns of wars
of aggression have been waged especially by US monopoly capital to expand its economic territory and gain direct or tighter control
of land and natural resources. Systematic and unabated deforestation through rampant industrial logging has multiplied at ever
destruction of the world’s forests has also led to the
increasing rates. The
conversion of agricultural plantations for export-oriented crops, farms for

cattle raising or monoculture tree plantations. The relentless extraction of mineral ores and wanton destruction by mining
multinational corporations (MNCs) in Asia Pacific, Latin America and African countries that are naturally endowed with rich mineral
deposits persists while they leave massive environmental destruction and pollution, widespread landlessness and displacement,
loss of livelihood, distortion of local culture, and rampant human rights violations to the peoples of these regions in their wake. Asia,
which holds more than half of the world’s population, has less than 36% of the world’s water resources and almost half of the
population in developing countries are exposed to polluted water sources. The contamination of air, water and land brought about by
products and production processes mainly from the industrial and manufacturing plants of MNCs continue. These large-scale
factories remain the top contributors of significant pollutants such as toxic and hazardous wastes in the world. More and more
underdeveloped countries (including India and China) have also become major dumping grounds for the wastes of industrial
countries. The dumping of toxic and hazardous wastes are mounting and alarming. Additionally, chemicals and obsolete
technologies proven to be harmful to the environment and/or human health and that are already banned in the industrial countries
are continually foisted on underdeveloped countries. The occupation of Iraq by the US (and the ‘Coalition of the Willing’) has given
the latter direct control over the vast oil resources of Iraq and has consolidated US domination over the world’s oil resources. After
toppling the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, the US has gained more political foothold in Central Asia and South Asia and further
access to the oil and gas resources in these parts of the world. The US launched its “second front against terrorism” targeting the
Philippines, Indonesia and Southeast Asia — a region known for its oil, natural gas and other natural resources. It has unceasingly
undermined the government of Venezuela, which has the biggest oil resources in Latin America and is continuously expanding its
influence in other Latin American countries (Colombia) and several African countries to tap potential oil and other mineral resources.
Foreign direct investments in energy all over the world are increasing
and control over these resources are transferred from nations to a
few energy companies. Even the technologies needed for the use of alternative energy in solar and wind are
limited to industrialized countries. The drive for biofuels has raised concerns over its
long-term sustainability and actual contribution to climate change.

Large tracts of forests have been lost in Brazil, Malaysia and
Indonesia due to conversion of forests to oil-palm plantations and
more biofuel plantations have been earmarked in other countries like
the Philippines. The recent wars of aggression of the US and its allies have not only increased the production, sale
and use weapons of mass destruction but have also caused the massive destruction and contamination of human property, health
and environment (i.e. use of depleted uranium, etc.) in the Balkans, Afghanistan, Iraq and other war-ravaged countries. Forest
clearings and land conversions necessitated by continued military exercises in different parts of the world led by the US pollute the
environment and the destruction of natural habitats. Toxic wastes from current and previous US military bases continue to wreak
ecological havoc in the surrounding areas. US military joint exercises bring with them not only direct US military aggression but the
dangerous weapons and waste from these activities. The United States is currently the number one producer of GHGs, emitting
more than 28% of all the historical GHGs emitted since 1840 worldwide. About 84% of US GHG emissions arise from the petroleum-
related energy and electrical power sectors. The US is also the biggest processor and unregulated user of oil and petroleum
products all over the world. Yet the US government has refused to sign the Kyoto Protocol, an international treaty signed by 169
countries which aims to reduce global levels of carbon dioxide and five other GHG emissions by 5.2% from their 1990 levels. It is
also the US that remains adamant in refusing to commit to long-term and rapid reductions of emissions in the ongoing negotiations
for new commitments under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Copenhagen. Primary
emitter countries such as the US and G8 countries have the principal responsibility to change their production activities and
consumption of energy for genuinely sustainable solutions to the ecological crisis. At the same time, they must also bear the cost of
reducing GHGs and building the capacity of vulnerable communities in poor countries to withstand climate change impacts which
they have caused. Developing countries still require adequate energy and infrastructure for the basic needs and social development
of their people, hence, should not be denied genuine sustainable development and must not be forced to carry the burden of
meeting carbon emission reduction targets for the world while industrialized countries refuse to do so. Instead of pursuing
comprehensive mitigation of their emissions by engaging in changes in social production, industrialized countries use carbon offset
mechanisms and emissions trading projects that offload the burden of carbon mitigation and reduction towards developing
countries. These distort development activities in these countries while maintaining the unsustainable patterns of consumption and
production activities of industrialized countries. Clean Development Mechanisms (CDM) and carbon trading effectively marketize
carbon emissions and essentially shuffles around responsibility to curb emissions. International financial institutions (IFIs) such as
the World Bank (WB) and other regional banks are becoming more aggressive in pushing for “free market” and business-friendly
false solutions to climate change related problems. Programs such as the Climate Investment Fund of the WB do not differ from
their previous so-called development projects that have violated human rights, displaced communities, destroyed the environment
and supported militarization in the past. These initiatives of the IFIs also give them leverage to influence the outcome of the
UNFCCC negotiations in Copenhagen to provide new opportunities for profit-making by monopoly capitalist firms who want to take
advantage of the climate crisis. These include proposals such as massive geo-engineering solutions that do not address the root
cause of the emissions and instead push untested and unproven but potentially profitable technologies without due consideration of
their ecological and social consequences. On the other hand, personal and individual reduction of carbon emissions such as shifts
to compact fluorescent light bulbs and switching to biodegradable products are mere token responses and short-sighted if they are
not framed within larger political and economic conditions which have vastly accelerated the rate of global warming. In any case,
poor communities would not have the capacity to engage in these actions unless their immediate economic and social problems are
first addressed. Indeed, climate change already aggravates other environmental problems that poor communities have to face as a
result of imperialist globalization’s ever increasing destruction of our ecology. It is no longer a question that human activity has
produced dangerous climate interference but on how to avoid catastrophic effects that could affect more than half of the world’s
population that are most vulnerable to climate change. Industrialized countries should commit to real targets and not shift the burden
to underdeveloped countries. The capacity of local communities to respond to disasters should be strengthened. Community-based
disaster response, monitoring and mitigation should be undertaken and livelihood should be provided for those who are vulnerable
to climate change impacts. Great advances have been made in information technology,
robotics, genetics, agriculture, and medicine, yet are not being applied towards solving
fundamental problems of humankind, such as the breakdown of health systems, famine and hunger, ecological
destruction, and social decay and disintegration. Instead, unbridled monopoly capitalist
globalization has opened up third world resources for the use of

TNCs extracting raw materials while leaving their pollution and emissions to the host communities. The
rapid destruction of the environment is a direct result of the rapid,
unchecked appropriation of the world’s resources for the benefit of a
few. Increased pressure for the quest for wealth places increased
pressure on the environment and environmental destruction. The
poor, who are most vulnerable, are subjected to these environmental
impacts while trying to provide subsistence-level production for
themselves. Existing environmental and social problems aggravated by
global warming will not abate until the plunder of the world for
monopoly capital’s greed for profits end. In order to preserve the world’s intrinsic and practical
value for human development, we need to fundamentally reorient production and
consumption based on human needs rather than for the boundless

accumulation of profit for a few. Society must take collective control
of productive resources to meet the needs of sustainable social development and avoid overproduction,
overconsumption and overexploitation of people and the environment which are inevitable under the prevailing monopoly capitalist
system. We have seen how communities throughout the world have remained resolute and determined to struggle for their rights
and defend their natural resources because it is not only their present but also their future at stake. The oppressed peoples and
nations are more determined than ever before to wage revolutionary struggles for national liberation and democracy and look
forward to this socialist future. As the imperialist powers scrambling to preserve global capitalism, we, the people, must struggle
harder and be more effective in waging militant anti-imperialist struggles for greater freedom, democracy, social justice,
To arrest climate change, we need to
development, ecological sustainability, solidarity and peace.
put an end to this systematic plunder of the environment for the

superprofits of corporations in industrialized countries. To arrest climate change,
we need to organize and defend our future against this parasitic and moribund system. To arrest climate change, we need to end
monopoly capital’s dominance over our lives and build a socialist future.
Biofuel production creates resource and land tradeoffs that are
comparatively more likely than oil to cause total extinction
Monbiot ‘7 George Monbiot, activist, journalist, intellectual, got a metal spike driven through his foot by a security guard
while he was protesting a new road in Britain, tried to carry out a citizen’s arrest of John Bolton for his role in instigating the Iraq
War, used to be Whitman’s go-to K answer but then he got too radical, finalist in the Lloyds National Screenwriting Prize with his
screenplay ‘The Norwegian’, “ A Lethal Solution,” 3/27/2007, http://www.monbiot.com/2007/03/27/a-lethal-solution/
governments using biofuel
It used to be a matter of good intentions gone awry. Now it is plain fraud. The
to tackle global warming know that it causes more harm than good . But
they plough on regardless. In theory, fuels made from plants can reduce the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by cars and trucks.
Plants absorb carbon as they grow – it is released again when the fuel is burnt. By encouraging oil companies to switch from fossil
plants to living ones, governments on both sides of the Atlantic claim to be “decarbonising” our transport networks. In the budget last
week, Gordon Brown announced that he would extend the tax rebate for biofuels until 2010. From next year all suppliers in the UK
will have to ensure that 2.5% of the fuel they sell is made from plants – if not, they must pay a penalty of 15p a litre. The obligation
rises to 5% in 2010(1). By 2050, the government hopes that 33% of our fuel will come from crops(2). Last month George Bush
announced that he would quintuple the US target for biofuels(3): by 2017 they should be supplying 24% of the nation’s transport
fuel(4). So what’s wrong with these programmes? Only that they are a formula for
environmental and humanitarian disaster. In 2004 this column warned that biofuels
would set up a competition for food between cars and people. The
people would necessarily lose : those who can afford to drive are, by
definition, richer than those who are in danger of starvation. It would
also lead to the destruction of rainforests and other important
habitats(5). I received more abuse than I’ve had for any other column, except when I attacked the 9/11 conspiracists. I was
told my claims were ridiculous, laughable, impossible. Well in one respect I was wrong. I thought these effects wouldn’t
materialise for many years. They are happening already . Since the beginning of last
year, the price of maize has doubled(6). The price of wheat has also
reached a 10-year high, while global stockpiles of both grains have
reached 25-year lows(7). Already there have been food riots in Mexico and
reports that the poor are feeling the strain all over the world. The US
department of agriculture warns that “if we have a drought or a very
poor harvest, we could see the sort of volatility we saw in the 1970s , and
if it does not happen this year, we are also forecasting lower stockpiles next year.”(8) According to the UN Food and Agriculture
Organisation, the main reason is the demand for ethanol: the alcohol used for motor fuel, which can be made from both maize and
wheat(9).Farmers will respond to better prices by planting more, but it is
not clear that they can overtake the booming demand for biofuel.
Even if they do, they will catch up only by ploughing virgin habitat.
Already we know that biofuel is worse for the planet than petroleum . The UN has
just published a report suggesting that 98% of the natural rainforest in
Indonesia will be degraded or gone by 2022(10). Just five years ago, the same
agencies predicted that this wouldn’t happen until 2032. But they reckoned without
the planting of palm oil to turn into biodiesel for the European market. This is now the
main cause of deforestation there and it is likely soon to become responsible for the extinction of the
orang utan in the wild. But it gets worse. As the forests are burnt, both the trees and the
peat they sit on are turned into carbon dioxide. A report by the Dutch consultancy Delft
Hydraulics shows that every tonne of palm oil results in up to 33 tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions, or ten times as much as
petroleum produces(11). I feel I need to say that again. Biodiesel from palm oil causes up to TEN TIMES as much climate change
Sugarcane producers are moving
as ordinary diesel. There are similar impacts all over the world.
into rare scrubland habitats (the cerrado) in Brazil and soya farmers are
ripping up the Amazon rainforests. As President Bush has just signed a biofuel agreement with
President Lula, it’s likely to become a lot worse. Indigenous people in South America, Asia
and Africa are starting to complain about incursions onto their land
by fuel planters. A petition launched by a group called biofuelwatch, begging western governments to stop, has been
signed by campaigners from 250 groups(12). The British government is well aware that there’s a problem. On his blog last year the
environment secretary David Miliband noted that palm oil plantations “are destroying 0.7% of the Malaysian rain forest each year,
reducing a vital natural resource (and in the process, destroying the natural habitat of the orang-utan). It is all connected.”(13) Unlike
biofuels is that they don’t upset drivers. They
government policy. The reason governments are so enthusiastic about
appear to reduce the amount of carbon from our cars, without

requiring new taxes. It’s an illusion sustained by the fact that only the
emissions produced at home count towards our national total. The forest
clearance in Malaysia doesn’t increase our official impact by a gram. In February the European Commission was faced with a
straight choice between fuel efficiency and biofuels. It had intended to tell car companies that the average carbon emission from
new cars in 2012 would be 120 grams per kilometre. After heavy lobbying by Angela Merkel on behalf of her car manufacturers, it
caved in and raised the limit to 130 grams. It announced that it would make up the shortfall by increasing the contribution from
biofuel(14). The British government says it “will require transport fuel suppliers to report on the carbon saving and sustainability of
the biofuels they supply.”(15) But it will not require them to do anything. It can’t: its consultants have already shown that if it tries to
even “sustainable”
impose wider environmental standards on biofuels, it will fall foul of world trade rules(16). And
biofuels merely occupy the space that other crops now fill, displacing
them into new habitats. It promises that one day there will be a
“second generation” of biofuels, made from straw or grass or wood.
But there are still major technical obstacles(17). By the time the new
fuels are ready, the damage will have been done.
Renewables – 1NC
Green energy in a capitalist context is environmentally and
economically disastrous
Harris 11 (Jerry. "Going Green to Stay in the Black: Transnational Capitalism and Renewable Energy." Perspectives on
Global Development and Technology 10.1 (2011): 41-59. Print.)
Marxists environmentalist John Bellamy Foster (1994) makes the point that capitalism can never fundamentally solve the
environmental crisis because it is inherently a system of unending growth and accumulation. As subjectively appealing this
argument is for the left, I believe it is misplaced in the sense of what capitalism can and cannot do. By environmentally redesigning
production, energy, transportation, architecture and agriculture, capitalism can maintain a market for goods that reduces inputs and
energy. It may not be able to accomplish this for all commodities, but enough to significantly lessen its abuse of our planet. If
accomplished the cataclysmic clash between capitalism and nature may be postponed for a significant amount of time. But whether
or not the capitalist class has the political will to carrying out these transformations is another question. Judging by its failures in
Kyoto, Copenhagen and elsewhere capitalism may lose any shred of political legitimacy long before it can act in a qualitatively
transformative manner. To be sure, there are socially-responsible corporations, scientists and economists who understand the full
nature of the challenge ahead. As Kevin Parker, global head of Deutsche Bank Asset Management said, “the cost of inaction is the
extinction of the human race. Period” (Broder 2009). But significant restraints exist. With short-term focus among neo-liberal
speculators, feeble efforts of neo-Keynesian reformers and sabotage by fossil fuel lobbyists the capitalist system may be unable to
respond within the limits of ecological time. Chained to the constraints of its economic dogma, important sectors of the capitalist
class are unable to react with long-term planning and the investments needed to build a sustainable economy. A few examples tell
the story. Out of a total of 2,810 climate-change lobbyists in Washington, only 138 support renewable energy (Goodell 2010). And
from the total of $250-$300 billion in global energy subsidies, $200 billion go to fossil fuels and only $16 billion for renewables
(United Nations Environment Programme 2008). It is clear that neither the neo-liberal nor neo-Keynesian wing of the transnational
capitalist class can meet the challenge. What needs to emerge is a new green hegemonic bloc providing political leadership with a
dominant culture and ideology. Such a change is possible, but even so green capitalism faces another set of historic problems.
What the transnational capitalist class cannot change is its need for profits and power won through competitive combat. Therefore,
movements towards monopolization, economic rationality and the exploitation of labor cannot be resolved within the parameters of
green capitalism. There will be a continuing drive to defeat or acquire competing corporations resulting in bankruptcy and
unemployment. Constant pressure to lower costs resulting in lower wages, less benefits and sweatshop conditions wherever
possible. And the need to externalize costs results in greater burdens on governments and citizens. As Marx pointed out, revolutions
occur when the relations of production hold back the necessary development of society, not the inability of capitalism to
Green capitalism
revolutionize technology. Therefore, the contradiction between labor and capital is still key.
may very well have the ability to develop the appropriate technology,
but not the means to fully realize its social organization.
Renewables – 2NC
Green energy is a failing attempt to resolve capitalism’s
contradictions—that’s Harris—but free market dogma and profit
accumulation means the requisite shifts in consumption and resource
use are impossible. Tech fixes only increase accumulation by major
corporations and logics of economic domination.
Wind Power
Wind power subsidies feed into corporate interests, giving capitalism
the protection of a ‘green image’
Harris 11 (Jerry. "Going Green to Stay in the Black: Transnational Capitalism and Renewable Energy." Perspectives on
Global Development and Technology 10.1 (2011): 41-59. Print.)
The wind power industry is already dominated by large TNCs. The top eleven corporations that produce and install wind turbines
held 95 percent of the market in 2008. These TNCs are a combination of relatively new players that established themselves over the
last twenty some years and older corporate giants. Vestas, the Danish TNC, held the number one spot with 19 percent of the
market, down from 24.6 percent in 2007. The only significant US TNC, GE Energy, was second with 18 percent. Three German
transnationals, 44 J. Harris / PGDT 10 (2011) 41-59 Enercon, Siemens and Nordex occupied 20 percent of the market; two Spanish
corporations, Gamesa and Acciona held 15 percent; Sinovel, Dongfang and Goldwind, all from China controlled 13 percent; and the
India giant, Suzlon, acquiring REpower of Germany, now has 8 percent (ekopolitan 2010). Although wind power is only one percent
of global energy, it continues to experience rapid growth and receives the largest share of renewable energy investments—$48.9
billion in 2009. Because of the size and complexity of wind turbines the industry tends towards large manufacturers that often also
install, service and maintain wind farms. Politically, building a green energy base is presented with nationalist rhetoric about oil
independence and local jobs. And government subsidies and incentives have been key to creating a market in all countries moving
in this direction. But as pointed out in a study by the Peterson Institute and World Resources Institute, “Cross-border investment
rather than trade is the dominant mode of global integration. Standard international trade in wind energy equipment is relatively
small and declining. Instead, foreign direct investment (FDI) flows dominate the global integration of the wind sector” (Kirkegaard,
Thilo and Weischer 2009). With $50 billion in total sales in 2008 only about 10 percent were in exports. An indicator of growing
integration is FDI in newly-built wind turbine factories. World totals were just $200 million in 2003 but grew to about $2.3 billion by
2008. (FOi Markets Project Database 2010) Consequently, although the industry is young it is already following transnational lines
of development. At the end of 2009 there were 130,000 wind turbines installed or under construction. Europe has half the world’s
wind turbine capacity and the industry employees 155,000 workers, but China and the US are its fastest growing markets.
Benefits to wind power are exaggerated for technological gain even

by federal regulators
Zehner ’12 Ozzie Zehner, visiting scholar at UC-Berkeley, “Ozzie Zehner: Alternatives to alternative energy,” Bulletin of the
Atomic Scientists 68(5), September 2012, pp. 1-7
BAS: The Energy Department’s 2008 report 20% Wind Energy by 2030 has been widely cited as evidence that major changes to the
US energy infrastructure are within easy reach. Why did you write that the report is based on unrealistic projections of how much
electricity turbines can generate under real-world conditions? Zehner: When I was working on the wind chapter, it seemed like I
couldn’t go anywhere without encountering citations from this report, so I thought I’d better go back and look at it closely. I
discovered discrepancies between Energy Department data and the historical data in the report. There are capacity factors—the
percentage of maximum capacity that you get out of a turbine in the real world--estimated in this report that are far above any
capacity factors found elsewhere. I couldn’t figure out where they were getting such high numbers. They were even higher than the
industry says are plausible. Just a percent or two can make or break a wind farm. So I decided to do some interviews at the
Department of Energy and also with the firm that was hired to create the data sets. I found that, when they ran up against figures
unfavorable to the wind industry, they crafted different numbers--by extrapolating from a period of rapid advancement and drawing a
straight line up into the future, without acknowledging the maturation of the industry that had already occurred. That’s like
extrapolating the growth of high school freshmen to show that, by college, they will stand taller than giraffes. BAS: Why did the
Energy Department go along with industry projections instead of government data? This report was written during the Bush
administration, which was not known as an advocate of renewable energy. Zehner: I don’t know what was going on in their minds
when they created it, but there was clearly interest in producing a report that was favorable to the wind industry. It appears that the
Department of Energy’s existing field data and its previous estimates on cost and capacity factors were too realistic to be used in a
report that was going to pump up the prospects for the wind industry.
Global Warming – AT: Perm
Critique of cap is prior—otherwise corporatization restricts solvency
Barlow 13 Maude Barlow, National Chairperson of the Council of Canadians, “Democracy is the solution to the climate
crisis,” Climate & Capitalism, 2/1/2013, http://climateandcapitalism.com/2013/02/01/democracy-is-the-solution-to-the-climate-crisis/?
utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=democracy-is-the-solution-to-the-climate-crisis
Thecrisis of democracy is largely fueled by the unprecedented power of
transnational corporations, and the richest, most powerful industry
sector in the world is big oil. Not only does it influence elections, in
many countries, it often sets domestic and international policy. In my
country (Canada), the energy industry wrote Prime Minster Stephen Harper and outlined the six environmental protections it wanted
gutted so that it could build new pipelines—east, west, and south—unimpeded. In two recent budgets, our government fully
Big oil companies, like other
complied, leaving our land, water, and air unprotected by law.
industry giants, are protected by bilateral, regional, and global trade

and investment agreements that allow them to sue governments at
will. US-based Occidental Petroleum successfully sued Ecuador
under the US-Ecuador Bilateral Investment Treaty for $2.4 billion in
compensation when that country terminated its contract after
Occidental broke its terms. The power of these corporations to
influence politics and policies as well as the trade deals that insulate
them from the rule of law must be ended if we are ever to move to
alternative and sustainable forms of energy. Ending corporate rule would go a long way to
restoring democracy.
AT: Alt Doesn’t Solve Environment/Plan Key
Naturalizing the political in terms of technological market solutions is
the true depoliticizing move—only the alt offers the possibility of
change
Foster 11 John B. "Capitalism and Environmental Catastrophe." John Bellamy Foster, "Capitalism and Environmental
Catastrophe" Monthly Review, 31 Oct. 2011. Web. 18 July 2012. <http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2011/foster291011.html>.
There are two predominant ways of addressing the climate crisis and the environmental problem generally. One is to look for
technological ways out -- often seen as being spurred by the creation of carbon markets, but the onus is on the technology. The
argument here is that through the massive introduction of various advanced technologies we can have our pie and eat it too. We
can get around the environmental problem, it is suggested, without making any fundamental social changes. Thus, the pursuit of
profits and accumulation can go on as before without alteration. Such magic-technological answers are commonly viewed as the
only politically feasible ones, since they are attractive to corporate and political-power elites, who refuse to accept the need for
system change. Consequently, the establishment has gambled on some combination of technological miracles emerging that will
allow them to keep on doing just as they have been doing. Predictably, the outcome of this high-stake gamble has been a failure not
only to decrease carbon emissions, but also to prevent their continued increase. The turn to those alternative technologies that are
already available (for example, solar power) has been hindered by the fact that they are often less profitable or require changes in
social organization to be implemented effectively. As a result, greater emphasis is placed on: (1) nuclear energy (a Faustian bargain
if there ever was one); and (b) carbon capture and sequestration technology for coal-fired plants, which is neither economically nor
ecologically feasible at present, and hence only serves to keep coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel, going. Beyond this the only option that
the vested interests (the 1% and their hangers-on) have left is to push for geoengineering technologies. This involves such
measures as dumping sulfur dioxide particles in the atmosphere to block the suns rays (with the danger that photosynthesis might
be decreased), or fertilizing the ocean with iron to promote algal growth and absorb carbon (with the possibility that dead zones
might expand). These geoengineering schemes are extremely dubious in terms of physics, ecology, and economics: all three. They
involve playing God with the planet. Remember the Sorcerer's Apprentice!
AT: Plan solves warming/environment
Corporatization overwhelms any environmental benefit to the plan—
alt’s try or die
Fitz ‘7 Don. "Global Warming:." ZCommunications. ZCommunications, 24 Apr. 2007. Web. 16 July 2012.
<http://www.zcommunications.org/global-warming-by-don-fitz>.
The problem is that market economics pushes corporations to encourage the most rapid squandering of energy possible . There could
be a doubling of available energy, a tripling of energy or an increase in solar and wind power of nine million percent and there would still be a shortage.
This is not to deny that solar panels are absolutely essential for a sustainable energy policy. It is to say that fanaticism about solar power which blinds
people to its limitations can also blind them from seeing the need to reduce the total quantity of energy produced in Western countries. Global
warming is not a technological problem and no increase in the production of solar and wind and eco-gadgets can solve it. The
energy crisis and rising CO2 levels are crises of market economics and the question we must ask is: How do we change
society to make it sustainable? There is no shortage of energy Consider the following two assertions: 1. There is already
more energy than we need. 2. No matter how much energy is produced, it will not be enough. These two statements appear
totally contradictory. Yet they are both true. It is similar to food and starvation. There is enough food to feed everyone on the
planet. Yet hunger is increasing. Agribusiness says that we need to fight starvation by increasing food production via another
"Green Revolution" with pesticides, herbicides, genetic engineering and leveling of rain forests to plant crops to be sold to distant
lands. None of those are necessary and will, in all likelihood, increase hunger. People starve not because there is not enough food,
but because available food is not distributed to those who need it. It is more profitable to process food and send it to those who
overconsume in rich countries than it is to sell it to those in poor countries who can pay less for it. Local food production for need,
combined with aid during times of crisis, could feed everyone. But increased corporate control of food means more production for
the international market and food drained away from those who need it the most. Corn for people to eat locally is transformed to
corn to feed cattle for international hamburger chains. Less corn is available to solve hunger as American obesity skyrockets. A
thousand food commodities and diabetes follow the same path. Just as an increase in the quantity of food can be followed by an
increase in starvation, an increase in the quantity of energy available can accompany an energy shortage. If people controlled their
energy locally, they could decide how much to produce and, more important, what types of energy-draining activities need to be
limited. But increases in energy production occur simultaneously with control by big energy corporations. The more energy that it
produces, the more big energy is motivated to sell it for wasteful practices . Will big energy propose to end nighttime sports events
with huge lights? To require that only fluorescent light bulbs be produced? To advocate for urban centers free of private
automobiles? Not a chance. In a market economy, the goal of big energy is to make as much profit today from selling as much
energy as possible and energy for real needs be damned. Big energy gleefully provides electricity for trivial pursuits in the
overdeveloped world as poor villagers fell their remaining trees for firewood. Even if perpetual motion machines or Star Trek
replicators could increase the production of solar and wind by nine million percent, there would still be a shortage of energy . In a
type of perverted Malthusianism, the market creates artificial desires faster than the planet's ecosystems can sustain them . The flip
side is that just as plenty of food exists right now, there is already an abundance of energy . Humanity can live better, healthier and
longer lives by changing habits of producing food, altering methods of transportation, building off-grid homes, limiting the
manufacture of unnecessary junk, and halting the killing people to steal their oil. If we do these, there could be a smooth transition
away from coal, oil, nukes and gas to solar, wind and other renewables. Without these changes, no quantity of renewable energy is
enough.
Extra Cap Links (Kritikal)
General
Flexodox/Reform
Reformist theory cedes too much ground to the status quo—
accepting the coordinates of economic equality makes substantial
emancipatory change impossible. Only action premised on a
totalized refusal of capitalism solves.
Tumino ‘1 Stephen Tumino, professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh, “What is Orthodox Marxism and Why it
Matters Now More Than Ever Before,” Red Critique, Spring 2001, http://redcritique.org/spring2001/whatisorthodoxmarxism.htm
One of the ways such writers hollow out Marxism of its Marxism and produce a Marxism beyond Marxism is by their overt
acknowledgement of the way Marxism is treated in the bourgeois culture industry. Hennessy, for example, writes that Marxism in
English Departments (the trope of the culture industry) is both "courted and tamed" (2). In other words, by announcing her
awareness of the way that Marxism is tamed, she hopes to inoculate herself from the charge that she is doing so. The message the
reader is supposed to get is this: because she knows Marxism is always being "tamed," she herself would never do that. Under
cover of this ideological self-inoculation, Hennessy then goes on to produce her "tamed" version of Marxism that is only
metaphorically "marxist" because it is void of all the concepts and practices that make Marxism Marxism. My larger point is of
course that the most effective writings for the ruling class are located in the middle register, in that register of writing usually praised
as lucid, clear, jargon-free and above all "readable." Zizek is abstract; Hennessy is concrete. This is another way of saying that the
work of Hennessy and other such "tamers" of Marxism is always a work of synthesis and consolidation—they make concrete the
work of high theory: it is for this reason that their work forms the very center of the culture industry. Finally, to be clear, the question
here is not to play a game of determining the "good" from the "bad" Marxism. What is good Marxism—what is effective in
overcoming inequality—is determined by history itself. The question is whether what is being done actualizes the historical potential
made possible by the development of the forces of production and thus brings about change in the existing social relations of
production (overcomes class inequality) or whether it plays within the existing actuality and thus turns the limits of the actually
existing into the very limits of reality as such. And in doing so, reifies the present social relations of production. Flexodox Marxists
like Hennessy accept the proposition that capitalism is here to stay and thus reject as "impractical" any pressure put on the external
supports of capitalism (capital and labor relations) and then work within capitalism—on the basis of community and emotional
intensity—to make its ongoing process of the exploitation of the labor of the world's workers more "humane" and tolerable.
Capitalism is, according to Hennessy's soap-operatic leftism, something that one should always keep in mind but not seriously
consider overthrowing. She is too cynical to take even her own views seriously: "This means that eliminating the social structures of
exploitation that capitalism absolutely requires and so violently enacts at the expense of human needs must be on the political
agenda, at the every least as the horizon that sets the terms for imagining change" (232). Capitalist exploitation is a heuristic
consideration not a revolutionary imperative. Beyond the theatrical moves of the bourgeois left, however, Orthodox Marxism is
emerging as the only understanding of the new global formations that lead to transformative praxis. Orthodox Marxism has become
impossible to ignore because the objective possibility of transforming the regime of wage-labor into a system in which the priority is
not profit but meeting the needs of all is confronted as a daily actuality. The flexodox left turns the emergent class struggles into self-
enclosed struggles for symbolic power so to represent class hegemony in the relations of production as capable of being changed
through cross-class "coalitions" when in fact exploitation is everywhere in the world maintained by such coalitions which are loosing
their legitimacy and breaking apart under the weight of their own contradictions precisely because the class divide is growing under
their rule and beyond their borders. Orthodox Marxism demonstrates that the productive forces of capitalism have reached
tremendous levels and have the ability to feed, clothe, and house the world many times over but are fettered by capitalism's existing
social relations: its fundamental drive to privately consume the social resources of collective labor. That the left today has, in
dramatic fashion, been forced to return (if only rhetorically) to Orthodox Marxism marks the fact that the struggle to transform
capitalism has reached a stage of development that necessitates a systemic theoretical basis for revolutionary praxis. The
hegemonic left now wants to incorporate Orthodox Marxism into its dogmatic coalitional logic as a discourse which depends for its
identity on "class" as "real": which is a code for the "lived experience" or the transcendental ineffable politics (Lacan) of class as an
outside inferred from the inside (the side of subjective "values") and as such held to be unavailable for positive knowing. Which is
another way of saying that class is a matter of "persuasion" and "seduction" rather than production. What the resulting flexodox
marxism cannot explain therefore is that class is not a matter of what this or that proletarian or even the proletariat as a whole
pictures as its goal. It is a matter of what the proletariat is in actuality and what, in accordance with this being, it will historically be
compelled to do (Marx-Engels Reader 135). Orthodox Marxism does not consist of raising "class" as a dogmatic banner of the
"real," but in the critique of false consciousness that divides the workers by occulting their collective interest by shifting the focus
from their position in social production, their material antagonism with the capitalist class. "Class as real" (a spectral agency) cannot
explain, and therefore cannot engage in, the material process through which capitalism, by its very own laws of motion, produces its
own "gravedigger" in the global proletariat. What the flexodox return to and hollowing out of the concepts of Orthodox Marxism
proves, among other things, is that "the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas" (Marx and Engels, The German
Ideology 67) and history progresses despite this ideological hegemony through the agency of labor. In short—"The history of all
hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles."
Multiculturalism – 1NC
Multiculturalism respects local cultures only to reassert the
superiority of a tolerant Eurocentric subjectivity—this depoliticizing
move obscures real oppression and furthers the triumphant march of
capitalism
Zizek ’99 Slavoj Zizek, researcher in sociology at the university of Ljubljana, The Ticklish Subject: The absent centre of
political ontology, 1999, pg. 215-221
How, then, does the universe of Capital relate to the form of nation-state in our era of global capitalism? Perhaps this relationship is best designated as ‘autocolonization’: with
the direct multinational functioning of Capital, we are no longer dealing with the standard opposition between metropolis and colonized countries; a global company, as it were,
cuts its umbilical cord with its mother-nation and treats its country of origin as simply another territory to be colonized. This is what is so disturbing to patriotically orientated right-
wing populists, from Le Pen to Buchanan: the fact that the new multinationals have exactly the same attitude towards the French or American local population as towards the
population of Mexico, Brazil or Taiwan. Is there not a kind of poetic justice in this self-referential turn of today’s global capitalism, which functions as a kind of ‘negation of
negation’, after national capitalism and its internationalist/ colonialist phase? At the beginning (ideally, of course), there is capitalism within the confines of a nation-state, and
with the accompanying international trade (exchange between sovereign nation-states); what follows is the relationship of colonization, in which the colonizing country subordi-
nates and exploits (economically, politically, culturally) the colonized country; the final moment of this process is the paradox of colonization, in which there are only colonies, no
colonizing countries — the colonizing power is no longer a nation-state but the global company itself. In the long term, we shall all not only wear Banana Republic shirts but also
live in banana republics. And, of course, the ideal form of ideology of this global capitalism is multiculturalism, the attitude which, from a kind of empty
global position, treats
each local culture as the colonizer treats colonized people — as ‘natives’ whose mares are to be carefully studied
and ‘respected’. That is to say: the relationship between traditional imperialist colonialism and global capitalist self-colonization is exactly the same as the relationship
between Western cultural imperialism and multiculturalism —just as global capitalism involves the paradox of colonization without the colonizing nation-state metropolis,
multiculturalism involves a patronizing Eurocentrist distance and/or respect for local cultures without roots in one’s own particular
culture. In other words, multiculturalism is a disavowed, inverted, self-referential form of racism, a ‘racism with a distance’ — it respects’
the Other’s identity, conceiving the Other as a self-enclosed ‘authentic’ community towards which the multiculturalist maintains a
distance made possible by his/her privileged universal position. Multiculturalism is a racism which empties its own position of all positive content (the
multiculturalist is not a direct racist; he or she does not oppose to the Other the particular values of his or her own culture); none the less he or she retains this position as the
privileged empty point of universality from which one is able to appreciate (and depreciate) other particular cultures properly — multiculturalist respect for the
Other’s specificity is the very form of asserting one’s own superiority. From the standpoint of the post-Marxist anti-essentialist notion of politics as the field
of hegemonic struggle with no pre-established rules that would define its parameters in advance, it is easy to reject the very notion of the ‘logic of Capital’ as precisely the
remainder of the old essentialist stance: far from being reducible to an ideologico-cultural effect of the economic process, the passage from standard cultural imperialism to the
more tolerant multiculturalism with its openness towards the wealth of hybrid ethnic, sexual, and so on, identities is the result of a long and difficult politico-cultural struggle
whose final outcome was in no way guaranteed by the a priori co-ordinates of the ‘logic of Capita The crucial point, however, is that this struggle for the politicization
and assertion of multiple ethnic, sexual, and other identities always took place against the background of an invisible yet all the
more forbidding barrier: the global capitalist system was able to incorporate the gains of the postmodern politics of identities to the
extent that they did not disturb the smooth circulation of Capital — the moment some political intervention poses a serious threat to
that, an elaborate set of exclusionary measures quashes it. What about the rather obvious counter-argument that the multiculturalist’s neutrality is false,
since his or her position silently privileges Eurocentrist content? This line of reasoning is right, but for the wrong reason. The particular cultural background or roots which always
support the universal multiculturalist position are not its ‘truth’, hidden beneath the mask of universality (‘multiculturalist universalism is really Eurocentrist. . .‘) but, rather, the
opposite: the stain of particular roots is the phantasmic screen which conceals the fact that the subject is already thoroughly ‘rootless’, that his true position is the void of
universality. Let me recall Darian Leader’s example of the man in a restaurant with his female companion, who, when asking the waiter for a table, says: ‘Bedroom for two,
please!’ instead of ‘Table for two, please!’. One should reverse the standard Freudian explanation (‘Of course, his mind was already on the night of sex he planned after the
meal!’): this intervention of the subterranean sexual fantasy is, rather, the screen which serves as the defence against the oral drive which actually matters to him more than
sex.45 In his analysis of the French Revolution of 1848 (in The Class Struggles in France), Marx provides a similar example of such a double deception: the Party of Order
which took over after the Revolution publicly supported the Republic, yet secretly it believed in Restoration — members used every opportunity to mock Republican rituals and
to signal in every possible way where ‘their heart was’. The paradox, however, was that the truth of their activity lay in the external form they privately mocked and despised: this
Republican form was not a mere semblance beneath which the Royalist desire lurked — rather, it was the secret clinging to Royalism which enabled them to fulfil their actual
historical function: to implement bourgeois Republican law and order. Marx himself mentions how members of the Party of Order derived immense pleasure from their
occasional Royalist ‘slips of the tongue’ against the Republic (referring to France as a Kingdom in their parliamentary debates, etc.): these slips of the tongue articulated their
phantasmic illusions which served as the screen enabling them to blind themselves to the social reality of what was going on on the surface. And, mutatis mutandis, the same
goes for today’s capitalist, who still clings to some particular cultural heritage, identifying it as the secret source of his success (Japanese executives following tea ceremonies or
Bushido code, etc.), or for the reverse case of the Western journalist in search of the particular secret of Japanese success: this very reference to a particular cultural formula is
a screen for the universal anonymity of Capital. The true horror lies not in the particular content hidden beneath the universality of global Capital
but, rather, in the fact that Capital is effectively an anonymous global machine blindly running its course; that there is in fact no
particular Secret Agent animating it. The horror is not the (particular living) ghost in the (dead universal) machine, but the (dead universal) machine in the very heart
of each (particular living) ghost. The conclusion to be drawn is thus that the problematic of multiculturalism (the hybrid coexistence of diverse cultural life-worlds) which
imposes itself today is the form of appearance of its opposite, of the massive presence of capitalism as global world system: it bears witness to the unprecedented
homogenization of today’s world. It is in fact as if, since the horizon of social imagination no longer allows us to entertain the idea of an eventual demise of capitalism — since,
as we might put it, everybody tacitly accepts that capitalism is here to stay —critical energy has found a substitute outlet in fighting for cultural differences which
leave the basic homogeneity of the capitalist world-system intact. So
we are fighting our PC battles for the rights of ethnic minorities, of gays and
lesbians, of different lifestyles, and so forth, while capitalism pursues its triumphant march — and today’s critical theory, in the guise of
‘cultural studies’, is performing the ultimate service for the unrestrained development of capitalism by actively participating in the
ideological effort to render its massive presence invisible: in the predominant form of postmodern ‘cultural criticism’, the very mention
of capitalism as a world system tends to give rise to accusations of ‘essentialism’, ‘fundamen talism’, and so on. The price of this
depoliticization of the economy is that the domain of politics itself is in a way depoliticized : political struggle proper is transformed into the cultural
struggle for the recognition of marginal identities and the tolerance of differences.46 The falsity of elitist multiculturalist liberalism lies in the tension between content and form
which already characterized the first great ideological project of tolerant universalism, that of Freemasonry: the doctrine of Freemasonry (the universal brotherhood of all men
based on the light of Reason) clearly clashes with its form of expression and organization (a secret society with its initiation rituals); that is, it is the very form of expression and
articulation of Freemasonry which belies its positive doctrine. In a strictly homologous way, the contemporary ‘politically correct’ liberal attitude which
perceives itself as surpassing the limitations of its ethnic identity (‘citizen of the world’ without anchors in any particular ethnic community) functions,
within its own society, as a narrow elitist upper-middle-class circle clearly opposing itself to the majority of common people , despised for
being caught in their narrow ethnic or community confines. No wonder liberal multiculturalist tolerance is caught in the vicious cycle of simultaneously conceding too much and
not enough to the particularity of the Other’s culture:  On the one hand, it tolerates the Other in so far as it is not the real Other, but the aseptic Other of premodern ecological
wisdom, fascinating rites, and so on — the moment one is dealing with the real Other (say, of clitoridectomy, of women compelled to wear the veil, of torturing enemies to
death...), with the way the Other regulates the specificity of its jouissance, tolerance stops. Significantly, the same multiculturalists who oppose Eurocentrism also, as a rule,
oppose the death penalty, dismissing it as a remainder of primitive barbaric customs of vengeance — here, their hidden true Eurocentrism becomes visible (their entire
argumentation against the death penalty is strictly ‘Eurocentrist’, involving the liberal notions of human dignity and penalty, and relying on an evolutionary schema from primitive
violent societies to modern tolerant societies able to overcome the principle of vengeance). On the other hand, the tolerant multiculturalist liberal sometimes tolerates even the
most brutal violations of human rights, or is at least reluctant to condemn them, afraid of being accused of imposing one’s own values on to the Other. From my own youth, I
recall Maoist students preaching and practising the ‘sexual revolution’; when they were reminded that the China of the Maoist Cultural Revolution involved an extremely
‘repressive’ attitude towards sexuality, they were quick to answer that sexuality plays a totally different role in their life-world, so we should not impose on them our standards of
what is ‘repressive’ — their attitude towards -sexuality appears ‘repressive’ only by our Western standards. . Do we not encounter the same stance today when multiculturalists
warn us not to impose our Eurocentrist notion of universal human rights on to the Other? Furthermore, is not this kind of false ‘tolerance’ often evoked by spokesmen for
multinational Capital itself, in order to legitimize the fact that ‘business comes first’? The key point is to assert the complementarity of these two excesses, of too much and not
enough: if the first attitude is unable to perceive the specific cultural jonissance which even a ‘victim’ can find in a practice of another culture that appears cruel and barbaric to
us (victims of clitoridectomy often perceive it as the way to regain the properly feminine dignity), the second attitude fails to perceive the fact that the Other is split in itself — that
members of another culture, far from simply identifying with their customs, can acquire a distance towards them and revolt against them — in such cases, reference to the
‘Western’ notion of universal human rights can well serve as the catalyst which sets in motion an authentic protest against the constraints of one’s own culture. In other words,
there is no happy medium between ‘too much’ and ‘not enough’; so when a multiculturalist replies to our criticism with a desperate plea: ‘Whatever I do is wrong — either I am
too tolerant towards the injustice the Other suffers, or I am imposing my own values on to the Other — so what do you want me to do?’, our answer should be: ‘Nothing! As long
as you remain stuck in your false presuppositions, you can do nothing!’ What the liberal multiculturalist fails to notice is that each of the two cultures engaged in
‘communication’ is caught in its own antagonism which has prevented it from fully ‘becoming itself’ — and the
only authentic communication is that of ‘solidarity
in a common struggle’, when I discover that the deadlock which hampers me is also the deadlock which hampers the Other.
Multiculturalism – 2NC
Multiculturalism is racism from a distance—extend Zizek—liberal
tolerance feeds a Eurocentric superiority complex uses the cultural
other as an ideological tool to conceal capitalist violence. Their
‘cultural recognition’ is reintegrated into the economy as a new
market, strengthening class oppression’s role in producing the
contradictions they isolate.
Cosmopolitanism/Globalization
Positing globalization as benevolent or inclusive accepts the
increasing transnationalization of corporate capitalism—only the
bourgeois is able to take advantage of increasing technical efficiency
and communicative connection. Only total revolution solves.
Sahay ‘1 Amrohini Sahay, assistant professor of English at Hofstra University, “(Corporate) Transnationalism and Red
Internationalism: Globality and Class Struggle Today,” Red Critique, Spring 2001,
http://redcritique.org/spring2001/redinternationalism.htm
At the core of the ruling class transnationalist theory of globalization is the thesis of "postcapitalism"—the idea that we are now in
what Peter Drucker calls a new, "post" age in which "post" is above all a marker that capitalism has superceded its basic
contradictions—"basic" in the sense explained by orthodox Marxism of stemming from the exploitation of wage-labor. The markers
of this supposedly "post" moment of globality which are repetitively rehearsed at all levels of the knowledge and culture industry is
the view that we now live in an information and services society where knowledge has displaced labor as the main source of social
wealth, where "consumption" has displaced "production" as the primary axis of social life and identity, and that therefore class is
also displaced and class struggle is no longer the main dynamics of social change. Left transnationalist theories—using the diverse
languages of the left and via deployment of its various idioms—are the (re)circulation of these corporate views—especially on class
and class struggle—to block any transformative understanding of globality: they are thus—in effect, if not in intention—an annex of
capital. Opposed to corporate transnationalism (in all its forms) is red internationalism: the historical materialist theory of capitalist
globality which shows how what is called "globalization" is nothing other than an intensification of the contradictions of wage-labor
as explained by orthodox Marxism, and which provides the basis for class struggle praxis on an international level to end capitalism.
To frame what follows, it is necessary to reiterate what I have already mentioned: left-transnationalism—like transnationalist theory
in general—is articulated in many voices and rhetorics, in cross-disciplinary languages and at multiple sites, a fact which is central to
its ideological effectivity. The aim of my discussion here is thus not to "summarize" or provide a comprehensive overview of it but to
broadly capture what is at stake in the singular logic behind its diverse discursive mediations and put it into contestation with the
Marxist theory of globality. In its "culturalist" form, left-transnationalism is advanced by writers such as Stuart Hall in his work on
"identity." Elaborating on the logic of what Anthony McGrew calls "the [recent] intensification of global interconnectedness" (467) as
a force of transnational integration, Hall writes: "though powered in many ways by the West, globalization may turn out to be part of
that slow and uneven but continuing story of the decentering of the West" (632). Hall's argument is of course put forward both to
depoliticize the concept of globalization by placing it on the continuum of an "evolutionary" modernity as well as to counter the view
of globalization as "cultural homogenization." It is the claim for the "progressiveness" of globality as the harbinger of new
transnational cultures and postnational identities and thus an end to the "hegemony" of the "national" which is then posited as the
basis of transition to a new "cross-border civilization" and an "enlightened" world-community of consumers. This representation of
globalization as a "progressive" decentering of the national is also put forward by Bruce Robbins in his argument for the new
"cosmopolitanism" as a form of "cultural internationalism" (17) which forms the only "realistic"—what he calls "worldly"— alternative
to the dead "utopian ideals" of socialist internationalism (7-8). Cosmopolitanism for Robbins, is the new "humanitarian" "style of
solidarity" (21), a form of "global feeling" (6)—as a "natural" evolution beyond the "national." As he thus says: "National print
capitalism having given way to global electronic and digital capitalism, the same forces that stretched culture to the scale of the
nation are stretching it beyond the scale of the nation" (21). Robbins here of course is simply repeating the conservative "new
economy" theories of globalization as the effect of "new information technologies," the aim of which is to posit social change as an
effect of the "agency" not of what Marx calls the "collective worker," but of what bourgeois managers call the "technologist," which is
a relay of the bourgeois view that it is the "inventiveness" of the entrepreneur and not the labor of the proletariat which makes
history. Yet perhaps what is at stake in Robbins' new "global feeling" is made most clear in what he takes as the exemplary test
case of the cosmopolitan "style of solidarity": the US-led NATO imperialist intervention in Bosnia and Kosovo aimed at ensuring that
Eastern Europe is "liberated" as a market and source of cheap labor for transnational capital. Displacing any analysis of the class
interests shaping the political—that is, the core of socialist internationalism—Robbins' "humanitarian" cosmopolitanism of "feeling" is
a thin device to manufacture consent for the policies of international imperialism. Thus as he says: "transnationally shaped and
educated sentiment is a necessary means of winning democratic consent for a particular set of policies" (16). If this is
internationalism, it—like Derrida's spectral "New International"—should more properly be seen as an "internationalism" of the
bourgeois. As I have already suggested, Hall's "decentering" and Robbins' cosmopolitanism, are themselves not "originary" but
instances of the corporate theory which Malcolm Waters calls "cultural globalization." On the terms of this theory, it is culture which
is the "driving force for global integration" (10) and the arrival of "an economy of signs and symbols" (124) marks the triumph of
"symbolic exchanges" over the material relations of class exploitation. The logic of the argument is made more clear by Waters
when he suggests that in the "culturalized global economy" (95)—a version of McLuhan's "global village" of face-to-face electronic
exchanges—"world class is displaced by a world status system based on consumption, lifestyle, and value commitment" (95).
"Politics" in the "global village" is then, following Robbins, reduced to "the pursuit of lifestyle" (156), to "style" and "feeling," which is
to say it becomes an extension of consumption.
Postmodernism
Eschewing historical science empties social being of antagonism—
this transforms thought into passivity
Sheehan ’12 Helena Sheehan, “Is History A Coherent Story?” Critical Legal Thinking, 2/20/2012,
http://criticallegalthinking.com/2012/02/20/is-history-a-coherent-story/
So I built up my sense of history all over again and grounded my work in this process over the decades, but I did so against
increasing pressures. The move away from big questions accelerated. For a time it was fierce polemical attack. The air was thick
with it, but over time that thinned out. What has replaced it is even more annihilating. No longer were there large scale contending
paradigms in every area facing off with each other with great energy and passion. It has just dissipated. It has been disconcerting,
because it is not as if anything has been resolved. Instead people learned to live with problems unresolved or unacknowledged or to
settle for resolution at a less than fundamental level. The confrontations of world views have given way to low level
eclecticism . There is a narrowing of perspective and a retreat from engagement, whether through myopia, ignorance,
shallowness, conformity, fear or careerism. So much of what is produced now is so half-baked. Conceptualisation is weak and
confused. Contextualisation is thin and random. I look for conceptualisation that is strong and lucid, for contextualisation that is thick
and systemic, but that is so rare now. Theory survives in a more and more degraded form.
Discourse – 1NC
Discursive framing is backwards—ideology and consumption
patterns are determined by material inequalities. Discourse theory
cedes politics by reducing radical action to ‘transgressive’ speech
acts like the 1AC
Tumino ‘8 Stephen Tumino, professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh, "Materiality in Contemporary Cultural
Theory," The Red Critique, Fall/Winter 2008, accessed 1/21/10
http://www.redcritique.org/FallWinter2008/materialityincontemporaryculturaltheory.htm
One of the mainstays of contemporary cultural theory is the argument that the social is primarily shaped by culture. Culture, that is,
not as a collection of artifacts or an archive of progress, but, rather, following the writings of Antonio Gramsci, as "an arena of
consent and resistance" (Stuart Hall, "Deconstructing" 239) over the shape of the social. Contemporary cultural theory has extended
the understanding of culture beyond universalist, and, therefore, supposedly elitist assumptions and normative hegemonic
conclusions about culture and instead focused on culture as "the articulation and activation of meaning" (Storey xiii) on the grounds
that it is primarily discourse that possesses "the power and the authority to define social reality" (xii). The meaning(s) in a culture
that secure and contest the dominant social arrangements are thought to lie in what Michel de Certeau calls "secondary production"
(xiii), the sphere of consumption, rather than the economic sphere of production. In these terms, it is the "consumer who in effect
'produces in use'" (xiii) the meaning(s) of the culture that determines social reality. So much has such a focus on the daily practices
of consumption and identification been "central to the project of cultural studies" (xi) that some have simply argued that "cultural
studies could be described ... perhaps more accurately as ideological studies" (James Carey qtd. in Storey xii). The focus in cultural
theory on the constitutive power of discourse to define social reality has shifted the attention of cultural studies from the wider social
relations of production which shape ideology and consumption and in fact determine the social real, toward a market theory of
culture which valorizes the excessive "uses" and "resignifications" of cultural commodities and in doing so transforms the subject of
labor into the subject of consumption who, far from intervening into global capital, supports it through "resistant" desires and
"rebellious" acts of consumption. Cultural theory, in other words, rests on the assumption that consumption determines production
rather than the other way around. People's "lifestyles" (which is another way of referring to the commodities they consume and how
they consume them) are thus assumed to be more significant, in these terms, than the labor relations they must enter into as a
necessary precondition of consumption. Such an assumption concludes that the markers and beliefs that position individuals in
culture as men and women, black, latino, gay,… are more important than the fact that they are wage workers that must first sell
themselves daily to capital before they can acquire the cultural markers of identity. Such an understanding of the priority of the
economic is seen on the cultural left as "left conservatism" (Butler, Bové, et. al.) because it forecloses on differences. But as Teresa
Ebert has explained, "differences in class societies are always exploitative" (169) because they serve to divide and segment the
working class and foster competition between the workers. At the core of the labor theory of culture is the explanation of how
culturalism itself has an economic basis in the division of labor – and more specifically, in the crisis of overproduction that is
endemic to capitalism since the 1970s—and reflects the interests of those who having had their material needs already met from the
labor of the other can afford to focus on their desires in the market.
Discourse – 2NC
Discourse theory is capitalist ideology—its emphasis on semiotic
consumption reduces radicalism to ‘rebellious’ speech acts which
make the consumer feel resistant while leaving material conditions
intact—that’s Tumino. Prefer labor theory of value—wage slavery is a
precondition for culture and determines consumptive practices.
The aff’s pretensions to ‘resistant consumption’ are bourgeois lies
Theory," The Red Critique, Fall/Winter 2008, accessed 8/25/2012
http://www.redcritique.org/FallWinter2008/materialityincontemporaryculturaltheory.htm
Cultural theory, in other words, rests on the assumption that consumption determines production rather than the other way around.
People's "lifestyles" (which is another way of referring to the commodities they consume and how they consume them) are thus
assumed to be more significant, in these terms, than the labor relations they must enter into as a necessary precondition of
consumption. Such an assumption concludes that the markers and beliefs that position individuals in culture as men and women,
black, latino, gay,… are more important than the fact that they are wage workers that must first sell themselves daily to capital
before they can acquire the cultural markers of identity. Such an understanding of the priority of the economic is seen on the cultural
left as "left conservatism" (Butler, Bové, et. al.) because it forecloses on differences. But as Teresa Ebert has explained, "differences
in class societies are always exploitative" (169) because they serve to divide and segment the working class and foster competition
between the workers. At the core of the labor theory of culture is the explanation of how culturalism itself has an economic basis in
the division of labor – and more specifically, in the crisis of overproduction that is endemic to capitalism since the 1970s—and
reflects the interests of those who having had their material needs already met from the labor of the other can afford to focus on
their desires in the market.
Discourse
Discourse theory crushes agency and produces passivity against
material inequality
McNally ’97 David McNally, professor of political science at York University, In Defense of History: Marxism and the
Postmodern Agenda, 1997, p. 26-27
We are witnessing today a new idealism, infecting large sections of the intellectual left, which has turned language not merely into
an independent realm, but into an all pervasive realm, a sphere so omnipresent, so dominant, as virtually to extinguish human
agency. Everything is discourse, you see; and discourse is everything. Because human begins are linguistic creatures, because the
world in which we act is a world we know and describe through language, it allegedly follows that there is nothing outside language.
Our language, or “discourse,” or “text” – the jargon varies but not the message – defines and limits what we know, what we can
imagine, what we can do. There is a political theory here too. Oppression is said to be rooted ultimately in the way in which we and
others are defined linguistically, the way in which we are positioned by words in relation to other words, or by codes which are said
to be “structured like a language.” Our very being, our identities and “subjectivities,” are constituted through language. As one trendy
literary theorist puts it in David Lodge’s novel Nice Work, it is not merely that you are what you speak; no, according to the new
idealism, “you are what speaks you.” Language is thus the final “prison-house.” Our confinement there is beyond resistance; it is
impossible to escape from that which makes us what we are. This new idealism corresponds to a profound collapse of political
horizons. It is the pseudoradicalism of a period of retreat for the left, a verbal radicalism of the word without deed, or, rather, of the
word as deed. In response to actual structures and practices of oppression and exploitation, it offers the rhetorical gesture, the ironic
turn of phrase. It comes as little surprise, then, when one of the chief philosophers of the new idealism, Jacques Derrida, tells us
that he “would hesitate to use such terms as ‘liberation’” 1 Imprisoned within language, we may play with words; but we can never
hope to liberate ourselves from immutable structures of oppression rooted in language, itself. The new idealism and the politics it
entails are not simply harmless curiosities; they are an abdication of political responsibility, especially at a time of ferocious capitalist
restructuring, of widening gaps between rich and poor, of ruling class offensives against social programs. They are also an obstacle
to the rebuilding of mass movements of protest and resistance.
Affect
Affect theory encourages a social neutrality and weak tolerance which
becomes acceptance of market structures—turns this debate round
into a training course in business administration and managing your
employees’ feelings
Tumino ’11 Stephen Tumino, “The Affective Turn in Pedagogy: The Ecstatic Teacher and Other Stories,” Rethinking
Marxism: A Journal of Economics, Culture & Society, 23:4, 2011, pp. 548-556
Instead of offering a survey of Profession 2008, I will focus on the structure which shapes the different discourses that explains what
is behind the consensus*what I will call the pedagogy of affect. The pedagogy of affect represents itself as an open space attuned to
difference that is positioned as a retreat from which to assess what does and does not work in the university so as to manage the
contradictions that have arisen there from the conflict between capital and labor. It represents itself above all therefore as a place
where these conflicts can be considered ‘‘reasonably,’’ with all its associations of nonpartisan neutrality, and relegates to an
‘‘ideological’’ past the university as site of commitment to theory for social transformation . Profession 2008 is telling in the way its
contributors all replace sharp conceptualization of the issues with an affective rhetoric that turns the university away from critique for
social change into a therapeutic retreat in which to display their class privilege . In affective pedagogy, the opposition of concepts to
feelings I am invoking here is thought to be an oppressive holdover from the past that is inherently unstable and prone to slippage,
so I need to explain why feelings are really anticonceptual concepts designed to rewrite theory as therapy and reconcile student-
citizens to going along with the status quo. To clarify, by ‘‘explain’’ I do not propose to ‘‘define’’ the affective, as any such definition
would simply repeat the common sense that subjective experience is self-evidently meaningful by separating it from the social
relations which are the cause of our experience. What is considered meaningful is always made sense of by taking sides in the daily
struggles that form over the appropriation of material resources. What I do propose to do in the remainder of this essay, however, is
to provide a conceptual framework for understanding the intellectual conflicts over the affective so as to explain how affect is used to
structure the dominant representation of pedagogy in Profession 2008 and turn what should be an education in conceptual
awareness of social relations into ideological training for what is good for big business.
Affections are symptoms of capitalist crisis—focus on non-intelligible

emotions forces a retreat into subjectivity that annihilates political
solidarity
In the affective pedagogy dominant today, all concepts are made into modalities of the body, as the arch-conservative Nietzsche
taught, and the body is turned into a zone of excess that spontaneously resists all conceptualization. Concepts, in this frame, are
elitist constructs imposed from above that aim to produce ‘‘docile bodies’’ (Foucault 1995). Although they cannot finally be done
away with, they can be made into moments of play, which, as Stanley Fish says, is the apolitical zone of getting things done, as a
true academic professional must (Save the World On Your Own Time). Body matterism is opposed by a materialist understanding of
the body, the senses, and the affective that is activated in the writings of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, and Kollontai, to name a few,
where the body is understood as a site of ideology and theorized in class terms. For Marx, for example, ‘‘the forming of the five
senses is a labour of the entire history of the world down to the present’’ (1974, 96). On his terms, ‘‘the senses have . . . become
directly in their practice theoreticians’’ as they ‘‘relate themselves to the thing for the sake of the thing, but the thing itself is an
objective human relation’’ (94). In other words, for Marx, the affective, although experienced spontaneously, cannot be understood
on its own terms as it is always made in the labor relations that shape both the object and the subject of knowing. In materialist
theory, the critique of the affective produces the class consciousness that ‘‘enjoyment and labor, production and consumption,
devolve on different individuals’’ (Marx and Engels 1984, 51). In the pedagogy of affect, there are no antagonistic concepts that
implicate our thoughts and feelings in the structure of social inequality, but merely more or less affective bodies more or less
opportunistically placed for their voices to be heard. What the pedagogy of affect represents is a model of the good society as an
empty plurality in which all are entitled to participate, unless they exclude themselves by advancing the struggles for fundamental
change. Theory for social change is marked as ‘‘totalitarian’’ and ‘‘terroristic,’’ and thus made into the other of the compassionate
and caring society where differences are accepted and nothing need change. In the pedagogy of affect, it is the intensity of feelings
more than providing critique of the system of wage labor and capital that is central to the social. In the affective pedagogy, critique is
made to exemplify an uncomfortable and ugly militancy that is relegated to the bad old days of the university that stood for knowing
what is to be done to change society (abolishing class). To make my discussion about the pedagogy of affect more concrete, I will
surface its effects in what is by now a canonical text of the new humanities: The Political Unconscious by Frederic Jameson (1988).
Jameson’s text provides such an occasion because, while it defends a materialist theory of affect as ideology that normalizes
inequality, it proposes using the affective as an ethical response to inequality. The effect of such a move is to underwrite the
common sense of consumer culture that makes the affective a therapeutic zone for the subject in which to feel at home within
exploitation rather than activate the conceptual against the hegemonic culture industry and its pedagogy of affect. Central to The
Political Unconscious is Marx’s concept of ‘‘commodity fetishism,’’ which Jameson understands primarily through Lukaćs’s theory of
‘‘reification,’’ the material process of production whereby social relations are depersonalized and seen as relations between things
due to the dominance of exchange value (production for profit). Following Marx, Jameson argues that any conception of the
autonomy of culture from the economic is ‘‘a symptom and a reinforcement of the reification and privatization of contemporary life’’
due to the ‘‘universal commodification of labor power’’ (1988, 20). On these terms, Jameson’s materialist theory is in a position to
implicate the affective as the commodification of the senses necessitated by private property, in a manner similar to the way he
reads Conrad’s ‘‘impressionistic’’ style, for example, which attempts ‘‘to rewrite in terms of . . . sense perception . . . a reality you
prefer not to conceptualize’’ (215). Jameson’s use of commodity fetishism as a theory of affect would seem to show that, far from
being a site of resistance to capital, affections, sensations, and feelings are an extension of exploitative relations: the site of
ideology. This is significant because he thus establishes the need to read culture and cultural experience (senses, feelings, passion)
not in its own terms but in relation to its outside*namely, the class relations that both necessitate such experiences and provide
‘‘ready-made’’ interpretations that justify social inequality. He shows, in short, that the senses, affects, experience, passion, and so
on are not explainable on their own terms (since they are produced under certain circumstances), but require explanation
(concepts).
Affect theory is borne out of pretensious lit theory and class privilege
that can’t be universalized and turns into McCarthyist red-baiting
To reproduce the conditions for accumulation, capital must violently displace any limit that stands to protect and promote the
material needs of the working class as these come into conflict with the requirements and practices that will increase the production
of surplus value from labor. For this reason, capital is inherently unstable and crisis prone. On the one hand, it must commodify the
needs of the workers by giving them a living wage with which to buy back what they have themselves produced, and, on the other, it
must cheapen the value of labor power by increasing the amount of time that workers engage in surplus labor over the necessary
labor time normally required to meet their needs on any given workday. Among other things, this accumulation process ‘‘chases the
bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe,’’ as the Manifesto of the Communist Party (Marx and Engels 1984, 487) says,
seeking out pools of cheap labor to exploit with the most advanced productive techniques available. The workers who resist the
forces of commodification and fight back to defend their standards of living are marked as criminals and handed over to the state,
which has its own ways of exploiting their labor. It is in this global class context that the institutionalization of torture by the United
States needs to be seen, not as a moral abomination that tarnishes an otherwise fundamentally just and good society that enshrines
human rights and stands for the best of humanity, as in Brooks’s rhetoric. Brooks’s attack on theory as a dangerous ideology that
violates common sense has also to be read in terms of its class politics. It represents an attack on the very reforms (theory) the
university has undertaken over the last forty years to manage the contradictions of global capital which has come to rely on a high-
tech and multicultural workforce. Brooks’s ‘‘responsible reading,’’ whose ‘‘proponents speak with a clear sense of what their work
can and cannot do’’ (2008, 35), wants to put a halt to ‘‘the free play of the signifier’’ (37) by demarcating an ‘‘arbitrary and phony . . .
parody of a deconstructive reading’’ (38) from a properly ‘‘ethical’’ one that calls things ‘‘by their name’’ (39). Despite appearances to
the contrary, there is in fact no contradiction in Brooks’ speaking in the name of an authentic (nonparodic) deconstruction that
violently asserts a clear sense of responsibility against which all else is marginalized as arbitrary and ridiculous because the rigors
of theory are no longer needed in the corporate university. Theory is to be done away with because the value of deconstruction to
create a flexible and compliant workforce that is sensitive to ambiguity and attached to difference with a mystical sense of belonging
has already proved itself to capital, and now the only theory left is the one that ‘‘goes too far’’ by uncovering the relation of theory to
class* red theory. The purging of theory in the pedagogy of affect is more than thinly disguised red-baiting; it represents the task of
the boss to make production more efficient by cutting the costs that eat into profits. Brooks’s defense of deconstruction as
‘‘responsible reading’’ is self-parodic and laughable. It is his defense of poetics as anti-instrumental reason that returns us to
common sense that sells in the corporate university where one can only profess the interests of the ruling class, and because these
interests are everywhere in crisis and obviously bankrupt and intellectually indefensible, one can only profess them emotionally in
sentimental tones that reassure the public of the humanity of the wages system. Profession 2008 by showcasing the affective
pedagogy and demonizing the need for sharp conceptual analysis is saying that the university is not a place of critique for social
change but a feel-good retreat from class conflicts that violently asserts class privilege.
Affect theory replicates the purported totalization it criticizes by

constructing an arbitrary and fluid distinction between closure and
emotive openness—this devastates radical enmity
Under the dominance of the ‘‘affective turn’’ in the humanities, Profession 2008 turns being a professor from being an intellectual
committed to the struggle to end social inequality to being someone who just happens to have a job that allows them to profess
feelings of what is right and advocate for the good, but that does not mandate them to conceptually establish a basis for achieving it
in practice, as doing so would assert a mastery of knowledge that violates the sovereignty of differences and marginalizes other
voices. It is the dominance of affective pedagogy that explains the rhetorical differences of the contributors to Profession 2008 and
makes it a model of the university for capital at a time of growing social inequality. What the affective pedagogy does above all is to
commodify the effects of class society as cultural differences, the better to do away with those practices that have become a
structural liability to the accumulation of profit. Take Peter Brooks’s essay, ‘‘The Humanities as an Export Commodity.’’ On the
surface it appears to be an argument for the value of the new humanities as a model of democracy and an engaged citizenry, for
whom ‘‘reading is a cognitive exercise with real world consequences’’ (2008, 35), that is interested in contesting how the United
States has entered the ranks of ‘‘rogue nations’’ by its institutionalized practice of torture, which he takes to be ‘‘wholly incompatible
with the morality of American democracy’’ (35). Actually, however, Brooks’s essay is a defense of the pedagogy of affect that has
displaced theory with feelings on the grounds that theory went too far and violated the self-evident norms of common sense
enshrined in the ‘‘humanistic tradition’’ (38) and the lessons of ‘‘poetry’’ (35) which are, pace Shelly, ‘‘the unacknowledged
legislators of humankind’’ (35). Brooks ‘‘has the feeling that the humanities’ big day . . . is over’’ (34), he says, because ‘‘the
body . . . rejected the transplant’’ (34). Behind these tropes of affect, with their assumption of a healthy organicism, is the cultural
common sense which says that theory is ‘‘ideological’’ (34) and therefore ‘‘dangerous’’ (35) because its commitment to ‘‘the
instrumental use of language’’ (35) is ‘‘violent’’ and ‘‘subversive’’ (35) of an ‘‘ethical reading’’ (38) of culture. An ‘‘ethical reading,’’ for
Brooks, is one that does not hold out the ‘‘facile’’ (34) and ‘‘mindless’’ (34) politics of ‘‘salvation’’ (35) through ‘‘critique’’ (35), but the
more ‘‘responsible’’ one that gives to its practitioners ‘‘a clear sense of what their work can and cannot do’’ (35). In the pedagogy of
affect, you are either in the camp of the ‘‘modest’’ and ‘‘wise,’’ and possess an innate but unacknowledged sense of right and the
good, or you are making a fool of yourself and not to be suffered gladly. How else to read Brooks’s earnest desire that, without a
trace of irony, wants to ‘‘promote and enforce responsible reading’’ (38) and ‘‘cleanse’’ (38) the university of ‘‘ideological flotsam’’
(34), and the way his rhetoric plays with the discourse of ‘‘border crossing’’ and ‘‘frontiers’’ as it seeks to put a halt to ‘‘unmarked
vans’’ (33) with all its violence toward the other? My point in marking such rhetoric is not simply to show how Brooks’s ‘‘responsible
reading’’ is itself unethical and antidemocratic (‘‘ideological’’) on its own terms, because of its instrumental use of poetics, for
instance, to diagnose critique-al theory as a pathological contagion on the body politic that needs to be purged, but to explain why
the affective is necessary to the university in a time of global capital.
Radical Democracy
Radical democracy is relativism with a grand façade—this replicates
political closure in excluding theory deemed ‘too radical’ or totalizing
Even when someone like Kim Emery says in response to Graff that the university should be a place of ‘‘radically democratic’’ (2008,
259) ‘‘critique’’ (255) that ‘‘advances knowledge’’ beyond its ‘‘current limitations’’ (257) due to the influence of ‘‘money and power’’
(255), what is silently assumed is the pedagogy of affect that accommodates difference above and beyond class. She does not need
to explain therefore why a ‘‘reductive’’ (258) theory of culture that surfaces how ‘‘culture everywhere and always trumps’’ (258) the
‘‘different needs, values and purposes’’ (258) of ‘‘deskilled and deregulated workers’’ (257) ‘‘support[s] and sustain[s] the status quo’’
(257), because what is assumed is that class no longer matters. Only cultural differences do, which are, according to her, inherently
‘‘queer’’ (‘‘neither finite nor fixed’’ [259]) and not to be accommodated or regulated in any way regardless because, after all, isn’t ‘‘the
secret that our future is unknown’’ anyway (259)? The ‘‘homogenizing’’ (258) ‘‘narrow-mindedness’’ (259) of the ‘‘elitist’’ (256)
university, she says, ‘‘does make me feel queer’’ (258), and the reader is supposed to take solace in that feeling as ‘‘incoherence is
a condition of possibility’’ (259) of an ‘‘open-ended’’ (259) democratic society. The pedagogy of affect is indeed a ‘‘radically
democratic’’ space where there is no limit to imagining that the unmet needs of the producers can be explained away as providing a
perfect opportunity to reinvent oneself as a more feeling person with deregulated desires who resists ‘‘reductive’’ knowledge with its
presumption that there is some ‘‘predictability’’ (259) or, worse still, ‘‘transparency’’ (259) about whose needs are and are not being
met and what is to de done about it. In the name of having ‘‘radical’’ feelings that ‘‘resist’’ coercive power, these theorists are doing
some very conservative things with theory. Brooks’s sentiment that ‘‘how to read poetry’’ is more ‘‘crucially important . . . now’’
(2008, 35) rather than ‘‘political philosophy and economics’’ (33) is mirrored by Felski, who feels that a narrowly pragmatic focus on
‘‘how we read’’ rather than ‘‘why’’ (109) is truly ‘‘transformative’’ (108), rather than the ‘‘bigger picture’’ (109) ‘‘revolutionary’’ claims
of ‘‘theory’’ (110). They are joined in these feelings by Emery who ‘‘feels queer’’ (258) will dismantle the ‘‘homogenizing
standardization’’ of culture required by ‘‘money and power’’(255). By activating ‘‘feelings’’ as the zone of effectivity they are opposing
theory, which is necessary to reveal the structure of inequality, as ‘‘ideology,’’ which is normatively equated with a ‘‘bad’’ subjectivity.
It seems that joining in the hunt for the red is the only way to have your voice heard in the university now.
Localism – 1NC
Local resistance bolsters capitalist expansion at all levels of social
life and coopts revolutionary energy – their strategy is incorporated
into broader forces of structural oppression
Dirlik ’94 Arif Dirlik, professor of history at duke university, After the Revolution: Waking to Global Capitalism, 1994, pg. 72-
75
The radical slogan of an earlier day, “think globally, act locally,” has been assimilated by transnational corporations with far greater
success than by any revolutionary strategy. As with the Communist Party of China in politics, however, the recognition of the local in
marketing strategy does not mean any serious acknowledgment of the autonomy of the local but is intended only to incorporate
localities into the imperatives of the global. The “domestication” of the corporation into local society serves only to mystify further the
location of power, which rests not in the locality but in the global headquarters of the company, which coordinates the activities of its
local branches. As the Japanese marketing analyst, Kenichi Ohmae, put it on one occasion (again, sounding much like Mao),
“global localism” is “seventy percent global and thirty percent local.”54 The guiding vision of the contemporary trans~ national
corporation is to homogenize the world under its guidance. The same CEO writes: “Are we above governments? N& We answer to
governments. We obey the laws in every country in which we operate, and we don’t make the laws. However, we do change
relations between countries. We function as a lubricant for worldwide economic integration [emphasis in the original].” 55 Some
lubricant, that which “changes” the relations it facilitates! It points to a crucial point, nevertheless: that transnational corporations of
today, much like radical guerillas, do not just respond to circumstances but create the conditions for their success. To achieve this
end, however, they must first grasp social, political, and cultural relations in their full complexity rather than rely on abstract
categories of analysis. The categories appear in their analyses, as they did in Mao’s writings, for example, as hermeneutic tools
rather than as descriptions of social reality. The goal of analysis itself is not to fulfill social need but to formulate the teleology of the
organization, although that teleology must be articulated with local languages to acquire legitimacy transnationally. If the managers
of Global Capitalism sound like Maoists, it is not, needless to say, because they are Marxists or Maoists but rather because they
face a situation that parallels that of guerilla revolutionaries, who also seek to articulate theory with concrete local circumstances.
Their task, in other words, is to domesticate the capitalist mode of production in diverse localities without compromising the global
imperatives of capital. Their analyses represent attempts to account for (and to contain) contradictions that are the very products of
the globalization of capitalism. Two elements seem to be of special significance in generating these contradictions. The first has its
roots in local resistances to capital, which acquired prominent visibility in the second phase of the capitalist mode of production.
Local resistance ranged in form from the assertion of national economic autonomy against capi talist hegemony to the literally local,
where precapitalist social relations persisted in resistance (or, at the least, as obstacles) to relations of production and habits of
consumption conducive to the penetration of capital. The reaffirmation (we might even say, conscious invention and articulation) of
native culture and habits has been part of this resistance and integral to its language. Capital has responded by appropriating this
language as its own, if only, as the statement on guerilla marketing clarifies, to disorga nize local cultures and habits so that they
may be “reconstructed” in accordance with the imperatives of capitalist production and consumption. The price, however, has been
(if only on an interim basis) the fragmentation of the language of capital itself. This problem was a product of earlier phases of
capitalism, as it expanded from Europe and North America, when it was un ambiguously Eurocentric and local cultural resistance
carried a certain plausibility in targeting EuroAmerican domination of the world. What makes the contemporary situation genuinely
contemporary is the successful globalization of capital, which points, on the one hand, to the successful breaking down of earlier re-
sistances and, on the other hand, to the “deterritorialization” of capital from its EuroAmerican roots. 56 Ironically, the very success of
capital has given rise to a new set of contradictions. The emergence of non-EuroAmerican capitalisms has been accompanied by
the emergence of new voices that challenge EuroAmerican models by calling for forms of organization that are derived from alterna -
tive cultural constructions. The most recent instance is the notion of a “communitarian capitalism” as opposed to “individualistic
capitalism.” Although “communitarian capitalism” may be a mystifying oxymoron, and resorting to a native cultural legacy may be
only a reconstruction of the past in response to the demands of capitalism, the issue, nevertheless, is the conflict over hegemony
with global capitalism.57 The same globalization of capital has given rise to an unprecedented competition for markets in new areas
of the world, which has intensified attention to local consumption habits, even if this is at bottom a competition over who can best
“reconstruct” local consumption habits. Instead of concentrating on abstract research and development to determine the nature of a
product, which could be sustained under conditions of monopoly, companies now have to take into account concrete habits of
consumption and concrete circumstances of marketing. The prime example of this new reality is the automobile industry where, as
Japanese producers never tire of saying, United States producers lost markets because they were oblivious to consumer
circumstances. Finally, globally and locally, the success of capitalism has also meant the diversification of the constituencies of
capital both as producers and as consumers, which means that capital now has to account for social groups that were earlier of
marginal interest at best: women, ethnic groups, age groups, and so on. These social groups, too, must be disorganized to be
“reconstructed,” which means that they may no longer be perceived in terms of abstract categories but must be analyzed in their full
overdetermined complexity and consciousness. The goal, at any rate, is to fragment social existence and consciousness in order to
reconstruct society globally, following the vision of a global capitalism. Under contemporary circumstances, however, fragmentation
is as much a condition of social existence as homogeneity. In structural terms, we could describe these circumstances as products
of a “conjuncture of structures,” the structure of global capital with the structure of local existence; in the computer language that is
so dear to managers of capital, it is an “interface” situation. Literal spatialization as well as the spatialization of categories are thus
very much a condition of existence; and so is uncertainty about temporality, because a conjuncture, overdetermined as it is, does
not permit easy predictions of the future. A global vision and transnational organization may help contain the contradictions (as the
Communist Party of China sought to contain them with Marxist theory and party organization), but since the vision and the
organization must be adjusted to account for the contradictions, for the time being the contra dictions are a prime object of concern.
Localism – 2NC
Localism is terrible for politics—that’s Dirlik—fetishization of what is
proximate to you ignores the way productive economy structures all
aspects of social life. The aff’s reclamation of social space only opens
new niche markets for capitalism to expand into while their epistemic
focus on the local keeps them blind to broader economic currents
structuring their existence
Localism – Distracts
Local focus shifts exploitation onto other ignored groups—systemic
vision is key
Katz 2k Adam Katz, Postmodernism and the Politics of “Culture,” 2000, 146-147.
Habermas’s understanding of undistorted communication is situated within the same problematic as the postmodernism of Lyotard
in a much more fundamental sense than would be indicated by the apparent opposition between them. Both locate emancipatory
knowledges and politics in the liberation of language from technocratic imperatives. And the political consequences are the same as
well. In both cases, local transformations (the deconstruction and reconstruction of distorted modes of communication) that create
more democratic or rational sites of intersubjectivity are all that is seen as possible, “with the goal,” as Brantlinger says, “of at least
local emancipations from the structure of economic, political and cultural domination” (1990, 191—192, emphasis added). The
addition of “at least” to the kinds of changes sought suggests a broader, potentially global role for critique, such as showing “how
lines of force in society can be transformed into authentic modes of participatory decision making” (19711. However, the transition
from one mode of transformation to another—what should be the fundamental task of cultural studies—is left unconceptualized and
is implicitly understood as a kind of additive or cumulative spread of local democratic sites until society as a whole is transformed.
What this overlooks, of course, is the way in which, as long as global economic and political structures remain unchanged and
unchallenged, local emancipations can only be redistributions—redistributions that actually support existing social
relations by merely shifting the greater burdens onto others who are less capable of achieving their own local emancipation. This
implicit alliance between the defenders of modernity and their postmodern critics (at least on the fundamental question) also
suggests that we need to look for the roots and consequences of this alliance in the contradictions of the formation of the cultural
studies public intellectual.
Our methods are exclusive—emphasis on local identity forecloses

totalizing class politics
Katz 2k Adam Katz, Postmodernism and the Politics of “Culture,” 2000, p. 57
And so, in Mercer’s discourse (as with Fiske’s), the very possibility of establishing criteria according to which one kind of social
change could be considered more “desirable” than some other kind is undermined because class has been replaced by identity.
Contrary to the economistic understandings of class that writers such as Hall accept in order to dismiss, Marxism understands class
not only as a position within an economic system but as a set of possibilities regarding the arrangement of the entire social and
cultural order. The primacy of working-class power in Marxist theory and practice is not a result of the exceptional degree of
suffering experienced by the working class or of any moral virtues they possess. Instead, that primacy derives from the fact that the
proletariat “organized as the ruling class” represents the potential for exploiting the socialization of the forces of production created
by capitalism in the interests of freer, more democratic, and egalitarian social relations. However, this criterion regarding the
possibilities represented by any struggle or agent is excluded from the category of identity, which can only reverse the criteria or
values contained in the dominant system. This idealizes those agents in the form in which the dominant culture has produced them,
leading to a utopian or moralizing politics. In this case, it is easy to understand Mercer’s claim that “the vocabulary of left, right, and
center is no longer adequate to the terrain of post-consensus politics” (1992, 424). Destabilization, which opens the possibility of
local reversals and revaluations in the interest of a more favorable insertion within the existing order, becomes the limit of
oppositional politics. This does not mean that the social identities imposed upon subjects due to their imbrication within a culture
based on exploitation do not have a (secondary) role in political struggles: Their significance lies in the necessity to indicate,
analyze, and oppose the reproduction of reactionary forms of authority in myriad ways within all practices, including oppositional
ones.
Localism – AT: Goes Global
The local is co-opted before it ever escapes its territorial boundaries
—capitalism will never accommodate real change
This is the logic behind the strategic essentialism on which the cultural studies public intellectual is based. The assumption here is
that the general public is, like the cultural studies community, a multiplicity of dialogic voices and identities. Insofar as cultural
local democratizations
studies knows this, it can present itself as the truth of the larger culture. The
brought about by cultural studies can therefore move outward, osmotically, into the
public as the semblance of universality taken on by local cultural democratic,
counterpublic spaces becomes a more genuine universality in the articulation of hegemony. According to Nelson, the “current
attack on universities is part of a struggle for power and influence in American culture” (1997, 109); hence, various alliances should
be possible with other targets in this same struggle.But, then, how is it possible to relate the
victory over some local antagonist to the larger political-economic
transformations that might produce that victory as a downsizing of
unwanted ideological themes? Which vision should be propagated? Since the cultural Right has been
selected as antagonist precisely because it is constitutive (i.e., it produces a coherent identity for cultural studies), there is
no escape from the assumption that simulating this antagonism as

the proliferation of resistant cultural studies voices is the academic
Left’s contribution to social change. In this case, Nelson’s project cannot maintain any distance from
its other, as Nelson constructs it: “Of all the intellectual movements that have swept the humanities in America over the last twenty
years, none will be taken up so shallowly, so opportunistically, so unreflectively and so ahistorically as cultural studies. It is
becoming the perfect paradigm for a people with no sense of history—born yesterday and born on the make” (1997, 54). The
depoliticization of cultural studies, though, is constitutive of cultural studies, not an accident that
befalls it. It is a result of its exclusion of its real other, Marxism. What Marxism cannot tolerate, as
Nelson notes, is a “contextualization so radical and relative that no universal generalizations about human history could be made”
(23). Radical contextualization is a synonym for opportunism, and every component of the identity for cultural studies Nelson seeks
to articulate is thoroughly contextualized and opportunistic. This applies to the Habermasian posture with those concerned with the
university’s mission. It applies to the subversion of disciplines whose power/knowledge formation is already shifting toward a
postdisciplinary radical contextualization. And it applies to the fantasy of gaining hegemony by marginalizing the cultural Right—eas-
ily the weakest link in the current remaking of global capitalist hegemony—the purpose of which, as Nelson implicitly acknowledges,
is primarily to hold “our” identity as progressive intellectuals together.
Ethics
Capitalism is the limit at which all ethical stances break down – the
only truly ethical position is prior anti-capitalist resistance
Morgareidge ’98 Clayton Morgareidge, professor of philosophy @ Lewis and Clark College, “Why capitalism is evil,”
1998, http://www.lclark.edu/~clayton/commentaries/evil.html
In recent commentaries for the Old Mole I have been trying to make capitalism look bad -- as bad as it really is. I have argued that
capitalism is war, and that those of us who do not own capital suffer
from it just as do civilian populations caught between opposing
armies, or as foot soldiers conscripted into armies fighting for interests that are not our own. I've tried to show that
capitalism is the violent negation of democracy, for it is the interests
of those who own capital that determine how we live: their jobs,
products, services, manufactured culture, and propaganda shape our
lives and our minds. Today I'd like to point to the ways in which capital undermines the
foundation of moral life. Well, what is the foundation of moral life? What makes it
possible for human beings to recognize that they have
responsibilities to each other and to their communities? For example: What could
possibly make anyone willing to pay living wages to workers in Indonesia or Haiti if you can get them to work for less? The 18th
Century philosopher David Hume asks, What reason can anyone give me to not to prefer the annihilation of all mankind to a scratch
Hume is one of many philosophers who argue that no such
on my finger?
reason can be given. This means that the foundation of ethics lies not
in reason, but rather in our passions or our hearts. For Hume it is part
of our nature that we feel sympathy for each other, and this sympathy
counters our narrow self-interest. Other philosophers have taken similar positions. Josiah Royce an
American philosopher of the last century argued that you do not really understand another person if you do not understand her
aspirations, fears, and needs. But to understand someone's feelings is, in part, to share them. And you cannot share an aspiration
mere
or a need without wanting to see it fulfilled, nor can you share a fear without hoping that it will not come to pass. So the
recognition of what other human beings are involves us in wanting to

see them live and prosper. The French-Jewish philosopher Emmanual Levinás whose major work
appeared in 1961 claims that ethics arises in the experience of the face of the
other. The human face reveals its capacity for suffering, a suffering
we are capable of either inflicting or opposing. So to look into the face of another human
being is to see the commandment, Thou shalt not kill. Another American philosopher, Nel Noddings, in her 1984 book Caring,
the ethical commitment arises out of the caring response that
argues that
most of us feel towards those who, like children, are in need . Most parents
encourage this caring response in their children, with the result that we grow up with an interest in cultivating our own capacity to
care for others. Now none of these philosophers are naive: none of them thinks that sympathy, love, or caring determines all, or
even most, human behavior. The 20th century proves otherwise. What they do offer, though, is the hope that human beings have
now we must ask, What forces are at work
the capacity to want the best for each other. So
in our world to block or cripple the ethical response? This question , of

course, brings me back to capitalism. But before I go there, I want to acknowledge that capitalism is not
the only thing that blocks our ability to care. Exploitation and cruelty were around long before the economic system of capitalism
came to be, and the temptation to use and abuse others will probably survive in any future society that might supersede capitalism.
putting the world at the disposal of those with
Nevertheless, I want to claim, that
capital has done more damage to the ethical life than any thing else . To
put it in religious terms, capital is the devil. To show why this is the case, let me turn to capital's greatest critic, Karl Marx.
Under capitalism, Marx writes, everything in nature and everything that
human beings are and can do becomes an object: a resource for, or
an obstacle, to the expansion of production, the development of
technology, the growth of markets, and the circulation of money. For
those who manage and live from capital, nothing has value of its own .
Mountain streams, clean air, human lives -- all mean nothing in
themselves, but are valuable only if they can be used to turn a profit. If
capital looks at (not into) the human face, it sees there only eyes through which brand names and advertising can enter and mouths
If human faces express needs,
that can demand and consume food, drink, and tobacco products.
then either products can be manufactured to meet, or seem to meet,

those needs, or else, if the needs are incompatible with the growth of
capital, then the faces expressing them must be unrepresented or
silenced. Obviously what capitalist enterprises do have consequences for the well being of human beings and the planet we
live on. Capital profits from the production of food, shelter, and all the
necessities of life. The production of all these things uses human

lives in the shape of labor, as well as the resources of the earth. If we care
about life, if we see our obligations in each others faces, then we have to want all the things capital does to be governed by that
care, to be directed by the ethical concern for life. But feeding people is not the aim of the food industry, or shelter the purpose of
As
the housing industry. In medicine, making profits is becoming a more important goal than caring for sick people.
capitalist enterprises these activities aim single-mindedly at the

accumulation of capital, and such purposes as caring for the sick or
feeding the hungry becomes a mere means to an end, an instrument
of corporate growth. Therefore ethics, the overriding commitment to
meeting human need, is left out of deliberations about what the
heavyweight institutions of our society are going to do. Moral convictions are
expressed in churches, in living rooms, in letters to the editor, sometimes even by politicians and widely read commentators, but
almost always with an attitude of resignation to the inevitable. People no longer say, "You can't stop progress," but only because
they have learned not to call economic growth progress. They still think they can't stop it. And they are right -- as long as the
production of all our needs and the organization of our labor is carried out under private ownership. Only a minority ("idealists") can
Only when the end of

take seriously a way of thinking that counts for nothing in real world decision making.
capitalism is on the table will ethics have a seat at the table.

Anti-Imperialism
The imperial machine cannot be reformed by mere policy
rearrangement – anything less than complete revolution is political
denialism
Churchill does not pretend to be a Marxist and thus is at least consistent in disregarding the
explosive class contradictions at the base of American society. Not so
the reformist leftists who cover with empty socialist phrases what are
in reality nothing but liberal bourgeois politics. “Gov’t Policy Puts People in Harm’s Way,”
declared Workers World (27 September 2001) following September 11. “The military response to terrorism just perpetuates the
cycle of terrorism and counterterrorism,” wrote radical-liberal professor Howard Zinn, uncritically quoted in the International Socialist
groups promote the illusion that
Organization’s Socialist Worker (14 September 2001). These
imperialist militarism is a bad policy that can be eliminated from the

capitalist system if sufficient pressure is applied. To this end, they seek to
form a “coalition” with the liberal wing of the capitalist class,
represented by a section of the Democratic Party. Contrary to the
preachings of the reformist fake socialists, the capitalist state cannot be
wielded by the exploited and the oppressed to serve their interests. In
order to defend itself, the working class must mobilize independently of
all the agencies and parties of its class enemy. In order to sweep away
this ruling class and open the road to a world free of class
exploitation, war and all forms of oppression, the working class must
take control of society in its own hands through a socialist revolution
that breaks up and destroys the capitalist state and establishes in its
place a workers state based on a planned, collectivized economy. The
political instrument needed to achieve this goal is a revolutionary workers party
—a party that fights to win the U.S. working class to the
understanding that, as part of the international proletariat, it must
fight to defend all the victims of U.S. imperialism through struggle
against their common enemy, the bloodstained U.S. capitalist rulers.
The model for such a party can be found in the Bolshevik Party of Lenin and
Trotsky, which led the first and to date only successful workers
revolution in history, the Russian Revolution of October 1917.
Anti-Nuclearism
The affirmative’s single-issue focus ignores that capitalism is the root
cause of the arms race, ensuring error replication and political co-
option
The People ’82 “Why Capitalism Can’t Freeze the Arms Race,” The People (Socialist Labor Party’s monthly journal,
April 1982
For one thing, even if it could be implemented, it would not affect the 50,000 nuclear warheads currently in the arsenals of the two
superpowers. Nor would it eliminate the material and economic conflicts pushing the two superpowers ever closer to resorting to the
use of these weapons. In short, while a nuclear freeze could possibly slow the headlong rush to a nuclear confrontation, it would not
end the danger of a nuclear holocaust that could destroy all humanity. The advocates and organizers of the freeze campaign are
aware of these limitations, but they argue that the freeze should be viewed as a "first step" toward real nuclear disarmament.
According to the campaign's initial strategy paper, the freeze proposal was conceived as a "limited, realizable objective." Limited
Focus In other words, the freeze campaign is premised upon a political concept that underlies many issue-oriented movements: limit
the focus of the movement to a "single issue," a "low common denominator" that many people could readily agree with, in order to
enlist the "broadest possible support." The reasoning behind this strategy is that it is better to have more people supporting a limited
objective than to have fewer people supporting a more comprehensive goal. It is precisely because of its limited focus that the
freeze concept could win the support of liberal politicians who are nonetheless totally committed to the preservation of U.S.
capitalism and who may intentionally or otherwise co-opt the movement by pushing meaningless, ineffective legislation. The
resolution introduced in Congress illustrates the point. Not only is that congressional proposal for a freeze watered down and more
vague than the original, it is a nonbinding resolution and will not make any change in actual policy. It calls for the superpowers "to
decide when and how to achieve a mutual and verifiable freeze" on testing, production and deployment of nuclear weapons. This
"when and how" provision renders the concept meaningless. Even Ronald Reagan probably would support a nuclear arms freeze
after the United States has gotten far enough "ahead" in the arms race and acquired a "first strike" capability. In essence, then, the
liberal politicians in Congress, without seriously impeding the U.S. nuclear arms buildup, could serve as a lightning rod by
channeling much of the opposition to the arms race into support of useless electoral efforts or legislative proposals. Political
opportunism has already begun to invade the freeze campaign itself. In California, for example, the campaign coordinator for the
freeze effort is Harold Willens, a capitalist millionaire. In a recent position paper printed in the San Jose Mercury News, he sought to
justify the freeze proposal on the proimperialist grounds that it would enable the United States to save money and to use its
technology to beat the Japanese and "become competitive in world markets once again." He also applauded President Reagan's
START (Strategic Arms Reduction Talks) concept, stating that it "could save the nation" and that it is basically in harmony with the
freeze objective. No doubt many of those actively involved in the freeze campaign would disown Willens' views and statements. Yet
Willens' views are just the kind of deluded and opportunistic thinking that the campaign invites with its "low common denominator"
approach. Realities of Class Rule There is a more fundamental weakness in the freeze campaign that should be noted. It cannot
and will not be implemented under the existing social system. The U.S. ruling class simply will not agree to a nuclear arms freeze
unless it has achieved a decisive lead in the arms race, in which case the Soviets would not agree to a freeze. The history of
disarmament efforts down through the years attests to that. The nuclear arms race, like militarism generally, is an inherent
byproduct of class-divided society. Mad as the stockpiling of nuclear arms is, it is no mere "aberration" in the prevailing competitive
world. Rather, it is the ultimate recourse to which the capitalist United States and the bureaucratic statist U.S.S.R. look to protect
their imperialist interests from one another and from other imperialist rivals. And because each considers arms superiority vital for
the protection of the interests of its ruling class, the arms race cannot be legislated away. Thus, the freeze campaign cannot stop
the arms race, because it does not address the cause of the arms race. The campaign is based upon a reformist strategy of trying to
limit the effects of the arms race through electoral action and political pressure. The unspoken assumption behind this strategy is the
false notion that the U.S. government is an instrument responsive to the people, and that if the majority of people want a freeze,
then the politicians in office will implement it or be replaced by politicians who will. However, the U.S. political state does not work
that way. Political democracy cannot function under an economic dictatorship. In capitalist society, the capitalist class owns and
controls the means of producing the goods and services needed to live. Through their economic power the capitalist class controls
the political state and those who, in the final analysis, determine the policies and conduct the affairs of the various departments of
government. That is why, no matter what promises politicians make to workers, once elected to office the "mandates" they follow are
those that serve the interests of the capitalist class. It is relevant to recall, for example, that in 1976 Jimmy Carter promised to work
toward "zero nuclear weapons." As president, however, he later gave his blessing to the MX and cruise missiles, the Trident
submarine and the placement in Europe of the new missiles that are now the subject of negotiation. He also issued Presidential
Directive 59, which made pursuit of a first-strike capacity an official policy. The Imperialist Arms Race Massive political pressure
from the working class can sometimes force concessions from the capitalist political state. But the nuclear arms race is too vital, too
central to capitalist-class interests for a reformist strategy to succeed in ending it. Driven by the profit motive and world market
competition, the U.S. capitalist class is irresistibly impelled to seek domination of other nations —as markets, as sources of cheap
labor, as areas for profitable investment, as sources of natural resources, or because of their strategic locations. It is to protect and
serve these material interests that the U.S. government practices imperialist policies, setting up and/or supporting repressive,
proimperialist governments throughout Central America, South America, Asia, Africa, the Middle East and other parts of the world.
OWS
Occupy’s focus on abstract questions like “fairness” and
“corruption” is an ideological shield for capitalism—critiquing only
the consequences of the market instead of the structure itself leads to
conservative co-option
Tumino ’12 Stephen Tumino, more marxist than Marx himself, “Is Occupy Wall Street Communist,” Red Critique 14,
Winter/Spring 2012, http://www.redcritique.org/WinterSpring2012/isoccupywallstreetcommunist.htm
If the OWS protests are communist in the way Zizek argues, however, and what is being protested is only corporate "greed and
corruption" as the OWS website says, then it is not the cause of the class inequality that lies in the daily exploitation of labor by
capital at the point of production that is being opposed but only the effects of class on culture because of the way it has
allowed the special interests of a tiny minority to dominate social and political life. But by only protesting the cultural effects of class
("greed and corruption"), rather than the cause of the stark inequality that we see, the dominant belief that capitalism may be made
"fair" and "democratic" is maintained. The effect of this belief is to make it seem as if the daily exploitation of the working class by
the capitalist class is normal and therefore acceptable—it's just the way things are and, therefore, ought to be. By making it seem as
if the roots of inequality lie in personal greed and unfairness—and not the law of profit that exploits labor—it becomes impossible to
understand and abolish class inequality at its roots. What Zizek and other "left" theorists promote as "communism" presumes that if
we only make the system a little fairer, with a little more regulation of Wall Street and a little more protection for workers, then
everything will go back to the way it was in some mythological past and democracy will be restored. However, without a basic
understanding of class that critiques the dominant ideology that normalizes capitalism by representing it as open to being made
"fair" and "democratic," it is impossible to change it, and the domination of social and political life by the 1% will continue. People
interested in the Occupy movement sometimes worry that it will be co-opted by the Democrats and diverted from being a movement
against social inequality into merely a movement to re-elect Obama and hope for piecemeal reforms. But given the focus on the
"greed and corruption" of corporate rule and given the lack of a critique of capitalism that exposes its basic class inequality and
explains why there cannot be democracy while classes exist, it is clear that at the level of ideas OWS has already been co-opted
into an ideological support of the existing class system. It is for this reason that even the Republicans are able to use the language
of Occupy for their own electoral strategies, as Gingrich and Perry have done by attacking the "vulture capitalism" of Romney's
investment firm. This ideological limitation and accommodation to bourgeois norms means that OWS as it currently exists is a
reformist movement that is attempting to save capitalism at a time of crisis rather than a genuine worker's movement to replace
capitalism—which is a system for making profit for a few off of the labor of the many—with socialism—a system whose primary
purpose is meeting the needs of the many by abolishing the exploitation of labor by capital.
AT: We Break Down Capitalism
Isolating certain ‘isms’ as the locus of oppression naturalizes
underlying relations of production of which oppressed identities are
mere offshoots—this makes class-based politics impossible
Zizek 2k Slavoj Zizek, Senior Researcher at the Institute for Social Studies in Ljubljana, 2000, Contingency, Hegemony,
Universality, p. 95-97
Let me, then, take a closer look at Laclau’s narrative which runs from Marxist essentialism the proletariat as the universal (lass
whose revolutionary mission is inscribed into its very social being and thus discernible via ‘objective’ scientific analysis) to the
‘postmodern’ recognition of the contingent, tropological, metaphorico-metonymic, link between a social agent and its ‘task’. Once
this contingency is acknowledged, one has to accept that there is no direct, ‘natural’ correlation between an agent’s social position
and its tasks in the political struggle, no norm of development by which to measure exceptions say because of the weak political
subjectivity of the bourgeoisie in Russia around 1900, the working class had to accomplish the bourgeois-democratic revolution
itself. My first observation here is that while this standard post— modern Leftist narrative of the passage from ‘essentialist’ Marxism
with the proletariat as the unique Historical Subject, the privileging of economic class struggle, and so on, to the postmodern
irreducible plurality of struggles undoubtedly describes an actual historical process, its proponents, as a rule, lease out the
resignation at its heart the acceptance of capitalism as ‘the only game in town’, the renunciation of any real attempt to overcome the
existing capitalist liberal regime. This point was already made very precisely in Wendy Brown’s perspicuous observation that ‘the
political purchase of contemporary American identity politics would seem to be achieved in part through a certain renaturalization of
capitalism’. The crucial question to be asked is thus: to what extent a critique of capitalism is foreclosed by the current configuration
of oppositional politics, and not simply by the ‘loss of the socialist alternative’ or the ostensible ~triumph of liberalism’ in the global
order. In contrast with the Marxist critique of a social whole and Marxist vision of total transformation, to what extent do identity
preserves
politics require a standard internal to existing society against which to pitch their claims, a standard that not only
capitalism from critique, but sustains the invisibility and inarticulateness of

class — not incidentally, but endemically? Could we have stumbled upon one reason why class is invariably named but rarely
theorized or developed in the multiculturalist mantra, ‘race, class, gender, sexuality’?1 One can describe in very precise terms this
reduction of class to an entity ‘named but rarely theorized’: one of the great and permanent results of the so-called ‘Western
Marxism’ first formulated by the young Lukics is that the class-and-commodity structure of capitalism is not just a phenomenon
limited to the particular ‘domain’ of economy, but the structuring principle that overdetermines the social totality, from politics to art
and religion. This global dimension of capitalism is suspended in today’s multiculturalist progressive politics: its ‘anti-capitalism’ is
reduced to the level of how today’s capitalism breeds sexist/racist oppression, and so on. Marx claimed that in the series production
—distribution —exchange—consumption, the term ‘production’ is doubly inscribed: it is simultaneously one of the terms in the series
and the structuring principle of the entire series. In production as one of the terms of the series, production (as the structuring
principle) ‘encounters itself in its oppositional determination’,’2 as Marx put it, using the precise Hegelian term. And the same goes
for the postmodern political series class—gender—race…: in class as one of the terms in the series of particular struggles, class
qua structuring principle of the social totality encounters itself in its oppositional determination’.3 In so far as postmodern politics
promotes, in effect, a kind of ‘politicization of the economy’, is not this politicization similar to the way our supermarkets which
fundamentally exclude from their field of visibility the actual production process (the way vegetables and fruit are harvested and
packed by immigrant workers, the genetic and other manipulations in their production and display, etc.) — stage within the field of
the displayed goods, as a kind of ersatz, the spectacle of a pseudo-production (meals prepared in full view in ‘food courts’, fruit
juices freshly squeezed before the customers’ eyes, etc.)?’5 An authentic Leftist should therefore ask the postmodern politicians the
new version of the old Freudian question put to the perplexed Jew: ‘Why are von saving that one should politicize the economy,
when one should in fact politicize the economy?’ So: in so far as postmodern politics involves a ‘[t]heoretical retreat from the
problem of domination within capitalism’, it is here. in this silent suspension of class analysis, that we are dealing with an exemplary
case of the mechanism of ideological displacement: when class antagonism is disavowed, when its key structuring role is
suspended. ‘other markers of social difference may come to bear an inordinate weight; indeed, they may hear all the weight of the
sufferings produced by capitalism in addition to that attributable to the explicitly politicized marking”7. In other words, this
displacement accounts for the somewhat ’excessive’ way the discourse of postmodern identity politics insists on the horrors of
sexism, racism, and so on -- this ‘excess’ comes from the fact that these other ‘-isms’ have to bear the surplus-investment from the
class struggle whose extent is not acknowledged.’8
Identity
Standpoint Epistemology
Standpoint theory calls upon for self-disclosure to extract greater
surplus from individual working subjects
Katz 2k Adam Katz, Postmodernism and the Politics of “Culture,” 2000, p. 74-75
So, standpoint theory and the politics it advances simply reproduce and update the very liberal categories they wish to critique. Such
understandings proceed in the same way as liberalism: They construct a model subject based upon a fetishized abstraction from
relations between individuals (such as those produced by gender psychology) and then transform this abstraction into a regulatory
principle for evaluating social relations. This fetishized abstraction, just like the abstraction classical liberal theory makes from the
exchange of commodities between individual producers, corresponds to outmoded private relations (the domestic servitude of
women) that have been made visible as oppressive and unnecessary as new social relations have become possible. The liberal
ideal of contractual agreements between equal and free individuals provides capitalist society with a way of managing contradictions
and crises by making them appear remediable without fundamental transformation : That is, capitalism simply needs to be freed from
distortions and returned to its own standards of fairness and equality. In the same way, the ideals posited by standpoint theory
provide new cultural and ideological resources for capitalist society to claim that social problems can be solved by local feminist
reorganizations without addressing the foundations of private property. Whether or not Hartsock or other standpoint theorists intend
such a conclusion is beside the point; it is an unavoidable consequence following the assumption that one’s preferred set of values
(and the agents who bear them) are internal to the present order. This assumption itself is necessary if one presupposes an
essential continuity between experience and practice. Such a utopian understanding excludes a theory of conflict that sees social
change as the result of confrontations between collective material forces representing opposed interests and produced by global
social structures and contradictions; in this case, the realization of the values represented by one of the opposing agencies would
include their radical transformation (as a result of the transformations in the social structure), not their implementation or privileging
in an unchanged form. According to the assumptions of standpoint theory, the values in question can be realized in a piecemeal,
peaceful, and cumulative manner—in which case, material confrontations between collective agencies should be avoided and, if
necessary, suppressed.
Every new ‘standpoint’ is another brand opportunity for global capital

—identities emerge from determinate material conditions
However, according to the standpoint theory of knowledge Hartsock defends (and has helped to develop), knowledge of social
conditions is ultimately the self-knowledge of marginalized groups, to which their marginalization gives them special access. She
argues that oppositional struggles have “two fundamental intellectual theoretical tasks—one of critique and the other of construction”
(1992, 163). For her, critique involves dismantling the categories and representations that have enabled the production of the
oppressed as Other; construction, by contrast, involves the claiming and constitution of the subjectivities of the other(s). Despite
Hartsock’s call for “systematic knowledge about our world and ourselves” (171), the source of knowledge according to her
understanding is the self-constituting marginalized subject, which she also claims needs to be understood as multiple and diverse
(171). She does not explain how this multiplicity and diversity can enable the construction of “an account which can expose the
falseness at the top and can transform the margins as well as the center” (171, emphasis added). Furthermore, it is impossible to
address this issue within the framework of standpoint theory, which sees knowledge as a result of subjectivity, not contradictions in
the social structure, and which therefore cannot ever be anything more than a reflection of the experience of specific subjects. The
construction of new subjectivities can, then, only be a remaking of materials already given within the dominant culture and ideology,
which is to say a reversal of the dominant terms. However, since a series of reversals does not add up to systematic knowledge,
Hartsock is left with prescriptions that are no different from those of the postmodernism she critiques: describing and respecting mul-
tiplicities and differences.
Identity Politics – No Outside to Capital
Capital universalizes itself to swallow any possible outside from
which the aff could construct a new identity—only the anonymous
universality of the proletariat resists the logic of capital
Lissovoy ‘8 Noah De Lissovoy, “Dialectic of Emergency/Emergency of the Dialectic,” Capitalism Nature Socialism, vol. 19
iss. 1, pp. 27-40, 2008, 10.1080/10455750701859380
Without a true distinction between inside and outside, there is no inner space of pure truth , no undistorted essence that can be
counterposed to a false or inauthentic surface. Instead, alienation can be seen as always already sealed into the very categories
and fact of existence within capitalism rather than representing a mere distortion of human being or a subversion of an original
wholeness. Thus, Moishe Postone argues that the categories of value and labor themselves are the necessary object of critique in
Marxism-i.e., that what has to be critiqued is the totality of capital as ontology rather than simply the maldistribution of social goods
or the experience of estrangement, which are its consequences. Postone gives a contemporary twist to the idea that identities do
not preserve an inner authenticity against their incorporation by capital but become identities by virtue of this incorporation.29 On
this basis, we can understand crisis not as an effect of the distance between a potential authenticity within the economies of self and
society and the actual violation of this potential by capitalism, but rather as indicating the tentative intrusion into capital of the
obscure forms of a social universe that lies beyond it, and which it cannot comprehend. This is the universe of human autonomy and
democratic collectivity, which from the point of view of power can only show up as riot and refusal, or as the fraying and exhaustion
of its own categories. This destabilization or interruption is connected to the threat posed by emerging global social movements.
These movements are characterized not only by the assertion of rights of citizenship under national (or international) constitutions,
nor (simply) by the demand by workers for a fair price for their labor power, but also by a challenge to the discursive framework of
global politics. They represent the first flickers of the appearance of a form of life that is inconceivable and imperceptible within the
present. The threat that such movements pose to power is that they begin to withdraw social content (actors, territories, forces) from
the order of the real as it is organized, and so menace capital with an implosion of the space of its own meaning and possibility. For
example, the indigenous movements that have emerged as the central historical force in Bolivia and elsewhere in Latin America
represent the appearance of a subject that was not reckoned on, even as antagonist, in capital's imaginary. Capital can only blame
itself for this surprise: in its drive to colonize every "periphery" and exploit distant and non-traditional sources of labor power, capital
awakens forces and histories that are not reducible to the forms of class contradiction that it has learned to manage. These
movements do not primarily threaten the legitimacy of power within the rational economy of communicative action; instead, they
threaten the very intelligibility of capital and the universe that it materializes. This threat extends to the forms of identification
available to subjects as they become "unmoor[ed]" from "traditional sources of identity" and are instead rearticulated on a global
terrain.31
Identity Politics – Securing Identity
Abstracted identity groups imagined outside capital naturalize
economic exploitation
Both the economic and the cultural-ideological aspects of social domination are recognized here but in a way that separates them in
an absolute manner and makes it impossible to theorize the relations between them. The two possible courses of action posited by
this passage are either to reflect an already existing collective will that is to be found in the economy or to fashion a new collective
will. The very notion of the economy as something that one could “get a hold of” presupposes the economic reductionism that Hall is
presumably contesting: That is, it accepts the notion of the economic as something self-contained and independent. In this case, as
soon as the contending classes step outside of the economy, they are no longer classes in any meaningful sense but rather posi-
tions struggling for power in relation to political, moral, intellectual, cultural, ideological, and sexual questions. This rigid antinomy is
reproduced in the choice between reflecting an already formed collective will and fashioning a new one. The possibility of
constructing a new collective will out of the contradictions situated in the economic structure, contradictions that are articulated in
relation to other cultural structures where the elements of such a will are emerging as a result of differentiated arenas of struggle, is
excluded here. Instead, the collective will can be fashioned through a synthesis of positions immanent in these specific struggles
themselves. This becomes more evident in Hall’s concluding chapters to The Hard Road to Renewal. There, he argues that
electoral politics—in fact, every kind of politics—depends on political identities and identifications. People make identifications
symbolically: through social imagery, in their political imaginations. They “see themselves” as one sort of person or another. They
“imagine their future” within this scenario or that. They don’t just think about voting in terms of how much they have, their so-called
“material interests.” Material interests matter profoundly. But they are always ideologically defined (1988, 261). Once again, there is
a reference to the importance of material, ultimately class interests, and Hall also mentions that people have conflicting interests as
well as conflicting identities. However, the claim that both the economic and the ideological are important—by itself, a commonplace
observation—can lead in one of two fundamentally opposed directions. One possibility is to theorize the material interests of social
classes and engage in an ideological struggle to clarify the contradictions that structure the ideologies and identities of oppressed
groups, thereby making the production of oppositional class consciousness possible. The other possibility is to construct images and
identities that are immediately accessible and intelligible within the framework of those contradictions, thereby resecuring
subordinated subjects’ consent for the social order that produces them. This latter possibility becomes the unavoidable
consequence if politics is defined as “a struggle for popular identities” (Hall 1988, 282). In addition, this possibility is inevitable given
Hall’s reductive understanding of material interests as little more than income levels (“how much they have”), rather than in terms of
the reproduction of all of the social and institutional conditions of the production of effective subjects.
Identity Politics – Identity Exchange
Identity groups are designed by capital to fracture political solidarity
—identity production always confirms existing labor structures
In that case, far from being the ground of border-crossing politics and pedagogy, voice, identity, and so forth are actually pretexts for
the production of an independent realm in which revaluation takes place. Thus, what is at stake in postmodernist politics is the
seizure of the (modern) means of authorization, of the means of producing social authority (i.e., subjectivities) that have been
released as a result of the hegemonic crisis of post-1960s capitalism and that are presumed to hold the key to a redistribution of
power and hence more democracy. As long as the independence of these means from the direct control of the main contending
classes (that is, the relative autonomy of the petite bourgeoisie) is assured, then a high degree of pluralism will be legitimate, as with
any relatively secure regime of private property. The privileging of heterogeneity represents the minimum level of agreement
necessary for this system of class practices because it guarantees the independence of the discursive terrain of revaluation from the
oppressed class and therefore its corporate possession by the border-crossing petite bourgeoisie. Within the framework of this
agreement, various forms of postmodernism, with marginally different political commitments, are possible. A Left postmodernism
supports this notion of pluralism and democracy by refusing to establish or theorize a hierarchy of struggles (which requires an
inquiry into the material conditions of social transformation), thereby ensuring that politics will not go beyond the arena of the
exchanges of discourses and identities and that it will continue to require the diplomatic practices of postmodern pedagogues. The
identities organized by a Left postmodernism, then, would best be characterized as neoidentities, since they are posited as identities
that are in principle exchangeable within the system of circulation established by the counterpublics themselves. And it is the border
crossers, who can participate in many counterpublics, who will have access to the means of exchange. That is, just as the
availability in principle of private property to any individual in fact secures its possession by the capitalist class, so the liberation of
the means of authorization in fact guarantees its possession by the class whose position within the social division of labor provides it
with privileged access to those means.
Identity Politics – Reformism
Identity politics in the academy creates a lazy aversion to radical
thinking and revolutionary theory—produces fundamentally reformist
positions that don’t affect central social coordinates
Postmodern philosophical and theoretical categories and presuppositions have been essential to the constitution of what I will call
“mainstream” or “appreciative” cultural studies. I understand postmodernism as consisting of all those discourses and practices
governed by the assumption that reality is constituted by an unbounded plurality of heterogeneous forms. As with cultural studies,
though, I do not limit the field of postmodernism to those discourses that openly support this assumption or refer to themselves as
“postmodernist.” Rather, I understand postmodernism as being constituted by a political economy of competing positions that
reproduce the legitimacy of those areas of knowledge and practice governed by the presupposition and privileging of heterogeneity.
I would include within the category of postmodernism, then, discourses that consider themselves indifferent to or even hostile to
postmodernism. I would cite, for example, Jurgen Habermas’s attacks on postmodernism, which are based on his understanding of
communicative rationality and the project of modernity. By situating these attacks within the framework of how one adjudicates
between different forms of established knowledge and discourse, Habermas simply reproduces the terms of the debate as consti-
tuted by postmodernism—a debate, that is, that is actually a struggle over the terms of a new mode of liberalism adequate for a late-
capitalist global order in crisis (and over who will “possess” those terms). Habermas’s discourses fulfill this function by
understanding the conditions of possibility of communication as immanent to specific and autonomous communicative situations and
forms themselves. In fact, the legitimation and hegemony of postmodern culture studies within the arena of culture critique depend
upon the existence of a range of competing positions that, as in the logic of the market as studied by Marx, “average out” in “the
long run.” The discourses of postmodern cultural studies are unable to theorize in a rigorous way the politics of the institutions in
which they are situated. Therefore, the incoherencies and contradictions of these discourses are most evident in relation to the
question of devising a politics of resistance to these institutions, in particular the academy. So, for example, Grossberg, Nelson, and
Treichier acknowledge from the start of their introduction that the volume they are presenting emerges at the height of a “cultural
studies boom” (1992, 1) of international dimensions. Later, they contend that “it is the future of cultural studies in the United States
that seems to us to present the greatest need for reflection and debate” (10). This is understandable because, as they argue earlier,
the “boom is especially strong” in the United States and has “created significant investment opportunities” (1). However, they go on
to contend, the “threat is not from institutionalization per se, for cultural studies has always had its institutionalized forms within and
outside the academy” (Grossberg, Nelson, and Treichier 1992, 10). Rather, the “issue for U.S. practitioners is what kind of work will
be identified with cultural studies and what social effects it will have. . . . Too many people simply rename what they were already
doing to take advantage of the cultural studies boom” (10—11). Thus, it is not the institutional situation—with its limits and
possibilities—that is at stake but policing the intellectual property and copyright of the new (non)discipline. The “multi-,” ‘non-, and
even “anti-” disciplinary character of cultural studies, on this account, enables the formation of a site of accumulation of institutional
capital whose “unfixity” also frees it from accountability to critiques of its institutional positioning. As far as its social effects go, we
have already seen that these are wholly contingent and therefore cannot be theorized or critiqued in any systematic way.
Grossberg, Nelson, and Treichler do not consider the possible uses to the institution of the free-floating, unfixed character of culture
studies. They do not see that the “extra-” and “cross-” disciplinary location of culture studies they celebrate actually allows the
academy to provide a space for radical discourses, without exerting any pressure to transform the existing disciplinary structure. The
question that needs to be raised here is not, of course, in regard to the legitimacy and necessity of working within late-capitalist
institutions (such as the university). Rather, the issue is the identification of institutionalization with institutionality in postmodern
cultural studies, along with the institutional and ideological forms that support and naturalize this conflation. Put another way, there
is a difference between working within and against dominant institutions and becoming an, inte gral part of the functioning of those
institutions. Working against dominant institutions from within requires the contestation of the various institu tional forms that
reproduce institutional power and authority; becoming institutionalized entails fulfilling the need of the institutions for new ways of
reproducing their power and authority. The relation between cultural studies and the existing disciplines proposed by Grossberg,
Nelson, and Treichler is inadequate in this context because of its ultimately laissez-faire approach to institutional forms and their
uses. In contrast, I would argue it is necessary to occupy positions within the disciplines and exploit the contradiction between their
claims to universality and their specialist partiality in order to challenge their very separateness and legitimacy. (For a more
extended discussion of this issue, see Chapter 4.)
Identity Politics – Inclusion/Exclusion
Inclusion/exclusion binaries push Marxism out of the discussion
Katz 2k Adam Katz, Postmodernism and the Politics of “Culture,” 2000, p. 45.
In this sense, the narrative McRobbie constructs, like the volume Cultural Studies itself, produces an identity out of the various kinds
of work being done in cultural studies. This need for identification accounts for the uncritical valorization of pluralism (as opposed to
contestation and critique). An instance of this is revealed in the fact that, despite her broad criticism and apparently deep anxiety
over the present state of cultural studies, McRobbie can find no particular contribution to the volume that she considers deserving of
criticism. In fact, she takes great pains to assure us that the general criticism she makes regarding the effects of the introduction of
deconstruction into ctiltural studies is not applicable to any of the specific texts in the volume (or elsewhere) that actually make use
of deconstruction. She explicitly exempts, for example, Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha from the “formalism” to which
deconstruction tends. This, of course, undermines her apparent criticism of deconstruction as an ideological discourse because the
problem would therefore be not with its political effects but with its misuses by individuals. Contrary to McRobbie’s claims about
openness, then, the purpose of her “criticism” of deconstruction, like her participation in the removal of Marxism from the theoretical
and political landscape, is to establish a set of inclusions and exclusions that will support the current constitution of the political
economy of institutional values—not too much formalism, not too much abstraction, no Marxism, and so on. However, as opposed
to the “tyrannical” regime of theory that McRobbie is glad to be rid of, these inclusions and exclusions are measured not against
determinations of political effectivity that are rigorously theorized but rather against an untheorized notion of their proximity to the
actual processes of identity formation. Those who are presently excluded from the pluralist institution of cultural studies could then,
at some point, be included—not on the condition that they account for their project by proposing some critical rearticulation of the
general project of cultural studies but rather by moving a bit closer to the details of everyday life, by uncovering some previously
neglected aspect of the processes of identity formation.
Identity Politics – Identity Proliferation
New subjectivities increase capitalist profits—niche identities are
translated into marketable goods and slogans
Katz 2k Adam Katz, Postmodernism and the Politics of “Culture,” 2000, p.134-135
However, this is not the case: Marxism develops a critical standpoint by theorizing the contradiction between the forces and
relations of production, which is to say by aligning itself with the most progressive possibilities implicit in the productive forces that
are restricted, concealed, and prevented from realization due to the outmoded nature of the relations of production. Such an
analysis is grounded in the category of material production that is material not in the sense of physical but in the sense of de-
materiality,
termining and extending the interchangeability of practices and subjects in the production process. It is this
then, that determines the combinations, articulations, and transformations in
the conditions, means, needs, and subjects that are associated in the
labor process. The category of commodification is ultimately limited in analyzing transformations in material production
because it tends to identify interchangeability with the structure of the commodity, whereas this is only one possible form taken by
this process of the development of the production forces. Insofar as transformations in material production under what Jameson
calls “multinational capitalism” take the form of collectivization, the conflation of this process with commodification determines a
nostalgic resistance to the development of the productive forces, precisely from the standpoint of “Nature,”
“Desire,” or “Culture.” On the contrary, from a Marxist position, these processes represent the
most advanced aspects of the productive forces in that they entail
reductions in required labor time, the production of new needs, and, above
all, the production of new types of subjects capable of managing new
modes of material production and hence transformations in the

apparatuses committed to the reproduction of labor power. The cultural
logic of late capitalism would, in this case, be located not in postmodernism (which articulates
this logic within bourgeois discourses that abstract the crisis from social contradictions) but in the contradiction
between the need for this type of subject (and the needs and capacities of this type of subject)
and the maintenance of private property and the subordination of all
institutions to its reproduction, which requires that the working class be “just as much an appendage of
capital as the ordinary instruments of labour” (Marx 1906, 628).
Identity Politics – AT: Universalism Bad
We’re universal for a reason—the alt is our last option in a world
determined by capital’s absolute inclusivity. Only class is abstract
enough to enable total revolution yet concrete enough to provide
specific coordinates for change
Dirlik ’94 Arif Dirlik, professor of history at duke university, After the Revolution: Waking to Global Capitalism, 1994, pg. 7-9
What is at issue here is not a repudiation but a “self-criticism” of Marxism. I do repudiate totalizing procedures that render Marxism
into a closed system which, in spite of their claims to totality, are guided by a categorical reductionism that sublates all other social
categories into one or another Marxist category. Totalizing procedures are necessary to confront capitalism in its totality and , more
importantly, to go beyond capitalism to incorporate problems of society and liberation that are not to be contained within the
problematic of capitalism (and a Marxism that takes its cues from capitalism), regardless of how important capitalism may be in
bringing such problems to the surface of consciousness. This alternative mode of totalizing, however, must be open-ended (which is
to say, historical), rather than limited a priori by categorical presuppositions. This is not a simple pluralism, because it retains the
aspiration to totality, and the necessity of articulating categories in the process of formulating totality historically; as it presupposes
that social categories in their concrete manifestations appear not in isolation from one another, as they do in analytical abstraction,
but in irreducible overdeterminedness which gives them their conjunctural meaning within historically changing totalities, as well as
shaping the procedures by which such totalities are to be grasped. This also conditions my assertion here that the goals of liberation
must be formulated independently of theory. Ethical choices that are not necessarily implicit in theory, or even in its immediate
historical circumstances, are important in formulating those goals. This is not to say, however, that the choices are themselves
arbitrary; whether or not they are possible, or even find their way into consciousness, the choices are not to be divorced from the
material circumstances of liberation. Marxism has much to say in this regard as well. In order to remain true to its goals of liberation,
however, this Marxism must redefine itself in the process of the struggle for liberation and be prepared to incorporate its conception
of totality into even broader totalities that may appear on the horizon of such struggles and, ultimately, even to abolish itself as
theory. Let me illustrate these points by a few words on “class.” I conclude later that the category of class, the central category of
Marxist social analysis, is insufficient for analyzing the conditions of liberation and may even obstruct the task of liberation through
its reductionism. This is not to say, however, that the concept of class is dispensable to social analysis or irrelevant in formulat ing
the goals of liberation. Of all the categories that are presently current in radical social analysis (I am thinking of gender, ethnicity,
race, etc.), class is the one category that is not reducible to concrete social identification. Its very abstractness is thus crucial to
uncovering the social relationships that lie at the core of the capitalist mode of production, hidden from view in its everyday
operations. Categories such as gender and ethnicity, however much we may insist that they are social constructs, nevertheless
have readily identifiable social (and, in the extreme, biological) referents. Class does not, except as an abstraction that is deduci ble
only within the system itself. The tentativeness historically of the concrete social manifestations of class provide ample testimonial to
its abstractness, for such manifestations are contingent for their emergence not on any readily identifiable social ties but on the
rather abstract notion of “class consciousness,” which is easily overwhelmed in everyday life by more concrete social relationships.
To use Marx’s terminology, if class makes sense as a concept, it makes sense mainly “in-itself” rather than “for itself,” which may be
at the root of the historical failure of Marxism to generate and sustain a class-based politics. Even where class politics has
generated class organization, there has been a tendency for the organization to divorce itself from its social constituency because
the constituency fails to maintain solidarity on an ongoing basis. This abstractness is, however, what makes class as a concept
more, not less, important. To the extent that capitalism provides the systemic context even for problems that are not of its making
(though it may be responsible for bringing them forward as problems and endowing them with their particular manifestations) the
category of class cuts across all other categories of social analysis. Because it is most important not as a concrete social entity but
as an abstract rational category, class enables a rational critique of capitalism in a way that competing concepts do not. It points to
the fundamental principle for the organization of power in capitalist society; for power in capitalist society itself is ab stract, the
attribute of the operations of the system rather than of any exclusive social group. It is possible to imagine a capitalism that has
assimilated different genders, ethnicities, and so on into its structure; it is not possible to imagine capitalism without classes. If these
other categories are necessary to understand the concrete manifestations of class in political consciousness and activity, class itself
is even more indispensable to the ideological demystification of these categories in the analysis of power. Be cause of their very
social concreteness, genders, ethnicities, and other such categories are readily assimilable into the power struc ture of capitalist
society, and it is relatively easy to mistake the assimilation of some members of the groups in question for the assimilation of the
whole. Group identification comes much easier when the group appears as a concrete social entity .
Natives
Native American exploitation is structured through capitalism’s
imperative to destroy competition
Hedges ’12 Chris Hedges, “Welcome to the Asylum,” Truthdig, 4/30/2012,
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/welcome_to_the_asylum_20120430/
When the most basic elements that sustain life are reduced to a cash product, life has no intrinsic value. The extinguishing of
“primitive” societies, those that were defined by animism and mysticism, those that celebrated ambiguity and mystery, those that
respected the centrality of the human imagination, removed the only ideological counterweight to a self-devouring capitalist
ideology. Those who held on to pre-modern beliefs, such as Native Americans, who structured themselves around a communal life
and self-sacrifice rather than hoarding and wage exploitation, could not be accommodated within the ethic of capitalist exploitation,
the cult of the self and the lust for imperial expansion. The prosaic was pitted against the allegorical. And as we race toward the
collapse of the planet’s ecosystem we must restore this older vision of life if we are to survive. The war on the Native Americans, like
the wars waged by colonialists around the globe, was waged to eradicate not only a people but a competing ethic. The older form of
human community was antithetical and hostile to capitalism, the primacy of the technological state and the demands of empire . This
struggle between belief systems was not lost on Marx. “The Ethnological Notebooks of Karl Marx” is a series of observations derived
from Marx’s reading of works by historians and anthropologists. He took notes about the traditions, practices, social structure,
economic systems and beliefs of numerous indigenous cultures targeted for destruction. Marx noted arcane details about the
formation of Native American society, but also that “lands were owned by the tribes in common, while tenement-houses were owned
jointly by their occupants.” He wrote of the Aztecs, “Commune tenure of lands; Life in large households composed of a number of
related families.” He went on, “… reasons for believing they practiced communism in living in the household.” Native Americans,
especially the Iroquois, provided the governing model for the union of the American colonies, and also proved vital to Marx and
Engel’s vision of communism.
Feminism
Feminist approaches to labor only contest the inequalities of wage
relations without theorizing their fundamental cause. This makes
both sexual and class inequality inevitable—only universal resistance
to capital creates space for total emancipation.
Cotter ‘1 Jennifer Cotter, Assistant Professor of English at William Jewell College, “Eclipsing Exploitation: Transnational
Feminism, Sex Work, and the State,” Red Critique, Spring 2001, http://redcritique.org/spring2001/eclipsingexploitation.htm
This "transnationalism," therefore, is itself a form of crisis management for capitalism that does not go beyond the localism that it
claims to contest. Nowhere is this more clear than in transnational feminism's re-theorization and normalization of the concept of
class. Under the banner of "transnationalism" the dominant feminism now claims to "return" to issues of class, labor, and "economic
production" in the theorization of the material conditions of women's lives, after decades of denying their relationship. For instance,
like many feminists, Angela McRobbie wants to distance herself from the failures of post-modern feminism by showing that its
culturalist focus on "desire" and "pleasure" in consumption and its subsequent inattention to "the highly exploitative conditions under
which [consumer] goods . . . have been produced," have engendered a mode of feminism that has "resulted in the [economic]
bottom end . . . of the social hierarchy being dropped from the political and intellectual agenda" (32-33; emphasis added). As a
consequence she argues that feminism, if it is to be effective toward social change, must not abandon "class as a primary concept
for understanding social structure" (38). Likewise, in their articulation of "transnational feminist cultural studies" Kaplan and Grewal
argue for the necessity of "such terms as division of labor, class, capital, commodification, and production" in feminism if it is going
to address the material conditions of all women's lives, not just some ("Beyond" 351). However, in transnational feminism and
cultural feminist theory generally, "class" is theorized not as the place of the subject in the social relations of production but as
his/her location in the social relations of reproduction, exchange, and consumption, or what McRobbie calls the "social relations of
shopping." While transnational feminists are now rushing to address "class," the theory of class that they propose is one that
displaces economic contradictions in the social relations of production, with moral and ethical contradictions in the "workplace." For
McRobbie "class" and "production" are understood in occupationalist terms—in terms of the type of work performed and the social
status it has in the workplace—not in terms of one's relationship to the means of production . In her analysis of women in the fashion
industry, for instance, she argues that what is necessary in order to change their exploitative conditions of "production" is a "(New)
Labor policy" that "think[s] across the currently unbridgeable gap" between various sectors of the international fashion industry by
emphasizing collaboration and ethical understanding between designers and pieceworkers and public pressure from fashion
magazines, celebrities, and other consumers to move women into "better paid and more highly skilled work" (42). In short,
transforming "production relations," according to McRobbie, means embracing solutions that propose to change the position of
women within the existing division of labor from one sector to another, or changing the way in which particular sectors are ethically
valued by others. In actuality, what she and other feminist theorists today are calling the sphere of "production" is in fact the sphere
of the circulation of labor-power as a commodity. That is, they focus on changing the terms under which labor-power is circulated as
a commodity: the terms within which it is bought and sold. What is excluded by the theorization of "class" and "production" as modes
of "circulation" is the possibility and necessity of transforming the relations under which labor-power is produced as a commodity:
the conditions of exploitation that enable it to be bought and sold in the first place. The position of labor-power as a commodity is
taken for granted as "given" in transnational feminist discourse and, as a consequence, "class" is normalized. This leads to practices
that restrict feminism to cooperation with the existing social relations of production without transforming them.
In contesting material inequalities insofar as they indicate problems

of sexuality, feminist theory tacitly accepts the supporting conditions
of patriarchy. Only a materially-oriented feminism centered around
class universality solves.
Cotter ‘2 Jennifer Cotter, Assistant Professor of English at William Jewell College, “Feminism Now,” Red Critique,
March/April 2002, http://redcritique.org/MarchApril02/feminismnow.htm
In this paper I argue that for feminism to confront its own crisis, it must deal with its obsession with "post-" theories (from post-
structuralism to post-Marxism) and instead produce transformative praxis that puts the focus on the needs of women for material
equality and freedom from necessity. The retreat into culturalism—in which culture is determining of all social relations—is so deep
in contemporary feminism that an argument such as the one I make is nowadays automatically dismissed as a late form of
"economism". But a feminism not founded on material conditions, as the history of feminism in fact proves, is ineffective. In its most
effective moments, feminism has worked to address this task by dialectically relating the questions of gender and sexuality to
matters of labor, capital, and their relation ("exploitation"). Gender, sexuality, and the needs of women for material equality and
freedom from necessity were never treated as simply personal or cultural issues—that is, as interpersonal relations or floating signs
without any set meanings. Rather, they were understood as social relations and as such the effects of englobing historical
conditions of production. Contemporary feminism, as I have already implied, has all but abandoned the question of mode of
production—especially the relation of labor-capital and its impact on gender and sexuality—and has put in place of revolutionary
praxis (as a means for ending economic inequality and restoring social justice), an "ethical resistance"—a new "transnational civil
society". "Ethical resistance", to be clear, transforms the laws of motion of capital into sentimental codes of affect, caring, and civility
and, therefore, advocates primarily for changes in behavior as a means for social transformation. In this context, contemporary
feminism has placed primary emphasis on interpersonal, "emotional relations", and specifically "caring labor" and "emotional labor"
as the root site of "resistance" and "agency" for women. In doing so, transnational feminism puts forward the understanding that the
social relations of reproduction are not only autonomous from the relations of production but also the root social relations that need
to be transformed in order to emancipate women. In doing so, transnational feminism restricts change for women to within the social
relations of production based on exploitation. For instance, cultural theorists such as J.K. Gibson-Graham, Stephen Resnick and
Richard Wolff argue that what is important in determining the material conditions of people's lives under capitalism is not whether or
not they are exploited but the "affective [and emotional] intensity associated with exploitation"—that is, how they experience
exploitation (Class and Its Others 14-15). Following this logic, feminists such as Harriet Fraad and Jenny Cameron argue that what
is necessary for changing the conditions of women's lives is transforming the "emotional division of labor" and how women
affectively and emotionally perceive their position in the mode of production and the social division of labor. As a consequence,
contemporary feminists are advocating as solutions to material inequalities and conditions of economic necessity for women under
capitalism, "new" models of civil, interpersonal, and emotional behavior such as Chela Sandoval's "postmodern love", Marjorie
Mayo's "emotional democracy", and Rosemary Hennessy's "revolutionary love". What makes a critique of this turn to "civility" all the
more urgent is that many contemporary feminists (such as Mayo and Hennessy) who advance "ethical resistance" do so under the
pretext of presenting a "revolutionary", "socialist" or "anti-capitalist" solution to the material contradictions of women's lives in
capitalism and, as a consequence, mislead women who are struggling for social transformation to reformist solutions. "Ethics" has,
in fact, become the primary method by which contemporary feminism and cultural theory generally try to "distance" itself from the
problems related to its reliance on "post-" theories (such as post-structuralism and its notion of "free play", which, it has increasingly
become evident, serves as a defense of the "free market" and ruling class interests). As a result of the increasing pressure of
economic inequalities in transnational capitalism and its consequences in deteriorating the conditions of women's lives, many
feminists have had to embrace projects that "oppose" capitalism (on "ethical grounds") in order to remain "credible". Transnational
feminism, to put it bluntly, is political opportunism with a progressive face. That is, it purports to address the needs of women
globally—but the actual practices proposed by transnational feminists do little to change the material conditions of the vast majority
of women's lives, and in fact reveal that the (affective/emotional) "needs" to which transnationalists attend are actually the very
privileged concerns of those whose needs have already been met. This is because by reducing the transformation of material
conditions of exploitation to changing behavioral norms and codes of civil conduct, feminism goes no further than offering a "caring
capitalism" as "resistance" to material inequality and dire necessity for the majority of women around the globe. As I argue
throughout the essay, far from working to address the material conditions of need for women in transnational capitalism, the "new
models" of "transnational civil society", "civility" and "ethical citizenship" that transnational feminism offers are actually an updating of
the traditional and illusory notion of "freedom" as "autonomy" from material conditions necessity that has long served to help
maintain capitalist production and the exploitation of the majority's labor for the profit of the minority. In fact, transnational feminism
is a particularly destructive path for feminism and has become a most effective ally of transnational capitalism, which is violently
working to undermine and erode the material conditions available for collective social well being, economic security, and freedom
from exploitation and economic necessity for all persons, in order to maintain profit. By putting forward the notion that social
transformation for women is to be found primarily in behavioral changes and changes in interpersonal relations, transnational
feminism abandons any notion of "material freedom" for women, which requires not merely "self-empowered" changes in personal
conduct and how we emotionally and affectively perceive the material conditions in which we live, but change in the material
conditions of production that subordinate the needs of the majority to profit for the few.
Even radical feminism’s acceptance of a ‘sunny capitalism’ free of

sexual exploitation makes crucial ideological concessions to
bourgeois forces, funneling revolutionary energy into minimal
reforms and failing to contest the root causes of private property
which cause violence against women.
Cotter ‘2 Jennifer Cotter, “War and Domestic Violence,” Red Critique, September/October 2002,
http://redcritique.org/SeptOct02/waranddomesticviolence.htm
Far from challenging the material basis—the class relations—behind the state, transnational feminism simply furthers the logic of
privatization and inculcates women into the imperialist project by presenting the complete deterioriation of social control of
resources, as an instance of "radical agency". The formal opposition to the "state" and to "imperialist war" by transnational feminism
turns out to be a quiet support for the economic relations of imperialism. The support by transnational feminism for the "redistribution
of capital" conceals the source of the material contradictions for women in the international division of labor: that is, the production of
capital—the fact that workers must work part of the day to produce necessary labor for their own reproduction and part of the day to
produce surplus-labor for the ruling class. By supporting the "redistribution of capital" as a radical act of "resistance", transnational
feminists are merely representing the interests of monopoly capital for profit as the general interest of all women. It is an economic
necessity for monopoly capitalists not simply to export goods but to "export capital" to new regions to develop production relations
conducive to raising profit. When other imperialist interests are also competing to concentrate production in the same regions in their
own hands, or when other local conditions owing to uneven development in capitalism prevent this from being done through
peaceful means, this makes warfare a necessary means for monopoly capitalists to raise the rate of profit. But, in other
circumstances this can be done by peaceful means. NGOs, and the transnational feminist support of them as the "alternative", are
merely one means to advance imperialist interests through peaceful means. They are one way in which transnational capital exports
capital to secure profitable conditions of production: they serve as a supplement to direct financial investment into industry and
production by specific cartels and finance capitalists, by investing in the social and cultural conditions that will promote the
adjustment of workers to their new conditions of exploitation. The fixation on the "state" and "war" as autonomous problems are an
ideological "decoy" for the underlying economic interests of capitalism. What transnational feminism helps provide ideological alibis
for is not actually the dismantling of the "state". Instead, it simply helps to ideologically "get rid" of the problems of the state as the
only provider of social services under capitalism and the necessity of socially owned and controlled resources to emancipate
women, in order to create more room for transnational capitalism. What it is instead set on dismantling is social citizenship, the
necessity for collective ownership and control of the means of production so that the life conditions of citizens cannot be dictated by
the interests of a few for profit, but are determined on the basis of human need. The notion of "resistant agency" is simply a re-
articulation of "civil citizenship"—"autonomous" freedoms of the individual abstracted from the conditions of necessity for the
majority of women in the international division of labor. Understood on these terms, arguments about the individualized agency of
women under the burqa, it is becoming all too clear, are a thin mask for protecting imperialism. This ideological strategy specifically
appeals to the interests of petit-bourgeois women of the North (aiming to protect their share of the surplus-labor of women of the
South), who support measures of increased productivity for women of Afghanistan and the Islamic diaspora so long as these
"investments" are made within production relations that will allow for a greater "return" to investment in the form of higher levels of
surplus-labor. This project is not at all inconsistent with the material basis and the ideological masking of the "war effort" that
transnational feminists formally oppose. For example, many have held up as "proof positive" that the current war is a war of
"liberation", that Afghan women are now being taught to read and write for the first time as a result of the overthrow of the Taliban
dictatorship. But the opportunistic track record of the United States toward protecting the material conditions to ensure equality for
women in Afghanistan, Iraq, the United States . . . including freedom from domestic violence, reveals that these conditions are only
"supported" when it is profitable to the ruling class. The U.S. support for the literacy of women and freedom from state sanctioned
abuse and murder by their husbands was not a priority when it meant accepting a regime in Afghanistan with which the U.S. could
not easily dominate the business relationship. Moreover, it is not an effort to emancipate women from exploitation and oppression
now that the Taliban proved to be no longer profitable for U.S. monopoly capital. Instead, it is an effort to process women into the
skills necessary to be better (i.e., more profitable) workers for transnational capital now that a regime more friendly to U.S. capital
rules in Afghanistan. Moreover, because these women are coming out of a situation of state sanctioned domestic violence and
discrimination, they will prove to be cheaper labor for transnational corporations. In like manner, by idealizing the conditions of
violence against Afghan women as a question of "individualized agency" and "civil rights" (against the U.S. and/or Islamic
fundamentalism), transnational feminism erases the necessity of economic security founded not upon private property and "national
security" but on collective ownership of the means of production. The contradictions of "public control" over social resources under
capitalism—that is, in the form of the modern "state"—is not an effect of an autonomous "state power" rather, it is the subordination
of these collectively produced resources to private ownership of the means of production. That is, the fact that the state at its
material basis is a product of class antagonisms and is produced to protect class relations. It is, as Marx and Engels argued, "a
committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie" (57). The state's social resources are the reserves of surplus-
labor (made possible by the exploitation of labor in production) that are allotted for reproducing social conditions for profit, not need.
Moreover, this basic contradiction—the extraction of surplus-labor for profit and the use of a portion of this surplus-labor to
reproduce production for profit—does not disappear if "reproduction" is further privatized in the hands of specific corporations and
non-governmental organizations. To challenge subordination of workers' needs—including all women's need for freedom from
domestic violence—to production for profit, it is necessary to transform the conditions of exploitation and private ownership of the
means of production that "necessitate" the production of surplus-labor and, as a consequence, need the modern state to adjudicate
a portion of these resources to reproduce social conditions on behalf of the ruling class. Women cannot be emancipated from
violence against them, through warfare or domestic violence, without freeing them from these conditions of necessity under
capitalism. That is, without abolishing the material conditions that reproduce global violence against women—the privatized family
and the social relations of production on which it depends (private property)—and putting in place social relations of production
based on collective ownership and control of the means of production.
Feminism – AT: Irreduceability
The idea that identity differences like sexuality are irreduceable to
particular social configurations naturalizes their hierarchical presence
as well as the conditions which enable them
Cotter ‘2 Jennifer Cotter, Assistant Professor of English at William Jewell College, “Feminism Now,” Red Critique,
March/April 2002, http://redcritique.org/MarchApril02/feminismnow.htm
Before further examining the consequences for women of contemporary feminism's turn to "civility", it is first necessary to further
examine the underlying "post-" theory of "difference" that it uses to support its argument for "ethical resistance" and "negotiation
within" capitalism as the only way to change the material conditions of women's lives. The dominant feminism has long embraced
"post-" theories which understand social "differences" as "irreducible differences" that are "post-production", "post-class", and "post-
labor". In other words, contemporary feminism sees "differences" as autonomous and unexplainable on any terms outside
themselves such as the mode of production. With increases in material inequality in the international division of labor, there has
been a "renewed" interest in materialism and pressure on feminists to address the material conditions of gender and sexuality and
their relation to inequality in transnational capitalism. However, while many contemporary feminists now formally distance
themselves from "post-" theories, they embrace its logic by explaining material reality through a logic of "muddying" and "inbetween-
ness" in which there is no way to totally transform (or even explain) social relations, only the possibility of "negotiation" within
capitalism. It is by now a routine assumption within contemporary feminism (and the left in general) that a dialectical and historical
materialist theory of "totality"—which explains social differences in terms of their root historical relations in the mode of production
and opens up the possibility of fundamental transformation—reduces the material reality of women's lives to an "abstract" and
"binary", metaphysical narrative. For instance, in their introduction to Between Woman and Nation: Nationalism, Transnational
Feminisms, and the State, Caren Kaplan, Norma Alarcón and Minoo Moallem argue that "the marxist call to 'totalize' in opposition to
'globalization' ignores the implications for many subjects vis-à-vis the (dis)array of localities and differences that have been
produced through the material effects of discursive practices and the discursive effects of material practices" (Kaplan et al 3). The
claim here is that dialectically relating gender and sexuality to the mode of production represents the material reality of differences
as "fixed" and "self-evident" and, therefore, erases the "actual conditions" and "lived reality" of "historical women". What is instead
necessary, transnational feminists argue, is a "playful" logic of "in-betweeness" that does not purport to resolve social contradictions
but "negotiates" within them. According to this argument, an "eclectic" position that "negotiates" social differences (without deciding
on any set position) produces a more historically aware and "post-binary" understanding of "concrete" material reality of "historical
women" that "links" discourse to "lived reality". Transnational feminist cultural studies has, therefore, embraced a logic of
"negotiation", "muddying" and "inbetween-ness" to explain the material conditions of women's lives and the "relation" between
various "differences". In fact, transnational feminists Kaplan and Grewal argue, it is precisely a logic of "inbetween-ness" and
"negotiation"—what they call a "muddying" logic which "refuses to choose"—that "bypasses conventional binary divisions" and
brings Transnational Feminist Cultural Studies beyond the divides between "gender" and "class", "Marxism" and "feminism" . . .
They, therefore, go on to argue for an eclectic fusion of feminism, Marxism, and poststructuralism as a way to "negotiate" the
historical divides between gender and class and resolve the rift between Marxism and Feminism. What is at stake in this
"inbetween" theory of materialism and how does a "muddying logic" explain the "actual conditions" of "historical women"? More
importantly, what consequence does this explanation have for struggles to transform the material conditions of women's lives and
free them from conditions of exploitation and dire need in the international division of labor? At the core of transnational feminism's
"in-between" theory of "difference" is the argument that social differences such as "gender", "sexuality" and "race" are "non-
dialectizable", or what Judith Butler calls "irreducible" differences. More specifically, this means that they cannot be posited as
having material conditions outside themselves such as the mode of production, class, and labor. Instead, transnational feminists
such as Caren Kaplan, Norma Alarcón, and Minoo Moallem argue that "differences" are constituted by an internal "double bind". A
"double bind" to be clear, is an epistemological contradiction within "differences"—what is considered in "post" theories to be a basic
condition of all language, meaning, and explanation—that denies difference and simultaneously universalizes difference. Kaplan,
Alarcón and Moallem argue, for instance, that "difference" is constituted by: An aporia, a spatial-temporal indeterminacy where
différance as 'interminable experience' comes into being, [which] is not a 'dialectizable contradiction in the Hegelian or Marxist
sense' and is constitutive of a double bind that cannot be overcome except through an epistemological metanarrative, which in turn
denies the marginalization of difference qua difference and the suffering that construction entails". (Alarcón et al 2; also quoting
Derrida's Aporias) For these feminists, there is no definite "outside" to the "double bind" that constitutes differences and social
inequalities. To put this another way, there is no position from which one can decisively oppose social inequalities without, at the
same time, universalizing and erasing "difference" and, therefore, reproducing another set of inequalities. The only way to try and
"explain" differences "outside" of this "double bind"—that is, the only way out of the simultaneous erasure and universalization of
difference—is through a contesting "epistemological metanarrative". However, according to this same logic, a "metanarrative"
cannot actually resolve the contradiction at the core of the "double bind" without at the same time reinstalling a universalized identity
that erases difference. This is because any new "narrative" or mode of explaining difference is, according to this theory, always
based on this irresolvable "double bind". This internal "double bind" in other words, is the fundamental and basic condition of all
differences. For this theory, the only way one can ultimately explain social differences is to see them as "epistemological
contradictions" and yet, this theory ultimately leads to the conclusion that there is no way outside of such epistemological
contradictions and the inequalities they create. The "double bind" is a pan-historical and eternal contradiction. As a consequence,
social inequalities that are "enabled" by this double bind are also eternal. Here transnational feminist cultural studies re-turns to
exactly what it claims to move away from: an ahistorical post-structuralism that reduces social contradictions to the textual play of
differences in meaning and, meanwhile, leaves the historical and material conditions of inequality intact. ' "Inbetween-ness" and
"negotiation" in other words do not offer a position that explains the historical conditions of inequality that have produced social
differences rather, they advance a metaphysical account of social differences that reduce difference to an ahistorical aporia or
"interminable [that is, endless] experience". This is not so much a position "beyond binaries" as it is a return to a new order of
"experience" that displaces the social and historical relations that produce material inequality with "textual" interpretations and
descriptions of "experience". But what lies behind this ahistorical notion of "difference" is the understanding that social differences
are "autonomous" and "self-producing" differences. For instance, in Danielle Juteau's contribution to Between Woman and Nation
she argues that social differences such as "gender", "ethnicity", "nation" and "sex" are constituted by "analytically distinct" social
formations, each with their own "conditions of production, reproduction, and transformation" (Juteau 142). There is no "outside" to
social differences, only an internal self-producing dynamic—like the metaphysical dynamic of the "double-bind"—that lies outside of
any historical relations that enable their production. It is not surprising, therefore, to see transnational feminists such as Norma
Alarcón, return to "flesh and blood experience" as the basis for understanding the "materiality" of gender, and sexuality. In the midst
of the claims for uncovering the social conditions of "historical women" is a return to the "naturalness" of differences and "bodily
experience" of them. Such a position naturalizes social differences and, as a consequence, conceals over the social and historical
conditions that produce differences and that enable difference to be used as a tool for increasing exploitation. What this reveals is
that transnational feminism does not, in fact, produce a "post-binary" postion ("beyond" male/female, inside/outside,
idealism/materialism, nature/culture, etc.) rather, it produces an eclectic position that merely oscillates between "discursive
invention" (the understanding that social differences are "invented" by discourse) and "biologism" (the understanding that social
differences are "self-producing", "self-evident", and natural processes outside of any historical and social relation of production). In
short, what lies behind transnational feminisms' call for "negotiation" is a thin culturalism that is actually a very traditional defense of
the autonomy of social differences. "In-between-ness" and "negotiation" are, in other words, rhetorical seductions for advancing
"singularity", particularity, and autonomy: the notion that social differences are natural, unchangeable and independent of any
external historical and material conditions that enable their production. That is, that they are "self-inventing", "self-producing"
differences.
Feminism – AT: Perm
Patriarchy is rooted in material conditions that can be confronted only
through labor theory of value—any risk of a link to the perm turns the
case
Cotter ‘1 Jennifer Cotter, Assistant Professor of English at William Jewell College, “Eclipsing Exploitation: Transnational
Feminism, Sex Work, and the State,” Red Critique, Spring 2001, http://redcritique.org/spring2001/eclipsingexploitation.htm
When the inquiry into conditions of production is restricted to what is actually the sphere of circulation, the material relations
between owner and worker appear to be relations of equality and freedom of choice— where both the buyer and seller of labor-
power are equal before the law and meet in the marketplace to each other's mutual advantage. It is on these terms that, despite
claims to recognize class as a material antagonism not merely a lifestyle "difference," McRobbie argues: "there is no inherent
reason why closer collaboration of this sort could not take place to the mutual advantage of all parties" (42). Such a view, however,
is a utopian reading of "class" which takes a moral stand against the effects of capitalist exploitation but fails to serve as a guide for
transforming the fundamental material contradictions that enable it. It fails to serve as a guide for transformation because, though it
criticizes the consequences of capitalism, it does not actually explain them and can therefore only "reject" the harmful effects of
capitalism without abolishing its fundamental processes. However, once we leave the sphere of circulation and turn toward what
Marx called the "hidden abode of production" what is laid bare and explained is the "secret of profit making": the production of
"surplus-value" (Capital, Vol. 1 279). Engels explains, . . . that the appropriation of unpaid labor is the basic form of the capitalist
mode of production and of the exploitation of the worker effected through it; that even if the capitalist buys the labor power of his
laborer at its full value as a commodity on the market, he yet extracts more value from it than he paid for; and that in the ultimate
analysis this surplus value forms those sums of value from which are heaped up the constantly increasing masses of capital in the
hands of the possessing classes. (Engels 33) It is this "discovery of surplus-value" and its production, as Engels makes clear in Anti-
Dühring, that distinguishes utopian and reformist understandings of "production" from materialist and revolutionary understandings
(Engels 33). Without knowledge of capitalist production as the production of surplus-value and the exploitation of labor, the
dominant feminism avoids transforming these conditions and putting in place the material conditions that are necessary to produce
collectivity in the work place—that is collective production not for the profit of some but the needs of all. Women cannot be
emancipated from exploitation and oppression under conditions in which some can appropriate the surplus-labor of others. This is
because emancipation requires public ownership and control over the material resources of society (the products of collective labor)
and thus, of the means of production. Without public ownership of the means of production—in which all persons collectively
determine the uses toward which social labor is put—the vast majority of women will continue to be denied economic access and
their labor will continue to be exploited. Thus, feminism must produce scientific knowledge of production—of the production of
surplus-value—so that it is able to produce practices that do not simply moralize against the consequences of capitalism but that are
capable of transforming its fundamental conditions. Freedom from oppression and exploitation for women must be materially
enabled, by putting the material conditions in place for it.
Liberal Feminism
In contesting domination in terms of political relations, liberal
feminism can only mitigate the effects of sexual inequality without
attacking its fundamental coordinates of labor exploitation. Only
class warfare can solve for the economic conditions which produce
violence against women.
Cotter ‘2 Jennifer Cotter, “War and Domestic Violence,” Red Critique, September/October 2002,
http://redcritique.org/SeptOct02/waranddomesticviolence.htm
What actually lies behind these contradictions are historical conditions of necessity in capitalism: the fact that, on the one hand,
economic compulsion brought on by exploitation in production drives women to continue to rely on the privatized family even though
it is a site of violence and abuse and, on the other hand, the military is itself necessary under capitalism in order to defend private
property relations, and specifically the interests of monopoly capitalists, that economically compel workers to rely on the privatized
family to begin with. These contradictions are symptomatic of the failure to resolve domestic violence by means of rearranging the
social relations of reproduction. Negotiation with the "state" for more resources to help crisis manage the privatized family does not
address the root issue of domestic violence. What is needed is freedom from necessity brought on by exploitation. This is because
domestic violence is a problem that stems from contradictions in production, which cannot be resolved through the social relations of
reproduction. Domestic violence is enabled by the privatized family which itself is a historical necessity under capitalism: workers
are economically compelled to rely on it as an economic unit owing to their increasing impoverishment in the social relations of
production (the more they produce, the more capital gets concentrated into fewer hands), at the same time they provide a valuable
service for capital by absorbing the burden of reproducing labor-power. The contradictions of the family under capitalism, therefore,
lead to greater economic and social contradictions for workers, not fewer. Fundamental changes in the relations of reproduction
require changes in the relations of production. This is further seen in the fact that, although capital historically necessitates the
subordination of relations of reproduction to private ownership of the means of production in order to offset the cost to capital of
reproducing labor-power, this use of "cost effective" measures (what Lenin called "clipping coupons") to reserve more of the existing
surplus-labor for profit does not stop the crisis in production and the decline in the rate of profit. It reduces the drain on profit, but
does not itself resolve the over all decline in the rate of profit. This requires access to new reserves of labor-power from which to
extract surplus-labor (through exploitation)—thus reproducing the economic conditions of private property and their ideological
effects that enable domestic violence against women. It is not an autonomous "state power" (which locates change in
"reproduction") but the social relations of production based on private property that the state is produced in order to maintain, that is
the "root cause" of violence against women through warfare and domestic violence. "National security" is an ideological strategy to
represent the interests of the ruling class to use imperialist warfare for a greater monopoly over the global surplus-labor, as the
general interests of all. Feminism, in order to enable the eradication of domestic violence needs to confront the conditions of
exploitation in the social relations of production that necessitate the state, imperialist warfare, and violence against women. Without
addressing the emancipation of labor from exploitation (the private appropriation of surplus labor), and freedom of workers from
conditions of necessity in capitalism (such as the economic compulsion of workers to rely upon the "privatized family" as an
economic unit to survive), women cannot be freed from the conditions that reproduce domestic violence and imperialist warfare.
Transgender
The 1AC's understanding of progress and power is disastrous -
attempts to liberate transgendered individuals make the mistake of
basing emancipation in localized, identity-based movements. Local
politics, however, are just another manifestation of capitalism - the
local is inevitably tied to and manipulated by global structures,
meaning the aff is co-opted and redeployed to fracture resistance to
capital and disable class consciousness.
Hennessy 2k Rosemary Hennessy, Professor of English and Director of the Center for the Study of Women, Gender, and
Sexuality at Rice University, Profit and Pleasure: Sexual Identities in Late Capitalism, 2000, pp. 8-9, Questia
Late capitalism’s new economic, political, and cultural structures have also intensified the relationship between global and local
situations. Global transnational corporations rely on localities of many sorts as sites for capital accumulation through production,
marketing, and knowledgemaking. Global-localism has become both the paradigm of production and an explicit new strategy by
which the corporation infiltrates various localities without forfeiting its global aims (Dirlik 34). From corporate headquarters, CEOs
orchestrate the incorporation of particular localities into the demands of global capital at the same time that the corporation is
domesticated into the local society. Thus it is in the interests of global capitalism to celebrate and enhance awareness of local
communities, cultures, and forms of identification. But this cannot be done in a way that makes evident their exploitation, that is, in a
way that makes visible the real material relationship between the global and the local (Dirlik 35). Against capitalism’s penetration of
local communities, many “local” groups—indigenous people’s movements, ethnic and women’s organizations, lesbian, gay, and
transgender rights movements—have presented themselves as potential sites for liberation struggles. Undoubtedly, these struggles
have indeed accomplished changes that have enhanced the quality of life for countless people. But the celebration of “the local” as
a self-defined space for the affirmation of cultural identity and the formation of political resistance often also play into late
capitalism’s opportunistic use of local-izing—not just as an arrangement of production but also as a structure of knowing . The turn
to “the local” has also been the characteristic talisman of a postmodern culture and politics that has repudiated the totalizing
narratives of modernity. The claims of indigenous and ethnic groups, of women, and of lesbian and gay people have been an
important part of postmodern challenges to the adequacy of cultural narratives—among them enlightened humanism and
Eurocentric scholarship—that do not address the histories of subaltern peoples. However, insofar as their counter-narratives put
forward an alternative that de-links the interests of particular social groups from the larger collective that they are part of, they tend
to promote political projects that keep the structures of capitalism invisible.
Queer Theory
Embracing ecstatic expressions of desire is politically disastrous—
queer pessimism’s anti-social turn makes it into a force of
commodification and normalization
Winnubst ’12 Shannon Winnubst, “The Queer Thing about Neoliberal Pleasure: A Foucauldian Warning,” Foucault
Studies, no. 14, pp. 79-97, September 2012
queer
As the field of scholarship that distinguished itself, especially in its early years, as probing the social meanings and mappings of pleasure,
theory’s historical emergence in the midst of neoliberalisms’s cultural

ascent may be more than coincidence. Given the problematics of
neoliberalism that I have derived from Foucault here, this valorizing of pleasure
as the social site of transgression becomes rather suspect. While the twists and
turns of this field of scholarship over the last two decades do not acquiesce to any easy, general pattern, I conclude with speculations about how it
intersects, overlaps and perhaps even coalesces with some of the

more subtle, but nonetheless constitutive, dynamics of neoliberal
practices and values. Specifically, I sketch how the queer theorizing of pleasure
known as “the anti-social turn” may be one of neoliberalism’s best
ruses and, subsequently, the turn to the racialized character of pleasure in scholarship known as “queer of color critique” is impera-tive for any
effort at resisting this clever alluring social rationality of neoliberalism. In the archaeology of neoliberalism’s dominant categories that I have developed
here, the non-normative rationality that sets neoliberalism apart from other objects of Fou-cault’s genealogies—madness, criminality, sexuality—turns
insofar as neoliberalism extends the

out to be driven by the formal condition of fungibility. That is,
economic calculation of enterprising, entrepreneurial interests into all

domains of social, political, personal and even ethical life, it
formalizes all objects of evaluation. Whether racial difference, music
genre, healthcare provisions, incarceration rates or sexual
orientation, the only question for neoliberalism’s non-normative
rationality is the quantifiable: how many fungible units are increased
or decreased? Lisa Duggan’s trenchant formulation of “homonormativity”
thus becomes the problem of “homoneoliberalism.”60 That is, identity
politics and histories become fodder for the fungible machine of
enterprise only on the condition that all sexual practices and
pleasures are also formalized, shorn of historical and social
differentiation. Rather than fall back on a Marxist ideological analysis, however, Foucault’s analysis allows us to sharpen the site of
intervention: the formalizing of social relations and difference into fungible units. Placing this intervention in Foucault’s overarching argument that
this
neoliberalism emerges as an intensification of classical liberalism’s values, practices and categories, I em-phasize that
formalizing process turns on an erasure of history. That is, in the parti-cular

concepts of social difference that concern me most (racial, gender, sexuality—all of which occur differently), the
neoliberal aestheticizing of difference can only occur through a
flattening out of the intense histories of xenophobia and violence that
attach to each of these categories in liberal cultures. The tools of
neoliberal cultures here are dizzying: contorted rhetorical strategies of
amnesia and repression; selective historical narratives that feed feel-
good multiculturalism; savvy eye candy that markets and
“celebrates” diversity; and so on. The histories of violence that attach to each of these categories of
social difference must not circulate if the work of fungibility is to feed the
neoliberal marketing of pleasure, freedom, and truth—of ethics. It thus

becomes worrisome to find that the central trend of queer theory that engages the
domain of pleasures as the radicalizing horizon for queer lives is also

suspiciously ahistorical—namely, the infamous anti-social turn. From the
early work of Leo Bersani to the more recent work of Lee Edelman and Tim Dean, the move to distinguish queer
pleasures as escaping or even undercutting the normalizing grip of

the social (or the political) also turns out to be a distancing from the historical.61
Having constituted “the social” as ende-mically normative, anti-social
theorists argue that the exquisite and distinctive pleasure of sexual
jouissance grants a singular access to transgressive—and hence
resistant—horizons of experience. For example, as an experience of pleasure that, à la Bersani, “shatters the
self,” jouissance has been and continues to be positioned as the singular
horizon of experience that cannot be subsumed into the

heternormative, reproductive logic of the social and the poli-tical. But it
does so precisely through the ecstatic kernel of jouissance that
places it outside of time and place—outside of historical and social
registers of meaning. The anti-social turn claims its place as the
quintessentially radical, resistant mode of living precisely in and
through its ahistorical character. Ironically, this focus on jouissance continues to strike me as a promising mode
of resistance to the fungibility machine of neoliberalism. The characterization of jouissance as a pleasure so intense that it becomes indistinguishable
from pain may well constitute a sub-stantially different experience that resists the flattened out, hyper-stimulated, endlessly streaming acts of
consumption that neoliberalism sells (quite successfully!) as “pleasure.” Jouissance cannot be maximized or intensified, tweaked or manipulated: it is
not an object of willful choice. As Tim Dean puts it, jouissance indicates that rare experience of pleasure that radically disarms the self, not the identity-
confirming, self-enhancing domesticated plea-sure that saturates neoliberal cultures.62 Consequently, because jouissance resists the formalizing
demand at the heart of the neoliberal enterprising rationality, neoliberalism must foreclose the possibility of such an experience taking on any social
meaning. The anti-social turn of queer theory is thereby correct to grasp the resistant character of this substantially different kind of pleasure. The cruel
this branch of queer theory em-braces jouissance precisely

irony, however, is that
as neoliberalism also positions it—namely, as an experience evacuated of

any possible social meaning. And in so doing, it may turn out to be
one of neo-liberalism’s best songs, subtly turning alleged social
transgression into yet another site of entrepreneurial enterprise.
Queer theory, as anyone teaching or writing or reading it can quickly tell you, is a hot commodity: it
continues to be quintessentially “cool.”
Queer theory reflects a postmodern idealism that academics eat up
precisely due to its confirmation of capitalism—‘fluid identity’ is a
new mask for liberal individualism which obscures relations of
production
Case ’94 Sue-Ellen Case, Professor and Chair of Critical Studies in the Theater Department of UCLA, “The Domain-Matrix”,
1994, p. 36-38
Looking back to the 1970s, one is reminded that the notion and the practice of the collective produced one of the signature
structures of lesbian feminism, as of the Marxist tradition. Both traditions posited a challenge to capitalist structures through notions
of collective ownership and its social practice. Lesbian feminism presumed that capitalism was a patriarchal form of economic
practice, deployed against women. Therefore, lesbian feminist events and businesses were organized collectively in order to avoid
replicating patriarchal structures in commerce among women. The majority of the collectives had closed down by the late 1980s. If
the East bloc fell to a successful take-over by global capitalism, lesbian food collectives, bookstore collectives, living collectives, and
theater collectives fell to traditional capitalist practices. The subject was multiple—not in its singular oscillation among multiple
positions, but in its very composition across different individuals. The identity "lesbian feminist" was one that groups sought to
produce. As socialism waned, postmodern individualism gained ground. Sexual practice was thus extracted from its association with
other social and economic practices. By the 1990s, "postmodern lesbian" or queer articles trace the way in which capitalist
projects have appropriated such abandoned territories for their own uses. For example, Sasha Torres's sense of the "prime time les-
bian," and Danae Clark's "Commodity Lesbianism" describe how the media and market make use of the "sign" lesbians to sell their
products. While I would contend that this commodification of what were once collective practices and market uses of the term
"lesbian" is the result of the queer retreat, some of the postmodern protectors would, as Robyn Wiegman has done, fault identity
politics for it, arguing that "it is along the modernist axis of self-assertion and visibility that both a lesbian consumer market and a
marketed commodity repeatedly named lesbian has been achieved'' (10). Yet, in the face of such high capitalist aggressivity, these
authors can offer only celebrations of commodification or, as noted in the section "Queer Performativity," isolated strategies of
subversion. In particular, "subversive shopping" has been formulated as an apt action within the commodified realm. It is difficult to
perceive, finally, what is subversive in buying the version of the sign "lesbian" that ad campaigns have developed. (For a fuller
description of the structures of commodification of "lesbian," see "Slipping into Subculture" and "`Subversive' Shopping" in "Bringing
Home the Meat.") Thus, the critique of the commodified lesbian, severed from any program for change—in isolation—actually
promotes commodification. The evacuation of the outside referent has effectively coupled the body and the materialist critique only
to give them over to, as Reinelt has pointed out, the hegemonic practices that endure in the codes. The new "queer dyke" thus
appears as commodity fetishist—the dildoed dyke who makes of herself an ad as politics. What remains is mapping the exact route
of the retreat through deconstructive critiques. Meanwhile, the collusion with global capitalist uses of such strategies, as noted by
Hennessy above, or of national agendas, still remains untested. As the critique withdraws from notions of communities or
subcultures into the sign "lesbian" slipping among market strategies, it often becomes what it seeks to critique. From the beginning
arguments around "performativity" and "queer" on through the matrix, we can begin to perceive a critical axis forming along the
abandonment of the term "lesbian" for "queer," in its class operations, and in its imperialist uses, along with the evacuation of the
body, as a subject-suspect. Within the poststructuralist critique of those two terms, textualization and inscription are deployed to
cleanse "lesbian" and "body" of their material(ist) accretions. "Queer performativity" thus runs the "race into theory" away from the
site of material interventions. Sagri Dhairyam, in "Racing the Lesbian, Dodging White Critics," states the case succinctly: The rubric
of queer theory, which couples sexuality and theory and collapses lesbian and gay sexualities, tends to effect a slippage of body into
mind: the monstrously feminized body's sensual evocations of smell, fluid, and hidden vaginal spaces with which the name
resonates are cleansed, desexualized into a "queerness" where the body yields to intellect, and a spectrum of sexualities again
denies the lesbian center stage. (30) The challenge of the "live" body needs to be cleaned up by the abstracting efficiency of theory.
But how do all of these theories happen to conjoin with the rise of global capitalism, the new techno-era, and the coming supremacy
of the computer screen?
Fluid Identity
Fluid subjectivity mirrors the irrational expansion of late capital—
borders are transgressed only so that we can set up new shops and
factories on the other side
Snyder 2k Laura Bartlett Snyder, Doctoral Fellow in the English Department at Louisville, “An Introduction,” 2000,
http://athena.louisville.edu/a-s/english/babo/snyder/bounintro.html, accessed 10/15/02
This web site explores the ways postmodern theories of subjectivity facilitate global capitalism. The seed for this project was planted
during “Deconstructed Selves, Postmodern Narratives,” a session at the 20th Century Lit. Conference. I had just heard a paper on
Crash so thoughts of cyborgs and strange postmodern desires were already mingling with a project topic that was due in my
Theories of Interpretation seminar. While Silvio Gaggi flashed slides of Cindy Sherman’s photography—the pictures of her well-
groomed, appropriately feminized body, a 50’s starlet in juxtaposition with images of excrement, false eyelashes, cigarette butts--I
discovered my topic: the ways that the postmodern notion of subjectivity--fluid, unfixed, transgressed boundaries--and the modern
notion of subjectivity-stable, unified, coherent, preserved boundaries-are analogous to the evolution from classical to global/late
capitalism. My theory: While the dissolution of boundaries in postmodern subjectivity may at first seem wildly radical, it actually
facilitates the hegemony by interpellating the ideal subject of global capitalism, one who can manipulate fluid capital ,
produce/consume intangible data, and accept the dissolution of national boundaries for the purpose of exporting manufacturing
work to 3rd world countries, for the purpose of global e-commerce, and for the formation of multinational corporations.
Culture Studies
Culture Studies – Class Prior
Focus on culture turns class politics into selfish individualism—the
primacy of labor is replaced by symbolic consumption, decimating
universalism
Tumino ‘1 Stephen Tumino, professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh, professor of English at the University of
Pittsburgh, “What is Orthodox Marxism and Why it Matters Now More Than Ever Before,” Red Critique, Spring 2001,
http://redcritique.org/spring2001/whatisorthodoxmarxism.htm
In spite of their formal "criticality," the writings of Zizek, Spivak, Smith, Hennessy and other theorists of designer socialisms produce
concepts that legitimate the existing social relations. The notion of class in their work, for example, is the one that now is commonly
deployed in the bourgeois newspapers. In their reporting on what has become known as the "Battle of Seattle," and in the coverage
of the rising tide of protest against the financial institutions of U.S. monopoly capital which are pillaging the nations of the South, the
bourgeois media represents the emergent class struggles as a matter of an alternative "lifestyle choice" (e.g., the Los Angeles
Times, "Hey Hey, Ho Ho, Catch Our Anti-Corporate Puppet Show!"). On this diffusional narrative, "class" is nothing more than an
opportunity for surplus-pleasure "outside" the market for those who have voluntarily "discarded" the normal pleasures of U.S.
culture. It is the same "lifestyle" politics that in the flexodox marxism of Antonio Negri is made an autonomous zone of "immaterial
labor" which he locates as the "real communism" that makes existing society post-capitalist already so that revolution is not
necessary (Empire). What is at the core of both the flexodox marxism and the popular culture of class as "lifestyle" is a de-
politicization of the concepts of Orthodox Marxism which neutralizes them as indexes of social inequality and reduces them to
merely descriptive categories which take what is for what ought to be. Take the writings of Pierre Bourdieu for example. Bourdieu
turns Marx's dialectical concepts of "class" and "capital" which lay bare the social totality, into floating "categories" and reflexive
"classifications" that can be formally applied to any social practice because they have been cut off from their connection to the
objective global relations of production. Bourdieu, in short, legitimates the pattern of class as "lifestyle" in the bourgeois media by his
view that "class" is an outcome of struggles over "symbolic capital" in any "field." I leave aside here that his diffusion of the logic of
capital into "cultural capital," "educational capital" and the like is itself part of a depoliticization of the relation between capital and
labor and thus a blurring of class antagonism. What Bourdieu's "field" theory of class struggle does is segregate the struggles into
so many autonomous zones lacking in systemic determination by the historic structure of property so that everyone is considered to
be equally in possession of "capital" (ownership is rhetorically democratized) making socialist revolution unnecessary. What the
reduction of "class" and "capital" to the self-evidency of local cultural differences cannot explain is the systemic primacy of the
production of surplus-value in unpaid-labor, the basic condition of the global majority which determines that their needs are not
being met and compels them into collective class struggles. Without totalizing knowledge of exploitation—which is why such
dialectical concepts as "capital" form the basis of Orthodox Marxist class theory— exploitation cannot be abolished. The cultural
idealism of the de-politicized voiding of Marxist concepts fits right in with the "volunteer-ism" of the neoliberals and "compassionate"
conservatives that they use to justify their massive privatization programs. Considering class struggle politics as a matter of cultural
struggles over symbolic status is identical to the strategy of considering the dismantling of social welfare as an opportunity for "local"
agency freed from coercive state power, i.e., the bedrock of the "non-governmental" activism and "community" building of the
bourgeois reformists. When President select Bush seeks to mobilize what he calls the "armies of compassion" against the
"Washington insiders" and return "power" to the "people" it is the old cultural studies logic that all politics is "people vs. power bloc,"
a warmed over popular frontism that makes politics a matter of building de-politicized cross-class coalitions for bourgeois right,
utopic models of a post-political social order without class struggle possessing equality of representation that excludes the
revolutionary vanguard. As Marx and Engels said of the "bourgeois socialists" of their day, such utopian measures "at. . . best,
lessen the cost, and simplify the administrative work, of bourgeois government" (Manifesto of the Communist Party, Selected
Works, 59). Zizek's "affirmation" of revolutionary Marxism as a "totalitarian" desire that polarizes the cultural "lifeworld" between
"friends" and "enemies" is another relay of "class-as-an-after-effect of 'struggle'" of the networked left. What the parody does is
make class struggle a rhetorical "invention" of Marx(ists) analogous to the bourgeois "rights" politics of the transnational coalitional
regime of exploitation ruling today, and erases the need for a global theory of social change. Orthodox Marxism cuts through the
closed atmosphere of the "friends" of the networked left and their embrace of a voluntarist "compassionate" millenarianism with a
critique from outside so to expose the global collective need for a revolutionary social theory and red cultural studies to end
exploitation for all.
Culture Studies – Zizek
Subordinating economy to a parcel of cultural life severs the liberal
consensus from its historical roots—this turns theory into a
rationalization of private exchange, as bourgeois ‘self-realization’
Žižek ‘9 Slavoj Žižek, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, Verso: London, 2009, p. 55-56
In keeping with the new spirit of capitalism, an entire ideologico-historical narrative is constructed in which socialism appears as
conservative, hierarchical, and administrative. The lesson of '68 is then "Goodbye Mr. Socialism;' and the true revolution that of
digital capitalism-itself the logical consequence, indeed the "truth;' of the '68 revolt. More radically even, the events of '68 are
inscribed into the fashionable topic of the "paradigm shift:' The parallel between the model of the brain in neuroscience and the
predominant ideological models of society is here indicative.37 There are clear echoes between today's cognitivism and
"postmodern" capitalism: when Daniel Dennett, for example, advocates a shift from the Cartesian notion of the Self as a central
controlling agency of psychic life to a notion of the auto- poetic interaction of competing multiple agents, does this not echo the shift
from central bureaucratic control and planning to the network model? It is thus not only that our brain is socialized-society itself is
also naturalized in the brain,38 which is why Malabou is right in emphasizing the need to address the key question: "What is to be
done to avoid the consciousness of the brain coinciding directly and simply with the spirit of capitalism?" Even Hardt and Negri
endorse this parallel: in the same way as the brain sciences teach us how there is no central Self, so the new society of the
multitude which rules itself wil be like today's cognitivist notion of the ego as a pandemonium of interacting agents with no central
authority running the show . . . No wonder Negri's notion of communism comes uncannily close to that of "postmodern" digital
capitalism.39 Ideologically-and here we come to the crucial point-this shift occurred as a reaction to the revolts of the 1960s (from
May '68 in Paris, to the student movement in Germany, and the hippies in the US). The anti-capitalist protests of the '60S
supplemented the standard critique of socio-economic exploitation with the new topics of cultural critique: the alienation of everyday
life, the commodification of consumption, the inauthenticity of a mass society in which we are forced to "wear masks" and subjected
to sexual and other oppressions, etc. The new spirit of capitalism triumphantly recuperated the egalitarian and anti-hierarchical
rhetoric of 1968, presenting itself as a successful libertarian revolt against the oppressive social organizations characteristic of both
corporate capitalism and Really Existing Socialism-a new libertarian spirit epitomized by dressed-down "cool" capitalists such as Bil
Gates and the founders of Ben and Jerry's ice cream.
Culture Studies – Labor
Culture can only emerge from relations of material difference—culture
studies is merely an ideological tool of late capitalism to displace
antagonism from economic relations onto more abstract and artificial
planes of theory.
Theory," The Red Critique, Fall/Winter 2008, http://www.redcritique.org/FallWinter2008/materialityincontemporaryculturaltheory.htm
While drawing out the ways in which culture is shaped by the developments of labor my argument is that a labor theory of culture
works to connect the most pressing cultural questions to the economic and political structures which determine how people live their
lives. This argument is based on the recognition that labor, as Marx explains, is the "process by which man, through his own
actions, mediates, regulates and controls the metabolism between himself and nature" (Capital 283). Before there can be a culture
of consent and resistance over the socially consequential meaning(s) that shape people's lives, there first needs to be their material
life itself. By grasping the material dependence of culture on the metabolism between labor and nature it follows, as Marx goes on to
explain, "that the man who possesses no other property than his labour power, must, in all conditions of society and culture, be the
slave of other men who have made themselves the owners of the material conditions of labour" ("Gotha Programme" 81). Thus, for
Marx, labor is not simply a natural material process necessary to sustain life but is also a historical zone of conflicts over control of
the means of production. Labor for Marx names "the human essence" ("Theses on Feuerbach" 145), but not in the metaphysical
sense of an "abstraction inherent in each single individual" (145), such as the "rationality" of homo economicus in classical political
economy, but rather as "the ensemble of the social relations" (145) under which men and women interact through their labor with
the material world and each other. Culture, according to Marx, is thus the arena "in which men become conscious of this [economic]
conflict and fight it out" (Critique of Political Economy 21); culture is the place, in other words, where the awareness of labor as the
root of the social is articulated, as well as resisted in "ideology" (21). The boundaries of culture are thus defined by the possibilities
of labor, as both the material basis of culture (what people need to consume) and the meanings attached to these practices (as
essential and consequential or not) are dependent on the collective social project of production (the global division of labor).
Although debates over cultural "values" tend to begin where it seems that labor ends—in the sphere of consumption—the options of
what can and cannot be consumed in any culture are determined by the level of production. Currently, for instance, there is what is
widely commented on as a "return to ideology" and the world is seen as divided between rival "fundamentalisms." Leaving aside that
fundamentalism in Islam is not just about values—although that is the way it is represented in the Western media, it is essentially
about inequality—in the US fundamentalism is seen in purely cultural terms as a rise in religious feelings in response to an invasion
of "alien" cultural values represented under the sign of 9-11 (Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations). US fundamentalism
besides being read as a religious phenomenon is also represented as the dominance of a "red" state mentality over its "blue" rival,
purportedly testifying to basic differences in cultural consumption (Brooks, Frank); latte drinking, Volvo-driving and IKEA shopping
versus soft drinks, NASCAR and Wal-Mart for example. On the latter terms US fundamentalism is supposed to signal the
dominance of an oil dependent mode of production located in the (conservative and evangelical) "red states" over a (liberal and
secular) service economy mostly located in the "blue states". Whether seen as a clash of civilizations between the West and the rest
or a cultural war within the US what the debate over "values" silently covers over is the accumulation of surplus profits in the
countries of the North from the economically dependent countries of the South. When Islamic fundamentalists say the West is on a
crusade to destroy Islam, this is a code for the West is plundering our oil, forcing our governments to spend our money on military
weapons, giving us cell phones and DVDs instead of drinking water,… Fundamentalism is basically an economic struggle
transcoded into populist religious languages for organizational reasons (in mosques, etc.). It is material domination that explains
both the cultural differences within the US, whether one shops at Wal-Mart or IKEA or drinks latte or a Big Gulp for example, as well
as the culturalist ideology which claims that cultural difference explains material inequality rather than the reverse. Without the
accumulation and concentration of capital in the North at the expense of the South there would not be the array of commodities
there are in the US nor would there be the culture industry promoting culturalism as the global frame of intelligibility explaining the
contemporary. The disguising of class conflicts in terms of culture is of course as old as class society itself. Every ruling class in
history has identified its particular form of rule with the general good and justified its mode of appropriating the labor of others in
cultural, and for the most part religious, terms. It was with the rise of capitalism, however, that culture begins to take on the
appearance of an independent basis separate from labor and is seen as by definition "free," as in Humanist and Enlightenment
discourses; free from religious and political coercion on the one hand, and free of the rule of the market on the other. Because the
freedom of culture was only ever an ideal of bourgeois society contradicted in daily practice it became a dogma that culture was a
timeless space that expresses what is most rational, moral and beautiful—"the best that has been thought and said" (Matthew
Arnold)—and as such the essence of what it means to be a person. The reason for this idealization of culture has an economic
basis however in the basic inequality of capitalism and it is necessary to unpack this relation in order to explain the present
dominance of culturalism and why it has replaced humanism as an apologetic for inequality. In the period between the fifteenth and
eighteenth centuries capitalism systematically dispossessed the laborer of not only his labor power or ability to work but also of all
the material preconditions through which labor is alone possible, such as the material to be worked upon, the instruments of labor
and the means of subsistence of the laborer. This systematic expropriation of the material conditions of productive social life forced
the worker to sell his labor to survive and thus commodified the worker as an "individual" unit of the production process. This
individual, now "free" to work or starve, is the real material basis for bourgeois philosophy and culture since the Enlightenment and
what is behind the basic division in the human sciences between the subject (culture) and its "soft" knowledges, such as the
humanities and social sciences, and the object (nature), which is investigated by the "hard" physical sciences. Capitalism needs
persons to be defined as individuals because it needs them to voluntarily enter into an economic agreement to exchange their labor
power for wages. An idealist view of culture is the necessary result of a society that defines its highest achievements in terms of
individual freedom, because it depends on the free exchange of labor for wages, and attacks any other cultural basis for defining
freedom, such as social equality. Because the development of capitalism itself has come more and more to limit individual freedom
to those who can financially afford it, the "individual" has been displaced as the standard of knowing and achievement, especially
since the historic economic downturn experienced by the Western democracies since the mid-70s. It was then that culturalism was
consolidated and has since become dominant. Culturalism, in other words, is the (updated) ideology most useful to capital in the
age of cybertechnologies and globalization. Like idealism and religion, which have always disguised and legitimated class
oppression, culturalism spiritualizes the material relations of class. But, unlike humanism (the now exhausted species of idealism),
which situates culture as the free expression of free subjects, relegating inequality to nature and explaining it away as differences of
knowledge or natural abilities, culturalism renders culture autonomous from class and thus spiritualizes it in a new way. Culturalism
is the reduction of culture to discourse which gives all social practices an ideological foundation in codes, conventions, discourse,
values, perceptions, and affect—rather than explain social practices as at root economic and grounded in the division of labor and
the interaction of labor and the natural world—at a time when it becomes impossible to justify capitalism on its own terms because
of the crisis of profitability and the increasing inequality it produces. However, the changes in technology which are commonly
supposed to explain the reification of culture as discourse in the contemporary (e.g., Friedman, The World Is Flat) are themselves
explained as effects of class forces, especially the drive to innovate endemic to market competition which has as a necessary result
the increasing alienation of the worker from her own labor power through under-/unemployment. The shift from "modernism" as a
cultural dominant to "postmodernism," which in the humanities is represented as a shift from "humanism" to "culturalism," is a
cultural effect of the global crisis of cyber-capitalism and not its triumphant "globalization" as culturalist discourses argue. The
reason for this is because capitalism cannot ultimately survive the reification of culture it makes necessary as this reification itself is
caused by the separation of the laborer from the productive process entirely, thus leading to a crisis of overproduction and the fall in
the rate of profit. Let me clarify what I have said. For roughly the last thirty years the capitalist West has experienced a prolonged
crisis of profitability which comes from systemic overproduction—it has reached the point that technological efficiency has massively
lowered the need for labor worldwide thus raising unemployment (often disguised as under-employment) while the profit imperative
is brutally maintained as the rationale of production. Capitalism, at least in its most advanced forms, is now is finding it difficult to
secure new areas of labor for productive investment, which among other things (such as financial speculation) forces it to
imperialistically expand its market geographically and at great cost in both material and ideological terms. The global expansion of
capitalism is actually a short term way to stave off the inevitable fall in the rate of profit that comes from the introduction of
technological innovations in the context of market competition. The value of capital depends on its ability to productively employ
wage-labor and appropriate a surplus-value over and above the costs of production and the reproduction of the laborer. In order to
realize a bigger share of surplus-value in the context of market competition capitalists are forced to lower the amount of necessary
labor it takes to produce commodities and this is for the most part done by increasing the productivity of labor through the
introduction of labor saving devices. With the spread of the most efficient methods of production the general result is to raise the
amount of capital socially invested in plant and equipment relative to the amount invested in labor thus increasing what Marx calls
"the organic composition of capital" at the expense of the working class who find themselves deskilled, their wages cheapened and
themselves impoverished. The rising organic composition of capital is what produces a fall in the rate of profit because of the social
costs it inflicts on the workforce, the consumers of the commodities.[1] Capitalism, through the workings of the law of value which
governs the production of commodities, inevitably reaches the point where it calls itself into question as it is "incompetent to assure
an existence to its slave within his slavery, because it cannot help letting him sink into such a state, that it has to feed him, instead of
being fed by him" (Marx and Engels, The Manifesto of the Communist Party). The eclipse of humanism by culturalism is a response
to these contradictions. Because capitalism over the last thirty years has not been able to "deliver the goods" to more and more
people and prove the superiority of the market for insuring individual freedom the "free subject" of the classical period of bourgeois
ascendancy has been placed in crisis and a self-enclosed understanding of culture has taken its place in the dominant ideology as
the self-regulating mechanism that protects the market from a class-based critique that would implicate "ideas" in the terms of
inequality. Culture serves this crisis management function most effectively by not simply dismissing inequality and the antagonisms
it generates (how could it?), but by translating (reifying) the contradictions into cultural terms that leave the foundation of capitalism
basically intact. It is, for this reason, a highly effective form of spiritualizing material relations in an era characterized by deepening
social inequalities that are the effect of the wage-labor-capital relation. Despite its aggressive insularity, in other words, culturalism
itself has an economic basis—it reflects the interests of those who having had their material needs already met from the labor of the
other can afford to focus on their desires in the market at a time of inescapable social inequality and it projects this special interest
as universal, as ideology has always done.
Culture Studies – Global/Local
Focus on local difference legitimizes global structures of capitalism—
assaults on meta-narratives can be linked to resurgence and
expansion of economic exploitation
So far, I will argue, cultural studies has in the last instance updated and reinforced the traditional function of the humanities, rather
than transforming it. Cultural studies has accommodated itself to existing practices, by producing new modes of fetishizing texts and
preserving conservative modes of subjectivity. In this way, it continues to advance the ideological function of the modern humanities
in a changed social environment. In particular, cultural studies has maintained the primacy of experience as the limit to critique, thus
reworking rather than displacing the liberal subject. The right wing attacks the changes introduced by cultural studies, charging—as
in the ongoing “PC” scare and the “culture wars”—that the humanities are abandoning their commitment to objectivity and the uni-
versal values of Western culture. These commitments and values have, of course, been undermined by social developments that
have socialized subjects in new ways while concentrating global socioeconomic power within an ever shrinking number of
transnational corporations. The intellectual and political tendencies coordinated by cultural studies, meanwhile, are responding to
these transformations by providing updated and therefore more useful modes of legitimation for capitalist society. At the same time,
regardless of the explicit opposition on the part of many leading figures within cultural studies to privatization and the assaults on
culture critique within the academy (which I will discuss in Chapter 4), the most fundamental concepts of cultural studies (such as
“destabilization,” “articulation,” “interdisciplinarity,” and so forth) provide ideological justi fications for institutional streamlining and
downsizing along with the suppression of critique. These developments in the mode of knowledge production must be understood
within the framework of the needs of the late-capitalist social or der. The emergence of theory and (post)Althusserian understandings
of ideology reflected and contributed strongly to the undermining of liberal humanism (in both its classical and its social-democratic
versions) as the legitimating ideology of capitalism. The discrediting of liberal humanism, first under the pressures of anticolonialist
revolts and then as a result of the antihegemonic struggles in the advanced capitalist heartlands, revealed a deep crisis in authority
and hegemony in late-capitalist society. This discrediting also revealed the need for new ideologies of legitimation, free from what
could now be seen as the naivete of liberal humanist universalism, which has come to be widely viewed as a cover for racist, sexist,
and antidemocratic institutions. The institutional tendencies producing the constellation of practices that have emerged as cultural
studies have, then, participated both in the attack on liberal understandings and in the development of new discourses of
legitimation. The liberal humanism predominant in the academy has increasingly been seen as illegitimate because it depends upon
an outmoded notion of private individuality—that is, the modern notion of the immediacy with which the privileged text is
apprehended by the knowing subject. In this understanding, literature is taken to be in opposition to science and technology, as a
site where what is essential to our human nature can be preserved or recovered in the face of a social reality where this human
essence (freedom) is perpetually at risk. However, the more “scientific” methods (such as narratology) that initially undermined the
hegemony of “new criticism” in the American academy, largely through the use of modes of analysis borrowed from structuralist
anthropology and linguistics, were themselves discredited by postmodern theories as largely conservative discourses interested in
resecuring disciplinary boundaries (for example, through the classification of genres) and protecting an empiricist notion of textuality.
Cultural studies, then, is the result of the combination of the introduction of theory and the politicization of theory enabled by these
social and institutional changes. However, the postmodern assault on master narratives (theory) has responded to the discrediting
of both structuralism and Marxism in a conservative political environment by redefining the term politics to mean the resistance of
the individual subject to modes of domination located in the discursive and disciplinary forms that constitute the subject. This has
opened up the possibility of a new line of development for cultural studies—one in which the local supplants the global as the
framework of analysis and description or one in which “redescription” replaces explanation as the purpose of theoretical
investigations. I will argue that the set of discourses that have congealed into what I will call postmodern cultural studies represents
the definitive subordination of cultural studies to this line of development. That is, the ideological struggles carried out throughout the
1970s in such sites as the Birmingham Center for Cultural Studies in England and the French journal Tel Quel have now been
stabilized into a different type of project: the full-scale reconstruction of liberalism on terms appropriate to late-capitalist social
relations.
Terror Talk/CTS
Discursive critiques of terrorism whitewash economic class in
determining both the causes of ‘terrorism’ and the ideological
backlash to it by the West – prior orthodox Marxist critique solves
better
Bayo ’12 Ogunrotifa Ayodeji Bayo, “PUTTING HISTORICAL MATERIALISM INTO TERRORISM STUDIES,” International
Journal of Current Research, vol. 4, issue 04, pp. 227-235, April 2012, http://www.journalcra.com/sites/default/files/1859_0.pdf
Critical Terrorism Studies (CTS) which seeks to uncover the
On the other side of debate is
ideological, conceptual and institutional underpinnings of terrorism .

CTS critiques dominant orthodox approach that tend to liaise with technical capitalism, and argue that violent activities used by the
state (state terrorism) against its own citizens or other states have been ignored by the orthodox terrorism scholars (Gunning 2007;
Silke 2009; Jackson, Smyth and Gunning 2009, Herring 2008). Scholarly interest espousing CTS approach felt that only dissent
violence directed against western interests are labelled as ‘terrorism’. While challenging the arguments of orthodox approach, critical
theorists questioned former’s positivistic epistemology, reject its scientific methods, challenge its rational ontology, and normatively
condemn its value neutral theorizing (Price and Reus-Smit 1998:261). Critical theorists argued that ‘object’ in orthodox ontology
does not exist independently of the ‘subject’ but rather shape each other in a dialectical, never-ceasing dynamics (Toros and
In challenging orthodox empirical verifiable social fact,
Gunning 2009: 92).
CTS opines that terrorism and its nature is not limited to violent acts
itself but depends on the context, circumstance and intention on one
hand, and the social, cultural, legal and political processes of
interpretation, categorization and labelling on the other hand (Jackson 2009:4). This
ontological underpinning of critical theorists can be regarded as
social constructivism—as it help to shape our understanding that actors/objects relate to each other within the
confines of collectively-constructed social configurations (Price and Reus-Smit 1998). Since ontology deals with what really exist out
there to know, then the question is how it can be known (epistemology). The epistemology of CTS tends to thoroughly scrutinise the
origin and uses of terrorism as a discourse, and the meaning ‘terrorist’ attach to their actions. This epistemology can be regarded as
Post-Structural Interpretivism (merging of post-structuralism and Interpretivism)—which connotes that terrorist acts can be
the
perpetrated by anyone within a structural configuration, given the existence of a particular context. In this regards,
ontological and epistemological position of Critical theorists seems to

suggest that social reality of terrorism can be understood by
appealing to the interdisciplinary methodological essence of its
existence. CTS therefore reject statistical analysis because it can be manipulated to support neo-liberal and neo-imperialist
political agenda, and protect certain hegemonic interest. However, CTS can be credited for espousing
history, ideology, context and intentions behind terrorism beyond the

narrow lens of orthodox approach. It is not clear following the review
of literature at what point in its history did state and non-state actors
engage or continue to engage in terrorism, what class2 in society did
non-state actors belong to, which class in society did non-state
actors recruit to carry out individual terrorism? How social
contradictions in the society usher terrorism within different classes?
In other words, CTS failed to explain class analysis of terrorism : how social
relations of production among different social class produce

terrorism within and across states. The inability of CTS to address this
brings us back to Historical Materialism as a theory that is needed to
engage in class analysis of terrorism more than critical theory . Although,
Herring (2008), Herring and Stokes (2011) and Jonathan (2011) have suggested that CTS should incorporate class analysis into its
theoretical vocabulary, these appeals seems to raise fundamental concern that may pitch it against certain interests who have
somewhat severed their link with Marxist and neo-Marxist scholarship, particularly in Frankfurt Critical School or Welsh school of
Historical Materialism (HM) should stand

Critical Security Studies. It is my contention here that
alone as new theoretical tradition in terrorism studies or in the alternative be a new variant that is taking
paradigmatic shift in CTS. This stems from the fact that if the focus of orthodox approach is to
provide problem-solving tools (as Robert Cox 1981:128-130 argued) to combat military threats using
counter-terrorism strategies against perceived enemies under the pretext of Waron Terror, CTS as far as its
current literature stands is less likely to shape policy direction. That explains
why Duvall and Varadarajan (2003:81) opines that critical theories is grossly overdrawn for imposing dubious categorisation and
HM must rise
simplifying all research into either being policy relevant or having no bearing on policymaking. Therefore,
to the task of unpractical gap left by CTS in order to advance

scholarship that bears implications for Policy and Practical socio-
political action that will help to stem the tide of state terrorism and individual terrorism of non-state actors that are more
likely to occur in the Third world countries than anywhere else in the future.
Hybridity
Affirmation of postmodern hybridity serves as an alibi for weak
leftism which is too cowardly to directly contest fundamental class
antagonism—‘playing with binaries’ is a bourgeois class privilege
which permits procrastinating on actual revolution
The Red Collective ‘1 wacky orthodox Marxists (Presumably), “Revolution as Seduction, Pedagogy as Therapy,
and the Subject is Always "Me",” Red Critique, Spring 2001, http://redcritique.org/spring2001/revolutionasseduction.htm
The oscillations, standlessness, and opportunism of the left now is justified by appeal to some very right-wing theories that ultimately
derive from Nietzsche, Heidegger and their latter-day students such as Derrida, Nancy, and deMan. This standlessness is in large
part the effect of the textualization of the inside/outside relations as the allegory of all "binaries" and the consequent deconstruction
of "opposition" and its "dialectics." The problematics of "inside/outside" are, of course, constitutive of some of the important issues in
contemporary theory. The most recent contestations over the inside/outside, which have a long history in Western philosophy, begin
with the rise of so-called "deconstruction" and poststructuralism in general. As part of deconstructing all binaries, the opposition of
inside/outside was subjected to several sustained readings by Derrida (Of Grammatology, Dissemination, Writing and Difference,
Margins of Philosophy) as well as deMan (Allegories of Reading, Aesthetic Ideology,…) and such other commentators as J. Hillis
Miller, Barbara Johnson and Samuel Weber. The effect of these textualizations has been to inscribe the outside in the inside/the
inside in the outside, and thus to establish, in the place of distinct zones of meaning clarified through critique-al theoretical debate, a
(Heideggerian) zone of in-between-ness into which all meanings are placed, thereby becoming indeterminate, post-oppositional
entities—playful "hybridities" which are presumably beyond binaries. This double-inscription, like all double-sessions in post-theory,
has been represented as "progressive" and politically enabling. Yet double-reading is a troping device deployed, for example, in
"progressive" anti-racist readings to render "black" and "white" supplemental and thereby produce an indeterminate and unknowable
hybridity beyond both (for example, Homi Bhabha's The Location of Culture or Gayatri Spivak's A Critique of Postcolonial Reason:
Toward a History of the Vanishing Present; Butler-Laclau-Zizek's Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues
on the Left). Similarly deployed in queer theory, nation-studies, and other post-studies, double-reading reduces concepts to
puncepts whose undecidability blocks the necessary reliable knowledge for revolution. To give another example, in his essay on
"Class" (Critical Terms for Literary Study, 2nd edition), Daniel T. O'Hara "doubles" "class," turning the concept of class into an
orphan trope and then adopting it so that it can be used "strategically, pragmatically, with a certain ironic, even (self-)parodic
lightness" (418). Double-reading is a device deployed to simultaneously textualize and dematerialize—to sever at the level of the
conceptual the possibility of connecting "inside" to "outside." In-between-ness, then, is the logic of the "double" that serves,
especially during times of heightened crisis, to legitimize liberal political vacillation, class opportunism, and stand-less-ness as
"progressive." However, no theory can claim progressiveness without taking a decisive stand—not only on culture, but also on the
fundamental issues that shape cultural practices. What the deconstruction of inside/outside provides is not a decisive stance, but an
epistemological alibi for political oscillation—and thus (under the guise of philosophical self-reflexivity and a sophisticated "up-to-
date"-ness) the resulting "in-between-nesses" provides a politics comforting to the ruling class. The binary inside/outside is the effect
of the fundamental binary of class: the bourgeois and the proletarian. Simply to textualize inside/outside—that is, to deconstruct
them—is an idealist act. In order to put an end to inside/outside and all other social binaries (man/woman; straight/queer; rich/poor;
white/black;…) we argue that class should be overthrown and that, in order to do so at this stage of historical struggle, the gap
between binaries should be heightened and their underlying contradictions brought to a crisis, not simply textualized and made
invisible.
Postcolonialism
Postcolonialism is a violent politics that entrenches the dominance
Eurocentric power, fragmenting social processes in the face of
capital, stressing “borderlands” identities thereby obscuring material
inequality, creating fluid subjects that are the dream of capital, and
divorcing itself from the material reality of suffering as a result of
Structural inequities while securing the privilege of liberal academics
who are already members of the transnational elite. It is a capitalist
steroid that must be rejected at all costs.
Dirlik ’94 Arif Dirlik, professor of history at duke university, After the Revolution: Waking to Global Capitalism, 1994, pg. 96-
100
The promoters of postcolonial discourse attribute its rapidly acquired popularity to its effectiveness in remedying or transcending the
deficiencies of earlier radical criticism. I would like to suggest, to the contrary, that postcolonial discourse resonate~ with the
ideological demands of a world situation under Global Capitalism, which accounts for its popularity not just among self-styled
radicals but among the managers of global capital as well. The reasons may be indicated briefly; they will also help distinguish the
position I take here from that assumed by postcolonial discourse, which is necessary since much of what I have written above
overlaps with important aspects of the postcolonial argument: I.Postcolonialism, in making Eurocentrism into the primary object of
criticism, diverts attention from contemporary problems of oppression and inequality to focus on the legacy of the past. Power
appears in postcolonial discourse as residual power and, because of the emphasis on culture (Eurocentric metanarratives), as
something to be disposed of by cultural criticism. By denying to capitalism “foundational” status, the postcolonial argument also
suppresses the generation of new forms of power, of oppression and inequality, under contemporary capitalism. Multiculturalism is
postcolonialism’s answer to Eurocentrism. This postcolonial “solution” to the problem of global inequality coincides with the ideology
of Global Capitalism, which, transnational in its operations, can no longer afford the cultural Eurocentrism of a bygone day when the
centers of global capital were still territorialized in Europe and North America. 2. In its denial of a capitalist structuring of the world
(hence, of colonialism and neo-colonialism, of the three worlds, etc.), in its insistence on fragmentation and the primacy of local
encounters, in its repudiation of unified subjectivity and “binarism” in favor of “hybridity” and “multiculturalism,” and in its affirmation
of fluid relations and transposable subject positions, postcolonial discourse often reads very much like a description of life under
Global Capitalism. Yet the postcolonial argument offers these phenomena as the keys to liberation rather than as manifestations of
new forms of oppression, dislocation, and alienation. It also projects these phenomena back into the past to call into question the
legacy of colonialism, to shift the burden of “underdevelopment” onto the “underdeveloped” themselves, and, in the name of
historicity (against structure), to erase from historical consciousness the memory of oppression and inequality so that the past is
abolished as a source of critical perspectives on the present. Here, too, postcolonialism coincides with the ideology of Global
Capitalism, which seeks to abolish distinctions between “Us and Them” and perceives the persistence of “vestigial memory” as the
greatest obstacle to dealing with the present.84 In either case, the contradictions of modernism are erased to yield a modernization
that identifies the future with current modernity. 3. Postcolonialism stresses the “borderlands” as opposed to fixed identities, which
may account for the proliferation of works with “border” in their titles in recent years as postcolonial discourse has achieved a
pervasive presence in cultural criticism. Borderlands provide locations for the “politics of difference,” for the mutual articulation of
cultures and sub jectivities. But in much of postcolonial criticism, borderlands appear in ahistorical and metaphorical guise.
Borderlands may appear on the surface as locations of equal cultural exchange, but they are products of historical inequalities, and
their historical legacy continues to haunt them. To reflect on my own previous statement that “we all live in the borderlands,” it is
necessary to underline that we do not all live in the same borderlands and that the affirmation of dif ference does not imply that all
differences are equal.85 As long as drastic inequality persists, the cultural exchanges that take place across unequal positions, too,
must bear upon them the mark of inequality—except for those between groups and classes (such as the “transnational capitalist
class”) that have achieved some semblance of transnational homogeneity and equality, who can laud their own “multiculturalism”
while turning a blind eye to all those marginalized by their success. This inequality, moreover, is not metaphorical or merely a legacy
of past cultural attitudes but a product of the continuing operations of capital. The argument here, too, stresses the “borderlands,”
but borderlands that are the very product of the operations of global capital. Maquiladoras and special economic zones are the
paradigms of “borderlands,” which exist not to promote equal exchange but to render the exploitation of labor more effective. If
borderlands as they are presently constituted liberate anyone, it is capital. Hence borderlands point not to liberated zones but to
zones that pose new problems for the task of liberation and may at best serve as points of departure, not as points of arrival. 4.
Postcoloniality (like post-modernity) calls for fluid subject positions; so does Global Capitalism. Guerilla marketeers seek to
reconstitute subjectivity on a daily basis to adjust consumers to the marketing needs of ever new products. Capital demands
flexibility from labor—to adjust to flexible working times in accordance with the needs of production, to be prepared to shift from one
kind of work to another as production demands, and, therefore, to “retool” constantly, to “remake” themselves so they can adjust to
flexible production. The “death of the subject” finds its production parallel in the “death of the worker.” Karl Marx drew a distinction
between “working to live” and “living to work” to distinguish alienated from non-alienated labor. Under alienated labor, he wrote, the
laborer “related to the product of his labor as to an alien object,” which also alienated the laborer from his/her “species-being.” The
result: “He is at home when he is not working, and when he is working he is not at home.”86 Marx believed in the dignity of work, in
work as a mark of human “species-being.” Capital has been trying since its beginnings to liberate itself from laborers by de-skilling
the worker to make him/her as close as possible to an appendage to a machine, and it has now come close to achieving this goal as
well. The laborer who can retool daily is a laborer that mimics production, so that alienated labor itself ceases to have any meaning
as a critical concept. Reich’s “routine production” and service workers require few skills beyond the ability to follow “routines”; the
“symbolic-analysts” command great skills still—to manipulate and to dislocate, themselves no less than the markets for their
products. Viewed “up” from the processes of production and consumption, the post-modern argu ment for fluid subject positions
loses the benign visage it presents in the realm of cultural criticism and appears for what it is: the fetishization of alienation. 5. The
problem presented by postcolonial discourse, then, may be summarized as a problem of liberating discourse that divorces itself from
the material conditions of life, in this case Global Capitalism as the “foundational” principle of contemporary society globally.
Intended as a critique of ideology, it becomes itself an ideological articulation of a contemporary situation. Its critical edge is directed
at radical positions of the “past,” while as far as capitalism is concerned it at best blunts criticism, at worst in corporates into its own
utopia the social consequences of Global Capitalism. It ignores (or disguises) the fact that the “multiple, complex, and contradictory”
subject positions of the borderlands nevertheless assume coherence and direction (if only temporarily) according to context, so that
the analysis of the context becomes of primary significance—which it by-passes, presumably because that kind of analysis smacks
too much of Marxism. Also ignored is the location of “postcolonial discourse”—First World academic institutions in which
“postcolonial intellectuals” themselves occupy privileged positions as members of a transnational intellec tual class, as much a
product of global capitalism as the transnational capitalist class. Global Capitalism has jumbled up notions of space and time. It
has also jumbled up political positions so that it is not uncommon these days to find “radicals” sounding like ideologues of power.
Postcolonialism – Materialism
Postcolonialism neglects the material aspects of global capitalism
and destroys the possibility for revolutionary struggle.
Dirlik et al. 2k Arif Dirlik, professor of history at duke university, Vinay Bahl, associate professor of sociology at the
Pennsylvania college of technology, Peter Gran, professor of history at temple university, editors, History After The Three Worlds:
Post-Eurocentric Historiographies, 2000, pg. 7-8
It is essential, however, that the search for such alternatives take for a point of departure the contemporary world situation, which is
no longer to be grasped in terms of past conceptualizations. While it is necessary to view contemporary ide ologies of globalization
critically, we can ill afford to overlook that they address contemporary challenges that are quite real. Especially important in this
regard is the conceptualization of the world in terms of the Three Worlds idea. In past days, the Three Worlds idea provided a
significant means to grasp global economic and political configurations. As late as the 1970s, the idea of the Third World pointed to
certain concrete forms of economic exploitation and political struggle. By the 1 980s, the struggle part of the meaning had lost its
salience, rendering the Third World synonymous with backward or undeveloped, which also suggested a return to the original post
—World-War-Il use of the term. The Third World, which earlier had been a location of possible alternatives to both First World
capitalist and Second World statist modernities, came increasingly to denote those areas in the world that were falling behind in the
race of progress. At the same time, economic developments associated with globalization further scrambled the tenuous bound aries
between the Three Worlds. The fall for all practices of statist socialist regimes in Eastern Europe in 1989 was the final event to
render irrelevant earlier conceptualizations of global configurations. With global capitalism has emerged a situation that not only
signals an end to the Three Worlds idea, but even more radically to the dichotomization of the world around East/West or
North/South distinctions. What are gone are not only concepts for organizing the world, but also concepts that served to give
coherence to projects of emancipation. The irrelevance of the concepts, however, does not imply the disappearance of fundamental
aspects of the situation that the concepts encompassed, especially the divisions between rich and poor, and the conditions of
inequality, oppression, and exploitation, which are perhaps sharper today than in the past. 1’ The problem with contemporary
alternatives to the Three Worlds idea—globalization, postmodernism, and postcolonialism—is not that they do not articulate a new
situation, but that they turn their backs on the persistent material and cultural problems created by the globalization of capitalism.
Such Third World issues—which are no longer confined to a geographical Third World—are literally absent from discussions of
modernity and postmodernity; as such discussions appear as “an all-Western debate; an Occidental quiz, with Western answers to
Western questions.”’2 The problems these discussions present are not abstractly intellectual but pro foundly pedagogical, with
implications for everyday social ideologies. Students— especially those who are nourished by Western academic culture—are often
caught in a situation where postmodem and postcolonial theories substitute for knowledge about other countries, knowledge of
languages, and most certainly knowledge of other theories. To a degree this book is addressed to these students. The authors must
assume that “it is not possible for anyone to stand outside either their material reality (both human and nonhuman) or of the evolving
context of ideas.” ideally, “one must operate taking cognizance of how the available alternatives will affect human beings living in the
particular world of the present.”’3 Postmodernism and postcolonialism encourage preoccupation with identity and subjectivity, but
only by displacing into the realm of culture the kind of self-knowledge that comes with the confrontation of historically circumscribed
material realities. The end result is, on the one hand, not so much self-knowledge as the denial of the possibility of knowledge of any
kind and the re-reification of identities that produces a liberal relativism, and on the other hand, murderous separation of human
beings. To overcome this new mode of culturalism in both its liberal and conservative manifestations, it is necessary once again to
confront life in all its materiality, which unites as well as divides humans across the globe. To this end, the various chapters in this
book reaffirm the historicity of the present to spell out the material context that produces contemporary cultures and ideologies,
including the contemporary crisis of history. Similarly, the alternative historiographies the chapters propose insist on the persistence
of past problems while recognizing the changed circumstances of the present; hence the title, History after the Three Worlds, which
parts with the Three Worlds idea but reaffirms it as the historical condition of the present.
Postcolonialism – Eurocentric
Postcolonialism ends up reifying pre-Eurocentric cultures thereby
reinstating global power structures and distracting from revolutionary
struggles.
Dirlik et al 2k Arif Dirlik, professor of history at duke university, Vinay Bahl, associate professor of sociology at the
Post-Eurocentric Historiographies, 2000, pg. 10
Dismissing metanarratives in postmodernism and postcolonialism, in disguising the systemic nature of power, also makes it
impossible to confront power systemically. It is not that postmodernist and postcolonialist arguments are irrelevant. The problem
rather is that these arguments fail to articulate their position vis-a-vis the power structure that provides their context, a power
structure that in its globalization finds in cultural hybridity an efficient means to manage people and things . While the
postmodernist/postcolonialist argument claims that the abandonment of “fixed” identities provides a more radical means of
resistance than earlier radi— calisms, in its refusal to address questions of structural power (imbedded in questions of capitalism,
democracy, privatization, and so forth), it in fact ends up disguising, if not celebrating, contemporary forms of power.’9 The
preoccupation with identity, not to speak of affirmations of its fluidity and flexibility, coincide rather suspiciously with the efforts of
capital to constandy remake and reconstruct identities in accordance with marketing needs. The outcome of the postmod-
ernist/postcolonialist argument is at best to elevate the “nihilist face of the Occi dent, one which is also politically inconclusive and
indeterminate.” The repudiation of Eurocentrism through the reassertion of hybrid identities against structural paradigms of identity,
informed by the history of Eurocentric domination of the world (capitalism, colonialism, nationalism, class, etc.), however, ends up in
the very idea of hybridity in reifying pre-Eurocentric cultures. It is also a back-handed acknowledgment that Eurocentrism was
indeed a formative moment in the construction of identities elsewhere—but now without any possibility of resistance to persistent
power structures. No wonder that postcolonialists have found homes in First World business and educational institutions.20
Postcolonialism – Eurocentric
Critiques of Eurocentricism cannot contend with the normative
assertion of European superiority that lies at the heart of Western
identities. Contesting this hegemony thorugh hybrid identities and
fluid cultures does not address the problematic of capitalism that
enabled European universalism to appear throughout the world. Only
beginning with capitalism has the possibility of ending Eurocentric
cultural domination.
Without the power of capitalism, and all the structural innovations that accom panied it in political, social, and cultural organization,
Eurocentrism might have been just another ethnocentrism. It is rather remarkable in an age of proliferating ethnocentrisms such as
ours that so litrie attention should be paid to ethnocentrism as a legacy, not just of Eurocentrism (although that may have
contributed to it in significant ways), but as a condition of the world at the origins of modernity, more often than not expressing the
centrality in a variety of world-systems of the cultural assumptions of those who dominated those world-systems. This may be
stating the obvious, but it needs to be stated nevertheless since considerations of political correctness have led to shyness about
criticizing ethnocentrisms other than Euro-American (or blatantly murderous expressions of it in such places as Bosnia, Rwanda, or
Turkey). Spheres of cultural hegemony that more or less coincided with economic and political domination have been present all
along, defining a “Chinese” world, an “Islamic” world, “Arabic” and “Indic” worlds, and so on. In spite of real or imagined hegemonies
over vast territories, however, none of these worlds were in the end able to match Eurocentrism in reach or transformative power.
The statement may seem foolhardy when the end of history is not yet in sight. What seems safe to say is that if these other cultural
hegemonies are ever glob— alized and universalized in the same manner as Eurocentrism, it will be on the basis of a world
globalized and universalized through Eurocentrism and in their articulations to this new world. There are presently efforts to discover
an early “modernity” in East and Southeast Asia, but it did not occur to anyone in those regions to even raise the question of
modernity until modernity had been established as a principle of history. Similarly, East Asian societies may claim a Confucian
heritage that explains their recent success in capitalism, but this heritage is one that has been rein terpreted by the very
requirements of capitalism. Eurocentrism is the one centrism that historically has encompassed the globe and reached levels of life
that were not even of much concem to its competitors; it rev olutionized lives around the globe, relocated societies in new spaces,
and transformed their historical trajectories—to the point where it makes no sense to speak of history without reference to
Eurocentrism. There may have been no shortage of “cultural hybridities” earlier; what is interesting and compelling about Eurocen—
trism is that by the time its globalizing aspirations neared (for the aspirations could never be reached) their geographical boundaries,
Eurocentrism was to become a constituent of most people’s hybridities—which is not to be said of any of the other centrisms, which
were regionally limited and historically unstable. The question is, then, what accounts for this power? The Eurocentric answer is
clear enough: the superiority of Euro-American values. It is an answer that is convincing only to Eurocentrists themselves. It is also
the cultural level at which most critiques of Eurocentrism proceed and run into dead ends. The problem with the culturalist critique of
Eurocentrism is not only that it provides no explanation for the hegemony of Eurocentrism in contrast to other centrisms, but that it is
also for the same reason incapable of addressing normative questions of value. The values of the dominant (such as human rights)
are not prima facie undesirable because of the fact of domination, just as the values of the dominated are not to be legitimated
simply by recourse to arguments of cultural difference. If capitalism is as much an agent of Eurocentrism as the advocacy of human
rights, it does not make much sense to laud the entry into capitalism of other societies while also collaborating in their abuse of
human rights on the grounds of cultural difference. The conflict between history and value is nowhere better illustrated in the
historicist (culturalist) affirmations of difference, which then proceed nevertheless to discover in these different societies civil and
other societies without any awareness that the latter might be products of Eurocentric teleologies, imbedded in the very terms them -
selves, that contradict the notions of difference. I suggest here that such contradictions are products of the isolation of cultural
questions from those of political economy. Eurocentrism was globalized not due to any inherent virtue of Euro-American values but
because those values were stamped on activities of various kinds that insinuated themselves into existing prac tices (such as trade)
and proved to be welcome to certain groups in non—Euro-American societies, or, when there was resistance to them, were
enforced on the world by military power. In other words, the globalization and universalization of Eurocentrism would have been
inconceivable without the dynamism it acquired through capitalism, imperialism, and cultural domination. One of the most remark-
able pieties of our times is that to speak of oppression is to erase the subjectivities of the oppressed; however, not to speak of
oppression, but still operate within the teleologies of modernist categories, is to return the responsibility for oppression to its
victims.’6 Alternatively, it is to make a mockery of any notion of resistance to oppression, by identifying resistance with any kind of
deviation from “normalcy.” The result, in either case, is the evasion of any significant and historically deter mined notion of politics by
turning all such encounters into instances of cultural politics.’7 What is also remarkable is the resonance between the political
conclusions of contemporary culturalism with the culturalism of an earlier modernizationism, that what is at issue is not politics or
political economy but culture.
Attempting rewrite Eurocentric histories only continues capitalism
consumption of difference-only challenging the ideological frame of
capital can solve.
In the field of modern Chinese history, changes in China call for an urgent con sideration of historical paradigms and an evaluation of
competing paradigms. Two generations of historians of China (in China and abroad) have taken revolution to be the paradigm
around which to write modern Chinese history. That paradigm now lies in ruins, not because the paradigm itself was wrong
necessarily, but because the revolution is a thing of the past in a China where leaders may pay lip service to the revolution in their
very nonrevolutionary and nonsocialist turn to incorporation into capitalism. Rather than observe the turn critically, historians have
been quick to deny that there was a revolution, that what had been considered a revolution was really nothing more than the
perpetuation of backwardness, and that it was the archives that were responsible for their failure to foresee the fate of the
revolution. The denial of revolution, not surprisingly, is accompanied by a shift of attention to pasts that may be more consonant with
the self-images of the present. The question here is not just a question of ideology in history; it is also a question of bad history that
refuses to acknowledge the ways in which the revolutionary past, having failed to achieve its putative goals, nevertheless served to
shape the present.24 A reasonable alternative to this rapid adjustment to the present that also requires a disavowal of the past (both
the past in actuality and the past in historiography) might be to acknowledge the crisis and turn to a revaluation of the past—not by
an abandonment of the paradigm of revolution but by inquiring into the meaning of revolution. 25 Radical historiography does not
consist of the abandonment, or rewriting, of the past every time a new historical situation presents itself—in which case it cannot
overcome a continuing adjustment to the present, which is hardly a claim to radicalism, as it makes it impossible to differentiate what
is radical from what is mimicry of the demands of power. Rather, it is infonned by a principled defense of autonomous political
positions that question ever-shifting claims to reality, not by denying reality but by critically evaluating its claims on the past and the
present. If the past has no relevance to understanding the present but is merely a plaything at the hands of the latter, there would
seem to be litde meaning to any claim of validity for history as epistemology, or for that matter, to any truth imbedded in the archives
of the past. The proposition that “history is a sign of the modern” would suggest only to the most naive that the moment we have
gone postmodern we may abandon history. The posts of our age, to those who would read them with some sense of reality, should
suggest that what comes after bears upon it the imprint of what went on before, and that we are not as free as we might think of the
legacies we have consigned to the past. The same goes for postrevolutionary, and for what has been my primary concern in this
discussion, post-lEurocentric. Our conceptions of the world face the predicament of turning into ideologies the moment that they
forget their own historicities. And awareness of historicity requires attention both to transformations and the presence of the past in
such transformations.26 To affirm the historical role Eurocentrism has played in shaping the contemporary world is not to endow it
with some normative power, but to recognize the ways in which it continues to be an intimate part of the shaping of the world, which
is not going to disappear with willful acts of its cultural negation. One aspect of Eurocentrism that infused both earlier revolutionary
ideologies and the accommodationist alternatives of the present seems to be especially important, perhaps more important for the
historian than for others because it is complicit in our imagina— hon of temporalities: developmentahsm. The notion that
development is as natural to humanity as air and water is one that is deeply imbedded in our consciousness, and yet development
as an idea is a relatively recent one in human history. As Arturo Escobar has argued forcefully in a number of writings, development
as a discourse is imbedded not just in the realm of ideology but also in institutional structures that are fundamental to the
globalization of capital.27 If globalism is a way of promoting these structures, by rendering their claims into scientific truths,
postcolonialism serves as their alibi by not acknowledging their presence. Historians meanwhile continue to write history as if
attaining the goals of development were the measure against which the past may be evaluated. That, I think, is the most eloquent
testimonial to the implication of our times in the continuing hegemony of capital, for which the disavowal of an earlier past serves as
disguise. It also indicates where the tasks may be located for a radical agenda appro priate to the present: in questioning
contemporary dehistoricizations of the present and the past and returning inquiry to the search for alternatives to developmental ism.
However we may conceive such alternatives, they are likely to be post-Eurocentric, recognizing that any radical alternatives to
modernity’s forms of domination must confront not just the cultures but also the structures of modernity. At any rate, it seems that
we need a reaffirmation of history and historicity at this moment of crisis in historical consciousness, especially because history
seems to be irrelevant—either because of its renunciation at the centers of power where a postmod ernism declares a rupture with
the past, unable to decide whether such a rupture constitutes a celebration or denunciation of capitalism, or contradictorily, because
of an affirmation of premodernity among those who were the objects of moder nity, who proclaim in order to recover their own
subjectivities that modernity made no difference after all. A historical epistemology will not resolve the contra diction or provide a
guide to the future, but it might serve at least to clarify the ways in which the present uses and abuses the past and serve as a
reminder of our own historicity—why we say and do things differently than they were said or done in the past. Ours is an age when
there is once again an inflation of claims to critical consciousness. These claims are based often on an expanded consciousness of
space. We need to remind ourselves, every time we speak of the constructedness of some space or other, that it may be
impossible, for that very reason, to think of spaces without at the same time thinking of the times that produced those spaces.
Borderlessness
The aff is not a move away from borders. “Borderlessness” is a myth
of global capitalism that reduces freedom to free markets. Border
conflict is the inevitable result of the struggle between labour and
capital.
DeFazio ‘2 Kimberly DeFazio [Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at Clarkson University], Whither Borders?
Red Critique, 2002 http://www.redcritique.org/MayJune02/whitherborders.htm
Until recently the leaders of big business couldn't boast enough about the new "borderless" economy—a post-national world of
global prosperity in which capital, labor, goods and services circulate freely—and its limitless opportunities for travel, commerce, and
communication. So borderless was this new world, these triumphalist narratives suggested, that like all identities the border between
rich and poor worldwide was being blurred in a continuum of boundless consumption. As corporate consultant Kenichi Ohmae has
argued, "as the 21st century approaches and as what I call the four 'I's'—industry, investment, individuals, and information—flow
relatively unimpeded across national borders, the building-block concepts appropriate to a 19th-century, closed-country model of
the world no longer hold" (The End of the Nation State vii). Borderlessness had become a code for the new global freedom. Yet
with the emergence of the so-called war on terror, the borders have "returned" to the borderless economy, and "freedom" is being
redefined. It appears that the Bush Administration is concerned with nothing other than securing US borders, tightening controls and
channeling billions of dollars of public funds to new and already existing national security, police and intelligence departments. The
borders, it seems, had become too "permeable". Suddenly we are told that the US borders are dangerously insecure, and the
preservation of American freedom now lies in the suspension of virtually all democratic rights, including far-reaching new
surveillance technologies to police all borders of the US, as a means of distinguishing "safe" immigrants from "dangerous" ones,
"us" from "them", the "civilized" from the "barbarians". Immigrants are under attack not only in the US, but throughout Europe (or
"Fortress Europe", as it has become known), where a number of far-right politicians have come to prominence on anti-immigrant
policies, pulling with them to the right "new social democrats" such as Tony Blair. And in one of the most violent manifestations of
bordering, Israel has begun constructing a physical barrier further imprisoning Palestinians behind a 12 mile long security fence,
separating "peace-loving" Israelis from, as Israeli government official Effi Eitam put it recently, Palestinian "animals". The
borderlessness of the new economy now appears as what it always was: a deadly farce, with freedom another name for the free
market. For, it is not only the recent corporate scandals that have exposed the great economic crisis now shaking the foundations
of society worldwide, but the actual decline of the living and working conditions of the vast majority of the world's people, more and
more of whom are forced to live under increasingly desperate situations of poverty, hunger, illness, illiteracy and rampant
destruction caused by imperialist wars—while a tiny global ruling elite accumulates ever more wealth and control over world
resources. The borderless world, in short, was never without borders. It was always founded on the border of exploitation; that is,
the relation between the propertyless and the property owners. Those who have only their labor to sell because they do not own the
means of production on one side, and on the other those who own the means of production and therefore compel all who do not to
work for them, in exchange for wages which represent only a fraction of the value actually produced. The "return" of the border since
September 11 represents the exacerbation of the antagonism between labor and capital: an antagonism which exceeds all national
borders. This relation between workers and owners is the fundamental "border" hidden beneath the euphoric rhetoric of
borderlessness—a rhetoric that has found expression in the last decade not only in the managerial philosophy of corporate gurus
and the third-way policies of US and European state officials, but in the high-theory idiom of postmodern "hybridity" and the more
popular discourse of the Internet.
Said
Said’s emphasis on cultural representations trades off with any firm
commitment to making material transformation, locking us into
bourgeois discussions over language and custom instead of
determining concrete avenues for revolution.
Sahay ‘2 Amrohini Sahay, assistant professor of English at Hofstra University, “Edward Said's (Class) "Politics",” Red
Critique, September/October 2002, http://redcritique.org/SeptOct02/TextandClass/edwardsaidsclasspolitics.htm
Over the years, especially since the publication of his book, Orientalism, in 1978, Edward Said has insisted that the most effective
way to understand the world is by cultural analysis. Even though the general public usually associates him with "politics", he is, in
any meaningful sense of the word, not only not political but clearly opposed to politics and political analysis. Culture has been the
key to understanding and solving problems. In fact, culture has acquired the status of a secular sacred in his writing. The privileging
of culture is, of course, the hallmark of the writings of liberal intellectuals in the West—from Arnold to Gramsci, to Trilling, ...and to
Said. A few years ago in an interview in Z Magazine, Said went so far as to basically condemn as irresponsible those teachers of
the humanities who used the "literary" (the canonic text of culture for Said) to draw political conclusions from it. As he said at the
time, "I don't advocate and I'm very much against, the teaching of literature as a form of politics… I don't think the classroom should
become a place to advocate political ideas. I've never taught political ideas in a classroom. I believe that what I'm there to teach is
the interpretation and reading of literary texts" (Z Magazine, July/August, 1993). The emphasis on "culture" has done two things for
Said: it has made his writing pretty much harmless to the establishment and made him into a valuable commodity for the U.S.
academy, which bids for his services on a yearly basis. It has, however, trivialized the issues that he deals with—trivialized them by
reducing their dense class content to a subtle cultural layeredness and thus worked towards diverting the reader from unpacking the
layers of the cultural web and obscured their class content. Said's writings on the Palestinian and Israeli "conflict", are exemplary of
this use of culture to divert attention from the ongoing class struggle in the contemporary situation. Take for example, Said's April
essay in Z Magazine, "Thinking ahead: After Survival, what Happens?" (April, 2002). The essay, in spite of its seemingly political
orientation, is focused on reading the situation in Palestine in terms of the moral "values" of the two sides. On these terms, it is
Sharon's "homicidal instincts" and his "single-minded negation and hate" and not the class interests of Israeli capitalism in
preserving Palestine as a cheap labor pool and secure market for Israeli big business that is at issue in the colonial occupation and
recent military aggressions. And Palestine should, in turn, be defended not as part of the historical struggles of the oppressed and
exploited of the world against their oppressors and exploiters but because it is "one of the great moral causes of our time". This is, to
be clear, part of Said's larger view: that it is not the "exploitation" of "labor" and the struggles against it that make history, but
"culture": the zone of "values", "ideas" and "representations". Thus, according to Said, Israel's "success" in its colonial occupation of
Palestine is only secondarily due to its overwhelming use of its military power (funded by U.S. imperialism which needs Israel to
protect its own class interests in the Middle East) to quell the class revolts of the Palestinians and maintain its colonial occupation of
Palestine. Rather, according to him, "What has enabled Israel to do what it has been doing to the Palestinians for the past 54 years
is the result of a carefully and scientifically planned campaign to validate Israeli actions and, simultaneously, devalue and efface
Palestinian actions". In this perspective, what "has enabled Israel to deal with [the Palestinians] with impunity" is "the immense
diffusionary, insistent, and repetitive power of the images broadcast by CNN, for example" which represent all Palestinians as
"terrorists" and Israel as merely acting in "self-defence". Thus what is "politically" necessary to defend Palestine, according to Said,
is to "tell the Palestinian story" in order to "provide context and understanding" and "a moral and narrative presence with positive,
rather than merely negative, value". The outcome of this view is of course to shift the focus onto (cultural) "representations" and thus
displace any serious discussion of the class interests determining colonialism and the kind of struggle that is needed to combat it. It
is to posit the world as an effect of "ideas" and thus cancel the possibility of any historical and materialist inquiry into the foundations
of the social relations which in fact explain all practices (including the political economy of "representations"). Far from offering any
effective political analysis of the causes of the Palestine-Israel struggle, Said's "postcolonial" discourse—in its blindness to class—is
itself symptomatic of the class violence of imperialism which is currently being unleashed upon the workers of the world, including
Palestinian workers. The ultimate symptom of this class blindness is when Said says, "To hear our spokesmen, as well as other
Arabs, throwing themselves on its [America's] mercy, cursing it in one breath, asking for its help in another, all in miserably
inadequate fractured English, shows such a state of primitive incompetence as to make one cry". But as Saeed Urrehman asks:
don't "the material circumstances of the dominance of English need to be foregrounded before we can demand that Palestinians
speak 'correct' English" (from discussion on postcolonial@lists.village.virginia.edu Monday, 8 April, 2002)? These "material
circumstances" of "correct" English are the class circumstances of capitalism which have not only made "English" the privileged
language of transnational big business under the global hegemony of U.S. imperialism but is what divides postcolonial intellectuals
such as Said—educated at the elite institutions of the metropole—from those without access to the lingua franca of the global elites.
In condemning the Palestinian spokesmen and other Arabs for their "miserably inadequate fractured English", Said thus in fact
defends the very class system that is ruthlessly crushing the people of Palestine and echoes the class violence of imperialism in a
cultural idiom. In doing so he does what he has always done: deploy "culture" to cover over the contradictions of class.
Jameson
Jameson’s attempt to escape capital fails—reifies class privileges and
occludes radical critique
Jameson, however, both in his early and later work seems to simultaneously undermine this very conclusion in ultimately arguing
against the ability to conceptualize economic relations and in suggesting that culture (contrary to what he has already critiqued)
should be seen as not only ‘‘semi-autonomous’’ from class relations but as an (immediate) site of libidinal ‘‘resistance’’ to class
inequality. For instance, he ultimately rejects a materialist theory of ideology which argues that ‘‘superstructural phenomena, are
mere reflexes, epiphenomenal projections of infrastructural realities’’ (42), on the grounds that ‘‘history . . . is inaccessible to us
except in textual form, and that our approach to it and to the Real itself necessarily passes through its prior textualization’’ (35).
There is, in other words, finally no outside to ideology, according to Jameson, and the concept of ideology becomes synonymous
with discourse in his writings. By getting rid of the outside, Jameson duplicates the dominant ideology, which reifies the cultural from
the class relations in which it is produced. On the discursivist terms Jameson invokes, it is impossible to give a critique of ideology
as a false consciousness of the economic and produce an awareness of the necessity for social change, which is what Marx’s labor
theory of value does. Because Jameson abandons the critique of ideology he speculates that, beyond the historical specification of
ideology as global commodification that acts as a ‘‘containment’’ of the awareness of the exploitation of labor in capitalism, culture
also provides the individual with a therapeutic ‘‘compensation’’ for a thoroughly commodified social life in the form of the ‘‘libidinal
transformation’’ (237) of the senses: ‘‘The increasing abstraction of visual art thus proves not only to express the abstraction of daily
life and to presuppose fragmentation and reification; it also constitutes a Utopian compensation for everything lost in the process of
the development of capitalism’’ (236). In short, as ‘‘compensation’’ for the ‘‘loss’’ (theft) of the surplus labor time of the worker by the
capitalist at the point of production, the worker receives an emotional plenitude in the consumption of art during the time after work.
The increasing abstraction Jameson locates in visual art, which he maintains may act as an affective compensation for exploitation,
is itself of course a modality of labor determined by the labor process as ‘‘the secrets which are disclosed to the eye of the physicist
and chemist’’*and, subsequently, the artist*is the product of ‘‘industry and commerce’’ as ‘‘even this ‘pure’ natural science is
provided with an aim, as with its material, only through trade and industry, through the sensuous activity of men’’ (Marx and Engels
1984, 46). What this means is that, if the development of the senses has reached the point where we perceive a world made up of
things as if purely in terms of their natural properties like color and form, as in modern art, this is as much as to say that the senses
have become commodified and are therefore only enjoyable at a price. Because the means to enjoyment must first be purchased in
order to be consumed, it follows that ‘‘enjoyment and labor, production and consumption, devolve on different individuals’’ (51) and
cannot act as compensation for exploitation. The enjoyment of art, for instance, requires wages not only over and above the mere
means of subsistence to purchase access to art, but also to purchase the education to enjoy it. To hold out a libidinal compensation
in consumption and the pleasure of the senses is to conveniently forget that access to consumption and its pleasures is a class
matter determined by one’s place in production*a ‘‘forgetting,’’ moreover, which is precisely ideological in that it acts to block access
to consumption on the part of the exploited (the workers) by normalizing the class privilege of the exploiters (the owners). They, of
course, have no need to be compensated as they do not lose anything in the production of commodities, but only gain the surplus
labor of others.
Specific K Links
Environmental Justice
Environmental Justice
Environmental justice is too local—capital will always find someone
else to dump waste on—the aff just opens a new market for
exploitation
Luke ’97 Timothy W. Luke, department of political science at Virginia Polytechnic Institute, " The (Un)Wise (Ab)Use of
Nature: Environmentalism as Globalized Consumerism?" International Studies Association, March 1997, accessed 1/20/10
http://www.cddc.vt.edu/tim/tims/Tim528.PDF
Newer ecological discourses about total cost accounting, lifecycle management, or environmental justice may simply articulate more
refined efforts to sustainably develop these bigger global processes of universal capitalization by accepting small correctives against
particular capitalist interests. Admitting that poor people have been treated unjustly in siting decisions for environmental bads lets
rich people redistribute these ecological costs across more sites so that they might benefit from the material and symbolic goods
created by being just so environmental. Environmental justice movements perhaps are not so much about attaining environmental
justice as they are about moving injustices more freely around in the environment, assuring the birth of new consumerisms for
increased efficiency at risk management and broader participation ecological degradation in our terraformed Nature.
Environmental justice in late-capitalism turns into environmental

gentrification—without contesting the economic coordinates which
produce inequality, every attempt to clean up certain areas ensures
that rich white people will move in on them—the aff is just another
Harlem
Checker ’11 Melissa Checker, Queens College and The Graduate Center, City University of New York, “Wiped Out by the
“Greenwave”: Environmental Gentrification and the Paradoxical Politics of Urban Sustainability,” City & Society, Vol. 23, Issue 2, pp.
210-229, 2011
Environmental gentrification describes the convergence of urban redevelopment, ecologically-minded initiatives and environmental
justice activism in an era of advanced capitalism. Operating under the seemingly a-political rubric of sustainability, environmental
gentrification builds on the material and discursive successes of the urban environmental justice movement and appropriates them
to serve high-end redevelopment that displaces low income residents. Materially, the efforts of environmental justice activists to
improve their neighborhoods (i.e. the removal of environmental burdens and the installation of environmental benefits) now help
those neighborhoods attract an influx of affluent residents. On the discursive side, environmental gentrification selectively adopts a
language of sustainability, also put forward by environmental justice activists. Thus, while it appears as politically neutral planning
that is consensual as well as ecologically and socially sensitive, in practice it subordinates equity to profit-minded development.
Importantly, my intent in this essay is not to make a causal connection between the successes of environmental justice activists and
gentrification, or to propose that environmental justice causes gentrification. Rather, I wish to examine the unintended
consequences of environmental justice activism and how it gets swept up in the multiplicity of factors that foment gentrification and
displacement. By asking how environmental justice activists and their constituents navigate this paradoxical situation, I also gain
insight into some of the implications of environmental gentrification for contemporary urban planning and politics. Certainly,
environmental gentrification does not mark the first time that low income residents’ efforts to improve their neighborhoods have been
co-opted; nor is this the first time that a positive and politically neutral discourse has masked unequal urban development. Indeed, I
argue that environmental gentrification is both old and new. On one hand, I argue that it marks a recent iteration of old discourses
about urban reform, renewal and revitalization, which similarly masked inequitable urban development. But, on another hand,
environmental gentrification reflects political, economic and social contexts that are unique to this particular historic moment. More
specifically, environmental gentrification operates through a discourse of sustainability which simultaneously describes a vision of
ecologically and socially responsible urban planning, a “green” lifestyle which appeals to affluent, eco-conscious residents, and a
technocratic, politically neutral approach to solving environmental problems. I argue that this particular combination reflects a move
towards a new form of politics, which some scholars refer to as the “post political.” According to Slavoj Žižek, this mode of
governance shies away from traditional, conflictual politics in favor of policies set forth by “enlightened technocrats (economists,
public opinion specialists . . .) via the process of negotiation of interests, a compromise is reached in the guise of a more or less
universal consensus.” (1999:198). For Eric Swyngedouw this consensus serves a neoliberal order in which governments fail to
address citizens’ most basic needs in order to subsidize the financial sector and take on grandiose projects designed to attract
global capital (2007). I argue that environmental gentrification follows this pattern, becoming a mode of “post-political” governance
that shuns politics and de-links sustainability from justice. Thereby, it disables meaningful resistance.
Sustainability Bad
Sustainability discourse overwhelms environmental justice of any
egalitarian potential by turning the debate into a series of techno-fixes
for single issue campaigns that ultimately privilege elites
Checker ’11 Melissa Checker, Queens College and The Graduate Center, City University of New York, “Wiped Out by the
“Greenwave”: Environmental Gentrification and the Paradoxical Politics of Urban Sustainability,” City & Society, Vol. 23, Issue 2, pp.
210-229, 2011
Such contradictions are mirrored in cities across the globe, as economic and ecological disparities widen while municipal leaders
tout definitions of sustainability that are premised, at least discursively, on the interconnectedness of ecological and social issues
(Warner 2002; Krueger and Gibbs 2007; Krueger and Agyeman 2005; Agyeman et al. 2003). An emerging literature addresses the
contradictory relationship of sustainable policies to inequitable urban redevelopment. Hagerman (2007) for instance, looks at
Portland, Oregon (often held up as an icon of urban sustainability) and finds that the production of new green spaces appealed to
very specific and elitist visions of “liveability” while forcing low income housing and service agencies to fight their own displacement.
Pearsall and Pierce (2010) examine the sustainability plans of 107 US cities and evaluate how many of those include environmental
justice both conceptually and as part of their sustainability indicators. Similarly, Finn and Mccormick (2011) study the climate change
plans of three major US cities and find that, despite stated holistic visions, they fail to attend to issues of equitable economic
development and environmental justice. As the latter two of these studies find, as sustainability becomes a pervasive framework, it
concentrates increasingly on issues such as climate change, and environmental amenities (i.e., parks, trees, open spaces). These
policies, however, eclipse the long-standing issue of unequally distributed environmental burdens (i.e., toxic waste facilities, bus
depots, waste producing industries) in low income neighborhoods and communities of color. More macroscopic analysts bring
critical sustainability studies together with recent scholarship on an era of “post-politics.” These scholars posit that the last few
decades have been characterized by deepening processes of de-politicization characterized by technocratic management and
consensual policy-making which disallow spaces for conflictual politics and the imagining of alternative modes of governance
(Swyngedouw 2009). Or, as Diken and Laustsen write, “[e]verything is politicised, can be discussed, but only in a non-committal way
and as a non-conflict. Absolute and irreversible choices are kept away; politics becomes something one can do without making
decisions that divide and separate” (2004: 7). Contemporary fixes to environmental issues, especially climate change, provide a
prime example of the rise of technocracy, managerial governance and consensual politics. As geographer Eric Swyngedouw
explains, sustainability is built on the basic vision that techno-natural and socio-metabolic interventions are urgently needed if we
wish to secure the survival of the planet and much of what it contains.. Difficulties and problems, such as environmental concerns
that are generally staged and accepted as problematic need to be dealt with through compromise, managerial and technical
arrangement, and the production of consensus. (2007:26) Here, in the contemporary global liberal order, those who do not
subscribe to the need for sustainability are relegated to the political margins. Debate, then, focuses on the best kinds of
technological or managerial fixes for environmental problems, and competing visions for “new socio-ecological order[s]” that more
radically departs from the neoliberal status quo are foreclosed (Swyngedouw 2007:26).
Cap = Root Cause
Wage relations are the root cause of environmental injustice—turns
the case—the alt alone solves best
Scattergood ‘3 Wendy Scattergood, assistant professor of political science at St. Norbert College, "A Structural
Argument for the Causes and Persistence of Environmental Racism: A World Systems Approach," Paper presented at the annual
meeting of the American Political Science Association, 27 August 2003, accessed 1/27/10
http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p_mla_apa_research_citation/0/6/2/6/4/p62645_index.html
It is within this market structure that a system of environmental and human exploitation evolved and continues today because
people think it is natural; ‘it’s just the way things are.’ This first section of the paper will attempt to describe the evolution of this
system of exploitation and explain its naturalization and institutionalization: why exploitative practices continue despite general
acknowledgement of the externalities (ill- effects) the system produces. Why focus on structure? I came to use structuralism
because evidence in the US showed poor minorities were significantly more exposed to environmental hazards than whites. 1 It is
hard to believe that all current siting decisions with racially biased outcomes are deliberately racist. Yet the siting distribution of
environmental hazards is clearly racially inequitable. It seemed that the current research on causation was identifying variables that
were symptoms of some greater underlying influence. 2 This led to the investigation of institutional racism; the “exclusionary
practices arising from…a racist discourse but which may no longer be explicitly justified by such a discourse, such that it is the
defense of a system of advantage which was historically based on racist exclusion” (Miles 1989, 84). Therefore, while overt racism
was a historical practice that is no longer supposed to be part of governmental policies and may not legally be used in siting
hazards, racially biased outcomes continue. This seemed more satisfying but I could not find the root cause and how this system
worked, so I went next to structuralism. The following study is built from Wallerstein’s (1993) world-systems approach in that I use a
globalized system of capitalism to show a particular division of labor that crosses nation-state lines. This allows analysis of how
global trading and production patterns disparately affect sub-national groups by class, rather than focusing on nation- states.
Wallerstein argues that commodities are a chain of markets where centripetal force moves production from the periphery
(developing countries whose "comparative advantage" is in low surplus raw material extraction and cash crop agriculture), to the
semi-periphery (mixed economies of raw materials and traditional manufacturing), to the core (developed countries with high-tech
manufacturing and service sectors). Wallerstein analyzed differential development rates to conclude that modern development in the
highly industrialized countries and the globalization of capitalism came at the expense of the periphery - both within states and in the
developing countries. "Contrary to the liberal economic notion of specialization based on comparative advantage, this division of
labor requires as well as increases inequality between regions" (quoted from Viotti and Kauppi 1993, 459). While Wallerstein
acknowledges race and gender as distinct groups within the division of labor who have been most exploited, the use of class as unit
of analysis limits the focus and does not allow for examination of common roots between environmental and human degradation.
Also, concentration on economic relations ignores how the Western cultural systems of science and religion rose simultaneously
with capitalism to symbiotically rationalize and justify exploitative practices. Marxists argue that economic relations are the societal
base upon which the cultural superstructure is built to rationalize the base. Regardless of which is a rationalization of which, the
simultaneous formation of economic and cultural systems and their synergistically reproduced global socioeconomic system
resulted in present forms of domestic and international environmental racism (here defined as inequitable distribution of
environmental hazards among different groups of people). As mentioned in the introduction, it is not my intent to discount the
relevance of autonomous state, group, and individual power in favor of structural power, it is merely to isolate structural power for
more thorough scrutiny.
Animals
Eco-Romanticism/Poesis
Affirming the poetic beauty of natural life against the specter of
technology dehistoricizes the conditions which necessitate such
modes of thought and turn resistance into flimsy re-thinking which
does nothing to challenge conditions of inequality for those on the
margins.
DeFazio ’12 Kimberly DeFazio, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at Clarkson University, “Machine-Thinking
and the Romance of Posthumanism,” The Red Critique, Winter/Spring 2012,
http://redcritique.org/WinterSpring2012/machinethinkingandtheromanceofposthumanism.htm
Machine-thinkers, in other words, oppose the effects of capitalism by blurring social boundaries and essentializing epistemological
distinctions in an effort, not to transform capitalism, but to find a freer mode of life outside of the social (outside the city). It involves,
as Wolfe puts it in his annotation of R.L. Rutsky's theory of posthumanism, "participat[ing] in—and find[ing] a mode of thought
adequate to—'processes which can never be entirely reduced to patterns or standards, codes or information'" (What is
Posthumanism? xviii). This is a (not so distant) echo of Thoreau's romantic desire to "wander far beyond... the narrow limits" of
restricting codes and conventions in everyday life, into the realm of what he calls "Extra vagance!": the fulfillment of the "desire to
speak somewhere without bounds" (Walden 270). Not coincidentally, the "nature" that thereby becomes valorized by critics of
machine-thinking is, in effect, a rewriting of romantic discourses. As much as theorists locate themselves beyond naïve (humanist)
constructions of nature, nature in contemporary theory is ultimately a bio-fantasy of a nature "outside" of and fundamentally
disruptive of the social relations of production. In opposition to techne, in other words, machine-thinkers oppose (natural) "life" itself
("bios"). Along these lines, in some contemporary posthumanist discourse, "nature" betrays a "viral" or "mutational logic" that
"exceeds and encompasses the boundary between the living or organic and the mechanical or technical" and thus becomes
"parasitical" (Wolfe, What is Posthumanism? xviii-xix)—a "natural" logic that is represented as breaking the bounds of existing
(social) thought but that ends up being a new species of deconstruction. Leaving aside for the moment posthumanism's updating of
deconstruction, one of the key points here is that rather than changing the relations in which life is lived, the new battle cry of the left
centers on new ways of thinking about life as excessive of human relations. Machine-thinking is in effect a romantic means of
disappearing the social. Life is re-articulated as "machine" and "nature," and as a consequence, what makes both— social labor—
becomes a fiction. I argue that such rewritings of capitalism as machine-thinking are part of a long line of romantic writings of the
social which emerge with particular force at times of economic crisis. Romanticism, I argue, is not merely a particular historical
manifestation of a literary sensibility. It is a broader response (literary, philosophical, cultural and political) in the post-Renaissance
West to the contradictions of capitalism: contradictions which romanticism reads in terms of science and technology and, in
particular, instrumental rationality. To put this another way, the translation of the material contradictions of capital into the ideal (and
in particular "machine thinking") is a structural feature of capitalism. It is rooted in the way that capital, as it develops, increasingly
"resolve[s] personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that
single, unconscionable freedom—Free Trade," one of the central consequences of which is that "for exploitation, veiled by religious
and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation" (Marx and Engels, Manifesto of the Communist
Party). Romanticism has always challenged the effects of capitalist relations (giving it a semblance of radicality) but not its root
cause (exploitation). In this vein, Emerson, for instance, argues that "Poetry is the consolation of mortal men," because they "live
cabined, cribbed, confined in a narrow and trivial lot—in wants, pains, anxieties and superstitions, in profligate politics, in personal
animosities, in mean employments—and victims of these; and the nobler powers untried, unknown" ("Poetry and Imagination" 37).
"A poet comes," Emerson continues, "who lifts the veil; gives them glimpses of the laws of the universe" (37-8). And what the poet
reveals, according to Emerson, is that reality is only the phenomenal appearance of a higher, spiritual reality. Romantics like
Emerson confine their understanding of capitalist conditions to its alienating effects and use of technology in the city (the space of
the most developed technology and class divisions). They therefore misread capitalism as primarily a rigid, homogenizing and
instrumental way of thinking. Poetry thus "consoles" men, for Emerson, because, through it, the "veil" of phenomenal reality is lifted
to reveal a symbolic universe which resists the instrumentality (i.e., the placing of ends before means) of modern life. Which is
another way of saying that Emerson reduces capitalism to something that cannot be changed, only thought about
differently. The concern, in other words, is with the ways in which, as Heidegger puts it, a technological age "take[s]
thinking itself to be a technē, a process of reflection in service to doing and making" ("Letter on Humanism" 218). Nothing—and no
one—is meaningful in and of itself, but for something else (a means toward an end). This reading of instrumentality de-historicizes
and de-materializes instrumentality. In focusing only on the how of instrumentality—how instrumental thinking equates the valuable
with the efficient, with efficaciousness—the reasons why this has become the dominant logic in capitalism fade into the background.
In fact, the marginalization of the why in cultural theory has become grounds for treating Heidegger (among others) as a militant
against the metaphysics of origin and religious origin in particular. Along these lines, Timothy Clark affirms that, for Heidegger,
"Ultimately, like human existence itself, it [Being] is without a 'why' (has nothing we might recognize as a meaning): it happened
because it happened" (34). Yet in the name of the destruction of religious and metaphysical origin, Heidegger has been instrumental
in updating spiritualism and, in effect, in dismantling the knowledge of material origin. Poetry, for both Emerson and Heidegger, re-
thinks the contemporary, and, in a more or less overtly religious language, produces a subject that recognizes the world's (material)
insignificance from the vantage point of a higher immaterial reality. "Every natural fact," Emerson writes in Nature, "is a symbol of
some spiritual fact" (26).
Machine-Thinking
Focusing criticism on human appropriation of ecology merely in
terms of modes of ‘thought’ naturalizes underlying profit motives—
technological thought doesn’t come from nowhere, it emerges from a
system which incentivizes the cheapest and most efficient modes of
production. Their posthuman thought is flimsy neo-romanticism
obscuring material inequality.
But what drives the "new industrial revolution" (Venter) is what drove the "old" one: the use of technology to appropriate surplus
labor (the source of profit) at the point of production. Profit is not derived from "nature" but labor: in order for nature to become a
commodifiable resource, it must become transformed by human labor, which is itself a dialectical outcome of nature. This is another
way of saying that the commodification of life on such a planetary scale today is only possible on the basis of the commodification of
human labor power. Biocapitalism is first and foremost a regime of wage labor. Contemporary cultural theory's concern with the
effects of capitalism on non-human life, however, has mystified capital's material roots, and one of the central means by which this
has been accomplished is what I call machine-thinking. Machine-thinking treats capitalism as an instrumentalized mode of thinking:
a mechanized mode of knowing which subjects all (non-) human life to its logic. Whether this logic is understood in the more positive
terms of Henry Jenkins, John Johnston or Bernard Stiegler, who sees a fundamental connection between humans and technology
and suggests that "The human invents himself in the technical by inventing the tool" (Stiegler, Technics and Time 141), or in the
"negative" terms of those like Paul Virilio or Horkheimer and Adorno, who suggest that "A technological rationale is the rationale of
domination itself. It is the coercive nature of society alienated from itself" (Dialectic of Enlightenment 121), machine-thinking
(mis)reads as the instrumentalization of society what is in reality the marketization of society—by which I mean the domination of all
aspects of life by exchange value and the subordination of use value (which meets human needs, including the need to preserve the
earth's diverse ecological systems) to profit. These misreadings, in effect, transcode the material relations of production under
capitalism into the immaterial and translate the labor relations of the machine into instrumental reason. In different idioms, such
discourses consequently turn the problem of capitalism into the problem of technologization and what Heidegger, one of the
twentieth century's most influential machine-thinkers, calls "technē, a process of reflection in service to doing and making" ("Letter
on Humanism" 218). On these terms, at stake is not exploitation but instrumentalization. Contemporary discourses see capitalism in
terms of what Heidegger identifies in "The Question Concerning Technology" as the truth of technology in the modern era: its
"enframing" logic (325), which ensures that in a technological age "even the cultivation of the field has comes under the grip of
another kind of setting-in-order, which sets upon nature. It sets upon it in the sense of challenging it. Agriculture is now the
mechanized food industry, air is now set upon to yield nitrogen, the earth to yield ore, ore to yield uranium, for example" (320). But
the focus on the way that, in a technological society, neither nature nor humans are meaningful in and of themselves but as means
toward an end—or the way that, as Heidegger puts it, an instrumental approach "expedites in that it unlocks and exposes" and is
fundamentally oriented "toward driving on the maximum yield at the minimum expense" (321)—isolates technology from both the
broader material conditions in which it is developed and the class interests it serves. For capital "drives on the maximum yield at the
minimum expense," not because of the "dialectic of enlightenment," as Horkheimer and Adorno contend, but for the purposes of
private accumulation. Humans are "set upon" nature in order to maximize surplus labor for the owner who buys the labor of others
and makes a profit from it. To put this another way, humans are set upon nature because they are set upon themselves. And
because the material relations of society set the terms for the relations between humans and nature, only under fundamentally
changed relations between humans can humans develop new relations to nature and non-human species. Yet the solution to the
instrumentalization of human and natural life for Heidegger and other (neo)romantics like Derrida, Wolfe, and Calarco is not a
fundamental change in social relations but a return to the "material" as non-instrumental reason (the non-reason of nature, the body,
feeling, spirit, "poeisis," the non-human, and so on): in short, a de-materialized material. Theorists of capitalism-as-machine-thinking
construct a post-rational linguistic realm of higher values which are assumed to exceed restricting codes and conventions. For
"mechanical" modes of thought which focus on classifying being and the "metaphysics" of presence (essentialism), they substitute
speculative, fluid concepts which foreground becoming, flux, and hybridity—what Goethe refers to as "morphology" and Derrida
calls the "double-session" and later "l'animot." For the Cartesian separation of subject and object they posit a subject which cannot
be extricated from its embeddedness in the world except through a violent act of human(ist) abstraction.
Textualism
Posthumanism’s intellectual indebtedness to post-structural lit theory
fancies textual play over taking theoretical responsibility for ongoing
social crises and growing inequality—the desire to break down
human/animal binaries is precisely the technique of capitalist
expansion, to include the other as worker and ignore materiality
For Derrida as for Calarco, then, the fundamental problem with Heidegger is the (Cartesian) "abyss" he assumes exists between
humans and animals, which renders humans "purely" one thing and animals another, and which posits the animal as lacking a
presence only humans are assumed to have. It is what allows, at the level of thinking, human mastery over the animal and nature.
But it is important to note that posthumanism is not opposed to the notion of a constitutive abyss per se. Rather, what it opposes is
the presumption that a gap exists between two entities that makes one essentially different from the other. After all, Wolfe
emphasizes Stanley Cavell's argument that "language (and understanding, and knowledge) rests upon very shaky foundations—a
thin net over an abyss" (quoted in Zoontologies 4). Similarly, Derrida celebrates the experience of standing naked in front of his cat
and becoming aware of the animal's "uninterpretable, unreadable, undecidable, abyssal… secret" that puts Derrida to "shame" (The
Animal That Therefore I Am 12). Abyss here, in Derrida and Wolfe, signals something beyond the reach of knowledge and
understanding, and is precisely that which exposes the "metaphysical" basis on which the human/animal distinction lies; it is
therefore to be understood as a mark of Derrida's and Wolfe's "subtle" thinking as opposed to the vulgarity of Heidegger. This is
another way of saying that posthumanist readings of human-animal relations do not at all move away from the speculative
epistemology of textualism. Rather, they import poststructuralist deconstruction of binaries as a means of introducing the (now, for
them, more "urgent") ethical question of the animal. The task of theory is no longer to mark the "lack" that undoes all distinction, all
concepts, but to mark a "fullness" of animal being that exceeds the humanist understanding and which, when brought to light, can
reveal a common distinctionlessness of all human/non-human life: a plentitude that (it is assumed) exists prior to the rigid,
essentializing distinctions that constitute the social. This shift itself however needs to be addressed in the context of the material
contradictions in the wake of global (cyber) capitalism. The focus on "lack" was part of the philosophical strategy of disarming
materialist concepts in the wake of the second World War and the heightening of the Cold War. Textualism was, to put this another
way, the epistemology of the neoliberal era of de-regulation. Through the lens of textuality, all concepts were rendered equally
unstable and untenable. On these terms, not only the "human," "progress" and "science" (banners of the bourgeois Enlightenment)
but "class" and "exploitation," like all other social categories, emerged as thin discursive constructs without any determinate relation
to material reality. Indeed, "determination" and the "material" were perhaps subject to the most widespread deconstruction. The
result was that the very concepts needed to understand the increasingly global nature of capital and its systematic subjugation of
the working class to the international relations of wage-labor, were rejected as "totalitarian" concepts. In the place of materialist
concepts, textualist-informed cultural theory—which grew to become the dominant framework from the 1960s through the 1990s—
substituted difference, singularity, and jouissance. "Materialism" soon became equated with the "materiality" of writing and its
subversion of all binaries, including the binaries of inside/outside (on which historical materialism is based). Textualization, in effect,
did at the level of theory what transnational capital did at the level of regulations and national boundaries: it subverted them so as to
expand the market and market-thinking. Since the 1990s, however, not only have poststructuralism's speculative aspects themselves come under increasing
criticism (see, for instance, the official eulogy for poststructuralist informed "high theory" in the 2004 Special Issue of Critical Inquiry) and are now widely discredited for being out
of touch with contemporary social realities, but economic contradictions have emerged as truly global crises that threaten capitalism itself. To be sure, posthumanism is just as
invested in dismantling distinctions. Thus Calarco is highly critical not only of Heideggerian essentialism but "semantic and ontological realism that involves making sharp
distinctions among different beings" (38). And, moreover, deconstruction of conceptual binaries is always the chief strategy in discrediting distinctions, especially distinctions
among species. Thus in Kelly Oliver's Animal Lessons, animals in canonic romantic and philosophical texts are read as the exemplary agents of deconstruction, as "biting back"
the very texts that seek to establish them as other: "In those passages in which they delineate what distinguishes man from animals, both Rousseau and Herder turn to animals
to illuminate their arguments. Their animals do not merely serve as examples against which they define man. Rather these animals belie the very distinction between man and
animal that their invocation seeks to establish. As we will see, the examples and metaphors of animals that inhabit these texts ape or mock assertions of any uniquely human
characteristics" (2). In an important sense, posthumanist discourses reanimate textualism for the knowledge industry, thus making it profitable again. But, again, the
posthumanist emphasis is increasingly a romantic reading of nature as "surplus," which foregrounds the excessiveness and fullness
of natural life, represented as violently reduced by human concepts. If (textual) "lack" has become less interesting to cultural theory than the excessive
plentitude of nature and the non-human, this needs to be related to the unavoidably vivid human devastation that global capitalism has quickly led to since its "triumph" over
Soviet socialism in the early 1990s—not only in the global South and many former Soviet-bloc nations, but (especially recently) in the very pillars of capitalist economies in the
global North. The technological advances that globalization promised would result in more democratic societies have been accompanied by profound social alienation and
isolation and even deeper class inequality. Globalization had promised a new era of freedom and prosperity, but "[i]n reality," as Teresa Ebert writes in The Task of Cultural
Critique, globalization has made wage labor (which is missing from, for example, Derrida's discourse on globalization/mondialisation) the universal regime of work. It has
suspended all strong labor laws and finance regulations so that capital can travel freely across national borders to invest, trade, and own property all over the world, as well as
set wages and receive huge tax benefits at the expense of workers... It has used democracy as a cover for imposing the free market on people of the world and transferring
public wealth to the private sector by commodifying water, healthcare, education, energy, food and transportation. It has increased the gap between poor and rich countries,
ruined the environment, and turned the 'working day' into a nightmare of unending exploitation for workers who, unprotected by any laws, have only two options: consent to
being exploited at an ever-increasing rate or live a life of extreme poverty and want in everlasting uncertainty. (136-37) Posthumanist concern with the animal is a
romantic retreat to nature in the face of unprecedented social crisis. Through it, the utter failure of capitalism to meet the worlds'
social needs (the deepening of class inequality between North and South and within the North and South) is re-written as the
(universal) failure of a transhistorical "humanity" which has purportedly become alienated from its roots in "nature." (Natural)
plentitude has returned to fill the void of living in the ruins of capitalism. But, at the same time, this posthumanist retreat to a ("new")
nature also encodes a new energetic ethics which makes its discourses seem not escapist but "activist" at a moment when theory
can no longer afford to seem out of touch. And, in this regard, far from undoing all essentialized notions of the human, it installs a
new ethical essence to the human, who emerges out of posthumanism as that species uniquely capable of recognizing the lack of
fundamental distinctions in nature and who makes ethical choices on that basis. Posthumanism's ideological value, then, is that it
serves the dual role of making theory "matter" again in its focus on specific "material" practices within capitalism that legitimate the
destruction of nature and abuse of animals (thereby giving posthumanism a veneer of activism), while at the same time steering
social activism and social theory away from class. It displaces the heightening contradictions between humans onto the relations
between humans and animals. For the calculating logic of instrumental reason, it offers a subversive mode of thinking that purports
to resist rigid binaries and hierarchies.
Animal Divide
Posthumanism errantly locates social divisions in conceptual
constructs, which trades in radical materialism for lazy, bourgeois
‘rethinking’ which blurs economic hierarchies which must be
recognized to be overthrown
Why has the animal question emerged "at this moment"? One of the fundamental assumptions of posthumanism is that new
phenomena—i.e., new studies into language acquisition and use in animals, into cognitive and affective similarities of humans and
animals, new technologies hybridizing humans and machines, humans and animals, new investigations into DNA—are the effects of
particular ways of knowing and their manifestation in particular uses of technology. In a new twist of machine-thinking, posthumanist
discourses suggest that new discoveries in science and technology—e.g., zoology, biology, microbiology, genetics—along with
challenges to traditional humanities within such disciplines as philosophy and literary studies have brought about challenges to older
paradigms of human-animal relations that make more ethical relations possible. Derrida articulates this matrix of assumptions when
he writes that "It is all too evident" that "traditional forms of treatment of the animal have been turned upside down by the joint
developments of zoological, ethological, biological, and genetic forms of knowledge, which remain inseparable from techniques of
intervention into their object, from the transformation of the actual object, and from the milieu and world of their object, namely, the
living animal" (The Animal That Therefore I Am 25; see also Wolfe's Introduction to Zoontologies x-xiii). Implicit here is the argument
that contemporary forms of knowledge have broken free of the Cartesian framework of rationalism (the "bad" science of an outdated
capitalism), according to which it was possible to clearly separate subject from object and which define the human in relation to its
distinct capacities for reason. New knowledges (the "good" science of contemporary capitalism) call these suppositions into question
by establishing deeper similarities between human animals that undermine the notion that humans possess any distinct traits. For
what Agamben calls "the anthropological machine" posthumanist discourses substitute what Wolfe calls a "viral" logic that "exceeds
and encompasses the boundary not just between human and animal but also between the living or organic and the mechanical or
technical" (What is Posthumanism?xviii). Which is another way of saying that what posthumanism advocates is a more fluid ("viral,"
"parasitical") machine. Derrida's comments above, it should be noted, are a quasi-appeal to the material which quickly turns the material into the ideal, and secondary
effects into the primary cause. New realities, Derrida suggests, are the effect of knowledge and its "techniques" on the one hand and on the other the (cultural) "milieu" of the
world—both of which are superstructural aspects of economic relations. That is to say, not only is the new research into animals revealing more similarities between humans
and animals dependent upon (Cartesian) study of the animal object by the human subject, but the studies into human-animal relations are not in any way "outside" of capitalist
accumulation, as Derrida suggests; they are, in fact, made possible by labor and the labor relations that relentlessly divide the working class and owners while producing
"results" that posthumanists treat as hybridizing or disrupting all inter- and intra-species distinctions. In this way, Derrida is able to address many of the new concrete realities of
capitalism, while at the same time isolating them from their roots in the (human) relations of exploitation. For Derrida and other posthumanists, as I have argued, the central task
is founded on (re)thinking: developing those knowledges that are capable of revealing the inherently ambiguous nature of human-animal relations, and critiquing those that
presuppose any essential distinctions.It is in this context of distinction-blurring posthumanist analysis that Calarco devotes the first chapter of Zoographies to a critique of
Heidegger because, he writes, "It is my contention that his work has served primarily to marginalize the animal question in contemporary thought" (although Calarco admits at
the same time that many of the "questions and theses" of his critique "are fundamentally indebted to the horizon of thought opened up by Heidegger" (15)). One of the texts
Calarco pays special attention to is the "Letter on Humanism," and especially its relation to Heidegger's earlier work. Whereas his earlier writings attempt to develop an ontology
that would "reorient the human and biological sciences, as well as the university as a whole" (31), the later writings, Calarco argues, are more "dogmatic" in their insistence on a
fundamental difference between humans and animals. For instance, Calarco picks up on Heidegger's question in the (later) "Letter," "whether the essence of the human being
primordially and most decidedly lies in the dimension of animalitas at all," as opposed to humanitas (Heidegger, "Letter" 227). Heidegger's question relates to metaphysics'
equating of the human with "animal rationale," where the human becomes simply "one living creature among others" (whose difference lies in its capacity to reason). The
problem with animal rationale, Heidegger argues, is that this is already a metaphysical interpretation of humans, which does not think "the essence of man... in its origin" (227).
It thus obscures the real difference of Dasein—which is fundamentally human (and is not so by virtue of its reasoning capacity but because of its relation to Being). For
Heidegger, language is the "house of being"; to be able to gain access to the dwelling of Being, Dasein requires language, the "home that preserves the ecstatic for his
essence" (228) or "the clearing-concealing advent of Being itself" (230). Only through language can one experience the "standing in the clearing of Being I call the ek-sistence of
man" (228). However, Heidegger argues, "Because plants and animals are lodged in their respective environments but are never placed freely into the clearing of being which
alone is 'world,' they lack language," and they thus lack access to Being. In short, according to Heidegger, animals are "separated from our ek-sistent essence by an abyss"
(230). At stake in such statements for Calarco is not Heidegger's idealist ontology, but that "Heidegger uncritically accepts two basic tenets of ontotheological anthropocentrism:
that human beings and animals can be clearly and cleanly distinguished in their essence; and that such a distinction between human beings and animals even needs to be
drawn" (30). The issue here for Calarco and other posthumanists is the "essentializing" tendencies which characterize humanist
thinking, and which Heidegger's later works more overtly display. Whether the "human" is understood as in idealist terms, as a
"thinking" being (as in Aristotle, Descartes or Hegel), or in materialist terms of labor (Marx), from the standpoint of posthumanism, all
forms of humanism are equally problematic on the grounds that, as Neil Badington puts it, humanism posits "an absolute difference
between the human and the inhuman" (Posthumanism 4). On this basis, Cary Wolfe opposes the liberal humanist "speciesism" which attempts to "define a
category of beings by its essence," so as to establish a fundamental difference and hierarchy between the human and nonhuman others (Animal Rites 32). Calarco thus says of
Heidegger that he "offers nothing in the way of critique concerning the metaphysical tradition's drawing of the oppositional line between human beings and animals" (53). This is
at the heart of the posthumanist critique of humanism: its more or less hidden anthropocentric nature of essentialism. Calarco thus shows in subsequent chapters how some of
the very theorists to have addressed the animal question in a way that opens up pathways toward the erasure of human/animal binary nonetheless end up to a greater or lesser
extent re-affirming the division and consequently essentialism. But how far beyond Heidegger do posthumanist discourses go? As I argued earlier, Heidegger's "third way" focus
is in part on the "qualitative experience" constitutive of being-in-the-world against the "abstract" (concept). Central to Heidegger's replacement of materialism with ineffable
materialism is the (familiar) critique of "theory" as a legacy of Cartesian separation of subject and object. Briefly returning to Being and Time, Heidegger emphasizes
that, whereas "Being-in-the-world, as concern, is fascinated by the world with which it is concerned" (88), theoretical "knowing" of
the world is characterized by "deficiency." He writes, "If knowing is to be possible as a way of determining the nature of the present-at-hand by observing it, then
there must first be a deficiency in our having-to-do with the world concernfully. When concern holds back from any kind of producing, manipulating, and the like, it puts itself into
what is now the sole remaining mode of Being-in, the mode of just tarrying alongside" (88). In other words, the subject/object relations of metaphysical knowing (theory) are
based on the illusory separation of the subject from its world—as if the subject were "autonomous" (89) from the object. On this basis of subject/object relations, Heidegger
renounces of course not only (idealist) rationalism, but the philosophy of materialism, which posits the existence of an external world independent of individual consciousness
but which can be known through scientific analysis. The problem, according to Heidegger, is that a theory which assumes a difference between subject and object is a mode of
being that "lets us encounter entities within-the-world purely in the way they look... Looking at something in this way... takes over a 'view point' in advance from the entity which it
concerns. Such looking-at enters the mode of dwelling autonomously alongside entities within-the-world" (88-89). One finds the same concern in posthumanist discourses: the
subject/object relations of traditional science have allowed the (human) subject to separate itself from the world in which it is
integrally embedded. Hence the argument that all such distinctions as subject/object, human/animal, human/machine, and so on require vigilant deconstruction so as to
show that we are all "mongrel" (Markley). That is to say, any standpoint from which one can separate subject from object, human from animal is a form of epistemological
purification which not only falsely constructs divisions whose boundaries are established by their exclusions, but is a "utilitarian calculus" on the basis of which "all living beings"
become "potentially means and not ends" (Wolfe). A broader point that needs to be made here is that, while for Heidegger the problem is the subject/object binary, and for
posthumanists it is the human/animal distinction, what they all reject as metaphysical thinking is the logic of the "binary" which is the structuring
principle of class society. Class societies, in which a few control the labor and products of others and thus have control over the
lives of the majority, necessarily create cultural and conceptual divisions which codify these class relations. Conceptual divisions
have their material roots not in the mind but in the world which the mind reflects, through more or less complex mediations. This is
one of the basic principles of materialism: ideas are not the product of the (individual) mind; rather, social consciousness is shaped
by social existence. Therefore changing how people think and thus act (whether to oneself, other humans, animals or the
environment) requires changing the material divisions that produce othering. Philosophy which simply does away with conceptual
distinctions in thinking, as Heidegger and other romantics do, not only gets rid of the very concepts (like "class," "exploitation,"
"determination") needed to understand the structuring principles of class society, but, in effect, displaces material change of
objective conditions onto the subjective change of the individual. This is the essential politico-cognitive work that neoromantic theory
does for capital. Whether through such concepts as Keats' "negative capability" Kant's "sublime," Heidegger's "Being" or "the question of the animal" that is the more
recent focus of such writers as Derrida, Wolfe, and Calarco, romantic machine-thinking celebrates the dissolution of boundaries: between self and other, subject and object,
philosophy and poetry, rich and poor, the social (as city) and nature. It constructs a post-rational linguistic realm of higher values which exceed restricting social codes and
conventions. Boundaries, in romanticism, are viewed as the imposition of cultural codes and linguistic conventions that rigidly delineate, not as material (as effects of labor
relations). It is through the replacement of "mechanical" concepts with speculative ones that romanticism blurs social boundaries and
epistemological distinctions in an effort, not to transform capitalism, but to find a freer mode of thinking within it . As Wordsworth puts
it in his Preface to Lyrical Ballads, it involves taking familiar incidents and "throw[ing] over them a certain colouring of imagination"—
or, in the updated idiom of posthumanism, a "revolution in language and thought" (Calarco, Zoographies 6). Heideggerian pre-
reflective experience, like "the question of the animal," is in short the space in which "abstract" binaries like class (not to mention
other social differences) evaporate. By blurring lines, romantic theory seeks, as Heidegger puts it, "the liberation of language from
grammar" ("Letter on Humanism" 218), rather than social transformation. To liberate language from grammar is of course to free up
thinking (from cultural bounds), to suspend the social structures of language and, according to Heidegger, to come closer to
understanding Being. Grammarless language is thus the fantasy of the plentitude of meaning outside of the social. No matter how
adamantly posthumanism condemns Heidegger's human-centered thinking, the very de-essentializing strategies it deploys to
challenge human-animal distinctions are informed by the (Heideggerian) desire to escape existing social conventions, through the
relay of the animal.
Posthumanism is designed to fracture class politics

Cotter ’12 Jennifer Cotter, Assistant Professor of English at William Jewell College, “Bio-politics, Transspecies Love and/as
Class Commons-Sense,” Red Critique, Winter/Spring 2012,
http://www.redcritique.org/WinterSpring2012/biopoliticstransspeciesismandclasscommonssense.htm
This essentially spiritualist understanding of life, moreover, is codified on a new level within a specific variant of biopolitical theories
—transspeciesist posthumanism—which posits a common spiritual life beyond historical differences between "humans" and
"animals" as the basis of new global social relations. As a form of biopolitical ideology, transspecies posthumanism displaces class
relations with an ahistorical and spiritualist understanding of common life. Transspecies posthumanism does so more specifically by
declaring the historical differences between species—specifically between humans and other animals—as a metaphysical
abstraction of the the common fact of living that exists within all species. One of the main goals of transspecies posthumanism is to
divert attention away from class relations and exploitation of surplus-labor, by enacting a "fissure" in the concept of the human—that
is, by ideologically dissolving the historical difference between human and animal—and, in so doing, invoking a "crisis" in the
concept of human labor-power. Transspecies posthumanism, therefore, situates "life"—which it understands as "transspecies" life or
life common to all species—outside of the historical relations that produce differences between the species. In doing so it dispense
with projects for material transformation of historical relations of production on the grounds that they are "violently anthropocentric"
and function on the basis of what Donna Haraway calls "the goad of human exceptionalism" (When Species Meet 46).
Alt Solves/AT: Perm
The posthuman imperative is incompatible with our strategy and
there’s no net benefit—ideological critique solves their offense
The war against science in romantic cultural theory is a proxy war against laws of social transformation, one which encodes the
interests of the petit-bourgeoisie—it protests the harsh realities of capitalism while evading the necessity of its material
transformation via revolution by positing an "excessive element"—this "excessive element" (whether being, difference, the animal,
or...) is what makes it useful to capitalism—because while it appears "transgressive" from one point of view (negation of the
existing), it inscribes within it the advance of the forces of production while the social relations of property remain intact. Put another
way, it "assimilates" the changes required by advancing forces of production to the framework of the old property relations. But there
is of course an untranscendable material "limit" to this process of "adjustment"—when, to paraphrase Marx in the Preface to A
Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy—the revolutionary letter comes due ("From forms of development of the productive
forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution."). Critique of ideology is thus a way of facilitating
this transformation by heightening the contradiction—producing positive knowledge ("ontology") of it (and the ways in which it is
obscured in bourgeois ideology).
Marxist theory solves and is prior to their posthumanist critique—

capitalism instrumentalizes all life in service of production—the aff
naturalizes class oppression by abstracting politics into weak
subjectivism, which makes for a weak reformism
Biopolitics in general and transspecies posthumanism in particular have become the norm in cultural theory because they provide a
cultural updating of the social relations of production in capitalism that is in accord with new strategies in which capital seeks to
realize surplus-value through "green" technologies. The greening of capitalism has become the new cultural horizon which justifies
exploitation under the pretext of getting in touch with nature/the animal and the environment. More specifically, with the ideological
"greening" of capitalist production, this means that the other which has been relegated to inhuman status—owing to the exploitation
of the other’s labor in production—is now discursively aligned with the animal and is revalued as a (re)source for a more just world
or what Haraway calls "alter-globalization." This is a ruling class ruse for sentimentalizing
exploitation. What this does is romanticize the poverty of the other which is not caused by speciesist ideology but by
wage-labor/capital relations. Transspecies posthumanism is ultimately a bypassing of the social—and the need for social
transformation to abolish the exploitation of labor—and a return to a form of the "elemental" and the "natural." To put this another
way, posthumanism ideologically normalizes the way in which wage-labor/capital relations, through the exploitation of surplus-labor
and the alienation of workers from the social products of their collective labor, reduces what Marx calls "species life" into "natural
life" or a "mere means to individual existence" (113). In his theory and critique of alienated labor in The Economic and Philosophic
Manuscripts of 1844, Marx makes an important distinction between "species life" and "natural life." "Natural life" is the life of "eating,
drinking, procreating…" in short, of meeting immediate physical needs to reproduce individual life. "Species-life," by contrast, is the
life marked by conscious laboring activity in which the human understands herself in historical and social relations—as an historical
being not simply a biological being—and for whom the object of labor is not only one’s own immediate physical needs but the
historical life of the species—the material relations of their production. Through the historical development of their collective labor,
humans are "species-beings" who have not simply developed the ability to meet their immediate individual physical needs but have
also developed the ability to consciously and collectively transform their historical and social relations of production. And yet, in
capitalism, Marx argues, the objects of production are torn from workers and confront the worker as forces alien to them. This is
because in capitalism people are divided by material relations into two classes: those who own the means of production and
therefore exploit the surplus-labor of others and make profits from it and the majority of others who own only their own labor and sell
it for wages, which they pay back to the owners of labor to buy the food, medicine, houses, cars… they need to go back to work for
the owners of labor. This alienation of labor, moreover, is not simply an alienation of the worker from the specific products she
produces—from the result of production—but is an alienation within "the act of production, within producing activity itself." "The
worker therefore only feels herself outside of her work, and in her work feels outside of herself. She is at home when she is not
working and when she is working she is not at home" (110). It is owing to the material relations of production founded on private
ownership of the means of production and the theft of surplus-labor that workers are alienated and that capitalism reduces the life of
the species to "a mere means to her existence" (113). "In tearing away from [workers] the objects of [their] production," the
alienation of labor "tears from [them] their species-life." Class relations, Marx argues, "change […] the life of the species into a
means of individual life," and in doing so, the alienation of labor under capitalism "makes individual life in its abstract form the
purpose of life of the species, likewise in the abstract and estranged form" (112-113). The world historical questions that enable
people to direct their collective labor to build their world consciously and collectively by means of social praxis are marginalized and
mere biological living ("individual life in the abstract") becomes the main goal of life for the majority in class society structured by
exploitation. This is another way of saying that capitalism reduces the majority "to work to live and live to work." Bio-politics more
generally, and transspecies posthumanism in particular, are theories of "passive adjustment" to the ruins of capitalism. They
spiritualize poverty and the subordination of love, kinship, and sexual relations to commodity exchange relations and production for
profit. They reduce species life to a mere means of individual survival within capitalism. This is a far cry from the understanding of
"love" produced by historical materialists such as Kollontai who argued that the basis of the "hypocritical morality" of capitalism is
not in its failure to produce "ideal (post)human beings"—what Haraway calls "companion species" or Hardt and Negri call "new and
different subjectivities"—rather it is in its material relations of production. The hypocritical morality of capitalism is not an effect a
specific kind of "love" or "family" (these are its symptoms and articulations) but rests on "the structure of its exploitative economy"
(Kollontai 263). Freedom of sexuality, love, desire cannot be produced unless emotional relations are, as Kollontai argues, "freed
from financial considerations," which is to say, freed from class society and its privatized relations of production that produce dire
economic necessity for the majority. This is not simply a matter of "meeting individual needs" for the reproduction of capitalism.
Rather, it requires freedom from necessity. Freedom, that is, from social relations of production based on the exploitation of labor
which, if left intact, will inevitably subordinate human relations including love and sexual relations to "financial considerations."
"Love"—of animals, of people, of differences, of the world—does not evolve or transcend beyond capitalism without the material
transformation of capitalist relations of production. Rather, it is in dialectical relation to the material relations of production in society.
"Love" can only be "freed" if it is freed from class society and its privatized relations of production that subordinate the planet to
production for profit while producing dire economic necessity for the majority. For an emancipatory theory of love what is needed is
a return to grasping the class relations that structure life under capitalism and understanding that ending alienation requires bringing
about social relations of production in which class antagonisms have not only already been abolished—because private property
has been abolished—but have been, as Engels puts it, "forgotten in practical life" (Anti-Dühring 119).
AT: Humanism Bad
Labor relations determine human essence and how humans treat the
environment—materialist critique solves your offense
Consequently, one of the important implications of the posthumanist theorization of "humanism" (which imports Heidegger's basic
critique of metaphysics) is that it reduces all humanism to Enlightenment humanism. In doing so, it also erases the materialist theory
of humanism, which is a critique of both Enlightenment humanism and posthumanism. As Marx himself argues, "the human essence
is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations" (Marx, "Theses on
Feuerbach"). The materialist theory of humanism, to put this another way, is the theory of humans' place in the city: the site of labor,
consciousness, and history. This theory of humanism has in fact always been put in question by capitalist ideology, the main task of
which is the use of culture to explain away (naturalize) the social relations of labor from which capitalists profit. Whereas materialist
humanism is the articulation of the possible—freedom from necessity, from the relations of exploitation—dominant theories of the
human/humanism are ultimately aimed at preserving existing class relations. They do so by erasing the roots of humanity in labor
and treating the human instead as the subject of consciousness and reason (i.e., the cogito, the speaking subject) or as the subject
of post-rational feeling and sensuousness (a subject of consciousness who considers consciousness of feeling more important than
rational knowing). What is thereby erased is that what humans do to nature is a result of what humans do to themselves : "the
exploitation of man by man." It is the social relations and not epistemological and cultural ones that shape material life, not only for
humans but also for all species. On these terms, the human subject is, above all, the subject of labor. To theorize the basis of the
human life in terms of labor is to emphasize that, in "the working-up of the objective world" of nature (humans' life-activity), humans
make their life-activity "the object of [their] will and [their] consciousness" (Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts 62). That is
to say, "Man makes his life-activity itself the object of his will and of his consciousness. He has conscious life-activity" (62). And
because his life-activity of production becomes an object of consciousness, his life-activity "is not a determination with which he
directly merges" (62). This is the basis on which Marx makes a distinction between humans and animals, between human life-
activity and animal life-activity (what he also calls the "natural life"). Humans, in their productive life, are "self-conscious." The
animal, by contrast, "is immediately identical with its life-activity. It does not distinguish itself from it," or, in short, it "merges" with its
life-activity (62). In fact, Marx writes, "It is just because of this that [the human] is a species being. Or it is only because he is a
species being that he is a Conscious Being, i.e., that his own life is an object for him" (62). Freedom and consciousness have an
integral connection here, since only because humans' life-producing activity is an object of reflection "is [their] activity free activity"
(62). Insofar as the "human" is shaped by social relations, in exploitative social relations, therefore, the "human essence" is loss,
deprivation, alienation, and contradiction. In the case of capitalism, for the first time in history, the majority of workers are "freed" in a
"double sense." The mass of the working population, lacking means of production to meet their own subsistence needs, must sell
their labor in order to survive. It is no longer the production of use values—values that meet the needs of the society—but exchange
—values produced for the sake of private accumulation of profit. In contrast to ancient societies, where "[t]he individual... can never
appear in the total isolation of the mere free labourer" (Marx, Pre-Capitalist 81), with the generalization of commodity relations
(relations of exchange), the individual appears increasingly isolated—an effect of the fact that "the worker finds the objective
conditions of his labour as something separate from him, as capital," which also assumes that "the capitalist finds the workers as
propertyless, as abstract labourers" (86). The alienation ("estrangement") of the worker from the means and product of labor, as
Marx discusses in detail in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, leads to further forms of alienation, all of which
derive from the separation of the worker from her means and product of labor. Not only does the life-activity of production become
an alienating activity, ensuring that only when one is not working does one feel truly "at home", but insofar as the individual's
realization of their life-activity in labor is alienated, the worker is alienated from herself and others. It could not be otherwise, then,
that people's self-estrangement becomes in turn the estrangement from others as well, from the individual's "species being." Thus,
although it is in production that people confirm their species-life, estranged labor turns consciousness of species life, of the central
activity of species life, into means of existence, into means of life (Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts 59). "In tearing
away from man the object of his production, therefore, estranged labour tears from him his species life, his real species objectivity,
and transforms his advantage over animals into the disadvantage that his inorganic body, nature, is taken from him" (63). But, for
Marx, the solution to alienation is not "retreat" into nature, and idealized forms of community with animals and others, but fighting for
new social relations, and thus a new "human essence." It is in the city (as the space of class conflicts) that this fight will take place.
Haraway
Haraway’s dissolution of species divisions obscures their historical
constitutions in social praxis—this relieves subjectivity of any
revolutionary necessity and redirects political energy towards in-
fighting among the proletariat
While Hardt and Negri articulate a general theory of "biopolitics," the development of biopolitical ideology in contemporary cultural theory takes on
many forms. One such significant form is the development of theories of transspecies posthumanism. Articulated in the writings of Derrida (The Animal
That Therefore I Am), Giorgio Agamben (The Open: Man and Animal), and Donna Haraway (When Species Meet). As I marked above, like other forms
of biopolitical ideology, transspecies posthumanism is also characterized by the displacement of "class," "labor" and production, with
"life" and "life force" (e.g., the "power of life" etc.) as "explanations" of material relations of production. More specifically, however,
transspecies posthumanism goes through the relay of the "animal" and "multispecies epigenetics" in order to ideologically displace
"human labor power," the dialectical praxis of labor and the social relations of production . Contemporary posthumanism, to put this another
way, is a theory of transspecies—an obscuring of the evolution of humans (through their labor) from non-humans—e.g., "animals". Humans are, of
course, animals but they are animals with an historical difference—they have developed a form of reasoning which is itself developed
by praxis, that is, by the dialectical praxis of labor and the ensemble of social relations of production within which it develops. One of
the main goals of contemporary posthumanism is to divert attention away from class relations and exploitation of surplus-labor, by
enacting a "fissure" in the concept of the human—that is, by ideologically dissolving the historical difference between human and
animal—and, in so doing, invoking a "crisis" in the concept of human-labor power. Central to this movement in cultural theory is Donna
Haraway’s book, When Species Meet, in which she argues for the dismantling of what she calls "The Great Divides" between animal and human.
Haraway cites as evidence of the collapse of boundaries between human and other animals, "the fact that human genomes can be found in only about
10 percent of all the cells that occupy the mundane space I call my body; the other 90 percent of the cells are filled with the genomes of bacteria, fungi,
protists, and such, some of which play in a symphony necessary to my being alive at all, and some of which are hitching a ride and doing the rest of
me, of us, no harm" (3-4). It is, for example, on this basis that Haraway puts forward the understanding that there is an aporia in Marx’s concept of
human labor power. She contends that while "Marx understood relational sensuousness, and [...] the metabolism between human beings and the rest
of the world enacted in living labor […] he was finally unable to escape from the humanist teleology of that labor—the making of man himself" (46). "In
the end," she argues, "no companion species, reciprocal induction, or multispecies epigenetics are in his stories" (46). In short, Haraway’s argument
is that Marx has left out the "animal"—more specifically, the genetic constitution of the "human" by various "companion species"—and, therefore,
according to Haraway, his focus on human-labor power is violently "anthropocentric." According to this transspeciesist logic, the biological constitution
of the body defies the social logic of capital because on the one hand, the "animal" cannot be understood in terms of exploitation, Haraway claims,
because "paws" are not "hands." On the other hand, human bodies are "constituted" by myriad microscopic "companion species" and therefore cannot
be said to be distinctly "human" at all (46). The exploitation of the surplus labor of the majority of workers by a minority of owners in
capitalism is, by this logic, evidently "biologically impossible." This is a rehearsal and updating of the ideologic of 18th and 19th
century pseudo-scientific discourses of biological determinism such as craniometry in which the social and historical relations of
production that give rise to exploitation were obscured and ideologically naturalized through the relay of the physical "raced" body.
To be clear, transspecies posthumanism is a radically different form of this ideology. Haraway, for instance re-maps the body not in terms of the
"cranium" and "race" but in terms of "dna" and "multispecies epigenetics." Moreover, while craniometry worked to ideologically construct all kinds of so
called sub-species, posthumanism, by contrast, ideologically dissolves historical boundaries between species. For transspecies posthumanism, it is not
that human and other animals are "identical" but that all species—and the material relations of evolution as well as the historical differences in the
material conditions of evolution of a species—are now ideologically dissolved into an "omni-species." This omni-species, so the story goes, is itself
constituted by multiple and, above all, post-binary "differences" whose multispecies epigenetics manifest themselves in what are believed to be
"undecidable" ways. Any conceptualization of historical boundaries between "species"—which would situate them in relation to the
structural relations in which they are produced—are regarded to be an arbitrary and unethical cultural construction and a violent
fixing of amorphous, undecidable, plural, micro-differences into metaphysical binary difference. This is a change in the form of 18th and
19th century pseudo-scientific ideology but not its content which reverts to the "physical body" and the so called "received biology" of bodies in order to
obscure the social relations of production. Haraway substitutes the effects of evolution for the dialectical relations of evolution when she displaces the
material conditions and relations under which natural selection and the evolution of diverse species are made possible, with the genetic "constitution" of
bodies. This is a matterist understanding of biology which substitutes the bodily sensuous—the received biology of "flesh and blood" or the
"physical"—for the ensemble of material relations that determine the development of a species. But biological organisms are mediated
by what Marx explains as the dialectical praxis of labor which acts on nature and transforms it in order to meet needs and in doing so
produces new needs. Even Haraway’s favored animal—the dog—is not outside of the dialectical praxis of labor and the social relations
of production in which it develops—and the way in which these structural relations transform the natural environment. As a species,
the evolution of the dog from the wolf is itself the effect of the dialectical praxis of human labor as it intervenes in nature and
transforms it to meet needs, and in doing so transforms its own needs. Dogs are a result of human breeding of wolves: "Humans lived
as roaming hunters and gatherers for most of their existence [and] wolves began following hunter-gatherer bands to feed on the wounded prey,
carcasses or other refuse. At some stage a group of wolves, who happened to be smaller and less threatening than most, developed a dependency on
human groups, and may in return have provided a warning system. […] Several thousand years later […] people began intervening in the breeding
patterns of their camp followers, turning them into the first proto-dogs" (Wade n. pag.). More generally, and more importantly, as Richard Lewontin and
Richard Levins argue in Biology Under the Influence, "The socially conditioned [production] and transformation of our environments"
through the dialectical praxis of labor and the social relations of production in which this labor is organized "determine the actual
realization of our biological limits" (36) Biology, they argue, is not just "received biology" but "socialized biology" by which they mean it is
mediated by the material relations of production. This is why, in advanced capitalism, A severe winter in an urban environment does not produce
frostbite but hunger—when the poor divert resources from food to fuel […] It is the social mediation of individual biological phenomena, by the social
relations of production based on exploitation, that turns a single day’s incapacity from the flu into the loss of a job from an already marginalized worker,
with consequent catastrophic economic failure and a [further] disintegration of health and general conditions of life. (Lewontin and Levins 37) While
Haraway proposes that transspecies posthumanism is a "materialist" theory which is more concerned with "mud," "slime," and "earth," than it is with the
"sky" or "heavens" (3-4), having ideologically displaced the historical conditions and material relations that enable material development of "received"
biology, transspecies posthumanism—like other biopolitical discourses—puts in their place spiritual causes. By dissolving all species into an
"omnispecies," transspecies posthumanism translates the material relations of evolution and history through which biology is socially mediated by the
dialectical praxis of labor into a generalized transhistory. The theory of transspecies, to put this another way, ideologically dissolves historical
life—life in historical and material relations of production—into general abstract "natural life" outside history. However, when the concept of
"natural life," is abstracted from the historical and material conditions and relations in which it is produced, it is at root a spiritualist theory of life. This
fundamentally idealist concept of life is part of the contemporary revival (also seen in the work of Agamben) of the concept that in classical Greek
philosophy is understood as zoē. As marked further above, ancient Greek philosophy makes a distinction between two concepts of life: zoē and bios.
While bios is regarded as mortal, biological life of, for example, the individual, zoē, by contrast, was understood as abstract general life (what is
"common" to humans, animals, and God’s according the the ancient Greeks) and more specifically as transcendent, spiritual "life" in the absolute. What
makes possible living beings, by this logic, is not definite historical and material relations but an ahistorical, common "life-force," which is a concept of
life that has its root in a spiritualist ontology (idealism).
Haraway replaces serious class politics with flimsy idealism

If we turn to some of Haraway’s cultural analysis, we begin to see this spiritualism and "animism" at work. For instance, her reading
of "Jim’s found dog"—a photograph, taken by a colleague Jim Clifford, of "a redwood stump covered with redwood needles,
mosses, ferns, lichens…" that resembles the shape of "an attentive sitting dog" (5)—is premised on a spiritualist theory of
"materiality" that is almost identical to the theory at work in the "found" images of the Virgin Mary in shadows, water stains, bird
droppings—and in 2004 on a 10 year old grilled cheese sandwich auctioned on Ebay for $28,000. According to Haraway’s narrative
it is the evolved consciousness that recognizes the "canine soul [that] animate[s] the burned out redwood" (5). "Whom and what do
we touch when we touch this dog?" Haraway asks, and she continues, "How does this touch make us more worldly, in alliance with
all the beings who work and play for an alter-globalization that can endure more than one season?" (5). Here, Haraway reads "Jim’s
found dog" as a figure of an "other" globalization, what she also calls "alter-globalization" or "autre-mondialization" and which she
claims is a "more just and peaceful other-globalization" (3). But her theory of "other-globalization" actually has very little theoretical
connection to the "worldly," or any materialist understanding of the world. Rather it is a signifier for a quasi-religious "other-
worldliness." The "found dog" in Haraway’s discourse is a trope for an ineffable, unrepresentable, transhistorical life-force. To touch
the "found dog" is, in this narrative, to touch a life-force that "animates" all beings great and small from bacteria, fungi, protists, to
the H1N1 virus containing swine, human, and bird genes, to the genetically altered onco-mouse and the cyborg. By this logic, an
"other globalization"--that is, a new social form, an other world or other global society— does not have to be brought about by
material transformation of historical relations in transnational capitalism. Rather, an "other-globalization" already exists within the
existing. We merely have to come to recognition of our "natural co-existence," and it is this recognition that will actualize the "other-
world" in practice.
Species Love
Transpecies love is bourgeois bullshit—being able to take your twelve
cats to petco with you is not revolutionary, it’s commodifying and
oppressive.
And the way, according to Haraway’s narrative, is through transspecies "love." "Love" of multi-species is conceptualized in
Haraway’s argument as a transformative life force that helps us "be in touch" and "bring into being" the "other-world" within the
world. Haraway contends that "love" is a "world making" activity that brings into being what she calls "other-globalization." It is "love"
of "companion species," "messmates," etc... that, she argues, brings into being "a more just and peaceful other-globalization"
(3).This is to say that, like Hardt and Negri, Haraway not only displaces "class" and the dialectical praxis of labor with "life" and "life
force" but also regards love—in this case love of multi-species "others" which is a transspecies trope for what Hardt and Negri call
love of difference and alterity or "singularities in the multitude"—as a creative force and "world-making" activity that brings into being
new social forms and an "other" world. And yet, the "new social forms" that Haraway argues for are not a break from capitalist
globalization they are founded on it. For example, Haraway puts forward the idea that the emergence of the "transspecies family"
and intimacy with pets under capitalism’s commodity relations marks a "new" and more "evolved" set of family relations. More
specifically she puts forward a narrative in which the market and the commodification of pets and "pet needs" has developed a new
and "improved" emergent transspecies family relation. Owing to the onslaught of the market and capitalist production into more and
more levels of social existence and the profits to be made by capital off of the pet industry (from pet food, to chiropractic
adjustments, mental health therapy, and prescription anti-depressants for pets), now animals—specifically the pets of the privileged
—have "rights." Haraway remarks: "dogs in capitalist technoculture have acquired the "right to health," and the economic (as well as
legal) implications are legion" (49). In Haraway’s narrative, capitalism has evolved and North Atlantic capital is the regime of the
evolved who recognize their "kinship" with animals and call for new transspecies family and inter-subjective relations. For example,
when comparing the cost of cholesterol medication for humans with the cost of "doggie dinners," Haraway moralizes that she would
"throw away my Lipitor before I shorted my dogs and cats." On such practices she contends, "No one can convince me that this […]
reflects bourgeois decadence at the expense of my other obligations" (51). "Furthermore," she adds, There could be no end to the
search for ways to relieve the psychophysiological suffering of dogs and, more, to help them achieve their full canine potential. […] I
am convinced that it is actually the ethical obligation of the human who lives with a companion animal in affluent, so-called first-
world circumstances. I can no longer make myself feel surprised that a dog might need prozac and should get it—or its improved,
still-on-patent offshoots. (61) This narrative puts in suspension materialist critique of class relations and the social relations of
production in which the needs of all sentient beings—human or animal—are subordinated to production for profit and in which
working class families are economically forced to negotiate between basic needs for its members (whether mono or multi-species)
such as food and medicine. It then translates these material contradictions of capitalism into "family values" and "ethical" consumer
choices. To critique the class privileges of the North Atlantic consummative subject and the sentimentalizing of these privileges—
which are effects of class contradictions originating in exploitation in transnational capitalism—as a manifestation of "bourgeois
decadence" is, consequently, represented as anthropocentric and "unethical" to the treatment of animals. Haraway’s argument is
not at all a point of departure from "anthropocentrism" but rests on the very presupposition of human superiority—the evolved
superiority of the first world subject—that it purportedly breaks from. It is in their ethical superiority over others, that some humans
have the evolved consciousness to "recognize" their "kinship" with animals. This is a class narrative which ideologically sutures an
"evolved consciousness" to the class privileges of some which are founded on material relations of exploitation and production for
profit in transnational capitalism. This narrative uses animals as a decoy to disappear class relations and present social inequality as
an effect of cultural and family values.
Badiou
Weak
Badiou’s politics foreclose a class-based approach to politics, this
dooms his project to meaningless idealism.
Zizek ‘2 Slavoj Zizek, Professor of Sociology at the Institute for Sociology, Ljubljana University, 2002, Revolution at the Gates,
p. 270-72
Take Badiou’s exalted defence of Terror in the French Revolution, in which he quotes the justification of the guillotine for Lavoisier:
“La republique n’a pas besoin de savants. [The Republic has no need for scientists.]” Badiou’s thesis is that the truth of this
statement emerges if we cut it short, depriving it of its caveat: “La republique n’a pas de besoins. [The Republic has no needs.]” The
Republic gives body to the purely political logic of equality and freedom, which should follow its path with no consideration for the
“servicing of goods” destined to satisfy the needs of individuals.144 In the revolutionary process proper, freedom becomes an end in
itself, caught in its own paroxysm — this suspension of the importance of the sphere of the economy, of (material) production, brings
Badiou close to Hannah Arendt, for whom, as for Badiou, freedom is opposed to the domain of the provision of goods and services,
the maintenance of households and the exercise of administration, which do not belong to politics proper: the only place for freedom
is the communal political space. In this precise sense, Badiou’s (and Sylvain Lazarus’s’45) plea for the reappraisal of Lenin is more
ambiguous than it may appear: what it actually amounts to is nothing less than an abandonment of Marx’s key insight into how the
political struggle is a spectacle which, in order to be deciphered, has to be referred to the sphere of economics (“if Marxism had any
analytical value for political theory, was it not in the insistence that the problem of freedom was contained in the social relations
implicitly declared ‘unpolitical’ — that is, naturalized — in liberal discourse”’46). No wonder the Lenin Badiou and Lazarus prefer is
the Lenin of What Is to Be Done?, the Lenin who (in his thesis that socialist-revolutionary consciousness has to be brought to the
working class from outside) breaks with Marx’s alleged “economism” and asserts the autonomy of the Political, not the Lenin of The
State and Revolution, fascinated by modern centralized industry, imagining (depoliticized) ways of reorganizing the economy and
the state apparatus. This “pure politics” of Badiou, Ranciere and Balibar, more Jacobin than Marxist, shares with its great opponent,
Anglo-Saxon Cultural Studies and their focus on struggles for recognition, the degradation of the sphere of the economy. That is to
say: what all the new French (or French-orientated) theories of the Political, from Balibar through Ranciere and Badiou to Laclau
and Mouffe, aim at is — to put it in traditional philosophical terms —the reduction of the sphere of the economy (of material
production) to an “ontic” sphere deprived of “ontological” dignity. Within this horizon, there is simply no room for the Marxian “critique
of political economy”: the structure of the universe of commodities and capital in Marx’s Capital is not just that of a limited empirical
sphere, but a kind of socio-transcendental a priori, the matrix which generates the totality of social and political relations. The
relationship between economy and politics is ultimately that of the well-known visual paradox of “two faces or a vase”: you see either
two faces or a vase, never both — you have to make a choice.’47 In the same way, you either focus on the political, and the domain
of the economy is reduced to the empirical “servicing of goods”, or you focus on the economy, and politics is reduced to a theatre of
appearances, to a passing phenomenon which will disappear with the arrival of the developed Communist (or technocratic) society
in which, as Engels put it, the “administration of people” will vanish in the “administration of things”.148 The “political” critique of
Marxism (the claim that if you reduce politics to a “formal” expression of some underlying “objective” socioeconomic process, you
lose the openness and contingency constitutive of the political field proper) should therefore be supplemented by its obverse: the
field of economy is, in its very form, irreducible to politics — this level of the form of the economy (of the economy as the
determining form of the social) is what French “political post-Marxists” miss when they reduce the economy to one of several
positive social spheres. In Badiou, the root of this notion of pure “politics”, radically autonomous with regard to history, society,
economy, State, even Party, is his opposition between Being and Event —this is where Badiou remains “idealist”. From the
materialist standpoint, an Event emerges “out of nowhere” within a specific constellation of Being —the space of an Event is the
minimal “empty” distance between two beings, the “other” dimension which shines through this gap.149
Apolitical
Badiou’s politics collapse on itself resulting in an apolitical FYI.
Zizek ‘1 Slavoj Zizek, Professor of Sociology at the Institute for Sociology, Ljubljana University, 2001, On Belief, p. 125-27.
Badiou himself gets caught here in the proto-Kantian trap of “spurious infinity”: afraid of the potential “totalitarian” terrorist
consequences of asserting “actual freedom” as the direct inscription of the Event into the order of Being (was Stalinism not precisely
such a direct “ontologization” of the Event, its reduction to a new positive order of Being?)~ he emphasizes the gap that separates
them forever. For Badiou, fidelity to the Event involves the work of discerning its traces, the work which is by definition never done;
in spite of all claims to the contrary, he thus relies on a kind of the Kantian regulative Idea, on the final end (the full conversion of the
Event into Being) which one can only approach in an endless process. Although Badiou emphatically advocates the return to
philosophy, he thereby nonetheless displays the failure to grasp the fundamental authentically philosophical insight, shared by
Hegel and Nietzsche, his great opponent —does Nietzsche’s “eternal return of the same” not point in the same direction as the very
last words of Hegel’s Encyclopaedia: “The eternal Idea, in full fruition of its essence, eternally sets itself to work, engendering and
enjoying itself as absolute Spirit?”22 For an authentic philosopher, everything has always— already happened; what is difficult to
grasp is how this notion not only does NOT prevent engaged activity, but effectively SUSTAINS it. The famous Jesuit axiom
concerning human activity displays a clear presentiment of this insight: Here, then, is the first rule of acting: assume/believe that the
success of your undertakings depends entirety on you, and in no way on God; but, nonetheless, set to work as if God atone will do
everything, and you yourself nothing.23 This axiom reverts the common maxim to which it is usually reduced: “Help yourself and
God will help you”’ (i.e., “Believe that God guides your hand, but act as if everything depends on you!”). The difference is crucial
here: you must experience yourself as fully responsible — the trust in God must be in your ACTS, not in your BELIEFS. While the
common maxim involves the standard fetishist split of “I know very well [that everything depends on me], but nonetheless [I believe
in God’s helping hand],” the Jesuit version is not a simple symmetrical reversal of this split — it rather thoroughly undermines the
logic of the fetishist disavowal. The political aspect of this gap is, of course, Badiou’s marginalist anti-Statism: authentic politics
should shun active involvement with State power, it should restrain itself to an agency of pure declarations which formulate the
unconditional demands of egaliberte. Badiou’s politics thus comes dangerously close to an apolitical politics — the very opposite of,
say, Lenin’s ruthless readiness to seize power and impose a new political order. (At the most radical level, the deadlock Badiou is
dealing with here concerns the thorough ambiguity of what he calls l’innommable, “the unnameable”: what cannot be named is
SIMULTANEOUSLY the Event prior to its Nomination AND the senseless factuality, givenness, of the pure multitude of Being —
from the Hegelian standpoint, they are ultimately THE SAME, since it is the act of nomination itself which retroactively elevates
some feature of Being into the Event.) This brings us back to Judaism and Christianity: Jews wait for the arrival of their Messiah,
their attitude is one of suspended attention directed towards the future, while, for a Christian believer, the Messiah is already here,
the Event has already taken place. How, then, does Judaism “mediate” between paganism and Christianity?24 In a way, it is already
in Judaism that we find the “unplugging” from the immersion into the Cosmic Order, into the Chain of Being, i.e. the direct access to
universality as opposed to the global Order, which is the basic feature of Christianity. This is the ultimate meaning of Exodus: the
withdrawal from the hierarchized (Egyptian) Order under the impact of the direct divine call.
A-Causal
Badiou decimates analysis of any determinant social or historical
conditions which makes the political event purely arbitrary and self-
serving
Sotiris ’11 Panagiotis Sotiris, “Beyond Simple Fidelity to the Event: The Limits of Alain Badiou’s Ontology,” Historical
Materialism 19.2 (2011) pp. 3-31
Furthermore, despite his many references to dialectics, he insists in Logics of Worlds on refusing the notion of dialectical negation.
On the contrary, he insists on treating negation as logical (belonging to the level of appearing), not ontological, as derivative and not
primary, replacing it with the notion of the reverse. It’s remarkable that what will serve to sustain negation in the order of appearing
is the first consequence of the transcendental operations, and by no means an initial given. Negation, in the extended and ‘positive’
form of the existence of the reverse of a being, is a result. We can say that as soon as we are dealing with the being of the being of
being-there, that is with the being of appearing as bound to the logic of a world, it follows that the reverse of a being exists, in the
sense that there exists a degree of appearance ‘contrary’ to its own.32 The result is that anyone looking for a more dialectical
conception remains unsatisfied, especially since Badiou insists that relations cannot fundamentally affect the elements that enter
into a relation with each other. Contrary to the insistence of Althusser or Poulantzas33 that classes do not exist outside of the class-
struggle, an antagonistic relation between social classes is not, according to Badiou, the basic condition of their existence, nor does
the balance of forces affect their form of social being. As Peter Hallward has noted: Not only is relation thus conceived as little more
than a variation on the elementary relation of order (greater-than or lesser-than), there is no clear sense that it can qualify, shape or
otherwise affect the objects related. A relation of struggle between two interests or classes, for instance, does not here play a
constituent role in their being or becoming so much as illustrate the relative difference in their ‘intrinsic’ intensity or strength. Such
relation always comes after its terms.34 This leads us to another important contradiction in Badiou’s endeavour, namely his refusal
of any causal relation between social reality and political decision and event. Peter Hallward has described this tendency as
Badiou’s insistence on the ‘difference between what people are and what people can do’.35 He also stresses Badiou’s rejection of
historical causality: Badiou rejects any constituent relation between truths and historical or social ‘development’, along with any
detailed notion of interaction between levels of socio-historical causation – geographic, demographic, economic, technological, etc.
He refuses any constituent mediation between subjects and the individuals they transform, between evental sites and the situations
to which they belong, between the occurring of events and the sites that they occupy.36 On the contrary, what we have is the
insistence on the radically contingent character of political choices. This is also made evident by Badiou’s refusal to treat socio-
economic analysis as an essential prerequisite of political intervention.37 It is what Alberto Toscano has described as ‘Badiou’s
hostility to a communism based on any variety of socio-economic immanence’.38 And, although Logics of Worlds elaborates more
on the question of the emergence of events out of a given situation, historical causality and the articulation of transformative-political
practice on existing social relations (as forms of historical causality) remain an open question. Despite the admission of a greater
degree of complexity, especially through notions such as the appearing, the world and the body, this ontological schema remains,
despite the usual mathematical rigour, in the end descriptive. Given the elements of a situation, we can see different ways of
arranging, and different possibilities of articulations including the non-appearance of a given possibility. What determines these
possibilities and impossibilities and the relation between being and appearing remains within the limits of radical contingency. In a
way, the very strength of Badiou’s overall argument, his conception of an endless possibility of new events, is also its weakness in
the sense of the refusal in advance of any form of relational determination and/or historical causality, even in the sense of the
‘absent cause’ of structural causality.39
Deleuze & Guattari
Deleuze & Guattari
Deleuze and Guattari’s schizophrenia allow for capitalism to coopt
their project and turn their resistance into the new trendy thing.
Zizek ‘4 Slavoj Zizek, Professor of Sociology at the Institute for Sociology, Ljubljana University, 2004, interviewed by Glyn
Daly, Senior Lecturer in Politics in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at University College, Northampton, Conversations With
Zizek, p. 151-52
Would this be a kind of twisted version of Deleuze and Guattari? It’s virtually the opposite of Deleuze and Guattari, because they
have this idea of capitalist schizophrenia, the bad paranoia, which then explodes into a good revolutionary schizophrenia. But I think
that Deleuze and Guattari are dangerously close to some kind of pseudo anti-psychiatry celebration of madness. I think that
madness is something horrible — people suffer — and I’ve always found it false to try and identify some liberating dimension in
madness. In any case, the limit that the social psychologists are referring to is of a far more straightforward kind. For example,
according to some American estimates at least 70 per cent of today’s academics and professors are on either Prozac or some other
form of psychotropic drug. It is no longer the exception. It is literally that in order to function we already need psycho-pharmacy. So
that is the limit: we will simply start getting crazy. But I don’t buy this notion of an external limit. I think that capitalism has this
incredible capacity of turning catastrophe into a new form of access. Capitalism can turn every external limit to its development into
a challenge for new capitalist investment. For example, let us assume that there will be some big ecological catastrophe. I think that
capitalism can simply turn ecology itself into a new field of market competition, like , you know, who will produce the better product,
which will be ecologically better.
Desiring-Machines
D&G’s machinic ontology reproduces capitalistic paradigms of labor
onto all forms of life, celebrating the increasing efficiency of tech
advancement and hybridization. Indiscriminate embrace of
technological difference and assimilation only strengthens classist
domination.
Wilkie ‘1 Rob Wilkie, professor in the English department at University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, “Class, Labor and the
"Cyber": A Red Critique of the "Post-Work" Ideology,” Red Critique, Spring 2001,
http://redcritique.org/spring2001/classlaborandthecyber.htm
The substitution of the fundamental antagonism between capital and labor with that of the relation between "humans" and
"machines" and, as such, as an ahistorical antagonism that exceeds the capitalist mode of production is evident in what has become
one of the most canonical texts on monopoly capitalism in postmodern theory, Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia. This text characterizes transnationalism as an "automated" capitalism premised not on the production of
commodities as much as the circulation of "spectral values" in which the development of the "cyber" transverses the antagonism
between capital and labor such that "there is no such thing as either man or nature now, only a process that produces the one within
the other and couples the machines together. Producing-machines, desiring-machines, everywhere schizophrenic machines" (2).
Such a "hybrid" theory, which posits the ability of technological development in itself to transcend social antagonisms, represents
wage-labor as a spontaneous "coupling" fueled by the mutual desires of both participants. Just as in "Aping Biology's" substitution of
the division of labor between "simple" and "complex" labor for the central antagonism of capitalism, Deleuze and Guattari's
articulation of capitalist production, in which the social division of labor is rearticulated as a "machine" of production and
consumption, collapses the class division between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat into a circular theory of class-as-lifestyle—
without the economic compulsion of necessity that results from the private ownership of the means of production—and thus
substitutes exploitation in production with the liberation of consumption. In The Manifesto of the Communist Party, on the contrary,
Marx and Engels argue, "the bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production" (476); that is,
without developing the technology of production to correspond with the necessity of lowering the costs of production in order to
increase the rate of profit. Marx continues this analysis in Capital where he states, "like every other increase in the productiveness
of labor, machinery is intended to cheapen commodities" including the commodity of labor-power (403). The "machine," in other
words, is an index both of the level of development of production as well as the social relations under which that labor is carried out.
Under capitalism, the developments in production which enable the meeting of the needs of all, but which through private ownership
are used only to meet the needs of the few, thus come to serve as the objective basis for social revolution: At a certain stage of
development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or—this merely
expresses the same thing in legal terms—with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto.
From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution.
(critique 21) In an attempt to escape Marx’s critique of the bourgeois ideologues who substitute the revolutions in the means of
production for a social revolution, Deleuze and Guattari rewrite history as the drive towards post-human labor, and thus posit that
the "true" historical conflict is between "human" and "nature," now effaced by the development of the "machine". In doing so,
however, their "post-human" reading of capitalism, which erases the fundamental class conflict over the means of production,
cannot explain the relation between the revolutionizing of the means of production, the increasing contradictions between the forces
and relations of production, and the current crisis of a falling rate of profit and can therefore move no further than into a description
of the tendency of capitalism to replace living with dead labor. Their technologist theory of capitalism, in other words, in which wage-
labor is replaced by the coupling of desiring-machines, discursively rehearses the actual capitalist tyranny of dead over living labor.
The technological determinism that informs almost all of the dominant discussions of capitalism today is the ideological reflection of
the fact that as capitalism develops it invests increasing amounts of capital in revolutionizing the means of production over and
against the relations of living labor as a means of maximizing profit. While it can thus be objectively recognized that recent
technological developments increasingly point to the objective possibility of the end of wage-labor, under capitalism this is
impossible as the development of the forces of production is tied to the interests of profit. As such, rather than the priority of social
necessity, technological advancements are judged on their ability to valorize capital. It is in the interests of profit that the possibility
of "emancipation" from wage-labor, which increases as capitalism develops, becomes the image of "liberation" from "work" in the
discourses of the ruling class. However as Engels makes clear, despite whatever technological advancements there can be no
escape from the contradictions of capitalism and thus no emancipation from wage-labor without a socialist revolution, because the
fundamental antagonism between capital and labor is intensified, not transcended, by automation: "During the first period of
machinery, when it possess a monopoly character, profits are enormous, and hence the thirst for more, for boundless lengthening of
the working day. With the general introduction of machinery this monopoly profit vanishes, and the law asserts itself that surplus-
value arises, not from the labor supplanted by the machine, but from the labor employed by it" (90). The dominance of the
"technological" in contemporary social theory is an index, then, of the reality that advances in the means of production have made
the class struggle over whether developments in the forces of production will be used for the production of profit or for meeting the
needs of all an issue impossible to ignore. That is to say—as the recent, massive layoffs of the workers in the "dot-com" sector have
demonstrated—it is through the development of the forces of production that the laborer comes face to face with the objective fact
that their means of survival rests solely on their ability to sell their labor power. While the development of industry lowers the socially
necessary labor time, enabling more commodities to be produced, and creates the potential for meeting the needs of all, under the
capitalist system the impetus of new machinery contradicts this possibility and, in the words of Marx, "dispels all fixity and security in
the situation of the laborer…constantly threatens, by taking away the instruments of labor, to snatch from his hands his means of
subsistence…and in the devastation caused by a social anarchy…turns every economic progress into a social calamity" (490). As I
have begun to show, contrary to the objective contradictions of capitalist relations, the dominant readings of cyber-capitalism in both
popular media as well as "avant-garde" theory represent the process of increasing productivity through the intensification of the
production process—in which capitalists accumulate tremendous profits while workers are subjected either to increased domination
by machinery or to the poverty of the industrial reserve army—as the transformation from a system based upon the exploitation of
labor to a network of social relations in which work has been "liberated" through the introduction of technology: a "post-capitalist,"
post-production era of endless "free time."
Derrida
Truth Good
Derridean critique makes impossible the realization of universal
inequality under capitalism, dismissing revolutionary will as
‘totalizing’ and ‘logocentric.’ This theorization of language as
continuously slippery only cements the status quo of bourgeois
domination.
Kelsh ‘1 Deborah Kelsh, Associate Professor of Teacher Education at St. Rose College, “(D)evolutionary Socialism and the
Containment of Class: For a Red Theory of Class,” Red Critique, Spring 2001,
http://redcritique.org/spring2001/devolutionarysocialism.htm
The growing contradictions of the contemporary situation in which the increase of wealth simply intensifies social inequality instead
of bringing about economic and cultural equality have shown not simply the inadequacy, but the frivolousness of the explanations of
the daily offered by the dominant cultural and social theory. Frivolous explanations—by which I mean various "post" theories—
obscure the logic that relates culture to capital and are unable to explain the actual, material practices that produce people as
subjects. By "subject," I mean individuals not as they appear in their own or other people’s imaginations, as Zizek and other left
theorists have mapped subjectivity. Rather, I mean individuals, as Marx and Engels have written, as they "produce materially and
hence as they work under definite material limits, presuppositions and conditions independent of their will." "Frivolous theory" cannot
explain, without "any mystification and speculation" as Marx and Engels emphasize, "the connection of the social and political
structure with production" (The German Ideology 46-7). The logic of the "frivolous" is the dominant Derridean mode of
understanding cultural practices. Derrida, in his 1973 (1980) book The Archeology of the Frivolous, does what he does in every text:
he textualizes all practices as effects of the slippage of signifiers and thereby foregrounds the gap between the sign and its referent
as both the gap that needs to be explained and as one that is immanent, an effect of the laws of motion of any symbolic system. He
thus both displaces onto the plane of the epistemological the gap between the classes, and he treats language transhistorically,
displacing Volosinov's argument that the "sign" is "an arena of class struggle" (23). By arguing further that "philosophical style
congenitally leads to frivolity" (125), Derrida defers explanation itself onto the plane of the rhetorical and semiotic. This series of
deferrals, disguised as epistemological relays, of course also defers explanation of the relation between culture and production.
Because the frivolous posits the limits of knowledge as transhistorical, unrelated to the limits imposed on it by history understood as
the struggle of antagonistic classes over ownership of the means of production, it also posits that no class or social movement can
ever produce knowledge that is reliable enough to guide emancipatory action. The unreliability of knowledge is simply "the way
things are." Political struggle itself is thus transformed into the frivolous: an endless and excessive quest driven by desire for the
ineluctable signified, where the best one can hope for is a little more of "what is." The frivolous, then, is an idealist and rather hollow
mode of reading whose privileging of the semiotic for its ambiguity represents the interests of the bourgeoisie in blocking the
development of revolutionary consciousness, and at the moment when the global divide between the haves and the have-nots is
increasing. The gap that needs to be explored is the gap between the classes, not the gap between the sign and its referent that is
privileged and reified by frivolous theory. What is necessary now, if one is serious about changing the material conditions of the
everyday for all, is a materialist explanation: one that can lay bare the logic of cultural practices and explain the crisis of explanation
through dialectical understanding of the relation between productive practices and culture. Materialist explanation de-isolates
culture, treating it not (as "post" theories have done) as a series of autonomous localities, but as an aspect of the totality of practices
in which subjects engage as they produce the means of their reproduction as an aggregate. The contemporary return to the concept
of class marks the exhaustion of textual logic and is supposed to signal a turn away from frivolous "post" explanations that are
complicit with capitalism. But class, in its new rearticulation, is simply a repetition of the frivolous. In the heyday of the frivolous,
class was of course the absent term. But in the early 1990s, when the frivolous began to show signs of explanatory fatigue even to
its practitioners, class returned to the humanities. The contradictions, conflicts and antagonisms of the "two great classes directly
facing each other: Bourgeoisie and Proletariat" (Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto 80) could no longer be explained by
the frivolous, which therefore began to look overtly frivolous and had to be repaired. Thus, Frank Lentricchia and Thomas
McLaughlin’s Critical Terms for Literary Study, whose first edition pointedly excluded class, now includes an entry on class.
However, the essay "Class," written by Daniel T. O’Hara, engages in one of the more common of frivolous tactics used to
marginalize class and exclude it from the scene of the daily: the use of irony, pastiche, joke, wordplay. O’Hara treats class as an
orphan trope and then adopts it so it can be used "strategically, pragmatically, with a certain ironic, even (self-) parodic lightness"
(418). This tactic is in actuality the popular device for unleashing violence on revolutionaries from behind a smiling face. It is
repeated in the "Rethinking Marxism" poster we all received: in the slogan "The party’s not over," "party" is not a concept but a
puncept whose undecidability blocks the necessary reliable knowledge for revolution. Even theorists whose work has been primarily
in poststructuralism are now forced to recognize the frivolity of their post-explanations and mend them with "class." Wai Chee
Dimock and Michael T. Gilmore, for example, in introducing their anthology Rethinking Class, revise class under the trope of
"rethinking" and transform it into yet another cultural difference exchangeable with any other. In doing so, they engage in crisis
management for the knowledge industry by deploying the tactic, as Donald Morton has theorized it, of "set[ting] the limits of the
horizon surveyed in such a way as to occlude the ‘troublesome,’ while claiming to open up issues to the full spectrum of ‘reasonable’
views" ("Texts of Limits" 57). By returning to class from within the framework of the ludic logic of "disruption," "questions of cause
and effect, of figure and ground, . . . become matters of interpretation, matters of uncertain conjecture" (3). The ideological services
of the two to the bourgeois knowledge industry might be seen in their conclusion in which, to the relief of the bourgeoisie, they
declare that class might "turn out to be as much an effect as it is a cause. . . . If this weakens the explanatory power accorded class
in orthodox Marxism, what is gained is a broader spectrum of permissible questions" (3). The "troublesome" they occlude in this
move is the red theory of class theorized by Marx as an objective and therefore knowable and transformable position in relation to
private property. Yet reading their text, highly praised by Cora Kaplan in her Introduction to the "Rereading Class" issue of PMLA,
one is struck by the contradictions of such performative rethinking and must ask: if class struggle is over, then why, as they propose,
revive "class"? And what can it mean, if such struggle is over, to revive the term so it can be used, as they say, "with . . . political
efficacy" and "analytic authority" (1)? The un-said of their revisionist practice is, of course, that not only is class not dead and class
struggle not over—but that class is so active under the surface that it needs containment, and it needs it quickly, efficiently.
Totalization is good in the context of class politics and their approach

prevents it
Katz 2k Adam Katz, Postmodernism and the Politics of “Culture,” 2000, p. Pg. 81-82
For deconstruction, this fictive character of authority opens up a space for indeterminacy that produces a kind of freedom for the
subject: the freedom to reinvent these categories perpetually in a pragmatic and playful way without the constraints of any governing
structure or end of practice. However, this discussion makes it possible to see that, while posing as a critique of authority and its
modes of self-legitimation, deconstruction maintains the categories and assumptions required to support existing modes of authority
precisely by relegating them in a cynical manner to the status of a necessary fiction that simply allows the work to proceed. The
opportunistic character of this logic lies in the fact that if the bricoleur employs the means and materials at his disposal, he must also
utilize and reproduce whatever modes of institutional authority are clos est at hand and simultaneously make them impervious to a
critique of their legitimacy (not merely their processes of legitimation), by positing “legitimacy” (the justification of the ends or
purposes served) as a naive and meaningless question. I have focused on this aspect of Derrida’s text because it enables us to see
the political dimension of his claim that the thought of the structurality of structure (the necessity arbitrarily to stop the free play of the
elements that have combined to produce the structure) has led to a decentering of structure that makes totalizing discourses
impossible. That is, the decentering of structure and the authority of the engineer through the activity of deconstruction in the end
enables the engineer to resecure his control over the material sources of social power. The power of the engi neer is the effect not of
an illusion of presence but of his possession of the mechanisms—knowledge and institutional authority—through which materials
are procured and arranged (and declared appropriate for a given task), and his control over those mechanisms determines the lack
of public access to them. This question is excluded and mystified by deconstruction’s renunciation of those modes of legitimation
most vulnerable to critique and adoption of more up-to-date ones. Furthermore, Derrida’s account excludes a highly significant point:
the class position of the engineer. The engineer is a member of the new petite bourgeoisie, that class that abstracts the
determination of its income from the workings of the law of value. In addition, it thereby appropriates a portion of the total surplus
value by maintaining a relative monopoly on certain skills and knowledges and the means of certification and accreditation of the
“owners” of those skills and knowledges required by the political economy of (late) monopoly capitalism. The engineer’s ultimate
lack of control over the determination of the means and ends of his activity—the lack of control that makes a deconstruction of his
transcendental claims possible—is an effect of his lack of control over the means of production, owned by the capitalist class. This
very claim to control, though, is one of the mechanisms by which this relative monopoly is secured. The central contradiction of this
class position, then, is that its position of domination and the logic of its subordination are intrinsically connected—a contradiction
that finds ideological expression in its claim to carry out its class function in the interests of “technical neutrality” but also, in periods
of crisis, in the deconstruction of this claim.
Apolitical
Deconstruction provides no political map and collapses into inaction
in practice because even obvious economic exploitation becomes
‘undecidable’
Assuming that one is not primarily interested in regulatory and managerial details (which have indeed been reduced to case-by-case
methods), one has to ask how antipolitical violence—economic exploitation in its concentrated political form, aimed precisely at the
conditions of political decidability (the historical and polemical articulation of theory, action, and knowledge)—appears on the same
surface as the classical emancipatory ideal, both implicating and technologizing that ideal and suppressing its articulation on the
new historical terrain. It is not impossible, for example, to explain how international conflicts over patents on pharmaceutical
products articulate certain historical concepts of productivity, property, legality, science, bureaucracy, sovereignty, subjectivity, and
so on so as to further alienate social capacities from needs. It is more difficult but still not impossible to theorize the co-constitution
of those categories so that their relations are reconstituted in terms not of border crossing or hybridity but of the space of science as
accountable to emerging contradictions in sovereignty and the space of legality as accountable to emerging antinomies in privatized
science, etc., and, moreover, to do so in a way that defends the fundamental space of politics and theory (which makes
reconstitution possible in the first place) against new concentrations of antipolitical violence. In other words, antipolitical violence
tries to exclude and destroy not singularity but the conditions of power, accountability, and theory coming together. So, where
Derrida places undecidability, there is pedagogical accountability. To return to Cheah once more, I would argue that his refusal to
reconsider the question of transcendence, as the theorization of the conditions of action as a prerequisite to legitimate action, leaves
him with a completely formal description of the place of the nation-state. So, he cannot ask, for example, what kind of Third World
feminism might take its implication in national culture and incompatibility with the consolidation of state power as an enabling (i.e.,
pedagogical) site. If this is something other than a site of undecidability, it is a site of class struggle, where, ultimately, one set of
rules, norms, and knowledges contests another. Thus, positing sovereignty as a site of an undecidable double bind undermines the
possibility of theorizing sovereignty as a site where internationally determined, class-articulated, and opposing agendas contend.
This consideration might have brought Gheah closer to a theorization of the central contradiction of global capitalism: the surfacing
of the categories of political-economic universality so that their recovery, seizure, and implication in their theoretical conditions is a
precondition of action, versus their privatization and subordination to capitalist economic, political, and economic priorities. This is
the form, I am contending, in which the contradiction between the forces and relations of productions appears today, and it is hence
determinative of future forms of class struggle within, over, and against globalization.
Identity Prolif
Deconstruction causes a proliferation of identities that allows
capitalism to thrive.
Glynos ‘1 Jason Glynos, university of essex, “Symptoms of a Decline in Symbolic Faith, or, Zizek’s Anti-capitalism,”
Paragraph Volume 24, Issue 2, 2001, pg. 85-86
As we have seen, what characterizes the logic of capital most succinctly for Zizek is its emptiness, its internal yet productive limit, its
structurally ‘open’ character that makes it such a formidable force in eroding traditional and modem relations of subordination. It
should be obvious by now, therefore, why he perceives a latent danger in contemporary leftist projects of emancipation that come to
rely too exclusively upon postmodern and postcolonial theories of identity. Zizek, for example, warns that ‘the elated
‘deconstructionist’ logomachy focused on essentialism’ and ‘fixed identities’ ultimately fights a straw[person] -man. Far from
containing any kind of subversive potentials, the dispersed, plural, constructed subject hailed by postmodern theory ... simply
designates the form of subjectivity that corresponds to late capitalism’. 31 As Hardt and Negri put it, [w]hen we begin to consider
the ideologies of corporate capital and the world market, it certainly appears that the postmnodemist and postcolonialist theorists
who advocate a politics of difference, fluidity, and hybridity in order to challenge the binaries and essentialism of modern sovereignty
have been outflanked by the strategies of power ... These theorists thus find themselves pushing against an open door ... This new
enemy not only is not resistant to the old weapons but actually thrives on them, and thus joins its would-be antagonists in applying
them to the fullest. Long live difference! Down with essentialist binaries!32 Their fear, then, is that the values of anti-essentialism,
contingency, and irony (along with a related set comprising undecidability, uncert4inty, risk, hybridity, fluidity, diversity, sensitivity to
context, etc.) are the values that the current ideology of corporate capital celebrate.33 What, then, it might be asked, can
contemporary critical theory legitimately hope to achieve? Even if we accept that capital has undisputed corrosive effects, is it
sufficient to simply point this out? Is it sufficient for the Left to make explicit its empty, albeit dynamic, logic, revealing it as our new
and powerful enemy? If we were to leave the critique of capitalism at this level, however, Zizek would scarcely have moved the
debate beyond the standard analytical distinction between objective scientific knowledge (of the actual workings of capital) and
(capitalist) ideology.34 This, after all, is why Hardt and Negri claim that theories ‘that privilege the pure critique of the dynamics of
capital risk undervaluing the power of the real efficient motor that drives capitalist development from its deepest core: the
movements and struggles of the proletariat’.35 Such analyses ‘will not be sufficient here because in the end they stop at the
threshold of the analysis of subjectivity and concentrate rather on the contradictions of capital’s own development’. In their view,
‘[h]istory has a logic only when subjectivity rules it, only when.., the emergence of subjectivity reconfigures efficient causes and final
causes in the development of history. The power of the proletariat consists precisely in this’. Thus, they urge, we ‘need to identify,’ a
theoretical schema that puts the subjectivity of the social movements of the proletariat at centre stage in the process of globalization
and the constitution of global order’ Perhaps we can take this as the central reason why Zizek has recourse to Lacan’s theory of
subjectivity.
Totality Good
‘Differance' inverts the productive process and reinscribes liberal
individualism by positing a trace of subjectivity beyond production—
this replaces class politics with bourgeois lit theory
Theory," The Red Critique, Fall/Winter 2008, http://www.redcritique.org/FallWinter2008/materialityincontemporaryculturaltheory.htm
I realize, however, that to argue for a labor theory of culture today is to write against the grain of cultural theory. This is, in large part,
because the materialist concepts which lay bare the social totality and explain how culture is always shaped by labor have for the
most part been displaced in cultural theory by the terms of poststructuralist linguistic philosophy, such as difference (play),
articulation, ideology (as discourse), hybridity, performance, and "pleasure" (jouissance). In such terms, the outside (labor) is
thought to be an effect of the inside (tropes), as Derrida for example argues in his critique of structuralism; the binary inside/outside
that governs referential theories of culture is itself an effect of différance, the internal tropic play of the structure itself as it tries to
"fix" its absent center ("Structure, Sign, and Play" 247-65).[3] On this logic, it becomes impossible to connect the secondary
processes and mediations of culture to their more basic economic causes, which is necessary for changing the social totality from a
"realm of necessity" ruled by reified understandings of social relations to a "realm of freedom" (Marx, Capital Vol. III 958-9) in which
men and women have learned to direct their productions. By disconnecting the outside (social relations of production) from the
inside (cultural practices of meaning) the relation of determination between the two is reversed in poststructural theory so that
culture is assumed to constitute the real and re-make history. As Laclau puts it: Once this is realized, once the deconstruction of
those categories [of identity] fully reveals the power games that govern their actual structuration, new and more complex
hegemonico-political moves become possible within them. (2) The social, in these terms, becomes a formal collection of
incommensurate language games without any objective order of priority ruled by the a-logic of desire, which is the central
theme of the liberal individualism of the market place. Such a discursive immanentism as is authorized by
difference in cultural theory has dominated cultural studies so the focus remains solely on the unforeseen inversions of meaning in
shopping as cordoned off from the totality of the social relations of production. For culturalism there is no outside to ideology on
which to base a critique of the totality and ideology instead is understood to merely describe the surface of daily life from within it
rather than provide an explanation of the appearance that grasps the essence of the daily in the invisible historic relations of social
production.
Foucault
Resistance
Foucault’s politics amount to ideological cover for capitalism—labor
is decentered from its determinant position in favor of an abstract and
indeterminate economy of life and meaning that constricts radical
action
The spiritualization of life in biopolitical theories, to be clear, is represented as a new form of materialism. The substitution of "life" for
"class" in bio-political theories draws from Foucault’s theory of "bio-power" in which he argues that "modern man is an animal whose
politics calls his existence as a living being into question" (The History of Sexuality Vol 1 143). "Bio-power," Foucault contends, is a
regime of power that, rather than ruling by threat of death, produces life through the disciplining of bodies, the regulation of
populations, and through the "technologies of the self" in which bodies come to bind themselves to identities produced through
sovereign power. In fact, Foucault posits "bio-power"—the instrumental disciplining of bodies such that they come to experience
their own subjection as the norm of life and source of pleasure—rather than the exploitation of labor as the material basis of
capitalism. Capitalism, Foucault contends, is not possible without "bio-power": "bio-power was without question an indispensable
element in the development of capitalism; the latter would not have been possible without the controlled insertion of bodies into the
machinery of production" (140-141). According to Foucault, "There is no binary and all encompassing opposition between rulers and
ruled at the root of power relations" (94). In this view there is "no regulative mechanism" of power relations. Instead, in Foucault’s
cultural imaginary of power, "power is everywhere ... because it comes from everywhere" (93). In this narrative, an explanatory
critique of "power" as the effect of class relations of capitalism—relations between exploiter and exploited—is part of a "binary
metaphysics" of power which discursively imposes a regime of truth (power/knowledge) onto what is "actually," so the story goes, an
ineffably and mysteriously plural, diffuse, and amorphous "multiplicity of forces." On the one hand, "life" is assumed to
spontaneously produce a discursive proliferation of meanings (knowledges) that then discipline and contain it. On the other hand,
life is regarded as an ineffable and plural opacity that "resists" all conceptual explanation. The subjection of bodies is reduced to a
contingent, "spontaneous" and aleatory effect of "life" as such or the sheer fact of living. This makes it appear as if "power over life"
comes not from structural relations relations of exploitation, but from a non-structural, amorphous, cultural plurality—a cultural
democracy of "power from below" to which all have access by virtue of living—that is "everywhere." Foucault’s theory of "bio-power"
is not a form of materialism but a form of cultural spiritualism. When Foucault argues that "bio-politics" is at the root of capitalism, he
dehistoricizes "the machinery of production" into which he claims bodies are "inserted." The existence of "the machinery of
production"—or a "controlled insertion" of bodies—is itself the effect of the dialectical praxis of labor. This is because power is not an
autonomous, trans-historical life force nor is it an ineffable diffuse plurality beyond historical and conceptual explanation, but an
effect of definite historical and material conditions and relations. Power, in other words, rests upon material conditions of production.
Whether or not the society has the "power" to end starvation or to condemn the majority of the laboring population to a lifetime of
starvation, has to do with the level of development of its material conditions of production—its forces of production—and the social
relations of production (the labor and property relations) that determine the social ends and interests toward which labor is put. This
power is the historical and material effect of labor in

is another way of saying that
the form of property . In a society in which property is privately owned, power is the capacity of the ruling class to
"command over the surplus-labor" of workers in production (The German Ideology 102). At the root of power relations is an
antagonistic class relation: the antagonism between owners of the means of production and workers who only own their labor to sell
in order to survive and are exploited. The binary of class, to be clear, is historical and material not, at root, discursive: class binaries
are not the effect of nature, god, nor are they the effect of "western metaphysics," "discursive construction," "binary thinking," or
conceptualization, but the effect of private ownership of the means of production. Foucault’s theory of power does the ideological
work of capital by concealing and ideologically inverting the structural relations of class in capitalism. In place of the material
transformation of structural relations of capitalism, Foucault advocates "resistance" within—a change in the discursive and cultural
regimes and a re-valuing of "life"—as the basis of a "different economy of bodies and pleasures" (159). This amounts to the the
updating of the culture of capitalism as the limit of change while the needs of the masses for material abolition of exploitation is
dismissed as a reactionary nostalgia for the impossible—what Foucault dismisses as "The ‘right’ to life ... beyond all the
oppressions" (145). Changing the cultural values of life and regarding this as constituting material change—i.e., as an end in itself—
becomes a means to ideologically update power relations without fundamentally transforming them.
Biopower
Miniature scales of power decimate large-scale vision which is the
only way to generate credible revolutionary praxis
Postmodern cultural studies also rewrites the category of materiality to refer to local practices and, ultimately, the body. For
example, postmodern cultural studies theorist John Fiske, while defining the material in terms of economic constraints, at the same
time argues for an understanding of materiality as the absence of any possibility for abstraction, of any distancing from the products
of culture. “Culture,” he says, “is inescapably material: distantiation is an unattainable luxury. The culture of everyday life is concrete,
contextualized, and lived, just as deprivation is concrete, contextualized and lived” (1992, 155). Since he identifies the material with
the lived experience of everyday life in the face of oppression and with the construction of an individualized environment that makes
survival and resistance possible, he goes on to locate materiality in the body: “The body and its specific behavior is where the power
system stops being abstract and becomes material” (162). For this reason, he considers it important to develop a “bottom-up” (165)
notion of subjectivity, as opposed to those theories in which contradictions in subjectivity “are traced back to the complex
elaborations of late capitalist societies” (161). This, I argue, excludes the possibility of understanding materiality in terms of the
systemic connections between specific practices. It reduces subjectivity to the local contexts in which individualized modes of life
are constructed, and it refuses any theory that does not involve “the development of the ability to experience as far as possible from
the inside other people’s ways of living” (159). In this case, of course, it becomes impossible to theorize the world market or
capitalist class domination, since these would be considered abstract categories that cannot be inside anyone’s way of living.
Theories of biopower presuppose an idealist notion of life beyond

material living—this new transcendence becomes an excuse for
political laziness and blinds the masses from becoming conscious of
their working conditions
"Biopolitics"—as Hardt and Negri understand it as the "power of life to resist"—is at root a theory of "creative life force," or what
Spinoza calls potentia and Henri Bergson calls elan vital, which has its philosophical roots in spiritual creationisms. "Biopolitics" with
its reliance on an autonomous "power of life" to "resist" is a spiritualizing of the dialectical praxis of labor and an erasure of the
material relations of production. It translates what Marx calls the "dialectical praxis of labor" into spiritualist terms by abstracting "life"
from its material conditions of possibility and ideologically converting productive activity or labor—which exists in a necessary
relation to the relations of production—into an autonomous "creativity." The existence of "life," which is to say "the existence of living
human individuals," and the "power to resist" presupposes material conditions which can enable and sustain human life. This is the
case since men and women "must be in a position to live in order to be able to ‘make history’"; they must be in a position to satisfy
needs of "eating and drinking […] habitation, clothing and many other things" (Marx and Engels, German 42). In order to satisfy
needs to sustain human life, the existence of human life is not only dependent on the means of subsistence, but on labor. Labor is,
as Engels puts it, not only the source of all wealth but "next to nature," he argues, "it is the prime basic condition for all human
existence" (Dialectics 170). There is no "human existence" that is prior to labor and labor is itself not outside of history; it is a
dialectical and material relation: Labour is, first of all, a process between man and nature, a process by which man, through his own
actions, mediates, regulates and controls the metabolism between himself and nature. He confronts the materials of nature as a
force of nature. He sets in motion the natural forces which belong to his own body, his arms, legs, head and hands, in order to
appropriate the materials of nature in a form adapted to his own needs. Through this movement he acts upon external nature and
changes it, and in this way he simultaneously changes his own nature. (Marx, Capital 283) The existence of human "life" and its
course of development never exists independently of the material conditions of production prevailing at the time (the forces of
production) and the social relations within which this production takes place (the relations of production or property relations). And
these conditions and relations are themselves the product of past labor and, in turn, shape the course of all other aspects of social
life. But labor conditions never remain static: as the forces of production develop this results in the production and satisfaction of
new needs which come into direct contradiction with the relations of production, requiring transformation in the relations of
production. Human existence is not prior to the social "metabolism" between the forces of production and the relations within which
this production takes place and are transformed. As Marx and Engels argue, The fact is, therefore, that definite individuals who are
productively active in a definite way enter into these definite social and political relations […] the social structure and the state are
continually evolving out of the life-process of definite individuals, however, of these individuals, not as they may appear in their own
or other people’s imaginations, but as they actually are, i.e., as they act, produce materially, and hence as they work under definite
material limits, presuppositions and conditions, independent of their will. (Marx and Engels, German 41) Biopolitics, by abstracting
life from the material relations of production and the dialectical praxis of labor, puts forward an understanding of the "power of life"
as limitless. In erasing the relation of necessity between "life" and the dialectical praxis of labor, one of the goals of biopolitics and its
ideological renewing of spiritual creationism is, as I discuss further below, to update the contemporary workforces of capitalism to
increase their productivity (under the banner of the "power of life") without eradicating exploitation in production. Raising productivity
without eradicating exploitation means raising the rate of exploitation of workers with the aim of raising the rate of profit for capital.
Biopolitics
Biopolitical theory replaces materialist radicalism with a mystical
vitalism which cannot causally explain historical development
As class contradictions have grown sharper with intensification of the crisis of profitability in global capitalism, cultural theory in the
North Atlantic retreats further and further into spiritual explanations and resolutions of material contradictions. Yet, rather than
confronting the relationship of increasing exploitation and, therefore, poverty of workers around the world, the concentration of
wealth into fewer hands, sharp increases in unemployment and economic insecurity, the commodification of all aspects of "life"
subordinating them to production for profit, and the sharpening alienation of workers to class relations founded on exploitation in
production, contemporary cultural theory is retreating away from the social, the historical, and the material basis of these questions
in production relations to "immaterial," "affective" and "spiritual" resolutions of material contradictions and ideologically translating
capitalism and exploitation into existential conditions of "life" as such. It is in this context that cultural theory in the global North has
embraced what Christian Marazzi calls "the biopolitical turn of the economy"—an increasing turn to "bio-politics" as a means to
explain and address the social and economic contradictions in capitalism now (as qtd. in Corsani 107). At the core of "bio-political"
theory is a substitution of "life"—particularly the spiritualist concept of a creative "life-force" or what Henri Bergson calls elan vital—
for the historical and material relations of the dialectical praxis of labor and class as explanations of the material basis of
contradictions in capitalism now and their transformation. In other words, at the core of biopolitics is a cultural spiritualism which
ideologically translates historical and material relations into a transhistorical and autonomous power of life—a mystical vitalism—and
posits this spiritual vitalism as the basis of bringing about new social relations. This new "spiritualism" of life is offered in a variety of
articulations in contemporary cultural theory from the writings that overtly address theories of "biopower" and "biopolitics" as in the
writings of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (Commonwealth), Giorgio Agamben (Homo Sacer), Maurizio Lazzarato, and Antonella
Corsani, among others, to the transspecies posthumanist writings of Derrida (The Animal That Therefore I Am), Agamben (The
Open), and Donna Haraway (When Species Meet). These biopolitical theories claim to address a range of material problems that
are the effect of production for profit in capitalism while at the same time abstracting these problems from their origins in class
relations and exploitation: from the encroachment of commodity relations into all aspects of life, including the private ownership of
strands of DNA and whole species of plants and animals; to the degradation of the environment in the interests of profit; to
economic crisis; to the extension of the working day; to the subordination of love and sexuality to production for profit; to the
estrangement of workers from social wealth... In place of addressing the material conditions and relations that have given rise to
these problems, however, bio-political theories posit an "other-world" and an "other-worldly life"—a concept of spiritual life that is
prior to, constitutive of, transcendent of and/or outside of the historical and social relations of capitalism—as the basis of a new
"commons" beyond the material contradictions of capitalism.
Power/Knowledge
Flat power/knowledge networks are conceptualized in ignorance of
constitutive economic relations—creates new marketplaces of
commodified identities
Specific modes of knowledge and technique begin to appear fundamentally violent and illegitimate in relation to a different mode of
sovereignty. Consequently, the primary responsibility of the specific intellectual, the self-reflexive inquiry into the modes of
power/knowledge that have formed one, i.e., “unlearning privilege,” is nothing but a transfer of allegiance to new modes of
marketized sovereignty emerging around knowledge production. The counterpublics, meanwhile, and their border-crossing
diplomats are simply negotiating points, playing one form of marketized sovereignty off against another . Such conditions complicate
politics, of course—no one gets to choose which mode of marketized sovereignty they come into direct confrontation with—but this
doesn’t liquidate the universalizing political principles. The very fragmentation of the “common” is at stake in the multiplication of
sovereign forms, since the legitimacy of any sovereignty is in the space it provides for theory, accountability, and power to be
articulated before an outside. To put it differently, how wide a scope does a given mode of sovereignty provide for each to be
“outside of the outside of the other,” on a global scale? In this way, we can also account for the hierarchy arranging different modes
of sovereignty, in terms of where the antagonism between privatized modes of sovereignty and transnational modes of
accountability are most concentrated.
Agamben
Agamben’s biopolitics wipes away any hope of material change in
favor of an ideological mysticism which homogenizes radical politics
with capitalist control
The spiritualism that is implicit in Foucault’s theory of "bio-power" has become more pronounced in contemporary articulations of
biopolitics. In their most recent book, Commonwealth, for example, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri put forward the concept of
"biopolitics" as a supplement to Foucault’s "biopower." While "bio-power" they argue, is the power "over life," they deploy the
concept of bio-politics to argue for an autonomous "power of life" to resist. In doing so, as this essay discusses at length further
below, they posit an abstract and essentially spiritualist concept of a creative life force—a neo-Augustinian conception of life—
outside the social and historical as the basis of a new "commonwealth" and "mass exodus" from capitalism. Giorgio Agamben, in
contrast to Hardt and Negri, uses the term "bio-politics" instead to refer to the "mechanisms and calculations of State power" over
life—what Foucault calls "biopower"—rather than an autonomous "power of life." For Agamben, what Hardt and Negri call the
"power of life" to resist, is always already an extension of the sovereign "power over life" not a resistance to it. The "originary
moment" of politics, according to Agamben, is that natural life, "the simple fact of living" or "life common to all" (what the ancient
Greeks called zoē) has been subsumed, "captured" by "biopolitical regimes of power" so that precisely when natural life (zoē) is
posited to be "outside" of sovereign power (bios)—banned by it, excluded from it—this is actually an extension of the inside of
sovereign power. Politics, in other words, is always already the inclusion of this "excluded" life, the politicizing of natural life—the
reduction of bodies to de-sacralized or "bare life." Yet, despite their different theories and different semantic uses of the term "bio-
politics," Agamben’s biopolitical theory as a whole is predicated—as much as is Hardt and Negri’s theory—on restoring a spiritualist
concept of life. In contrast to the life of "bios and zoē"—at the interstices of which, Agamben contends, is always already de-
sacralized "bare life"—Agamben posits a "new form-of-life," a "messianic redemption" or "happy life" as a moment of transcendence
(Means Without End 114-115). Finding even Foucault to be "too historical" for positing biopower as a stage in the development of
history, and history itself to be always already a reduction of life to bare life, Agamben puts forward this new form of life as outside of
history. For Agamben, there is no historical possibility of ending exploitative social relations and bringing about freedom through
material transformation—all social, political, and historical life is always already a violent subordination of life to bio-politics. All
historical and social life—regardless of the actual social and economic organization of society—is in this view always already a form
of "de-sacralized" life or "bare life" (Homo Sacer 82). Rather than articulating a materialist theory of social transformation and the
historical and material possibility of bringing about social relations free from exploitation, Agamben articulates a spiritual song of
mourning and melancholia for a "lost" sacred life that has never been: "Redemption is not an event in which what was profane
becomes sacred and what was lost is found again. Redemption is, on the contrary, the irreparable loss of the lost" (The Coming
Community 102). Social transformation is reduced to a spiritual journey toward the "messianic" common life "to come" that can
never fully be materialized without becoming "bare life"—a journey, in other words, in which the working class, like Ralph Ellison’s
invisible man at the Battle Royal, is "kept running."
Hardt & Negri
Hardt & Negri
Centering focus on immaterial labor falsely inverts wage relations,
presuming that the intellectual pursuits produced in the ‘new
economy’ can outstrip the conditions of inequality which create them.
This is the most dangerous form of false consciousness.
Wilkie ‘1 Rob Wilkie, professor in the English department at University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, “Class, Labor and the
"Cyber": A Red Critique of the "Post-Work" Ideology,” Red Critique, Spring 2001,
http://redcritique.org/spring2001/classlaborandthecyber.htm
Perhaps the best representatives of the technological determinist avant-garde, whose theories of capitalist automation are at the
forefront of the ruling classes assault on the knowledges necessary for producing the class consciousness of the proletariat, are
"juridical" or "autonomous" communists Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. In their Labor of Dionysus, Hardt and Negri propose a
renewed social movement, one that breaks with the fundamental teachings of Marx while still claiming the mantle of communism:
"we are convinced that communism is definable not only in Marxist terms…when we say communism here we refer primarily to the
materialist method. Materialism too, of course is not only Marxian" (16). Their disagreement with Marx comes, like all of the anti-
Marxists today, over the labor theory of value. Like Beck and Deleuze and Guattari, they take issue with the fact that "Labor is too
often defined narrowly in the realm of a capitalist work ethic that denies pleasures and desires" (7). Instead, they argue, "labor in our
societies is tending towards immaterial labor—intellectual, affective, and techno-scientific labor, the labor of the cyborg" (10).
According to Hardt and Negri, this shift towards a "post-productive" capitalism, in which "simple" labor is replaced by "complex"
labor and commodity production is replaced with the accumulation of information, discredits the Marxist labor theory of value
because while Marxism tries to "make sense of our history in the name of the centrality of proletarian labor," the new regime of
"immaterial" labor renders the concept of the labor theory of value, and with it the necessity of a socialist revolution by the
proletariat, "completely bankrupt" (10). Instead they propose that to effectively understand the "New Economy" of intellectual labor,
what is necessary is "overturning" the base-superstructure model, declaring "if labor is the basis of value then value is the basis of
labor" (9). At the core of Hardt and Negri's theory of "juridical communism" and its "value theory of labor" is a warmed over utopian
socialism in which it is presumed that because technological advancements have made possible the realization of the meeting of the
needs of all, regardless of whether such a society is ever actualized, such developments have brought to an end the antagonistic
relationship between capital and labor, such that the class struggle can no longer be reduced to the question of control over the
means of production, but rather has become a matter of an ideological struggle over who will control the means of representation.
That is to say, in defining labor as a "social analytic" that "interprets the production of value…equally in economic and cultural terms"
(7) what is at stake in their analysis is the occulting of the concept of production by erasing that the fundamental lever of capitalist
production is not "cultural capital," but the production of profit that can only be realized through the exploitation of labor. Progress, in
this case, comes to be understood as something that can outstrip the relations of production without fundamentally transforming the
conditions of that progress. It becomes a "progress" without contradiction, struggle, or revolution.
Hardt and Negri autonomize social byproducts of economic equality,

redirecting radicalism against the dust thrown up by economic
antagonisms
Tumino ‘1 Stephen Tumino, professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh, "What is Orthodox Marxism and why it
matters now more than ever," Red Critique, Spring 2001, accessed 1/3/10
http://www.redcritique.org/spring2001/whatisorthodoxmarxism.htm
In spite of their formal "criticality," the writings of Zizek, Spivak, Smith, Hennessy and other theorists of designer socialisms produce
concepts that legitimate the existing social relations. The notion of class in their work, for example, is the one that now is commonly
deployed in the bourgeois newspapers. In their reporting on what has become known as the "Battle of Seattle," and in the coverage
of the rising tide of protest against the financial institutions of U.S. monopoly capital which are pillaging the nations of the South, the
bourgeois media represents the emergent class struggles as a matter of an alternative "lifestyle choice" (e.g., the Los Angeles
Times, "Hey Hey, Ho Ho, Catch Our Anti-Corporate Puppet Show!"). On this diffusional narrative, "class" is nothing more than an
opportunity for surplus-pleasure "outside" the market for those who have voluntarily "discarded" the normal pleasures of U.S.
culture. It is the same "lifestyle" politics that in the flexodox marxism of Antonio Negri is made an autonomous zone of "immaterial
labor" which he locates as the "real communism" that makes existing society post-capitalist already so that revolution is not
necessary (Empire). What is at the core of both the flexodox marxism and the popular culture of class as "lifestyle" is a de-
politicization of the concepts of Orthodox Marxism which neutralizes them as indexes of social inequality and reduces them to
merely descriptive categories which take what is for what ought to be . Take the writings of Pierre Bourdieu for example. Bourdieu
turns Marx's dialectical concepts of "class" and "capital" which lay bare the social totality, into floating "categories" and reflexive
"classifications" that can be formally applied to any social practice because they have been cut off from their connection to the
objective global relations of production. Bourdieu, in short, legitimates the pattern of class as "lifestyle" in the bourgeois media by his
view that "class" is an outcome of struggles over "symbolic capital" in any "field." I leave aside here that his diffusion of the logic of
capital into "cultural capital," "educational capital" and the like is itself part of a depoliticization of the relation between capital and
labor and thus a blurring of class antagonism. What Bourdieu's "field" theory of class struggle does is segregate the struggles into
so many autonomous zones lacking in systemic determination by the historic structure of property so that everyone is considered to
be equally in possession of "capital" (ownership is rhetorically democratized) making socialist revolution unnecessary. What the
reduction of "class" and "capital" to the self-evidency of local cultural differences cannot explain is the systemic primacy of the
production of surplus-value in unpaid-labor, the basic condition of the global majority which determines that their needs are not
being met and compels them into collective class struggles.
Labor
Hardt and Negri’s shift to immaterial labor obscures violent wage
slavery in peripheral markets and displaces class into an
indeterminate ‘post-materialist’ economy
The argument that biopolitics is a form of spiritualism, to be clear, is at odds with the claims and self-representations of bio-political
cultural theorists, who contend that their theories are a "new" and "true" form of materialism. Bio-politics maintains that capitalist
relations of production has been fundamentally materially transformed by the development of bio-technologies, cybertechnologies,
knowledge work, the growth of service industries, the erosion of industrial manufacturing in the North... so that earlier distinctions
between "productive" and "reproductive" labor have collapsed. Antonella Corsani, for example, claims that "what is emerging from
the metamorphoses of capitalism is a new relationship between capital and life" (107). "The sphere of reproductive activities,"
Corsani contends, "is integrated into that of production, so that ‘life itself’ is productive of surplus-value" whether we are eating,
drinking, "even," she claims, "when we are sleeping or making love" (117). Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri confirm this assumption
when they suggest that we should no longer speak of capitalism in terms of "productive labor" but of "biopolitical labor" (which they
use as a trope for reproductive labor) which produces social life itself or "subjectivities." In their recently published book,
Commonwealth, Hardt and Negri displace "exploitation" with "alienation" as the key site of struggle and social transformation when
they declare: "we find ourselves being pulled back from exploitation to alienation, reversing the trajectory of Marx’s thought" (139-
140). According to Hardt and Negri, "alienation" has no material relation to exploitation (the theft of surplus-labor by owners of the
means of production during the working day) and this, they claim, is owing "to the fact that some characteristics closely tied to
exploitation particularly those designating capital’s productive role, have faded" (140). On this basis bio-political theories posit
reproduction—what Hardt and Negri refer to as "biopolitical production"—as having materially displaced production in capitalism.
What has actually been occurring in transnational capitalism, however, is not a disappearance of productive labor or exploitation
(the theft of worker’s surplus labor by owners of the means of production), but the transfer of productive labor and the export of
capital from the global North to the global South in search of securing sources of cheaper labor to exploit. As Paula Cerni has
argued "something very material has accompanied the creation of a ‘post-material’ economy where 83% of non-farm employees
work in services." Far from actually bringing about a "post-material" economy "the real shift towards [unproductive] service sectors in
Western economies" has resulted in a situation in which Western economies "no longer produce enough goods to fund [their] own
massive physical requirements, and, as a result, [they are] running an unprecedented trade deficit" (Cerni n. pag.). What is at the
root of this is the fact that it is labor not the "immaterial" of culture or ideology that is the source of social wealth. It is precisely
because the basis of profit has been and continues to be the exploitation of productive labor that the wealth of North Atlantic capital
—and its share of the profits of the world market—is in decline as it has concentrated investment in reproductive labor within its own
respective national borders, has relied more heavily on productive labor around the world. To conflate the shifts in the way in which
North Atlantic capital aims to acquire a larger share of the social wealth in transnational capitalism, with a fundamental change in
basis of how this wealth is actually produced in transnational capitalism, is a parochial analysis of the global economy that erases
the continued exploitation of surplus labor of workers around the world in China, in India, in Pakistan, Iraq, Afghanistan... These
shifts in production are not a break from the class relations of capitalism and the exploitation of workers around the world; they are
an intensification of its irreconcilable class contradictions. And the consequences of these class contradictions and their "solutions"
have been devastating for workers both in the global North and the global South, from the spiking of unemployment, to the loss of
homes and pensions, to the gutting of public infrastructure for workers and transferring this social wealth to corporations, to
increases in suicide rates, depression, anxiety, and pharmaceutical dependency, to "jobless and wageless recovery" which, in
actuality, means an increase in the rate of exploitation of workers.
Homogenizing new labor as immaterial erases today’s increasing

class divides and erases exploitation from a theory of work. This
makes Hardt and Negri’s alternative into a shallow bourgeois embrace
of status quo class relations.
Torrant ‘2 Julie Torrant, “Empire versus Imperialism and the Question of Family Labor,” Red Critique, July/August 2002,
http://redcritique.org/JulyAugust02/empireversusimperialism.htm
Here, as in Deleuze and Guattari's theory of the power of "desire" to break down the boundaries of the "Oedipal" family, Hardt and
Negri, in effect, celebrate the power of the market to break down the boundaries of the (nuclear) family. While Hardt and Negri's
articulation of the "freedom" of the market may be somewhat more "sobering" than Deleuze and Guattari's (and more aligned with
Foucault's theory of "biopower") in that it recognizes the limits of this freedom imposed by an ideological "society of control", for all
these theorists, what is erased is the bourgeois, or "privatized" family as a political and economic institution (and not merely a
subjective "ideology") that is an effect of the private property relations of wage-labor/capital. In short, what is ultimately at stake in
theorizing the family and the contradictions that emerge at the site of the family is whether this theory legitimates or contests the
existing private property relations. To unpack the issues further, like all "post"-family theorists from Deleuze and Guattari to Michele
Barrett, Judith Stacey and Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim, the starting point of Hardt and Negri's theory of the withering away of the
family as part of "civil society" is the idea that the family in capitalism equals the modern "nuclear" family and that the "new", flexible
"postmodern" family forms, such as queer and other "non-traditional" families represent a fundamental transformation of the family.
In other words, when Hardt and Negri refer to the "breaking down" of the family as one of the institutions of civil society, they are
referring to the way in which "continually decreasing proportions of the U.S. population are involved in the nuclear family" (197). This
breakdown of the bounds of the (nuclear) family is represented by Hardt and Negri as in some ways a dystopian moment, because it
does not mean "a decline in the forces of patriarchy", but rather the extension of "'family values' ... across the social field" and an
intensification, as well as an extension, of the field of functioning of familialist ideology (197). At the same time, however, and in the
tradition of poststructuralism, they posit this post-familial field-without-boundaries as a space of self-invention wherein the (so-called)
breakdown of the family is a result of the blurring of the boundaries of "production" versus "reproduction/consumption" which
corresponds, in turn "to the indeterminacy of the form of subjectivities produced" (197). The implication here is that within
postmodern "empire" (as opposed to modern imperialism) the family is no longer the site of un- and underpaid reproductive labor--
that is, an oppressive site in part because of its isolation from the broader economic sphere--but rather a space of "freedom" which
no longer necessarily produces restricted, gendered subjectivities since the gender division of labor (which largely corresponds to
productive versus reproductive labor) is no longer effective within empire. This posited logic of an increase in subjective freedom in
reading "family" and "gender" within "empire" is evident, especially, if we turn to Hardt and Negri's theory of "immaterial" labor, which
is the basis for the "utopian" side of their contradictory theory of family. The chapter on "Postmodernization, or the Informatization of
Production", as Hardt and Negri acknowledge, forms the core of the theory of "empire" because it is the most sustained discussion
of the question of "labor" and "production" within their text. This chapter is crucial because it is here that Hardt and Negri work to
evacuate, at its (class) root, the materialist theory of "labor" and the social by displacing "production" and production relations from
the center of this theory. In doing so, they displace "exploitation" as the global logic of the social in postmodernity and erase the
political economy of need. In this chapter Hardt and Negri define immaterial labor as "labor that produces an immaterial good, such
as a service, a cultural product, knowledge, or communication". On the one hand, this theory of labor simply follows the now
canonical theory of the new economy with its emphasis on the "passage toward an informational economy" (289). However, in an
articulation which reflects the latest developments of the "new economy" theories in the wake of the increasing global divide
between the "haves" and the "have-nots" (and which points to the limits of this theory), Negri and Hardt argue that "immaterial labor"
has not one but two "faces". The first "face" of Hardt and Negri's "immaterial labor" is the now familiar "computerization" of labor.
"Immaterial labor," they write, "can be recognized in analogy to the functioning of a computer", and they elaborate, arguing that
"[t]he computer and communication revolution of production has transformed laboring practices in such a way that they all tend
toward the model of information and communication technologies" (291). One of the problems with this theory, as with other theories
of the new economy, is that it equates highly-skilled, high value work with low-skill work, presenting a picture which misrepresents
the "new" economy—in contrast with the "old" economy—as now based on (only) high-skill, knowledge-based work, when in fact the
majority of the jobs that are created are low-skill, low wage jobs. In fact, Negri and Hardt acknowledge this problem, citing Robert
Reich's observation that with the growth of "knowledge-based jobs of creative symbolic manipulation implies a corresponding growth
of low-value and low-skill jobs of routine symbol manipulation, such as data entry and word processing" (292). Nevertheless, Hardt
and Negri, having acknowledged this division within the "information economy", in one of the many contradictions of their text, go on
to argue that the "informatization of production and the emergence of immaterial labor" has lead to "a real homogenization of
laboring processes" (292). Here, Hardt and Negri ignore the actual differences in the conditions of work within the "post-industrial"
workforce which they just a few lines earlier pointed out. More importantly, in this, their most sustained discussion of labor—and
despite their rhetorical emphasis on "exploitation" in earlier sections of the text that have their focus on "politics"—they ignore the
question of the exploitation of labor. Hardt and Negri's argument about the "homogenization" of "laboring processes" (itself a quite
problematic argument) is most significant because it focuses on new forms of labor in post-industrialism—arguing that these have
become "homogenized"—without regard to the relations within which this labor takes place. By arguing that the new forms (or
"processes") of labor represent a fundamental transformation of production, and one marked by increasing "homogenization", Hardt
and Negri posit "labor" in post-industrialism as more "democratic". Such an argument erases from view the historicity of (post-
industrial) labor—the fact that this labor has not become more "democratic" because more "homogenized", but rather that the social
(class) relations within which this labor takes place have not only remained fundamentally, structurally the same (they are still
relations of wage-labor/capital), but have become increasingly divided with the concentration of ownership. It is this displacement of
"exploitation" from the center of the social that underpins their argument for the "end" of the proletariat as the revolutionary subject
and its replacement with the (populist) notion of "the multitude" as the revolutionary subject. The (bourgeois) class interests of such
a displacement of "exploitation", and its implications for theorizing "gender" and "family", becomes especially clear through a critical
reading of Hardt and Negri's discussion of the "second face" of "immaterial labor", that of "affective labor". Affective labor, according
to Hardt and Negri, "involves the production and manipulation of affect and requires (virtual or actual) human contact". It is, Hardt
and Negri argue, akin to what some feminists have called "caring labor" or "labor in the bodily mode" (293). Although this labor is the
labor of "human contact and interaction", this interaction, according to Hardt and Negri, can be either "actual or virtual". Thus, they
argue that both health services, which "rely centrally on caring and affective labor" and the entertainment industry, which is "likewise
focused on the creation and manipulation of affect" are examples of immaterial, affective labor (292). Hardt and Negri, in other
words, displace the concept of "reproductive labor" with their concept of "affective labor" and they make this displacement in order to
re-write labor itself as a cultural(ist) category. "Reproductive labor" is labor that is necessary in order to reproduce labor-power (the
capacity to labor) from generation to generation as well as day to day. While emotional distress may work to incapacitate labor(ers),
emotional well-being in itself does not equal labor-power which is the implication of Hardt and Negri's theory of "affective labor".
They write, for instance, that "affective labor", which includes the labor of "health services" such as nursing, has as its (sole) aim
providing "a feeling of ease, well-being, satisfaction, excitement, or passion" (293). This rewriting of reproductive labor leaves out
entirely the way in which the meeting of "affective needs" is dependent upon meeting basic needs such as needs for food, clothing,
shelter. It is not possible, for instance, to produce feelings of ease and well-being in children—no matter the quality and quantity of
"actual or virtual" human interaction provided for them by family members, health care workers and/or television actors—if these
children are not provided daily and consistently with the basic necessities of food, clothing, shelter, and so forth. To argue
otherwise, as Hardt and Negri do, is to put forward a bourgeois theory of (reproductive) labor which takes as its starting point the
bourgeois subject whose basic needs are always already met (through the exploitation of workers' labor). Moreover, Hardt and
Negri's theory of "affective labor", through its displacement of "reproductive labor", works to foreground the family as an
interpersonal space. This, in turn denies that the family in capitalism is subordinated to the reproduction of wage-labor and thus
denies that it is economically shaped and determined by the relations of wage-labor/capital.
Hardt and Negri conflate productive and reproductive labor—this
leads them to mistakenly assume that new forms of labor can
transcend wage relations without escalating to full revolution,
enabling them to posit a method of social transformation which
leaves capitalism fundamentally intact.
Torrant ‘2 Julie Torrant, “Empire versus Imperialism and the Question of Family Labor,” Red Critique, July/August 2002,
http://redcritique.org/JulyAugust02/empireversusimperialism.htm
With their theory of affective labor as "immaterial labor", Hardt and Negri not only blur the priority of "need" over "desire" and mystify
the family as a site of fulfilling one's needs (as it is for the majority of workers) as opposed to a site of "desire" (for those whose
basic needs are already met)—they thus show the class basis of their theory. They also, in a related move, blur the priority of
"productive" versus "reproductive" labor in capitalism. They do this first by arguing that the distinction between types of labor is
determined by the "kind" of product that is produced. Does this labor produce a (material) "good", in which case it is traditional,
"material" labor, or does it produce an (immaterial) "service" or "affect", in which case it is part of the new, "immaterial labor"?
However, they then go on to argue that what is new about (their theory of) "affective labor" is that they grasp "affective labor" as
"productive labor" whereas the "old"/modern theories of capitalism and imperialism did not grasp affective labor as "productive"
labor. Such an argument fundamentally misrepresents (the Marxist theory of) "productive" labor. As Marx repeatedly argues,
"productive labor" in capitalism is labor that produces surplus (exchange) value. Marx writes, for instance, that the capitalist's, "aim
is to produce not only use-value, but a commodity also; not only use-value, but value; not only value, but at the same time surplus-
value" (Capital196). It does not matter, from this view, what (concrete) form the (surplus) exchange values that are produced take—
that is, whether they are harmful to public health (such as alcohol) or enabling of public health (fresh vegetables and fruit not
contaminated by pesticides) or whether they are goods or services—as long as surplus-value is produced. Moreover, the status of
this labor as "productive" or not is not determined by the concrete technical processes that produce the product, but the relations
within which they take place. As Teresa Ebert argues, in capitalism the "productivity of labor is derived not from its concrete
usefulness but from its social form, which is determined by the social relations of production. It is not labor that determines its
productivity; rather, the productivity of labor is determined by its situation within the mode of production" (102). Returning to Hardt
and Negri's theory of affective labor, we can see that by arguing that (all) health services work, as well as (all) entertainment
industry work, is "affective labor" and as such (now) productive labor, Hardt and Negri are conflating "productive" labor with
"reproductive labor" (including both waged and non-waged reproductive labor). But, as Marxism argues, health care labor can
constitute either "productive" or "reproductive" labor within capitalism. If such health care labor takes place within a for-profit hospital
or other health care organization, it is "productive labor" because it produces surplus-value (profit) for capitalists. If it takes place in a
non-profit organization, then it is not productive labor. The importance of Hardt and Negri's conflation of "productive" with
"reproductive" labor is that it works to deny that the priority of (production for) "profit" over (production for) "need" is embedded in the
contemporary (capitalist) labor relations (the social relations of wage-labor/capital) and thus resolves the contradiction between
"profit" and (meeting) "need" in capitalism. This denial is evident, for instance, when Hardt and Negri write that: in each of these
forms of immaterial labor [including the third form, "affective labor"], cooperation is completely inherent in the labor itself. Immaterial
labor immediately involves social interaction and cooperation. In other words, the cooperative aspect of immaterial labor is not
imposed or organized from the outside, as it was in previous forms of labor, but rather cooperation is completely immanent to the
laboring activity itself. This fact calls into question the old notion (common to classical and Marxian political economics) by which
labor power is conceived as "variable capital", that is, a force that is activated and made coherent only by capital, because the
cooperative powers of labor power (particularly immaterial labor power) afford labor the possibility of valorizing itself. (294) Here, in
a condensation of a rather stunning series of conceptual slippages and confusions, Hardt and Negri argue that "affective labor" is
productive labor (which is their implication when they say that it "valorizes itself") and that because it is labor of human interaction
(and is thus not part of the social relations of production/exploitation), it is not subordinated to capital. They are, in other words,
saying that affective labor is productive labor and that, moreover, it is productive labor that is autonomous from capital. Hardt and
Negri conflate "reproductive" labor, or the labor that works to reproduce (wage-)labor from day to day as well as generation to
generation, with "productive labor". As I have indicated, this re-articulation of reproductive labor (the labor of reproduction of labor-
power from day to day and generation to generation) completely re-writes the Marxist theory of "productive" versus "reproductive"
labor. What, then, is the effectivity of this rewriting? Hardt and Negri argue that in rewriting reproductive labor in this way, they
enable workers to "recognize" that they are now actually "free" (autonomous) from capital—they no longer need capital in order to
produce and meet their needs. But is reproductive labor, or "the family" actually free from the dictates of capital? If we turn to the
question of "family labor" (which is unpaid, or non-waged reproductive labor, and thus, according to Marxist theories not productive
labor because it takes place outside of wage-labor/capital relations wherein surplus value is extracted from workers), we can see the
way that Hardt and Negri's theory is a theory of the "transcendence" of for-profit labor relations. In Negri and Hardt's theory this
(reproductive) labor is posited as not simply "outside" of wage-labor, but like all forms of immaterial labor it is understood as
autonomous from capital and the priority of "profit" over "need" that is structurally embedded in its imperatives. In other words, they
posit the site of "family" and other forms of necessary labor which work to reproduce labor-power as free from the domination of
capital, its drive for profit, and its ruthless suppression of "need" in its quest for profit. This is not only completely opposed to the
Marxist feminist critique of the family, but is fundamentally aligned with the conservative family values theorists which Hardt and
Negri claim to oppose.
Love/Commonwealth
Hardt and Negri’s concepts of love and evil replace materialist politics
with idealist abstractions—this obscures working-class oppression
and disrupts political universality
By theorizing love as a "bio-political event" Hardt and Negri understand it as a trans-material, trans-social, and trans-historical,
"creative life force." They argue that love, as a bio-political event, is "productive" by which they mean that it produces "new subjectivities" and
"singularities" and, they add, it is productive of new social forms and relations: "When we engage in the production of subjectivity that is love, we are
not merely creating new objects or even new subjects in the world. Instead we are producing a new world, a new social life" (181). What Hardt and
Negri call relations of "production" are actually relations of reproduction. In their theory, the relations of reproduction in capitalism—and
specifically the ideological reproduction of subjectivities and the relations through which this takes place—are considered to be the material terrain of
social transformation and freedom. The actual material relations of production—the labor and property relations by which social wealth is
produced—and the relationship of love to these relations of production are inverted and hidden from view. The assumption of this
theory is that capitalism is held in place at root not by its material relations of production but by the reproduction of subjectivities who
will adjust to and participate in capitalist production. Moreover, by this logic, change in subjectivities—or subjective change—is taken to
constitute material change as an end in itself. In this narrative subjective change and more specifically, the mere act of "loving"—or "loving
differently" —as an end in itself "constitutes" new social relations: "love is a process of production of the commons and production of
subjectivity. This process is not merely a means to producing material goods and other necessities but also an end in itself" (180). No transformation
outside of "loving differently" and transforming the forms of affective relations is, according to this theory, necessary in order to bring about human
freedom. In this theory, not only are the relations of production ideologically "dematerialized" but so are the relations of reproduction
themselves. When Hardt and Negri appear to make references to "love" and "love relations" as "social," they do not mean by this that love—and the
form that it takes—presupposes specific social relations and material conditions of possibility, rather they theorize "love" as a transsocial and
immaterial life force that brings into being new social forms. Love, they claim, is at root an "ontological event" that constitutes being and reality as such:
Every act of love, one might say, is an ontological event in that it marks a rupture with existing being and creates new being [...] Being, after all, is just
another way of saying what is ineluctably common, what refuses to be privatized or enclosed and remains constantly open to all. (There is no such
thing as a private ontology.) To say that love is ontologically constitutive then, simply means that it produces the common. (181) Love, in this
argument, is outside of social relations but "creates" them. Social relations in other words presuppose love . Human life and reality as
such presuppose love in this scenario. Love, in this narrative, is both origin (arche) and end (telos) of reality or Being as such. At different points in their
narrative Hardt and Negri refer to love as: an "economic power"; an affective network; a bio-political event; an bio-political force which creates and
brings into being new social forms; a force which composes singularities (differences) within the commons; and the basis of ontology or Being as such
(180-183). In short, in Commonwealth, love is understood in theological and spiritualist terms: it is regarded to be all powerful, it is all
knowing, absolute reality, it is all encompassing, it creates all that is and all that will ever be. It is ideologically "cleansed" from its
actual relation to the material relations of production. To complete their theological sermon on the "power of love," Hardt and Negri argue that
love is a "force to combat evil" (189-199). Here Hardt and Negri deploy the theological concept of "evil" in place of a rigorous historical materialist
analysis of material contradictions. Having ideologically displaced the dialectical praxis of labor as the basis of social forms with "love" as a creative life
force, the deployment of the concept of "evil" now enables Hardt and Negri to displace analytical critique of private property relations and exploitation
as an explanation of social inequality with a theory of moral and panhistorical "corruption." In Hardt and Negri, "evil" is understood as the "corruption" of
love and the common or what they elsewhere call "love gone bad": Our proposition […] is to conceive of evil as a derivative and distortion of love and
the common. Evil is the corruption of love that creates an obstacle to love, or to say the same thing with a different focus, evil is the corruption of the
common that blocks its production and productivity. Evil thus has no originary or primary existence but stands only in a secondary position to love.
(192) According to Hardt and Negri’s logic, since love is an ontological category that constitutes "being" and at the same time is a creative life force that
brings into being new social forms, "love" brings about all social relations. Thus, social relations which are unequal are, so the story goes, best
"explained" as the "corruption" of love or what they also call "love gone bad." To this end, they suggest that "As soon as we identify love with the
production of the common, we need to recognize that, just like the common, love is deeply ambivalent and susceptible to corruption" (181-182). On
these terms, Hardt and Negri posit that "capitalism" too, like all social forms is at root made possible by love, but a "love gone bad" (193). Capitalism, in
their view, is not an historical relation based on private property relations and the exploitation of labor-power—the theft of surplus labor in production.
Rather, they argue that capitalism and its alienating effects are best explained as a form of "love gone bad," by which they mean as a form of
"corruption." More specifically, according to Hardt and Negri, the "corruption" of love is manifested in "identitarian love" or "love of the same" rather than
"love of difference." Race love, nation love, patriotism, romantic love, marriage-couple love are, for Hardt and Negri, examples of "love of the same"
(182-183). As an "antidote" to love of the same, Hardt and Negri expand upon the concept of "love thy neighbor," and following Nietzsche they argue
that higher than love of neighbor is "love of the farthest" (183). Here Hardt and Negri reduce social transformation to moral platitudes and lessons in
multiculturalism and "loving difference." In doing so they erase the fact that exploitation under capitalism is the root cause of inequality and, as well,
exploitation is entirely compatible with "love of the farthest" as transnational capitalism goes "all over the globe" and "must settle everywhere, nestle
everywhere, establish connexions everywhere" not only to expand its markets but to secure sources of exploitable labor-power to stave off declines in
profit (Marx and Engels Manifesto 487). What Hardt and Negri then propose as the "solution" to "love gone bad" or "love of the same" and toward the
"commons" is not social transformation but a "mass exodus" from institutions of the family, the nation, the corporation... As a "force to combat evil,"
Hardt and Negri contend, "love now takes the form of indignation, disobedience, and antagonism. Exodus is one means […] of combating the corrupt
institutions of the common, subtracting from claims of identity, fleeing from subordination and servitude" (195). Hardt and Negri’s argument for a "mass
exodus" from "old/bad" forms of love is, as I explicate further below, an updating of the culture of capitalism—of the methods used to help reproduce
the social relations of production founded on exploitation—and not a break from capitalism. However, before further examining Hardt and Negri’s
theory of "love," "evil," "corruption," and "exodus" and their ideological role in transnational capitalism now, it is first important to understand the
genealogy of Hardt and Negri’s theory in classic idealism. This is important both because Hardt and Negri overtly claim to be producing a "materialist"
theory and because their theory is taken by others as a "new" "true" materialism. Materialism, broadly, is the explanation of the origin of existence on
the basis of exclusively material relations and laws of motion. When Hardt and Negri claim that love is "ontological" and constitutive of
"Being," this does not mean that they are working with a materialist understanding of love. Despite their claims for a "materialist
teleology" (59) and a "materialist perspective" (194), at its core Hardt and Negri’s theory of love and the "commons," is not actually an
historical updating of materialism for new material conditions of production that are in the process of formation, but an ideological
updating of classic Christian idealist (spiritualist) ontology in which the "real" is represented as grounded in the ideal or spiritual. This
can be seen not only in their direct references to St. Paul’s theology, but in how closely Hardt and Negri’s theory of "love as being"
and "love as a force to combat evil" resembles Augustine of Hippos’ classic Christian idealist ontology of "God as being" and of
"good" and "evil" and their "relation" to each other . In classic Christian ontology, "God is being" and is the "real." More specifically, the concept
of God, in classic Christianity, is understood as absolute spirit: the all powerful, immutable, ineffable, excessive, and unquantifiable divine life force.
This concept of absolute spirit, moreover, is regarded to be the absolute basis of the real as such and is regarded as "supremely good." In this theory
of being, the concrete and sensuous world of the earth is considered to be an effect of god. The world, in other words, according to this ontology is
"God’s creation" and God is its ‘life force." However, according to classic Christian ontology, "God" is regarded to compose or create but does not
constitute the world. In other words, for Augustine and classic Christianity in general, the divine creator is not the creation. To put this another way, in
classical Christian ontology, the world is not seen as "God incarnate" because, in this theory of ontology, "God" is an immaterial, divine force which
cannot be incarnated. In this view, "God" as absolute spirit is outside any terms of empirical measurement, not contained in or by any material,
concrete, or sensuous form or relation. In the Confessions, for example, Augustine remarks that "truth says to me: Your God is not heaven or earth or
any kind of bodily thing" (213). Although, in the course of the Confessions, Augustine formally rejects the theories of Plato and ancient Greek
philosophy in general, his theory of "God" at the same time derives from Plato’s concept of ideal forms and the theory of ontology of which it
is a part. In Republic, Book X, for example, Plato distinguishes between "ideal forms," which he argues is the product of "God" and is the
one "true" form; the concrete or material form manufactured by an artisan, which Plato regards to be a copy of the ideal form; and
the image or representational form (as in painting or poetry) produced by what Plato regards to be an "imitator" of the concrete. In this
theory of ontology the ideal form is the basis of being. The concrete form produced by human labor is considered to be a lesser
copy of the ideal form produced by God, and the image or representation of the concrete form is regarded by Plato to be an even
lesser copy of a copy—an "imitation" of a copy—of the ideal form (Plato, Dialogues 477-495). In the Confessions, "God" is being, and is the
"real," and the concrete and sensuous world is a second order reality or "becoming" but not being itself. For example, Augustine remarks. "I considered
all the other things that are of a lower order than yourself, and I saw that they are not absolute being in themselves, nor are they entirely without being.
They are real in so far as they have their being from you, but unreal in the sense that they are not what you are" (147). In this view, "God creates the
world in his own image" but the "image" (which in this theory of ontology is the concrete and sensuous world) is an effect and (lesser) copy of "God." In
this view, the world then, because it is regarded to be created by a divine life force that is "supremely good" is also good, but because it is not this
divine force in itself, it is a "lesser" good or second order good. As such it is regarded to be subject to corruption. This "corruption," in Augustine is
given the name of "evil." In the classic Christian ontology because God is regarded as absolute reality, as Being, and as supreme good, "evil" is
understood not to "exist." To this end Augustine remarks: For you evil does not exist, and not only for you but for the whole of your creation as well,
because there is nothing outside it which could invade it and break down the order which you have imposed on it. Yet in separate parts of your creation
there are some things which we think of as evil because they are at variance with other things. But there are other things again with which they are in
accord, and then they are good. In themselves, too, they are good. (148-149) Evil, for Augustine, is the absence of Being—its disintegration—and the
corruption of Being and the good . "Evil," as it is regarded by Augustine, is not an autonomous "force"—does not "exist"—but is manifested in the
corruption, disorder, decay and dissolution of God’s creation which is good when things are "in their proper place" but evil when it becomes disordered
(150-151). Hardt and Negri formally distance their theory of love (as divine life force) and evil (as earthly corruption of divine life force) from Augustine’s
theory of love, god and evil, by drawing from Spinoza’s understanding that "evil" does "exist" but has a second order existence. They claim that,
Spinoza’s difference resides at a deeper level where the education or training of the mind and body are grounded in the movement of love. He does not
conceive of evil, as does Augustine, for instance, as the privation of being; nor does he pose it as a lack of love. Evil instead is love gone bad, love
corrupted in such a way that it obstructs the functioning of love. […] And since love is ultimately the power of the creation of the common, evil is the
dissolution of the common or, really, its corruption. (193) This is primarily a language game but not a break from the basic spiritualist ontology of
Augustine. While Augustine claims that "evil" does not exist, he still deploys "evil" as an explanatory concept in place of a rigorous
explanation of historical relations of production. In like manner, when Hardt and Negri, following Spinoza, claim that "evil" does
"exist" they are deploying a concept that vacates materialist critique. The point of contention in this essay, however, is not the specific theory
of "evil" but the use of the concept of "evil" to explain material contradictions and the social inequality that arises from these contradictions. Any use of
the concept of "evil" to explain capitalism and exploitation is an ideological mystification of material relations regardless of which
specific theory of "evil" is used. The concept of "evil" ideologically translates the material contradiction of class society—and the
historical and material causes of intensified economic exploitation and social alienation in private property relations—into an eternal
existential condition of life as such. "Love" is an autonomous life force but it is always already subject to "evil" and corruption .
According to Hardt and Negri, "this is not to say we should imagine we can defeat evil once and for all—no, the corruptions of love and the common will
continue" (198). The structural and systemic violence of capital, its onslaught into more levels and areas of human existence, and the social alienation
that results from private property relations are abstracted from the historical conditions that produce them and transcoded into a transhistorical
"corruption" rather than historical, and therefore, transformable material relations. As a result, as classic Christian idealists, Hardt and Negri’s
theory also returns to Plato’s "ideal forms." "Love" and "the commons" are deployed as ideal forms in which training is needed while
the struggle to transform the social relations of production—the material relations of capitalism—is considered a corrupt copy of an
ideal form. This is the marketing of a new religion to the contemporary global working class, dressed up as material resolutions to
the class contradictions workers face. This does not explain but explains away and disappears the material contradictions in which
workers live. Deploying the concept of "evil" to explain away material relations, puts the production of materialist knowledge of
objective relations in suspension—knowledge which is necessary for bringing about more effective collective social transformation—
and instead is aimed at rallying people around "moral certitude" without knowledge. It is quite telling for instance, when Hardt and Negri
argue that their Spinozan theory of "evil" provides a more effective "explanation for why at times people fight for their servitude as if it were their
salvation, why the poor sometimes support dictators, the working classes vote for right-wing parties, and abused spouses and children protect their
abusers" (193). "Such situations," they contend: are obviously the result of ignorance, fear, and superstition, but calling it false consciousness provides
meager tools for transformation. Providing the oppressed with the truth and instructing them in their interests does little to change things. People
fighting for their servitude is understood better as the result of love and community gone bad, failed, and distorted. […] People are powerfully addicted
to love gone bad and corrupt forms of the common. Often, sadly, these are the only instances of love and the common they know! (193-194; emphasis
added) Hardt and Negri update a ruling class paternalism that workers do not need to know the truth of material relations or struggle
to produce concepts that can most effectively explain these relations. According to their narrative, even if the oppressed "know the truth" of
material relations and their objective interests, it does "little good" because the oppressed are "addicted" to their own oppression. Here, they displace
the materialist concept of exploitation of the surplus-labor of the working class by capital as an explanation of material contradictions in capitalism,
including poverty, with the psycho-affective concept of the "addiction" of the working class to "corrupt" forms of love. They displace the explanatory
concept of "false consciousness" with the "ignorance, fear, and superstition" of workers . Hardt and Negri claim that their approach
embraces the "power" of the poor. "The poor," Hardt and Negri contend, "are actually extraordinarily wealthy," by which they further
elaborate: "despite the myriad mechanisms of hierarchy and subordination" they are "creative" and "express an enormous power of
life" (129, 131). This is an ideological inversion of the exploitation of workers surplus-labor under capitalism and a concealing of the
brutal material contradictions under which workers live with the promise of "hope" and "spiritual wealth" in place of material equality.
Moreover, according to this logic workers in transnational capitalism do not suffer from the exploitation of their labor or poverty at all,
they suffer from a pathology—from a state of "addiction"—and get in the way of their own already existing freedom and
"extraordinary wealth." The oppressed and exploited, in other words, are according to this logic "pathological" and "choose" their
own poverty and exploitation. The implication of their argument regarding domestic violence, for instance, is that domestic violence
is the "addiction" of abused spouses and children to "bad forms of love." This is not only not feminism, it is sexist anti-feminism
which pathologizes the abused, oppressed and exploited and ideologically disappears the structural relations and the material
contradictions of private property that enable the growth of domestic violence . What Hardt and Negri advance in the name of the "commons"
is a cynical volunteerism and moralism against the working class. Workers’ collective struggle for socialism and to end the exploitation of their surplus-
labor is demonized as "evil" and "corrupt" and what the workers "really need," according to Hardt and Negri’s sermon, is education and training in
"love." The (ideo)logic of this is that the exploited and oppressed are poor and exploited because they don’t know how to love.
Heidegger
Heidegger
Heidegger relies on a falsely universal agent of change, ensuring that
the status quo remains unaltered, and that his thought is co-opted by
fascists.
Taking his cue, let us question Heidegger, though perhaps not with piety. Begin with the question of universality A thinker of
Heidegger’s magnitude, one of the philosophical luminaries of the twentieth century, must, one should think, stand for the whole of
humankind if he is to command respect. And indeed he claims to do just this, if only through his continual reference to ‘man’ as the
subject and object of his discourse, viz: ‘Who accomplishes the challenging setting-upon through which what we call the real is
revealed as standing-reserve? Obviously, man. To what extent is man capable of such a revealing?’ (p. 299). We may translate this:
who is the agent of the pathological relation to technology that is causing the eco logical crisis? The answer to this is, self-
evidently ... man. At this point, however, the questioning of Heidegger may commence. For the usage of an undifferentiated ‘man’ as
the agent of technological degradation is a highly dubious way to confront the ecological crisis. Who is this ‘man?’ Logically, it is
either somebody or everybody, and if the latter, it is either all of us as an undifferentiated mass, or all of us in some kind of internal
relation — a hierarchy such as patriarchy or class, as we have discussed: in other words, some articulation of the social world. The
articulated view opens onto an effective understanding of the crisis. But it is not the one chosen by Heidegger, who, instead of
articulating the real character of humanity, splits it into two equally unsatisfactory moieties. Manifestly, he speaks for an
undifferentiated notion of ‘man’; concretely and practically, however, he speaks only for the Northern European elites. Heidegger
really speaks just for some people, but as this would absolutely violate the spirit of his discourse and the supreme abstraction of his
language he ascends into the fuzzy realm of a falsely universalized subject. How do we know that Heidegger speaks just for the
dominant classes of Northern Europeans? There is the matter of his personal history, which was only evaded and never repudiated
during the years when this essay was gestated. The younger Heidegger was acutely aware that philosophical syntheses are
reflective of real struggles and cannot be fulfilled unless the philosopher intervenes in these struggles. In this spirit he connected his
philosophical project of curing the malaise of modern society to National Socialism, as the party capable of healing this lesion by
taking state power in Germany29 The Nazi career of Heidegger was one of the great intellectual scandals of the twentieth century,
and the shame of it undoubtedly contributed to a certain gnomic tendency in his later thought, such as we see in essays of this kind,
where elliptical phrases, neologisms and scurrying through the language of antiquity for authenticity maintain the illusion that no
specific programme for transformation need be enunciated. But Nazism was nothing if not a specific project. Whatever else can be
said about the Third Reich, there can be no doubt that whoever signed up to its principles (and Heidegger was a party member)
affirmed a radically racist view of the world, within which, of course, the Northern European elites occupied the master role. We can
see directly within the present text how Heidegger refuses to define a specific agent for the crisis, however much its logic may
demand this — and also why the question of efficient cause is distasteful to him, as this methodology used faithfully, would disclose
his dreadful partiality. And so Heidegger talks movingly of the revealing expressed in the making of a silver chalice, but glosses over
the history that has degraded craftsmanship — or its spiritual associations as described. For who makes chalices any more?
Why not address the people who make Barbie dolls, or methyl isocyanate, or overpriced sneakers, or cluster bombs — and who can
stop doing so if they are willing to starve, or lose their health insurance, or not make the mortgage payments on the house? Are not
the real conditions of their labour the causal elements in the deterioration of their techne? Heidegger talks elsewhere of the ‘forester’
who no longer ‘walks the forest path in the same way his grandfather did’ because he is ‘today ordered by the industry that produces
commercial woods’ thus making him ‘subordinate to the orderability of cellulose’. Yes, yes, excellent to talk of this, but why not go on
to the ‘industry’ as a causal mover not because of the essence of ‘industrialization’ that it bears, but because it is set going to serve
the lord of capital that reduces trees to cellulose? Nor should this be talked of only in metaphorical terms: who is this industry?
There are real people involved, who personify the great forces of the capital system yet must also be held morally, politically and
legally responsible, as the management of Union Carbide should have been held responsible for Bhopal. Similar reflections are in
order for the peasants whose downfall Heidegger laments — and who fell, and continue to fall all over the world, because of the
encroachment of the same profit motive. And of course, the same goes for one of his most important insights, that there is
something active at work in the world that ‘puts to nature the unreasonable demand that it supply energy which can be extracted
and stored as such’. Does this something simply arrive, like Athene, from the head of its father? Or is it the product of a vast
transformation only understandable in terms of the inexorable force of capital? Is it the self-caused exfoliation of an original
estrangement, carried out without any mediations in the real world? Well, then, one still has to explain the many simulacra of said
mediations, such as stock exchanges, oil pipelines, credit cards, police and armies. If one draws all the appropriate inferences that
point to such a conclusion, but refuses to name it as such, then one is mystifiying, and as with all mystifications, supporting the
status quo. It is striking how closely Heidegger’s critique of technology can be applied to the capital system, yet never bridges
across to this most obvious point. This is not to deny that his critique runs far beyond the ordinary insights derived from political
economy Heidegger’s insights are, as he intended, profound: they advance our view of what is wrong and what has to be done to
right it in a way that no political-economic analysis of the ecological crisis possibly can. But what is merely profound swims at an
inaccessible and meaningless depth. More, it can be used for malignant purposes. We dwell on Heidegger not just because of his
philosophical eminence, but essentially because reasoning of this sort has been repeatedly used for malignant purposes. Behind the
discourse of ‘ecology’ can lurk, therefore, a spectre of fascism. We return to the theme in Part III.
Dasein
Heidegger’s emphasis on an originary Dasein beyond physical
appearance mystifies revolutionary philosophy, making radicalism a
question of changing how you think about the world and producing
an ignorance of the material circumstances which gave birth to ‘tool
thinking’
Heidegger is not only the "master" theorist of what is now dominantly called "theory" (the speculative discourses informed by
poststructuralism) but he is a touchstone for virtually all discussions of posthumanism today. His significance is related to his efforts,
in the wake of the first global crisis of capitalism, to account for that which simultaneously grounds all thinking (Being) and yet has
remained excessive to philosophy. Faced with the first World War and consequent massive devastation throughout Europe as the
imperialist nations settled colonial boundaries, Heidegger was forced to confront the very nature of human being, on new terms. For
him, the traditional modes of understanding human existence were unable to account for the realities of modern life and had to be
subjected to a systematic "destruction" in order to move forward. His "fundamental ontology" thus attempted to disclose the true
basis of Being from which people had been alienated since the Socratics. The loss of individuality, for Heidegger, results, not from
material relations, but from a failure to understand the true nature of being. One of the theoretically influential aspects of Heidegger
is the way that his writing combines an interest in the (ruins) of the everyday and a mystical mode of reading "beyond" the material
appearance of the world. To address this aspect of Heidegger's writing, we can turn to his discussion in Being and Time of the
everyday use of a particular tool, engaging in a particular activity such as hammering. Graham Harman suggests, in fact, that
Heidegger's "theory of equipment contains the whole of Heideggerian philosophy, fully encompassing all of its key insights," and its
importance lies in the way that it encourages "a ruthless inquiry into the structure of objects themselves" (Tool-Being 15). Although
Harman suggests that through a re-reading of Heidegger it is possible to return to the world of objects, and represents his own re-
reading of Heidegger as "a military campaign driving back toward the surface of reality" (6), not a transcendent one, I argue that
whether Heidegger is addressing the world of "objects" or the human thinking that grasps their being or human being itself, the
material world quickly recedes in Heidegger's writings, into the ethereal, inaccessible, and ineffable (into the subjective), a central
aspect of his machine-thinking. Consider, for instance, Heidegger's well-known passage on the hammer, in which he writes, In
dealings such as this, when something is put to use, our concern subordinates itself to the 'in-order-to' which is constitutive for the
equipment we are employing at the time; the less we just stare at the hammer-Thing, and the more we seize hold of it and use it, the
more primordial does our relationship to it become, and the more unveiledly is it encountered as that which it is—as equipment. The
hammering itself uncovers the specific 'manipulatability' ['Handlichkeit'] of the hammer. The kind of Being which equipment
possesses—in which it manifests itself in its own right—we call "readiness-to-hand" [Zuhandenheit]. Only because equipment has
this "being-in-itself' and does not merely occur, is it manipulable in the broadest sense and at our disposal... If we look at Things just
‘theoretically', we can get along without understanding readiness-to-hand. But when we deal with them by using them and
manipulating them, this activity is not a blind one; it has its own kind of sight, by which our manipulation is guided and from which it
acquires its specific Thingly character. (98) Addressing the act of "hammering" of course automatically signals Heidegger's interest
not only in the more "concrete" (i.e., "material" or "worldly") aspects of the everyday but also the world of work, labor and tools: the
realm of production. And yet, as I mentioned, the effect of Heidegger's reading of "hammering" is precisely the spiritualizing of the
material: bringing back the centrality of the individual subject's thinking as the basis of the real. Contrasting "unveiled"
"encountering" with (Cartesian) theoretical knowing of the objective world, Heidegger suggests that the experiential act of
hammering itself attunes one to the "primordial" nature of the relation of human to hammer, the hammer's being as "readiness-to-
hand." Grasping this readiness-to-hand is not something that can be achieved by any theoretical approach, but by the intuitive
experience itself. For, on these terms, manipulating the hammer provides the subject with an (immediate, non-theoretical) "sight"
which itself gives the objects manipulated their "thingly character." And this itself is the effect of the particular (intrinsic) being of the
hammer's relation to Dasein, which reveals itself to the human subject in the act of hammering. To put this another way, in his
theorization of production ("hammering"), which is centered on the subject, the world and products of labor increasingly recede and
disappear. As he puts it elsewhere, the approach he highlights "is not a way of knowing those characteristics of entities which
themselves are [seinder Beschaffenheiten des Seienden]; it is rather a determination of the structure of the Being which entities
possess. But as an investigation of Being, it brings to completion... that understanding of Being which belongs already to Dasein and
which 'comes alive' in any of its dealings with entities" (95-6; emphasis added). It is not about the material relations of human being
or even the relations of humans and tools that matters here. It is instead what using equipment tells the subject (Dasein) about the
innermost nature of human existence. Thus the focus, as Dasein, becomes the interiority of the subject , the subject thinking about
the hammer—or the "other" hammer in the subject's thoughts. Heidegger's is a spectral hammer, which seems to attain its more
authentic ("primordial") sense of being precisely to the extent that its roots in the material world are suppressed . The subject's
"rootless" interior "sight" is then posited as (de-)establishing, negating, the qualities of the material world. The material world (that
matters) ends up being an effect of the thinking subject. Consequently, as his discussion unfolds, the hammer looses more and
more of its "hardness" (that which links it to the outside world) to the sensuousness of language and thinking (which renders that
outside world increasingly ineffable). The sensuousness of language here combats the instrumentalities of the material world. We
are led throughout Being and Time, and especially in his later writing on poetry, to the materiality of language, which guides the
subject, never to any "outside" reference (i.e., the objective world of history) but to an ever deeper interiority of meaning within
language. Language, after all, is for Heidegger "the house of Being" ("Letter on Humanism" 217). And it is, more specifically, "[t]he
liberation of language from grammar into a more original essential framework" (218) that constitutes the most "primordial" mode of
language (poetry). Through the meditation on "grammarless" language (outside of social convention), Heidegger's writing removes
from language any material resistance, and dwells in the sensuousness of the signifier. What starts out as a gesture to the
worldliness of the world, in short, ends up in the worldless subject. This is because, in the first place, the being of hammering has
little to do with the physical, material aspects of the hammer (its use value, which is in part related to a products' physical properties)
or empirical properties which could be "tested" scientifically ("characteristics"). Even less so is the hammer's readiness-to-hand for
Heidegger the result of its being a product of labor, used under specific historical relations of property which enable it to be "ready-
to-hand" for those who sell their labor to survive (the "in order to" of commodity production). This is not coincidental. For, central to
his treatment of the "hammer" is the double-move of first reducing materialism (which argues that consciousness is determined by
material relations) to mechanical materialism (the Newtonian thinking which treats the world as independent, isolated, and
unchanging objects), and then, having done this, rejecting "materialism" as a rigid mode of thinking incapable of grasping the
complexity and changes of social or natural life. As Heidegger explains, "When analysis starts with such entities [as Things] and
goes on to inquire about Being, what it meets is Thinghood and Reality. Ontological explication [then] discovers... substantiality,
materiality, extendedness, side-by-side-ness, and so forth" (96). But even on these terms, he argues, "the entities which we
encounter in concern are proximally hidden"(96). This is because, to address things in terms of their materiality or their "substance"
(127), Heidegger argues, is to posit "an idea in which Being is equated with constant presence-at-hand" (29), an idea based on
entities as "That which enduringly remains, really is" (128). Conflating idealist and materialist theories of substance, and thus
representing materialism as positing an unchanging, eternal theory of the objective world, Heidegger suggests that the materiality of
the object is an appearance only. Advancing a critique of present-ism that will later become central to textualism and posthumanism,
Heidegger suggests that empiricism, rationalism and historical materialism—all of which, in different ways, assume the existence of
an "object" which can be "known" by a "subject" which is distinct from the object—have obscured the true being of entities by
focusing only on appearances of objects (their "presence"). But these presentist appearances conceal deeper-lying dynamics (of
becoming, of relations between presences and absence) that exceed attempts to conceptualize (or "fix") them. However, it is
important to recall that "presence" for Marx is not a metaphysical fiction but a material relation. The presence of an object is not
simply a matter of its empirical reality, but the historical conditions which make that object available for humans in the first place.
Hammering, on these terms, is not a transhistorical relation to being, but a historical relation to the conditions of labor. Hammering
with one's own tool, in order to meet one's own means of subsistence, has a different meaning than hammering with a tool that you
have been hired to use and whose product you will have no control over or property in, because both the hammer and the product
are privately owned. For Marx, the material "presence" of objects is their material relations, which are submerged in the everyday.
Whereas Heidegger posits the outside as the extension of the inside—the internalization of the thinking subject, which "negates" the
outside world—for Marx, the interior is the extension of the exterior. "My general consciousness," Marx argues, "is only the
theoretical shape of that which the living shape is the real community, the social fabric" (Marx, Manuscripts 105). Because Marx is
oriented toward the outside—the inside is the outside—the material world never loses its materiality, and labor is established as the
movement of history. Production, for Marx, is the "externalization" of the subject, the "objectifying" of the self in labor, under definite
conditions. There is thus a dialectical relation between subject and world. "Objectification" (in the language of the Economic and
Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844) is an outward movement, as opposed to Heidegger's absorption of the external world into the
subject. In human's objectification in the activity of production, the subject "externalizes" not only the individual self, but the social
relations in which the self is a laboring subject. The subject's agency is not therefore primarily a matter of thinking-as-negating but
producing-as-bringing-into-being, and only by virtue of this agency of labor is the subject also a thinking subject. Heidegger's
language, by contrast, is inwardly oriented, hence the outside world becomes increasingly ineffable, and this is, I argue, one of the
central effects of machine-thinking—the evaporation of the social divisions of the outside world in the sensuousness of language, in
poiesis.
Dasein is a helpless attempt to stave off the collapse of idealism

through existential appeals to an irrational and inaccessible ‘greater
meaning’—this causes material complacency and collapses into
relativism
Lukács ’80 György Lukács, The Destruction of Reason, 1980, chapter 4, transcribed rather poorly by some blogger,
http://maximumred.blogspot.com/2010_06_01_archive.html
In view of this interpretation of time Heidegger's second chief programmatic point, proof of the elementary historicality of 'existence'
as a basis for comprehending history, turns out to be pure shadow-boxing. Heidegger was right in making a stand against the neo-
Kantians who were trying to argue historicality from a 'subjective' setting, and in indicating that Being must be historical in order for
there to be any historical science. As on many points, vitalism was here preempting the collapse of undialectical idealism. Butg
Heidegger still lagged far behind the neo-Kantians in the concrete definition of his 'existential' historicity. As a consequence the
primary phenonmena of history was, for him, existence, i.e., the life of the individual, the 'universal coherence of life between birth
and death'. And this too - quite in accordance with the Diltheyan vitalistic method - was defind from experience: 'It (this coherence,
G.L.) consists of a sequence of experiences "within time"'. The result was a double distortion. Firstly, Heidegger did not take the
historical data in Nature as the 'originals' (Kant-Laplace theory, Darwinism, etc.), but presented the coherence of human
experiences far removed from the 'original state' as the starting-point, the 'primal phenomenon'. Secondly, he failed to observe that
his 'primal phenomenon' was derivative: a consequence of that social Being and praxis of men in which alone such a 'coherence' of
experiences could come about at all. As far as he did notice a link, he rejected it as belonging to the domain of the 'one'. In so doing,
he not only isolated a distorted derivate of human social praxis - as an historical 'primal phenonmenon', as 'original' - from real
history, but also set them up as antinomies. The tendency to falsify in this way the structure of reality graphically expresses the pre-
fascist character of Heidegger's thinking. Now since the primary historicality was 'ontologically founded' on this basis, the automatic
product of it was Heidegger's crucial distinction between 'authentic' and 'unauthentic' history. 'In keeping with the rooting of
historicality in anxiety, existence exists as authentically historical or unauthentically historical, all depending.' But according to
Heidegger's reading of history, it was precisely real history that was unauthentic, just as real time is the 'vulgar' kind. In giving history
an apparently ontologically reasoned basis, Heidegger actually took away any kind of historicality, whilst acknowledging as historical
only a philistine's moral 'resolution'. In his analysis of everyday existence, Heidegger had already rejected all human orientation
towards objective facts or trends in socio-economic life. There he stated: One would completely mistake phenomenally what mood
(Stimmung) reveals and how it does so, were one aiming at collating witih the revealed material that which existence, in the given
'mood', knows about and believes 'simultaneously'. Even if existence is 'secure' in the belief of its 'Whither', or thinks it is rationally
enlightend about the Whence, none of this affects the established phenomenal fact that teh 'mood' confronts existence with the That
of its There, a remorselessly sphinx-like sight. Existentially-ontologically, one has not the least right to suppress the 'evidence' of the
existing state thorugh judging by the apodictic certainty of a theoretical perception of that which is purely present. The illumination of
existence can come only from within, for every (to Heidegger's mind: purported) objectively directed perception brings about a
casting down (das Verfallen), a state of surrender to the 'one' and unauthenticity. Thus it was only logical for Heidegger, in positing
the historicality of existence, to refute equally firmly everything objectively historical; Heidegger's historicality, then, has nothing to do
with the point 'that existence occurs in a "world-history"'. Here he was polemicizing - quite rightly to some extent - against the old
idealistic argumentation of the theory of history. The 'location of the historical problem', he said, 'must not be sought in history as a
science of history ... How history may become a possible object of history (in the absract) can only be inferred from the ontological
character of the historical,, from historicality and its rootedness in temporaneity.' Here again Heidegger was pre-empting the
collapse of idealism, not unskillfully, by giving the impression that he planned to make the historical nature of existence itself the
starting-point of history. But on one breath he was giving his existence itself, as we have observed, a thoroughly subjectivistic
definition, while in the next he radically 'purged' the original historicality of existence of all relation to real, objective history. For: 'In
accordance with the rooting of history in anxiety, existence existes as either authentically or unauthentically historical.' From this we
may logically conclude that 'the authentic being-unto-death, i.e., the finiteness of temporaneity is the latent ground for the
historicality of existence'.
Authenticity
Heidegger’s notion of authentic being is code for private property—
his disdain for the working class is indicative of a bourgeois bias, a
preference for “the finer things” not available to the proletariat
In the most basic terms, of course, both Heidegger and Marx agree that, as Marx puts it, "at the present day general consciousness
is an abstraction from real life and as such antagonistically confronts it" (Economic Manuscripts 105)—that is, that consciousness is
alienated from reality. But Heidegger's hostility to the "general consciousness" is deeply tied to his romantic treatment of technology
and technological thinking. "In utilizing public means of transport and in making use of information services such as the newspaper,"
Heidegger argues, "every Other is like the next. This Being-with-one-another dissolves one's own Dasein completely into the kind of
Being of 'the Others' in such a way, indeed, that the Others, as distinguishable and explicit, vanish more and more. In this
inconspicuousness and unascertainability, the real dictatorship of the 'they' is unfolded' (Being and Time 154). Elaborating his
machine-thinking, Heidegger here perhaps makes most manifest his rejection of the working class "mass," within whom (it is
assumed) all individuality is lost and one sinks into "averageness" and "mediocrity." Deeply aware of the growing international power
of the organized working class, not only in the Soviet Union, but throughout Europe and even in the US after the first world war,
what Heidegger "sees" in the strengthening urban proletariat is an indistinguishable mob threatening unique authenticity
(individuality), which is a code for private property. As a result, it is not the property relations which strip workers of the means of
production, forcing them to work for someone else that Heidegger sees as the root problem of the working class. It is instead the
machines that cause the working class to lose their individual freedom and individuality, not workers' class relation to machinery but
the machinery itself (along with its instrumental thinking). Thus the homogenization (abstraction) of labor by capital gets translated
as "leveling down" and "averageness" which themselves are then equated with "publicness." The "city" (the space in which
technology is most concentrated) then is rejected because it "controls every way in which the world and Dasein get interpreted"
(165). Nature in turn becomes the romantic space in which "every difference of level and of genuineness" and the "heart" of matters
are experienced outside of social interpretation—as the "ineffable." This of course leads Heidegger, in his later writings, to become
more and more concerned with the consequences of technology's "enframing" logic for nature. As he puts it in "The Question
Concerning Technology," in a technological age "even the cultivation of the field has comes under the grip of another kind of setting-
in-order, which sets upon nature. It sets upon it in the sense of challenging it. Agriculture is now the mechanized food industry, air is
now set upon to yield nitrogen, the earth to yield ore, ore to yield uranium, for example" (320). For Heidegger, the conflict between
"consciousness and real life" (Marx) is ultimately a mode of thinking that has not been attentive to Being, and can be remedied with
a new mode of thinking. For Marx, by contrast, this results from the social relations in which the products of human's labor are
alienated from them. Only a society in which a few own the means of production can others be in a position that they not only must
sell their labor to survive but under conditions in which they have no control over or property in their product of labor. "How would
the worker come to face the product of his activity as a stranger," Marx asks, "were it not that in the very act of production he was
estranging himself from himself? The product is after all but the summary of the activity, of production... In the estrangement of the
object of labor is merely summarized the estrangement, the alienation, in the activity of labor itself" (73-4). For this reason, there can
be no moving beyond the situation in which people are alienated from their productive activity ("hammering") unless the social
relations of production are transformed. But Heidegger bypasses change of material relations by suggesting that hiding behind (or
"alongside") the materiality of the everyday world of tools is a deeper, more elusive being—one which renders the relation of subject
and object far more "ambiguous" (subjective) and which can be accessed only through intuition. For Heidegger, the more authentic
approach to Being can only take place through the "qualitative experience" constitutive of being-in-the-world as against the
"abstract" (concept) or theory.
Dwelling
You can’t turn back history—Heidegger’s penchance for being-with-
the-earth and dwelling authentically is a bourgeois fantasy designed
to lull radical thought into complacency with the status quo
Central to the abstraction of labor under capitalism is the fact that, for capitalists to increase accumulated value (profit), more value
has to be produced than the laborer is compensated for: what is not compensated for is the surplus value taken by the capitalist (a
social process, Marx argues, "that goes on behind the backs of the producers" [135]). The role of technology under capitalism is to
make the worker more productive in the same amount of time, thereby allowing the capitalist to appropriate more and more value
while paying the worker the same (proportionally less). "It is the compelling force of anarchy in social production," Engels argues,
"that turns the limitless perfectibility of machinery under modern industry into a compulsory law by which every individual industrial
capitalist must perfect his machinery more and more, under penalty of ruin" ("Socialism: Utopian and Scientific" 140). But, as Engels
continues, the perfecting of machinery is making human labour superfluous. If the introduction and increase of machinery means the
displacement of millions of manual by a few machine-workers, improvement in machinery means the displacement of more and
more of the machine-workers themselves. It means, in the last instance, the production of a number of available wage-workers in
excess of the average needs of capital, or the formation of a complete industrial reserve army... Thus it comes about... that
machinery becomes the most powerful weapon in the war of capital against the working class; that the instruments of labour
constantly tear the means of subsistence out of the hands of the labourer; that the very product of the worker is turned into an
instrument for his subjugation" (140-41). It is because of the more immediately visible effects of technology that, in the early stages
of capital, workers attacked the machines that were putting them out of work—for instance in the 1780s, when workers in the Leeds
woolen industry responded to their increased exploitation by destroying the owners' new machines, and in the later Luddite
movement of the early 1800s, in which textile workers attacked the looms (see J. F. C. Harrison's, Society and Politics in England,
1780-1960 [71-72] for the Leeds workers' Petition that appeared in the newspaper at the time). One of the consequences of what
Engels calls the "subjugation" of the worker by his product is that advances in technology also de-skill the laborer. If not entirely
thrown out of work, the worker who used to have to carve wood to create a chair, now presses buttons that guide a laser which cuts
uniform pieces of wood to be assembled, much of which is now done by the consumer. Similarly, the computer technician who used
to need to be able to write codes to produce programs now uses ready-made templates, and highly trained symbolic analysts are
used for mind-numbing data-entry. To put this differently, the drive for capital to increase exploitation means that the constant "re-
skilling" it requires of its workforce as it introduces new technologies is thus always at the same time a de-skilling—since the
technology has made the production process even more monotonous. Complex labor, in other words, is constantly being reduced to
simpler forms of labor. Capital is thus always introducing newer (increasingly complex) technologies, which require new skills on the
part of workers and thus new "training." But the effect of these new skills is not only to make the "training" increasingly short-term
and the workers more easily replaceable; it also, as Engels suggests, creates an ever larger urban proletariat and reserve army of
labor. Technology, in short, becomes the focus in capitalist culture because machinery, as Engels puts it, "becomes the most
powerful weapon in the war of capital against the working class." But, as Engels also emphasizes, abstracting machines from the
social relations of production diverts attention from the class relations of machines. In the early stages of capitalism, when the
divisions between capital and labor were only beginning to emerge and therefore before the era of organized labor (which
connected the use of machines to the labor relations of capitalism which divide those who own the means of production from those
who don't), there was a historical basis for workers attacking the machines that put them out of work. It was among the strongest
and most direct means they had of challenging their employers. Likewise, the intellectuals in the late eighteenth century and early
nineteenth century, who saw the devastating effects of capital on the rural and industrial workers, were especially concerned with
the machine-thinking that accompanied capitalism. In particular, they attacked the ways in which the machine and machine-thinking
took away human agency, rendering humans passive, even conceptually and imaginatively imprisoned. In his critique of Newton
and the influence of Newtonian thought, Coleridge thus writes, "Mind, in his system, is always passive—a lazy Looker-on on an
external world," and Coleridge insisted that "any system built on the passiveness of the mind must be false" (Coleridge, Letter to
Tom Poole). Coleridge suggests that Newtonian mechanical thinking implied people simply reflected their conditions of life, rather
than being reflective or creative individuals who could not only think deeply about their life (not just reflect it) but produce new ideas
and new ways of thinking about the interconnectedness of life. It did not allow for the imagination, the thinking beyond what
(materially) is. Similarly, Blake's "There Is No Natural Religion," suggests that the idea that "Man's desires are limited by his
perceptions" (as associationalism and empiricism proposes) means that "none can desire what he has not perciev'd" (V). It implies
individuals cannot think what has not been already experienced, and that thinking is just a repetition of experience, nothing else. To
say that individuals are effects of their environment, for Blake and other romantics, is to construct a reductive model of subjectivity in
which individuals are rendered passive subjects of their environment. Hence the romantic proposal that individuals' determination
(their being, their consciousness) exceeds social conditions; the human is thus more "at home," not in the city (the space of the
social), but in (spiritualized) "nature." But in the same degree that the division between capital and labor is more and more splitting
society, as Marx and Engels put it, "into two great hostile classes directly facing each other" (Manifesto 474), bringing with it a more
and more international and class-conscious working class—in the same degree does the romantic focus on machines and machine-
thinking take on a reactionary, rearguard character. Heidegger's ontology and contemporary romanticism are both elaborated in a
fundamentally different historical moment than the early romantics in the early era of capitalism. Not only has the class divide
continued to deepen with the growth of capitalism, but the materialist theory of history has itself developed to explain the historical
origins of capitalism (and therefore its inevitable end) and to discover that basis of capitalism is in the unpaid labor of the worker
which is extracted at the point of production (i.e., that this surplus labor is the source of profit). It has therefore become increasingly
important for capitalism to produce modes of thinking which challenge materialism and which thereby obscure the roots of capitalism
in surplus labor and prevent social struggles aimed at making exploitation impossible. What Marx said of the "critical-utopian
socialists" holds true of neoromanticists: "although the originators of these systems were, in many respects, revolutionary, their
disciples have, in every case, formed mere reactionary sects" (Manifesto 516). This is because, "in opposition to the progressive
historical development of the proletariat" they "hold fast" to the ideas that reflected an earlier stage in the class conflict, and thus
provide no theoretical understanding for transformative social struggle. "They, therefore, endeavour," Marx argues, "to deaden the
class struggle and to reconcile the class antagonisms" (499). In fact, romanticism takes on more and more directly the responsibility
of combating materialism and the class it represents. In this way, rather than address the material conditions which reduce the
individual to the alienated worker, Heidegger—in the name of a more fundamental ontology—treats materialism and science as the
problem, and romanticizes earlier periods when labor was more skilled and less alienated. It is not the historical relations in which
people "live so long as they work" but the fact that these conditions (and all social explanations of these conditions) make individuals
the same that are his concern. Historical relations are reduced by Heidegger to a transhistorical mode of being in which the subject
"itself is not; its Being has been taken away by the Others... These Others, moreover, are not definite Others. On the contrary, any
Other can represent them" (Being and Time 164). Thus the homogenization (abstraction) of labor by capital gets translated as
"leveling down" and "averageness" which themselves are then equated with "publicness."
Poesis
Eco-romanticism’s ideological function is revealed by its historical
connection to times of economic crisis, concealing the way it soothes
theorists into compliance and ignorance of material circumstances.
The mode of romanticism I address in this essay is ultimately a class response to the contradictions of capitalism which it reads in
terms of science and technology, and in particular instrumental rationality. To be more specific, this romantic construction of nature
(including nostalgia for the past) is a response to the fact that, as Marx and Engels argue, The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the
upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound
man to his "natural superiors", and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous
"cash payment". It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine
sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the
numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom—Free Trade. In one word, for
exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation. The bourgeoisie
has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the
lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage labourers. (Manifesto 486-7) Romantic machine-thinking is a
response to capital's relentless conversion of people into wage-laborers—a process which, in times of crisis, hits the "middle"
sectors of class society (i.e, intellectuals, the petit-bourgeois) particularly hard. Facing the deep insecurity of their class position yet
ultimately opposed to the working class struggle to transform capital, the first line of defense among intellectuals facing growing
economic and social crisis has always been the turn to the immaterial, and often the irrational. That is to say, romantic idealism is a
discursive relay of the displaced petit-bourgeoisie—and, in the face of the rising conflict between labor and capital, signals a retreat
into and call for some "other way of life" in order not to engage the material conflicts of the present. This is why it surfaces with such
force during moments of intensified crisis. Thus, for instance, the rise of romanticism in late 1700s to the early 1800s is also the time
of revolutionary upheavals, the intensified destruction of peasant life, as well as the consolidation of the early industrial city with its
obvious class contradictions with life in the early factories (before the period of "social reform" from the 1840s on in England)—
which romanticism sees in terms of the excesses of Enlightenment rationality and the logic of quantification. Although developed in
many idioms, what these romantic responses ultimately share, I argue, is not so much a nostalgia for the past—this is a secondary
effect—but an idealist logic which ultimately erases the human as shaped by labor. The importance of critically re-examining such
discourses (which often claim to represent a radical departure from dominant thinking) is that, by disappearing the relations of labor,
and replacing the material with the immaterial, the ideological work of machine-thinking is to forestall transformative change. It
substitutes for the revolution of material structures what Wordsworth, in his Preface to Lyrical Ballads, calls "throw[ing] over [familiar
incidents] a certain colouring of imagination" (597) or what Matthew Calarco, in reference to posthumanism, calls a "revolution in
language and thought" (Zoographies 6): a substitution that has become increasingly appealing to ruling class interests at times of
deepening social contradictions.
Cap = Root Cause
Capital is the root cause—calculation is only feasible and rational in
contingent economic contexts
Eldred 2k Michael Eldred, Capital and Technology, Left Curve No. 24, May 2000, http://www.arte-fact.org/capiteen.html
Here, as everywhere else, Heidegger totalizes calculatingness without taking the economy into account, i.e. he consistently neglects
what 'regulates' the 'regulating circuits' of capitalist economic activity, namely, the essentially contingent value-form. Because he did
not learn anything essential from Marx, Heidegger characterizes present-day society not as capitalist society, but as "industrial
society" (ibid.): "It is subjectivity relying entirely on itself. All objects are aligned towards this subject." (ibid.) In view of the Marxian
analysis of the essence of commodity fetishism (which has to be thoroughly understood and should not be used erroneously, as in
conventional left-wing cultural critique, as a code-word for the deranged tendency of modern humans to consume) which fathoms
and presents the essential phenomenon of objects slipping out of the controlling hands of human subjects, no matter whether
individual or collective, it must be concluded that Heidegger did not understand the Marxian alienation of essence of the subject in
capitalism and thus missed the opportunity of thinking through modern technology in its essential sameness with capitalist economy.
Capitalism is the underlying structure that leads to modernity's

obsession with technology and management - the alt is a prerequisite
to the aff
Zizek ‘4 Slavoj Zizek, researcher in sociology at the university of Ljubljana, "The Ongoing "Soft Revolution"," Critical Inquiry,
Vol. 30 No. 2, Winter 2004, accessed 1/27/10 http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/421126
More than ever, capital is the concrete universal of our historical epoch. That is, while it remains a particular formation, it
overdetermines all alternative formations, as well as all noneconomic strata of social life. The twentieth‐century communist
movement defined itself as an opponent of capitalism and was defeated by it; fascism emerged as an attempt to master capitalism’s
excesses, to build a kind of capitalism without capitalism. For this reason, it is also much too simple, in a Heideggerian mood, to
reduce capitalism to one of the ontic realizations of a more fundamental ontological attitude of will to power and technological
domination (claiming that the alternatives to it remain caught within this same ontological horizon). Modern technological domination
is inextricably intertwined with the social form of capital; it can only occur within this form, and, insofar as the alternative social
formations display the same ontological attitude, this merely confirms that they are, in their innermost core, mediated by capital as
their concrete universality, as the particular formation that colors the entire scope of alternatives, that is, that functions as the
encompassing totality mediating all other particular formations. In his new book on modernity, Fredric Jameson offers a concise
critique of the recently fashionable theories of alternate modernities: How then can the ideologues of “modernity” in its current sense
manage to distinguish their product—the information revolution, and globalized, free‐market modernity—from the detestable older
kind, without getting themselves involved in asking the kinds of serious political and economic, systemic questions that the concept
of a postmodernity makes unavoidable? The answer is simple: you talk about “alternate” or “alternative” modernities. Everyone
knows the formula by now: this means that there can be a modernity for everybody which is different from the standard or
hegemonic Anglo‐Saxon model. Whatever you dislike about the latter, including the subaltern position it leaves you in, can be
effaced by the reassuring and “cultural” notion that you can fashion your own modernity differently, so that there can be a Latin‐
American kind, or an Indian kind or an African kind, and so forth.… But this is to overlook the other fundamental meaning of
modernity which is that of a worldwide capitalism itself.5
Zizek
Zizek – 1NC
Zizek’s a capitalist coward—the failure of his idealism for politics is
illustrated by his romanticist fetish for ‘quirky’ bourgeois culture—
this evaporates revolutionary subjectivity
The goal of the left "bal masque" is perhaps most clearly represented in the image for the "Marxism 2000" conference on millennial
marxism—the poster for Rethinking Marxism which is the organ of the contemporary neoliberalism masquerading as "Marxism." The
poster, which opportunistically appropriates Diego Rivera's "Dance in Tehuantepec" (1935), completes the ironic slippage the
bourgeois left has taken as the purpose of post-al theory—the troping of concepts as puncepts. The image on the poster is of
peasants performing a (folk) dance and the caption reads "The Party's Not Over." The transcoding of the Party of the proletariat to
the party of folk-dancers is the transcoding of revolution to reform that Zizek's "orthodox marxism" performs. The idea is that social
inequality is an effect of the persistence of cultural rituals that need to be addressed separately from class exploitation and
revaluated from within as cultures of resistance. The "folk"-sy theme accommodates the populist romanticization of people on the
neomarxist Thompsonite left (Smith, Sprinker) as well, where class is reduced to the "lived experience" of traditions of "resistance"
which say good-bye to the urban working class as a revolutionary agency that critiques all conventions. The flexodox left wants a
party-ing proletariat (Hennessy), rather than a Party of the proletariat, to put a smile-y face on exploitation. The hollowing out of
Marxism in the name of (orthodox) Marxism by such theorists as Smith, Sprinker and Zizek is based on the ideological un-said of
the bourgeois right of property and its underpinning logic of the market which are represented as natural ("inalienable") "human
rights," or more commonly, in daily practices, as individual rights. Revolutionary struggles against these "rights" (of property) are
assumed to be signs of dogmatism, ruthless impersonality, vanguardism and totalitarianism—all "obvious" markers of Orthodox
Marxism. The remedy put forward by these theorists is to resist the revolutionary vanguard in the name of "democracy from below,"
which is itself a code phrase for "spontaneity." Spontaneity—the kind of supposed "freedom" which is the fabric of bourgeois daily
life—is itself a layered notion that, in its folds, hides a sentimentalism that in reality constitutes "democracy from below" and its allied
notion of the "individual," and the "human subject." Zizek and other "high theorists" manage to conceal this naïve emotionalism (of
which soap operas are made) in the rather abstract language of "theory." What is subtly implicit in the discourses of "high theory,"
however, becomes explicit in the annotations of middle theory—that is, in bourgeois cultural commentary and criticism. Rosemary
Hennessy's Profit and Pleasure is the most recent and perhaps most popular attack on Orthodox Marxism in the name of Marxism
itself. Instead of looking at the cultural commentary in Hennessy's book (the book is actually a reprinting of older essays, and is thus
even more historically significant as a documentary record of the continual emptying of Marxism in the 1980's and 1990's), I will look
at its "Acknowledgments." This text is not something "personal" and "separate" from the cultural commentary and criticism of the
essays in the body of her book. The "Acknowledgments" text represents in fact a summing up—and a mutual confirmation between
Hennessy and those she "acknowledges"—of the core assumptions and ideas that inform the practices of the bourgeois left now.
Sell-out
Zizek’s a sell-out—his psycho-idealism decimates class politics
Zizek provides another example of the flexodox parody of Marxism today. Capitalism in Orthodox Marxism is explained as an
historical mode of production based on the privatization of the means of subsistence in the hands of a few, i.e., the systemic
exploitation of labor by capital. Capitalism is the world-historic regime of unpaid surplus-labor. In Zizek's writings, capitalism is not
based on exploitation in production (surplus-labor), but on struggles over consumption ("surplus-enjoyment"). The Orthodox Marxist
concepts that lay bare the exploitative production relations in order to change them are thus replaced with a "psycho-marxist"
pastiche of consumption in his writings, a revisionist move that has proven immensely successful in the bourgeois cultural criticism.
Zizek, however, has taken to representing this displacement of labor (production) with desire (consumption) as "strictly correlative"
to the concept of "revolutionary praxis" found in the texts of Orthodox Marxism (e.g., "Repeating Lenin"). Revolutionary practice is
always informed by class consciousness and transformative cultural critique has always aimed at producing class consciousness by
laying bare the false consciousness that ruling ideology institutes in the everyday. Transformative cultural critique, in other words, is
always a linking of consciousness to production practices from which a knowledge of social totality emerges . Zizek, however, long
ago abandoned Orthodox Marxist ideology critique as an epistemologically naïve theory of "ideology" because it could not account
for the persistence of "desire" beyond critique (the "enlightened false-consciousness" of The Sublime Object of Ideology, Mapping
Ideology,. . . ). His more recent "return to the centrality of the Marxist critique" is, as a result, a purely tropic voluntarism of the kind
he endlessly celebrates in his diffusionist readings of culture as desire-al moments when social norms are violated and personal
emotions spontaneously experienced as absolutely compulsory (as "drive"). His concept of revolutionary Marxist praxis consists of
re-describing it as an "excessive" lifestyle choice (analogous to pedophilia and other culturally marginalized practices, The Ticklish
Subject 381-8). On this reading, Marxism is the only metaphorical displacement of "desire" into "surplus-pleasure" that makes
imperative the "direct socialization of the productive process" (Ticklish Subject 350) and that thus causes the subjects committed to
it to experience a Symbolic death at the hands of the neoliberal culture industry. It is this "affirmative" reversal of the right-wing anti-
Marxist narrative that makes Zizek's writings so highly praised in the bourgeois "high-theory" market—where it is read as "subtle"
and an example of "deep thinking" because it confirms a transcendental position considered above politics by making all politics
ideological. If everything is ideology then there can be no fundamental social change only formal repetition and reversal of values
(Nietzsche). Zizek's pastiche of psycho-marxism thus consists in presenting what is only theoretically possible for the capitalist—
those few who have already met, in excess, their material needs through the exploitation of the labor of the other and who can
therefore afford to elaborate fantasies of desire—as a universal form of agency freely available to everyone. Psycho-marxism does
what bourgeois ideology has always done—maintain the bourgeois hegemony over social production by commodifying, through an
aesthetic relay, the contradictions of the wages system. What bourgeois ideology does above all is deny that the mode of social
production has an historic agency of its own independent of the subject. Zizek's "return" to "orthodox" Marxism erases its materialist
theory of desire—that "our wants and their satisfaction have their origin in society" (Marx, Wage-Labour and Capital, 33) and do not
stand in "excess" of it. In fact, he says exactly the opposite and turns the need for Orthodox Marxist theory now into a phantom
desire of individuals: he makes "class struggle" an effect of a "totalitarian" desire to polarize the social between "us" and "them"
(using the "friend/enemy" binary found in the writings of the Nazi Carl Schmitt, Ticklish Subject 226).
AT: Zizek on OWS
Zizek reduces communism to reshuffling capitalist exchange and
forging a more fair system of social relations through egalitarianism
and hope and land before time jokes—this is entirely consistent with
late capitalist ideology
Tumino ’12 Stephen Tumino, more marxist than Marx himself, “Is Occupy Wall Street Communist,” Red Critique 14,
Winter/Spring 2012, http://www.redcritique.org/WinterSpring2012/isoccupywallstreetcommunist.htm
But there is another way too that OWS is thought to be communist. As an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education explains,
many of the ideas that lie behind the Occupy movement can be found in the writings of the academic Left, especially those of
Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, and Slavoj Zizek who all openly proclaim themselves "communists."[3] But what kind of communism is
this? Zizek explains at the OWS encampment in New York City (4:37-6:36): The only sense in which we are communists is that we
care for the commons: the commons of nature; the commons of what is privatized by intellectual property; the commons of
biogenetics. For this and only for this we should fight. Communism failed absolutely. But the problems of the commons are here.
They are telling you we are not Americans here. But the conservative fundamentalists who claim they are really American have to
be reminded of something. What is Christianity? It’s the Holy Spirit. What’s the Holy Spirit? It’s an egalitarian community of believers
who are linked by love for each other. And who only have their own freedom and responsibility to do it. In this sense the Holy Spirit
is here now. And down there on Wall Street there are pagans who are worshipping blasphemous idols. If communism means
Zizek's "nursery tale" of overcoming our differences through the power of love to defend our common (national) interests against the
greedy few who would personally enrich themselves at others expense, then Glenn Beck has nothing to worry about because what
he fears is only a ghost—the "spirit" of Jesus not the theory of Marx. For Marx, on the contrary, communism "is in no way based on
ideas or principles that have been invented, or discovered, by this or that would-be reformer" (The Communist Manifesto)—it is not
the nursery tale of how shared beliefs will produce an egalitarian community, which is precisely the kind of "utopian socialism" that
Marx's "scientific socialism" was a critique of. Rather, it is "a question of what the proletariat is, and what, in accordance with this
being, it will historically be compelled to do" given "its own life situation as well as in the whole organization of bourgeois society
today" that explains the idea of communism according to Marx and Engels (The Holy Family). What Marx's idea of communism
requires is the opposite of belief, of only looking at the world the way we would like it to be rather than understanding how it is. What
it means is taking a closer look at the "actual relations springing from an existing class struggle, from a historical movement going
on under our very eyes" (The Communist Manifesto). According to Marx, communists "do not confront the world in a doctrinaire way
with a new principle: Here is the truth, kneel down before it!" but rather "merely show the world what it is really fighting for" (Marx to
Ruge, September 1843). Communism, in Marx's terms, is thus "not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which
reality [will] have to adjust itself" but "the real movement which abolishes the present state of things" (Marx and Engels, The German
Ideology). Take class, for example. On Marx's terms, class is not merely a problem of the unfair distribution of income between the
"haves" and "have-nots" that will change by people becoming less greedy and more ethical. Class, for Marx, explains the global
division of labor that exists between those who own and control the means of production of social wealth and those who own
nothing but their labor power which they must sell to the employers in order to live. Class inequality will only change, therefore,
when the workers end their economic exploitation by capital and take control of production and establish a society in which the rule
is "from each according to their ability, to each according to their need" (Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme). Like the
mainstream commentary, Zizek's idea of communism as defense of the idea of community only addresses inequality as if it were a
problem of the unfair distribution of wealth and power. While Glenn Beck thinks that any re-distribution of wealth from the rich to the
poor would create a violent disruption of an otherwise peaceful, fair and just society, Zizek thinks that the re-distribution of wealth
from the poor to the rich that has been the norm since Reagan's presidency is brutal, unjust, and needs to be made fairer.
Communism for Zizek amounts to a fairer distribution of wealth in which we do not sacrifice the common good in order to make a
few people rich.
Other
Baudrillard
Baudrillard restrains revolutionary subjectivity and presupposes a
nihilistic autonomy in simulation that deliberately confirms existing
economic inequality
Katz 2k Adam Katz, Postmodernism and the Politics of “Culture,” 2000, p. Pg.118
In another reversal of a Marxist thesis, Baudrillard argues that by creating the masses in its own image, the regime of the
simulacrum has produced the force capable of undermining it, not, however, through a “critical-revolutionary” activity that would
overthrow social structures but through a kind of defiant apathy that resists all calls to recognize the legitimacy of any principle or
practice. Baudrillard, as Kellner points out, is indicating the possibility of a legitimacy crisis in contemporary capitalist societies. This
is because Baudrillard’s discourse is a kind of inverted nostalgia for the exercise of the collective power of the working class. In this
case, it is a collective power produced not by the organization of the proletariat within the production processes of capitalism but by
their organization within simulated signifying practices. Thus, the most authentic expression of this resistance is silence, the refusal
antirevolutionary
to respond to organized modes of participation and democracy. For the same reason, though, the
and antiproletariat content of Baudrillard’s discourse is all the more visible and virulent .
Put in the form of an imperative, his claim is that the working class must be reduced to the constant staging and imaginary reversal
of the contradiction between its potential collective power and its actual collective dispossession and dispersal as a series of private
individuals; to put it another way, according to this logic, the collective power of the working class is exercised precisely as an effect
of the sensationalizing of its dispossession. These conclusions, meanwhile, ultimately follow from the presumed autonomy of the
production of knowledge, which is no longer seen as dependent upon the accumulated labor expropriated from the working class
but rather as the conditions of production of the working class (as an effect of simulated models).
Baudrillard’s approach prompts conservativism and reactionary

politics
The question of the relation between hyperreality and the reality it posits can also be addressed by raising the issue of where the
code acquires the resources for its own reproduction. Either it contains within itself the capacity for infinite recombination (which
would contradict both its need for external materials and its actually fairly limited repertoire, as described by Baudrillard) or it
requires the very simulations of its logic, for which it also provides the model. The code would then be two-sided: On the one side, it
governs by simulacra; on the other, it requires the responses and resistances of the masses it organizes and obliterates. In this
latter case, then, the total system described by Baudrillard takes the form of the access of subjects to the code, their appropriation of
it, and their ability to put it to use—that is, it requires precisely the kind of resistance prescribed by Baudrillard. These are subjects
who are able to recognize the reality of their understanding of the unreality of their simulated understandings, which, in the end,
reproduces a moral center (supported not through seriousness but through parody and sensationalization) that is not all that
different from the one problematized by postmodernity. Thus, the mode of resistance offered by Baudrillard actually provides the
dominant order with the resources needed to reproduce its simulated models, and these resources are the autonomous activities of
the simulated subjects themselves.
Baudrillard makes progressive, universal politics impossible.

Kellner ’89 Douglas Kellner, Phil. Chair @ UCLA, 1989, Jean Baudrillard, p. 107-8
Yet does the sort of symbolic exchange which Baudrillard advocates really provide a solution to the question of death? Baudrillard’s
notion of symbolic exchange between life and death and his ultimate embrace of nihilism (see 4.4) is probably his most un-
Nietzschean moment, the instant in which his thought radically devalues life and focuses with a fascinated gaze on that which is
most terrible — death. In a popular French reading of Nietzsche, his ‘transvaluation of values’ demanded negation of all repressive
and life- negating values in favor of affirmation of life, joy and happiness. This ‘philosophy of value’ valorized life over death and
derived its values from phenomena which enhanced, refined and nurtured human life. In Baudrillard, by contrast, life does not exist
as an autonomous source of value, and the body exists only as ‘the caarnality of signs,’ as a mode of display of signification. His
sign fetishism erases all materialjty from the body and social life, and makes possible a fascinated aestheticized fetishism of signs
as the primary ontological reality. This way of seeing erases suffering, disease, pain and the horror of death from the body and
social life and replaces it with the play of signs — Baudrillard’s alternative. Politics too is reduced to a play of signs, and the ways in
which different politics alleviate or intensify human suffering disappears from the Baudrillardian universe. Consequently
Baudrillard’s theory spirals into a fascination with signs which leads him to embrace certain privileged forms of sign culture and to
reject others (that is, the theoretical signs of modernity such as meaning, truth, the social, power and so on) and to pay less and less
attention to materiality (that is, to needs, desire, suffering and so on) a trajectory will ultimately lead him to embrace nihilism (see
4.4). Thus Baudrillard’s interpretation of the body, his refusal of theories of sexuality which link it with desire and pleasure, and his
valorization of death as a mode of symbolic exchange — which valorizes sacrifice, suicide and other symbolic modes of death —
are all part and parcel of a fetishizing of signs, of a valorization of sign culture over all other modes of social life. Such fetishizing of
sign culture finds its natural (and more harmless) home in the fascination with the realm of sign culture which we call art. I shall
argue that Baudrillard’s trajectory exhibits an ever more intense aestheticizing of social theory and philosophy, in which the values of
the representation of social reality, political struggle and change and so on are displaced in favor of a (typically French) sign
fetishism. On this view, Baudrillard’s trajectory is best interpreted as an increasingly aggressive and extreme fetishizing of signs,
which began in his early works in the late 1 960s and which he was only gradually to exhibit in its full and perverse splendor as
aristocratic aestheticism from the mid-1970s to the present. Let us now trace the evolution of his fascination with art, a form of sign
culture which Baudrillard increasingly privileges and one which provides an important feature attraction of the postmodern carnival.
Hennessy/’Comradery’
Reducing class universality to mere ‘feelings’ of solidarity constructs
solidarity as something spontaneous and abstract, substituting a
bourgeois soap opera of emotions for concrete revolution.
Tumino ‘1 Stephen Tumino, professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh, professor of English at the University of
Pittsburgh, “What is Orthodox Marxism and Why it Matters Now More Than Ever Before,” Red Critique, Spring 2001,
http://redcritique.org/spring2001/whatisorthodoxmarxism.htm
The hollowing out of Marxism in the name of (orthodox) Marxism by such theorists as Smith, Sprinker and Zizek is based on the
ideological un-said of the bourgeois right of property and its underpinning logic of the market which are represented as natural
("inalienable") "human rights," or more commonly, in daily practices, as individual rights. Revolutionary struggles against these
"rights" (of property) are assumed to be signs of dogmatism, ruthless impersonality, vanguardism and totalitarianism—all "obvious"
markers of Orthodox Marxism. The remedy put forward by these theorists is to resist the revolutionary vanguard in the name of
"democracy from below," which is itself a code phrase for "spontaneity." Spontaneity—the kind of supposed "freedom" which is the
fabric of bourgeois daily life—is itself a layered notion that, in its folds, hides a sentimentalism that in reality constitutes "democracy
from below" and its allied notion of the "individual," and the "human subject." Zizek and other "high theorists" manage to conceal this
naïve emotionalism (of which soap operas are made) in the rather abstract language of "theory." What is subtly implicit in the
discourses of "high theory," however, becomes explicit in the annotations of middle theory—that is, in bourgeois cultural
commentary and criticism. Rosemary Hennessy's Profit and Pleasure is the most recent and perhaps most popular attack on
Orthodox Marxism in the name of Marxism itself. Instead of looking at the cultural commentary in Hennessy's book (the book is
actually a reprinting of older essays, and is thus even more historically significant as a documentary record of the continual emptying
of Marxism in the 1980's and 1990's), I will look at its "Acknowledgments." This text is not something "personal" and "separate" from
the cultural commentary and criticism of the essays in the body of her book. The "Acknowledgments" text represents in fact a
summing up—and a mutual confirmation between Hennessy and those she "acknowledges"—of the core assumptions and ideas
that inform the practices of the bourgeois left now. As the "Acknowledgments" text makes clear, the cultural commentary of
Hennessy's Profit and Pleasure is rooted in the notion that politics is basically a community activity. In bourgeois cultural criticism,
the idea of "community activity" is a code term that signals the substitution of shared "ideas," "assumptions," and "emotions" for
"class" solidarity (Rorty). What, therefore, lies at the core of "community" is not a structure (class) but a "feeling" (emotional
intensity). Hennessy, who is not as subtle as Zizek or even Smith, is quite open about the valorization of "feeling" ("opened her
heart" [xii], "feisty politics" [xii], "precious friendship" [xiii], "a path with heart" [xiii], "warmth and love" [xiii]). The mark of membership
in her post-al community is "heartache": in this evaluative social scheme, she who has felt the most "heartache" (emotional intensity)
is the most authentic member of the community. This appeal to a "comradeship" based on the intensity of "feeling" clearly indicates
that no matter what Marxist or quasi-Marxist language Hennessy uses elsewhere in her book, she basically believes that people's
lives are changed not by revolutionary praxis but by encountering other "feeling" people: "During the last year of writing this book, I
met . . . and my life has not been the same since . . . " (xiii). The lesson of this encounter, Hennessy indicates, was not the classic
lessons of Marxism that social change is a product of structural change, but that social change comes about by means of something
called "revolutionary love" ("amor revolutionario," xiii) which—according to her—has taken her "time and again to the other side"
("llevarme una y otra vez al otro lado," xiii). The other lesson is the danger of vanguardism: "revolutionary love" has also reminded
her that "power is finally and always in the hands of the people" ("el poder es finalmente y siempre en los manos de la gente," xiii).
People as spontaneous actors. On this view, Orthodox Marxism is dogmatic and totalitarian. So to "correct" its "faults," Hennessy
empties its revolutionary vanguard of its commitment and puts feeling (manifested by "heartache") in its place. What is, of course, so
significant is that Hennessy installs such sentimentality as the ultimate layer of her Marxism in the name of Marxism itself. This is
what makes the work of bourgeois writers like Zizek, Smith, Sprinker and Hennessy effective and welcome in the academy and the
culture industry: they do not (like regular right-wingers) attack Marxism but they reduce its explanatory power and its revolutionary
force by substituting spontaneity for revolutionary praxis. For these writers social transformation is the effect not of revolutionary
praxis but of a spontaneous and emotionally intense exchange between two kindred "spirits." It is the spirit that moves the world.
What in Hennessy is presented as Marxism or feminism turns out to be a souped-up version of the old bourgeois cultural feminism
which, running away from revolution, retreats once again into community, spontaneity, affectivity, and above all the autonomous
subject who gives and receives love above and beyond all social and economic processes.
The K
1NC
Short
Short
The development of the oceans is synonymous with the development
of capitalism. Empirically, the ocean has served as a capitalist
railroad to bring distant countries’ economies into our own to serve
the interests of those at leading roles in a capitalist society. This
capitalist domination of nature has created a metabolic rift,
destroying natural reproduction and creating “metabolic interaction”
between capital hungry humans and the earth. This interrupts and
continually destroys nature as we know it.
Clark and York ‘8 [Brett Clark, assistant professor of sociology at
North Carolina State University, and Richard York, coeditor of
Organization & Environment and associate professor of sociology at
the University of Oregon, “Rifts and Shifts: Getting to the Root of
Environmental Crises,” Monthly Review, Vol. 60, Issue 06, November
2008]
The issue of capitalism’s destructive metabolic relation to nature was raised by Marx
in the nineteenth century. The German chemist, Justus von Liebig, in the 1850s and ’60s, employed the concept of metabolism in
his studies of soil nutrients. He explained that British agriculture, with its intensive methods of cultivation to increase yields for the
market, operated as a system of robbery, destroying the vitality of the soil. Liebig detailed how the soil
required specific nutrients—nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium—to maintain its ability to produce crops. As crops grew they took
up these nutrients. In earlier societies, the produce of nature was often recycled back to the land, fertilizing it. But the concentration
of land ownership, which involved the depopulation of rural areas, and the increasing division between town and country, changed
this process. Food and fiber were shipped from the countryside to distant markets. In this, the nutrients of the soil were transferred
from the country to the city where they accumulated as waste and contributed to the pollution of the cities, rather than being
returned to the soil. This caused a rupture in the nutrient cycle. Marx, who was influenced by Liebig’s work, recognized that soil
fertility and the conditions of nature were bound to the historical development of social relations. Through his studies of soil science,
Marx gained insights in regard to the nutrient cycle and how soil exhaustion was caused. On this basis he provided a materialist
critique of modern agriculture, describing how capitalist operations inevitably produced a
metabolic rift, as the basic processes of natural reproduction were
undermined, preventing the return to the soil of the necessary nutrients.6 The transfer and loss of
nutrients was tied to the accumulation process. Marx described how capital creates a rupture in the
“metabolic interaction” between humans and the earth, one that is only intensified
by large-scale agriculture, long-distance trade, and massive urban growth. With these developments, the nutrient
cycle was interrupted and the soil continually impoverished. He explained that the drive for the
accumulation of capital “reduces the agricultural population to an ever decreasing minimum and confronts it with an ever growing
industrial population crammed together in large towns; in this way it produces conditions that provoke an irreparable rift in the
interdependent process of social metabolism, a metabolism prescribed by the natural laws of life itself. The result of this is a
The
squandering of the vitality of the soil, which is carried by trade far beyond the bounds of a single country.”7
development of capitalism, whether through colonialism, imperialism,

or market forces, expanded the metabolic rift to the global level, as
distant regions across the oceans were brought into production to
serve the interests of capitalists in core nations. While incorporating
distant lands into the global economy—a form of geographical displacement—helped relieve some
of the demands placed on agricultural production in core nations, it did not serve as a remedy to the metabolic rift.
The systematic expansion of production on a larger scale subjected more of the natural world to the dictates of capital. The
consequence of this, as Marx noted, is that “ it disturbs the metabolic interaction between
man and the earth, i.e. it prevents the return to the soil of its constituent elements consumed by man in the form of
food and clothing; hence it hinders the operation of the eternal natural condition for
the lasting fertility of the soil.”8
Capitalist imperialism intercedes all that it comes near, distilling everything in its wake
to commodities – ethics become appropriated through a capitalist discourse.
DELEUZE AND GUATTARI 1972 (Gilles and Felix; Anti-Oedipus) 194-
195
It remains to be said that, in order to understand the barbarian formation, it is necessary to relate it not to other formations in competition
with it temporally and spiritually, according to relationships that obscure the essential, but to the savage primitive formation that it supplants
by imposing its own rule of law, but that continues to haunt it. It is exactly in this way that Marx defines Asiatic production: a
higher
unity of the State establishes itself on the foundations of the primitive rural communities ,
which keep their ownership of the soil, while the State becomes the true owner in conformity with the
apparent objective movement that attributes the surplus product to the State, assigns the productive
forces to it in the great projects undertaken, and makes it appear as the cause of the collective conditions of appropriation:" The full
body as socius has ceased to be the earth, it has become the body of the despot, the despot
himself or his god. The prescriptions and prohibitions that often render him almost incapable of acting make of him a body without
organs. He is the sole quasi cause, the source and fountainhead and estuary of the apparent objective movement. In place of mobile
detachments from the signifying chain, a detached object has jumped outside the chain; in place of flow selections, all the flows converge into a
great river that constitutes the sovereign's consumption: a radical change of regimes in the fetish or the symbol. What counts is not the person
It is the social machine that has profoundly changed :
of the sovereign, nor even his function, which can be limited.
in place of the territorial machine, there is the "megamachine" of the State, a functional pyramid that has the despot at its
apex, an immobile motor, with the bureaucratic apparatus as its lateral surface and its transmission gear, and the villagers at its base, serving as
The stocks form the object of an accumulation, the blocks of debt become an
its working parts.
infinite relation in the form of the tribute. The entire surplus value of code is an object of
appropriation. This conversion crosses through all the syntheses: the synthesis of production, with the hydraulic machine and the
mining machine; the synthesis of inscription, with the accounting machine, the writing machine, and the monument machine; and finally the
synthesis of consumption, with the upkeep of the despot, his court, and the bureaucratic caste. Far from seeing in the State the principle of a
territorialization that would inscribe people according to their residence, we should see in the principle of residence the effect of a movement
the earth as an object and subjects men to the new imperial
of deterritorialization that divides
inscription, to the new full body, to the new socius. ' They come like fate, ... they appear as
lightning appears, too terrible, too sudden."
The alternative: problematize the foundations of the affirmative’s advocacy.

Our advocacy creates a becoming of schizophrenia that allows a re-articulation
towards capitalism. The schizophrenic escapes the confinement of the capitalist
apparatus and creates the space for the revolutionary ethic.
DELEUZE AND GUATTARI 1972, Anti-Oedipus, 340-342
From the viewpoint of the unconscious libidinal investment, all the oscillations from one formula to the other are possible. How can this
be? How can the schizophrenic escape, with its molecular dispersion, form an investment that is as strong and
determined as the other? And why are there two types of social investment that correspond to the two poles? The answer is that
everywhere there exist the molecular and the molar: their disjunction is a relation of included disjunction, which
varies only according to the two directions of subordination, according as the molecular phenomena are subordinated to the large aggregates,
or on the contrary subordinate them to themselves. At one of the poles the large aggregates, the large forms of gregariousness, do
not
prevent the flight that carries them along, and they oppose to it the paranoiac investment only as an "escape
in advance of the escape." But at the other pole, the schizophrenic escape itself does not merely consist in
withdrawing from the social, in living on the fringe: it causes the social to take flight through the multiplicity of
holes that eat away at it and penetrate it, always coupled directly to it, everywhere setting the molecular charges that will
explode what must explode, make fall what must fall, make escape what must escape, at each point ensuring the conversion of schizophrenia
as a process into an effectively revolutionary force. For what is the schizo, if not first of all the one who can no longer bear "all that": money,
the stock market, the death forces, Nijinsky said-values, morals, homelands, religions, and private ~artitudes? There is a whole world of
the difference between the one who escapes, and the one
difference between the schizo and the revolutionary:
who knows how to make what he is escaping escape, collapsing a filthy drainage pipe,
causing a deluge to break loose, liberating a flow, resecting a schizo. The schizo is not revolutionary, but the
schizophrenic process-in terms of which the schizo is merely the interruption, or the continuation in the void-is the
potential for revolution. To those who say that escaping is not courageous, we answer: what is not escape and social investment at the same
time? The choice is between one of two poles, the paranoiac counterescape that motivates all the conformist, reactionary, and fascisizing
investments, and the schizophrenic escape convertible into a revolutionary investment. Maurice Blanchot speaks admirably of this
revolutionary escape, this fall that must be thought and carried out as the most positive of events: "What is this escape? The word is poorly
chosen to please. Courage consists, however, in agreeing to flee rather than live tranquilly and hypocritically in false refuges. Values, morals,
homelands, religions, and these private certitudes that our vanity and our complacency bestow generously on us, have as many deceptive
sojourns as the world arranges for those who think they are standing straight and at ease, among stable things. They know nothing of this
immense flight that transports them, ignorant of themselves, in the monotonous buzzing of their ever quickening steps that lead them
impersonally in a great immobile movement. An escape in advance of the escape. [Consider the example of one of these men] who, having had
the revelation of the mysterious drift, is no longer able to stand living in the false pretences of residence. First he tries to take this movement as
his own. He would like to personally withdraw. He lives on the fringe .... [But] perhaps that is what the fall is, that it can no longer be a personal
destiny, but the common 10t."In this regard, the first thesis of schizoanalysis is this: every investment is social, and in
any case bears upon a sociohistorical field.
Normal
The development of the oceans is synonymous with the development
of capitalism. Empirically, the ocean has served as a capitalist
railroad to bring distant countries’ economies into our own to serve
the interests of those at leading roles in a capitalist society. This
capitalist domination of nature has created a metabolic rift,
destroying natural reproduction and creating “metabolic interaction”
between capital hungry humans and the earth. This interrupts and
continually destroys nature as we know it.
Clark and York ‘8 [Brett Clark, assistant professor of sociology at
North Carolina State University, and Richard York, coeditor of
Organization & Environment and associate professor of sociology at
the University of Oregon, “Rifts and Shifts: Getting to the Root of
Environmental Crises,” Monthly Review, Vol. 60, Issue 06, November
2008]
The issue of capitalism’s destructive metabolic relation to nature was raised by Marx
in the nineteenth century. The German chemist, Justus von Liebig, in the 1850s and ’60s, employed the concept of metabolism in
his studies of soil nutrients. He explained that British agriculture, with its intensive methods of cultivation to increase yields for the
market, operated as a system of robbery, destroying the vitality of the soil. Liebig detailed how the soil
required specific nutrients—nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium—to maintain its ability to produce crops. As crops grew they took
up these nutrients. In earlier societies, the produce of nature was often recycled back to the land, fertilizing it. But the concentration
of land ownership, which involved the depopulation of rural areas, and the increasing division between town and country, changed
this process. Food and fiber were shipped from the countryside to distant markets. In this, the nutrients of the soil were transferred
from the country to the city where they accumulated as waste and contributed to the pollution of the cities, rather than being
returned to the soil. This caused a rupture in the nutrient cycle. Marx, who was influenced by Liebig’s work, recognized that soil
fertility and the conditions of nature were bound to the historical development of social relations. Through his studies of soil science,
Marx gained insights in regard to the nutrient cycle and how soil exhaustion was caused. On this basis he provided a materialist
critique of modern agriculture, describing how capitalist operations inevitably produced a
metabolic rift, as the basic processes of natural reproduction were
undermined, preventing the return to the soil of the necessary nutrients.6 The transfer and loss of
nutrients was tied to the accumulation process. Marx described how capital creates a rupture in the
“metabolic interaction” between humans and the earth, one that is only intensified
by large-scale agriculture, long-distance trade, and massive urban growth. With these developments, the nutrient
cycle was interrupted and the soil continually impoverished. He explained that the drive for the
accumulation of capital “reduces the agricultural population to an ever decreasing minimum and confronts it with an ever growing
industrial population crammed together in large towns; in this way it produces conditions that provoke an irreparable rift in the
interdependent process of social metabolism, a metabolism prescribed by the natural laws of life itself. The result of this is a
The
squandering of the vitality of the soil, which is carried by trade far beyond the bounds of a single country.”7
development of capitalism, whether through colonialism, imperialism,

or market forces, expanded the metabolic rift to the global level, as
distant regions across the oceans were brought into production to
serve the interests of capitalists in core nations. While incorporating
distant lands into the global economy—a form of geographical displacement—helped relieve some
of the demands placed on agricultural production in core nations, it did not serve as a remedy to the metabolic rift.
The systematic expansion of production on a larger scale subjected more of the natural world to the dictates of capital. The
consequence of this, as Marx noted, is that “ it disturbs the metabolic interaction between
man and the earth, i.e. it prevents the return to the soil of its constituent elements consumed by man in the form of
food and clothing; hence it hinders the operation of the eternal natural condition for
the lasting fertility of the soil.”8
Capitalist imperialism intercedes all that it comes near, distilling everything in its wake
to commodities – ethics become appropriated through a capitalist discourse.
DELEUZE AND GUATTARI 1972 (Gilles and Felix; Anti-Oedipus) 194-
195
It remains to be said that, in order to understand the barbarian formation, it is necessary to relate it not to other formations in competition
with it temporally and spiritually, according to relationships that obscure the essential, but to the savage primitive formation that it supplants
by imposing its own rule of law, but that continues to haunt it. It is exactly in this way that Marx defines Asiatic production: a
higher
unity of the State establishes itself on the foundations of the primitive rural communities ,
which keep their ownership of the soil, while the State becomes the true owner in conformity with the
apparent objective movement that attributes the surplus product to the State, assigns the productive
forces to it in the great projects undertaken, and makes it appear as the cause of the collective conditions of appropriation:" The full
body as socius has ceased to be the earth, it has become the body of the despot, the despot
himself or his god. The prescriptions and prohibitions that often render him almost incapable of acting make of him a body without
organs. He is the sole quasi cause, the source and fountainhead and estuary of the apparent objective movement. In place of mobile
detachments from the signifying chain, a detached object has jumped outside the chain; in place of flow selections, all the flows converge into a
great river that constitutes the sovereign's consumption: a radical change of regimes in the fetish or the symbol. What counts is not the person
It is the social machine that has profoundly changed :
of the sovereign, nor even his function, which can be limited.
in place of the territorial machine, there is the "megamachine" of the State, a functional pyramid that has the despot at its
apex, an immobile motor, with the bureaucratic apparatus as its lateral surface and its transmission gear, and the villagers at its base, serving as
The stocks form the object of an accumulation, the blocks of debt become an
its working parts.
infinite relation in the form of the tribute. The entire surplus value of code is an object of
appropriation. This conversion crosses through all the syntheses: the synthesis of production, with the hydraulic machine and the
mining machine; the synthesis of inscription, with the accounting machine, the writing machine, and the monument machine; and finally the
synthesis of consumption, with the upkeep of the despot, his court, and the bureaucratic caste. Far from seeing in the State the principle of a
territorialization that would inscribe people according to their residence, we should see in the principle of residence the effect of a movement
the earth as an object and subjects men to the new imperial
of deterritorialization that divides
inscription, to the new full body, to the new socius. ' They come like fate, ... they appear as
lightning appears, too terrible, too sudden."
Oedipus takes and negates our value to life by forcing us to desire

our own repression. Only under these conditions is fascism possible
on the microscale. The impact is the loss of value in life.
Seem 83 (Mark, Intro to Anti-Oedipus, xvii)
To be anti-oedipal is to be anti-ego as well as anti-homo, willfully attacking all reductive psychoanalytic and political analyses that
remain caught within the sphere of totality and unity, in order to free the multiplicity of desire from the deadly neurotic and Oedipal
Oedipus is the
yoke. For Oedipus is not a mere psychoanalytic construct, Deleuze and Guattari explain.
figurehead of imperialism, "colonization pursued by other means, it is

the interior colony, and we shall see that even here at home ... it is our
intimate colonial education." This internalization of man by man, this
"oedipalization," creates a new meaning for suffering, internal
suffering, and a new tone for life: the depressive tone. Now depression does not
just come about one fine day, Anti-Oedipus goes on, nor does Oedipus appear one day in the Family and feel secure in remaining
there. Depression and Oedipus are agencies of the State, agencies of paranoia, agencies of power, long before being delegated to
Oedipus is the figure of power as such, just as neurosis is the
the family.
result of power on individuals. Oedipus is everywhere.For anti-oedipalists the ego,

like Oedipus, is "part of those things we must dismantle through the united assault of analytical and political
Oedipus is belief injected into the unconscious, it is what gives
forces."4
us faith as it robs us of power, it is what teaches us to desire our own

repression.Everybody has been oedipalized and neuroticized at home, at school, at work. Everybody
wants to be a fascist.Deleuze and Guattari want to know how these beliefs succeed in taking hold of a body,
thereby silencing the productive machines of the libido. They also want to know how the opposite situation is brought about, where a
body successfully wards off the effects of power. Reversing the Freudian distinction between neurosis and psychosis that measures
: the neurotic is the one on whom the
everything against the former, Anti-Oedipus concludes
Oedipal imprints take, whereas the psychotic is the one incapable of

being oedipalized, even and especially by psychoanalysis.The first
task of the revolutionary, they add, is to learn from the psychotic how
to shake off the Oedipal yoke and the effects of power, in order to
initiate a radical politics of desire freed from all beliefs. Such a
politics dissolves the mystifications of power through the kindling, on
all levels, of anti-oedipal forces-the schizzes-flows-forces that escape
coding, scramble the codes, and flee in all directions: orphans (no
daddy-mommy-me), atheists (no beliefs), and nomads (no habits, no
territories). A schizoanalysis schizophrenizes in order to break the
holds of power and institute research into a new collective
subjectivity and a revolutionary healing of mankind. For we are sick,
so sick, of our selves!
The alternative: problematize the foundations of the affirmative’s advocacy.

Our advocacy creates a becoming of schizophrenia that allows a re-articulation
towards capitalism. The schizophrenic escapes the confinement of the capitalist
apparatus and creates the space for the revolutionary ethic.
From the viewpoint of the unconscious libidinal investment, all the oscillations from one formula to the other are possible. How can this
be? How can the schizophrenic escape, with its molecular dispersion, form an investment that is as strong and
determined as the other? And why are there two types of social investment that correspond to the two poles? The answer is that
everywhere there exist the molecular and the molar: their disjunction is a relation of included disjunction, which
varies only according to the two directions of subordination, according as the molecular phenomena are subordinated to the large aggregates,
or on the contrary subordinate them to themselves. At one of the poles the large aggregates, the large forms of gregariousness, do
not
prevent the flight that carries them along, and they oppose to it the paranoiac investment only as an "escape
in advance of the escape." But at the other pole, the schizophrenic escape itself does not merely consist in
withdrawing from the social, in living on the fringe: it causes the social to take flight through the multiplicity of
holes that eat away at it and penetrate it, always coupled directly to it, everywhere setting the molecular charges that will
explode what must explode, make fall what must fall, make escape what must escape, at each point ensuring the conversion of schizophrenia
as a process into an effectively revolutionary force. For what is the schizo, if not first of all the one who can no longer bear "all that": money,
the stock market, the death forces, Nijinsky said-values, morals, homelands, religions, and private ~artitudes? There is a whole world of
the difference between the one who escapes, and the one
difference between the schizo and the revolutionary:
who knows how to make what he is escaping escape, collapsing a filthy drainage pipe,
causing a deluge to break loose, liberating a flow, resecting a schizo. The schizo is not revolutionary, but the
schizophrenic process-in terms of which the schizo is merely the interruption, or the continuation in the void-is the
potential for revolution. To those who say that escaping is not courageous, we answer: what is not escape and social investment at the same
time? The choice is between one of two poles, the paranoiac counterescape that motivates all the conformist, reactionary, and fascisizing
investments, and the schizophrenic escape convertible into a revolutionary investment. Maurice Blanchot speaks admirably of this
revolutionary escape, this fall that must be thought and carried out as the most positive of events: "What is this escape? The word is poorly
chosen to please. Courage consists, however, in agreeing to flee rather than live tranquilly and hypocritically in false refuges. Values, morals,
homelands, religions, and these private certitudes that our vanity and our complacency bestow generously on us, have as many deceptive
sojourns as the world arranges for those who think they are standing straight and at ease, among stable things. They know nothing of this
immense flight that transports them, ignorant of themselves, in the monotonous buzzing of their ever quickening steps that lead them
impersonally in a great immobile movement. An escape in advance of the escape. [Consider the example of one of these men] who, having had
the revelation of the mysterious drift, is no longer able to stand living in the false pretences of residence. First he tries to take this movement as
his own. He would like to personally withdraw. He lives on the fringe .... [But] perhaps that is what the fall is, that it can no longer be a personal
destiny, but the common 10t."In this regard, the first thesis of schizoanalysis is this: every investment is social, and in
any case bears upon a sociohistorical field.
The role of the ballot is to interrogate desire. Our framework comes

first – society is structured around the modes of desire and before we
question how things ought to work we have to question why things
work the way they do
Deleuze and Guattari 1972, Anti-Oedipus, 283-284
What is the meaning of this distinction between two regions: one molecular and the other molar; one micropsychic or micrological,
the other statistical and gregarious? Is this anything more than a metaphor lending the unconscious a distinction grounded in
physics, when we speak of an opposition between intra-atomic phenomena and the mass phenomena that operate through
statistical accumulation, obeying the laws of aggregates? But in reality the unconscious belongs to the realm of physics; the
body without organs and its intensities are not metaphors, but matter itself. Nor
is it our intention to revive the question of an individual psychology and a
collective psychology, and of the priority of the one or the other; this distinction, as it appears in Group
Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, remains completely stymied by Oedipus. In the unconscious there
are only populations, groups, and machines. When we posit in one case an involuntariness (un involontaire) of the social and
it is a question of a
technical machines, in the other case an unconscious of the desiring-machines,
necessary relationship between inextricably linked forces. Some of these are

elementary forces by means of which the unconscious is produced; the others, resultants reacting on the first, statistical aggregates
through which the unconscious is represented and already suffers psychic and social repression of its elementary productive forces.
But how can we speak of machines in this microphysical or micro-psychic
region, there where there is desire-that is to say, not only its functioning, but formation and auto-
production? A machine works according to the previous intercommunications of its
structure and the positioning of its parts, but does not set itself into place any more than it forms or reproduces itself. This is even
the point around which the usual polemic between vitalism and mechanism revolves: the machine's ability to
account for the workings of the organism, but its fundamental
inability to account for its formations. From machines, mechanism abstracts a
structural unity in terms of which it explains the functioning of the organism.
Vitalism invokes an individual and specific unity of the living , which every
machine presupposes insofar as it is subordinate to organic continuance, and insofar as it extends the latter's
autonomous formations on the outside. But it should be noted that, in one way or another, the
machine and desire thus remain in an extrinsic relationship, either because
desire appears as an effect determined by a system of mechanical causes, or because the machine is itself a system of means in
terms of the aims of desire. The link between the two remains secondary and indirect, both in the new means appropriated by desire
and in the derived desires produced by the machines.
One-Off
Overviews
Short
Normal
1. Extend Clark and York: We recognize the affirmative’s advocacy
for its underlying intentions – a reliance on the capitalism
system that falls into the dream of infinite expansion and
growth. The plan uses the medium of the ocean to engage and
grow the capitalist system. They may have good intentions, but
their discourse relies on the self-reliant relations to capitalism
which D&G discuss. Link alone turns the case- impacts in a
metabolic rift that destroys nature.
2. Extend our first D&G card: the first impact we isolate is not one
of wars or nuclear beings – our criticism is one of how we relate
to the system of capitalism. Capitalism in both the status quo
and the world of the plan results in total commodification.
Everything becomes a resource to bring growth and prosperous
futures to the capitalist. Life, being, and ethic become just
another resource. We are good for nothing but another day at
the factory. The case sees us as reliant on the capitalist system;
that we can’t prosper without a direct food line from the system,
which traps us into the bad relational ethic that D&G criticize.
This outweighs any impacts that they can bring up because no
value to life makes death non-unique because it becomes (1)
preferable and (2) meaningless.
3. The second impact we isolate is desire repression, two
implications
a. The internalization of control force people to desire the
repression of their desires. This brings about a depressive tone
in life in which you can no longer truly desire what you desire.
We come to fear anything that can't be mapped out including our
own desire, but desire is always chaotic. In the affirmative world
you cannot find new, small shops in some obscure city, you
cannot drive for the sake of driving, you cannot do anything that
is outside the benefits of the plan. That’s Seem ’83.
b. This is because you want your desires repressed, allowing
dictators to be propped up, ending in mass slaughter and
violence– Turns case
Ballantyne 7 (Andrew, Tectonic Cultures Research Group at
Newcastle University , "Deleuze and Guattari for Architects" 27-28)
So these habits of thought, once they are planted in us, take over and
refract our view of the world and all our dealings with it . It is probably becoming
clear by now how the ‘capitalism and schizophrenia’ project, across the two volumes Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus, was
caught up in every aspect of life. It is set up not as a set of dogmas or even of questions, but as a set of values. It is a work of ethics,
The
and the link with Spinoza’s Ethics is strong. It too is a project based around immanence rather than transcendence.
‘desiring-machines’ that figure so prominently at the opening of Anti-

Oedipus, are the machines that operate without our noticing them to
produce the desires that we do notice, and that we would like to act
upon. But as mechanisms that operate to produce consciousness, the
machines can be pulling in different directions and producing
incompatible desires, which might be resolved at a preconscious
level, or might surface as conflicted conscious desires. There are
thousands upon thousands of these mechanisms, of which we
become aware only as they produce effects that approach the level of
consciousness, and what goes on amongst them is a micropolitics –
thousands upon thousands of rhizomatic connections, without any clear limit on where the connections would stop, and
without any necessity to pass through a centralized arborescent hub.
The scale of operations builds up from a preconscious
sub-’individual’, who is already a swarm of desiring-machines, to a
social group, or a crowd, where certain aspects of the people involved
connect together to produce a crowd-identity that is unlike that of any
of the individuals in the crowd. Crowds will do things that individual people would not (Canetti, 1973).
The individuals are to the crowd what desiring-machines are to the
individual. Except that one could alternatively say that it is certain of the mass of individuals’ desiring-machines that, upon
being brought together in the crowd, they are found to be able to act together to produce the group identity. The crowd is
a body. Some of the mechanisms that would come into play in the
individual acting alone are somehow switched out of the circuit, and
become irrelevant to the crowd, and having been switched off cannot
inhibit the crowd’s actions. So the sense of the ‘individual’ is even further problematized, and we see it to be
highly divisible. But nevertheless the idea of the individual is deeply ingrained in our language, and if we’re trying to explain
ourselves, we might find that it’s the most direct word to be using. If we’re trying to connect with others then we need to be able to
allow ourselves, from time to time, to speak like everyone else. As we follow Deleuze and Guattari further into their world, it
becomes increasingly difficult to do that, as each ‘straightforward’ utterance seems, from an alternate view, to have an inaccurate
aspect.
4. Extend our second D&G card: Our alternative is to problematize
the foundations of the 1AC. This is an advocacy of taking the
certain foundation that the affirmative’s advocacy relies on and
creating a moment of disruption by questioning how they
develop the plan. This is acts as a full solvency takeout because
they imagine the utopian vision of the plan without finding an
ethic to create the plan. This will not kill the system of
capitalism, but it creates the space we need to wiggle out of this
slavery and into a new ethic of revolution. The alternatives goal
is to allow for a moment of revolution within your mind. Your
unconscious psychic tells you that capitalism is wrong and is
the reason for your discomfort. But instead of listening to the
voice, you and capitalism suppress it. The alternative is the only
option you have to break free of this hold, the ballot is what
gives you the ability to reject capitalism and even if just for a
second you put a crack in the wall and begin to fight it. It is the
one moment we give you of revolution that you vote negative
for, we have given you the tools to become free you must just
use them.
One-Off
Desire
First, our criticism begins with the way political formations occur in the status
quo – groups formulate themselves around broader ideological and political
reference points which act as transcendent signifiers constantly coding and
directing potential. Even the most revolutionary aims can be tainted by
underlying desires which inform the unconscious. Desires is strangled by the
formations of the status quo, turning life against itself, preventing the existence
of immaculate joy
If someone retorts that we are claiming the famous rights to laziness, to non-productivity, to dream and fantasy production, once
desiring-production
again we are quite pleased, since we haven't stopped saying the opposite, and that
produces the real, and that desire has little to do with fantasy and dream. As
opposed to Reich, schizoanalysis makes no distinction in nature between political
economy and libidinal economy. Schizoanalysis merely asks what are the
machinic, social, and technical indices on a socius that open to desiring-
machines, that enter into the parts, wheels, and motors of these machines, as
much as they cause them to enter into their own parts, wheels, and motors.
Everyone knows that a schizo is a machine; all schizos say this, and not just little Joey. The question to be asked is
whether schizophrenics are the living machines of a dead labor, which are then contrasted to the dead machines
of living labor as organized in capitalism. Or whether instead desiring, technical, and social machines join together
in a process of schizophrenic production that thereafter has no more. schizophrenics to produce. In her Lettre aux
ministres, Maud Mannoniwrites: "One of these adolescents, declared unfit for
studies, does admirably well in a third-level class, provided he works some in
mechanics. He has a passion for mechanics. The man in the garage has been his
best therapist. If we take mechanics away from him he will become
schizophrenic again."52 Her intention is not to praise ergotherapy or the virtues of social adaptation.
She marks the point where the Social machine, the technical machine, and the
desiring-machine join closely together and bring their regimes into
communication. She asks if our society can handle that, and what it is worth if it
can't. And this is indeed the direction the social, technical, scientific, and artistic
machines take when they are revolutionary: they form desiring-machines for
which they are already the index in their own regime, at the same time that the
desiring-machines form them in the regime that is theirs, and as a position of
desire.
Second, we will isolate the impacts
1. Desire repression,
A. This capitalist, Oedipal system, which is the internalization of
control, takes and negates our value to life by forcing us to
desire our own repression. Only under these conditions is
fascism possible on the microscale. The impact is the loss of
value in life. The internalization of control force people to desire
the repression of their desires. This brings about a depressive
tone in life in which you can no longer truly desire what you
desire. We come to fear anything that can't be mapped out
including our own desire, but desire is always chaotic. You
cannot find new, small shops in some obscure city, you cannot
drive for the sake of driving, and you cannot do anything that is
outside of capitalism- that’s Seem 83.
B. This is because you want your desires repressed, allowing
dictators to be propped up, ending in mass slaughter and
violence- Ballantyne 7 from the overview.
2. Death,
The resolution is the literal basis of capitalism, forcing our lives to be
a drive to “develop” and “explore” the oceans. Under this model,
death is preferable to living but doesn’t matter at the point at which
people can be replaced by capital.
3. In round,
This internalization of control has created a rhetoric behind the
mechanic and the global. This rhetoric of the resolution attempts to
tell us that this is how we should live. It tells you to do some obscure
plan to stop whatever problems the earth and the oceans themselves
are facing. This ensures its continuation by making people live the
rhetoric as truths in their own lives. The kritiks investigation of this
rhetoric breaks its foundation of validity down. Use your ballot to
allow multiple pathways and interpretations guard us from this
dangerous form of rhetoric that dooms us to the internalization of
control, the Oedipal. This impact should be weighed above all else
because it’s in this round.
Solvency
Solves Capitalism
1. Adopting the ethic of the schizo allows us to overthrow
capitalism by furthering the schizophrenia implicit in capitalism
to its absolute limit – through this method we push the flows to
break through the wall and become unbounded, ushering
absolute freedom
Deleuze & Guattari 72 (Gilles and Felix; Anti-Oedipus) 244-247
Civilization is defined by the decoding and the deterritorialization of flows in capitalist
production. Any method will do for ensuring this universal decoding : the privatization brought to bear on
property, goods, and the means of production, but also on the organs of "private man" himself; the abstraction of monetary
quantities, but also the abstraction of the quantity of labor; the limitless nature of the relationship between
capital and labor capacity, and between the flows of financing and the flows of incomes or means of payment; the scientific and
technical form assumed by flows of code themselves; the formation of floating configurations starting from lines and
points without a discernible identity. The route taken by the decoded flows is traced by recent monetary history: the role of the dollar, short-
term migrating capital, the floating of currencies, the new means of financing and credit, the special drawing rights, and the new form of crises
and speculations. Our societies exhibit a marked taste for all codes-codes foreign or exotic-but this
taste is destructive and morbid. While decoding doubtless means understanding and translating
a code, it also means destroying the code as such, assigning it an archaic, folkloric, or residual
function, which makes of psychoanalysis and ethnology two disciplines highly regarded in our
modern societies. Yet it would be a serious error to consider the capitalist flows and the
schizophrenic flows as identical, under the general theme of a decoding of the flows of desire.
Their affinity is great, to be sure: everywhere capitalism sets in motion schizo-flows that
animate "our" arts and "our" sciences, just as they congeal into the production of "our own"
sick, the schizophrenics. We have seen that the relationship of schizophrenia to capitalism went
far beyond problems of modes of living, environment, ideology, etc., and that it should be
examined at the deepest level of one and the same economy, one and the same production
process. Our society produces schizos the same way it produces Prell shampoo or Ford cars, the
only difference being that the schizos are not salable. How then does one explain the fact that
capitalist production is constantly arresting the schizophrenic process and transforming the
subject of the process into a confined clinical entity, as though it saw in this process the image
of its own death coming from within? Why does it make the schizophrenic into a sick person not only nominally but in
reality? Why does it confine its madmen and madwomen instead of seeing in them its own heroes and heroines, its own fulfillment? And
where it can no longer recognize the figure of a simple illness, why does it keep its artists and
even its scientists under such close surveillance-as though they risked unleashing flows that
would be dangerous for capitalist production and charged with a revolutionary potential, so
long as these flows are not co-opted or absorbed by the laws of the market? Why does it form in turn a
gigantic machine for social repression-psychic repression, aimed at what nevertheless constitutes its own reality-the decoded flows? The
answer-as we have seen-is that capitalism is indeed the limit of all societies, insofar as it brings about
the decoding of the flows that the other social formations coded and overcoded. But it is the
relative limit of every society; it effects relative breaks, because it substitutes for the codes an extremely rigorous axiomatic that
maintains the energy of the flows in a bound state on the body of capital as a socius that is deterritorialized, but also a socius that is even more
pitiless than any other. Schizophrenia, on the contrary, is indeed the absolute limit that causes the
flows to travel in a free state on a desocialized body without organs. Hence one can say that
schizophrenia is the exterior limit of capitalism itself or the conclusion of its deepest tendency,
but that capitalism only functions on condition that it inhibit this tendency, or that it push back
or displace this limit, by substituting for it its own immanent relative limits, which it continually
reproduces on a widened scale. It axiomatizes with one hand what it decodes with the other. Such is the way one must
reinterpret the Marxist law of the counteracting tendency. With the result that schizophrenia pervades the entire capitalist field from one end
to the other. But for capitalism it is a question of binding the schizophrenic charges and energies
into a world axiomatic that always opposes the revolutionary potential of decoded flows with
new interior limits. And it is impossible in such a regime to distinguish, even in two phases, between decoding and the axiomatization
that comes to replace the vanished codes. The flows are decoded and axiomatized by capitalism at the same
time. Hence schizophrenia is not the identity of capitalism, but on the contrary its difference, its
divergence, and its death. Monetary flows are perfectly schizophrenic realities, but they exist
and function only within the immanent axiomatic that exorcises and repels this reality. The
language of a banker, a general, an industrialist, a middle or high-level manager, or a
government minister is a perfectly schizophrenic language, but that functions only statistically
within the flattening axiomatic of connections that puts it in the service of the capitalist
order.'(At the highest level of linguistics as a science, Hjelmslev is able to effect a vast decoding of language only by setting in motion from
the start an axiomatic machine based on the supposed finite number of the figures considered.) Then what becomes of the
"truly" schizophrenic language and the "truly" decoded and unbound flows that manage to
break through the wall or absolute limit? The capitalist axiomatic is so rich that one more axiom is added-for the books of a
great writer whose lexical and stylistic characteristics can always be computed by means of an electronic machine, or for the discourse of
madmen that can always be heard within the framework of a hospital, administrative, and psychiatric axiomatic. In brief, the
notion of
break-flow has seemed to us to define both capitalism and schizophrenia. But not in the same
way; they are not at all the same thing, depending on whether the decodings are caught up in
an axiomatic or not; on whether one remains at the level of the large aggregates functioning
statistically, or crosses the barrier that separates them from the unbound molecular positions;
on whether the flows of desire reach this absolute limit or are content to displace a relative
immanent limit that will reconstitute itself further along; on whether controlling
reterritorializations are added to the processes of deterritorialization; and on whether money
burns or bursts into flames.
2. Capitalism only functions by pushing its absolute limit of schizophrenia

away – making the limit concrete and saturating its axiomatic will destroy
capitalism from the inside
Deleuze & Guattari 72 (Gilles and Felix; Anti-Oedipus) 249-250
Hence capital differentiates itself from any other socius or full body, inasmuch
as capital itself figures as a directly economic instance, and falls back on
production without interposing extra-economic factors that would be inscribed
in the form of a code. With the advent of capitalism the full body becomes truly
naked, as does the worker himself who is attached to this full body. In this sense
the anti-production apparatus ceases to be transcendent, and pervades all
production and becomes coextensive with it. Thirdly, as a result of these developed
conditions involving the destruction of all codes within a becoming concrete,
the absence of limits takes on a new meaning. This absence no longer simply
designates the unlimited abstract quantity, but the effective absence of any
limit or end for the differential relation where the abstract becomes something
concrete. Concerning capitalism, we maintain that it both does and does not have an exterior
limit: it has an exterior limit that is schizophrenia, that is, the absolute decoding
of flows, but it functions only by pushing back and exorcising this limit. And it
also has, yet does not have, interior limits: it has interior limits under the
specific conditions of capitalist production and circulation, that is, in capital
itself, but it functions only by reproducing and widening these limits on an
always vaster scale. The strength of capitalism indeed resides in the fact that its
axiomatic is never saturated, that it is always capable of adding a new axiom to
the previous ones. Capitalism defines a field of immanence and never ceases to
fully occupy this field. But this deterritorialized field finds itself determined by
an axiomatic, in contrast to the territorial field determined by primitive codes.
Differential relations of such a nature as to be filled by surplus value; an absence
of exterior limits that it is "filled" by the widening of internal limits; and the
effusion of anti-production within production so as to be filled by the absorption
of surplus value-these constitute the three aspects of capitalism's immanent axiomatic. And monetarization
everywhere comes to fill the abyss of capitalist immanence, introducing there , as
Schmitt says, "a deformation, a convulsion, an explosion-in a word, a movement of
extreme violence."
Solves Discourse
1. This debate presents us with a fork in the road. To the right is
the paranoid apparatus of the status quo – go back home, take
the blue pill, and lock your doors so everything is tight and
secure. To the left is a less logical approach – the
schizophrenic. We choose to move to this position, to accept
that things are pretty crazy and to meet the demands of life we
too have to be fluid and, by all means, a little crazy. Note that we
are not embracing what schizophrenia means – to do so leaves
us autistic or locked up, failed revolutionaries. Instead we
choose to run with this idea until it becomes no longer useful.
We can learn from the schizophrenic revolution to break off
whatever chains attach themselves to us and embrace nothing
but the here and now.
Deleuze and Guattari 72 [Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari explain in
their text “Anti-Oedipus” (276-280)]
If the familial investment is only a dependence or an application of the unconscious investments of the social field-and if this is just as true of the child as of the
adult; if it is true that the child, through the mommy-territoriality and the daddy-law, already aims for the schizzes and the encoded or axiomated flows of the social
Delirium is the general matrix of

field-then we must transport the essential difference to the heart of this domain.
every unconscious social investment. Every unconscious investment mobilizes a delirious interplay of
disinvestments, of counterinvestments, of overinvestments. But we have seen in this context that there were two major types
of social investment, segregative and nomadic, just as there were two

poles of delirium: first, a paranoiac fascisizing (fascisant) type or pole that
invests the formation of central sovereignty; overinvests it by making it the final eternal cause for
all the other social forms of history; counterinvests the enclaves or the periphery; and
disinvests every free "figure" of desire-yes, I am your kind, and I

belong to the superior race and class. And second, a
schizorevolutionary type or pole that follows the lines of escape of desire;
breaches the wall and causes flows to move; assembles its machines and its groups-in-fusion in
the enclaves or at the periphery-proceeding in an inverse fashion from that of the
other pole: I am not your kind, I belong eternally to the inferior race, I
am a beast, a black. Good people say that we must not flee, that to escape is not good, that it isn't effective, and that one
must work for reforms. But the revolutionary knows that escape is revolutionary-withdrawal, freaks-
provided one sweeps away the social cover on leaving, or causes a piece
of the system to get lost in the shuffle. What matters is to break

through the wall, even if one has to become black like John Brown.
George Jackson. 'I may take flight, but all the while I am fleeing, I will be looking for a weapon!" Doubtless there are
astonishing oscillations of the unconscious, from one pole of delirium

to the other: the way in which an expected revolutionary force (puissance)
breaks free, sometimes even in the midst of the worst archaisms;
inversely, the way in which everything turns fascist or envelops itself in fascism, the way in
which it falls back into archaisms. Or, staying on the level of literary examples: the case of Celine, the great victim of delirium who evolves while communicating
more and more with the paranoia of his father. The case of Jack Kerouac, the artist possessing the soberest of means who took revolutionary "flight," but who later
finds himself immersed in dreams of a Great America, and then in search of his Breton ancestors of the superior race. Isn't the destiny of American literature that of
crossing limits and frontiers, causing deterritorialized flows of desire to circulate, but also always making these flows transport fascisizing, moralizing, Puritan, and
These oscillations of the unconscious, these underground passages from one

familialist territorialities?
type of libidinal investment to the other-often the coexistence of the

two-form one of the major objects of schizoanalysis. The two poles united by Artaud in
the formula: Heliogabalus-the-anarchist, "the image of all human contradictions, and of the contradiction in principle." But no
passage impairs or suppresses the difference in nature between the two,

nomadism and segregation. If we are able to define this difference as
that which separates paranoia and schizophrenia, it is because on the one
hand we have distinguished the schizophrenic process ("the
breakthrough") from the accidents and relapses that hinder or

interrupt it ("the breakdown"), and because on the other hand we
have posited paranoia no less than schizophrenia as independent of
all familial pseudo etiologies, so as to make them bear directly upon
the social field: every name in history, and not the name of the father. On the contrary, the nature of the familial investments depends on the
breaks and the flows of the social field as they are invested in one type or another, at one pole or the other. And the child does not wait until he is an adult before
grasping-underneath father-mother-the economic, financial, social, and cultural problems that cross through a family: his belonging or his desire to belong to a
superior or an inferior "race," the reactionary or the revolutionary tenor of a familial group with which he is already preparing his ruptures and his conformities.
What a muddle, what an emulsion the family is, agitated by backwashes, pulled in one direction or another, in such a way that the Oedipal bacillus takes or doesn't
take, imposes its mold or doesn't succeed in imposing it, pursuing directions of an entirely different nature that traverse the family from the exterior. What we
Oedipus is born of an application or a reduction to personalized

mean is that
images, which presupposes a social investment of a paranoiac type-

which explains why Freud first discovers the familial romance and Oedipus while reflecting on paranoia. Oedipus is a
dependency of the paranoiac territoriality, whereas the schizophrenic

investment commands an entirely different determination, a family gasping for
breath and stretched out over the dimensions of a social field that does not reclose or withdraw: a family-as-matrix for
depersonalized partial objects, which plunge again and again into the
torrential or depleted flux of a historic cosmos, a historic chaos. The
matrical fissure of schizophrenia, as opposed to paranoiac castration;
and the line of escape as opposed to the "blue line," the blues.
Solves In Round
Our actions today and the speech acts we endorse are themselves political
statements and actions that must be accounted for. In this sense, the
alternative is insane. We truly believe we are presidents and lawmakers but
we’re still in high school. We are not endorsing fiat, whatever that means,
instead we are endorsing the schizophrenia possible within ourselves – we are
endorsing the freedom possible now by abandoning self-repression for as long
as possible.
Libidal investments are made on the socius itself as a full body , and that their
respective poles necessarily relate to the character or the "map" of this socius-
earth, despot, or capital-money (for each social machine the two poles, paranoiac and schizophrenic,
are distributed in varying ways). Whereas the paranoiac and the schizophrenic, properly speaking, do not operate
on the socius, but on the body without organs in a pure state. It might then be said that the
paranoiac, in
the clinical sense of the term, makes us spectators to the imaginary birth of the
mass phenomenon, and does so at a level that is still microscopic. The body
without organs is like the cosmic egg, the giant molecule swarming with worms, bacilli,
Lilliputian figures, animalcules, and homunculi, with their organization and their machines, minute strings, ropes,
teeth, fingernails, levers and pulleys, catapults: thus in Schreber the millions of spermatazoids in the sunbeams, or
the souls that lead a brief existence as little men on his body. Artaud says: this world of microbes, which is nothing
more than coagulated nothingness. The
two sides of the body without organs are,
therefore, the side on which the mass phenomenon and the paranoiac
investment corresponding to it are organized on a microscopic scale, and the
other side on which, on a submicroscopic scale, the molecular phenomena and
their schizophrenic investment are arranged. It is on the body without organs ,
as a pivot, as a frontier between the molar and the molecular, that the
paranoia-schizophrenia division is made. Are we to believe, then, that social
investments are secondary projections, as if a large two-headed schizonoiac,
father of the primitive horde, were at the base of the socius in general? We
have seen that this is not at all the case. The socius is not a projection of the
body without organs; rather, the body without organs is the limit of the socius,
its tangent of deterritorialization, the ultimate residue of a deterritorialized
socius. The socius-the earth, the body of the despot, capital-money-are clothed full
bodies, just as the body without organs is a naked full body; but the latter exists
at the limit, at the end, not atthe origin. And doubtless the body without organs haunts all forms
of socius. But in this very sense, if social investments can be said to be paranoiac or
schizophrenic, it is to the extent that they have paranoia and schizophrenia as
ultimate products under the determinate conditions of capitalism.
ANSWERS
A/T: Framework (LONG- might wanna cut
down some)
1. Interpretation: The affirmative has to prove their plan is a good
idea.
2. We have 4 DAs to their framework
a. Internal Contstraint DA: We have an external impact to their form
of knowledge production— the internalization of constraints on
our thoughts and actions is what DnG call microfascism, which
negates our ability to live life to the fullest and enables
macropolitical fascism by teaching the citizens that the needs of
the State must always come first. That’s Seem ‘83
b. Fear Populace DA: They uses fear tactics like claiming the end
of debate, the complete loss of fairness and education, and
extinction to force the populace to believe that the only way to
ensure their security is to recede further into the control of the
State – Our affirmation discursively functions as what happens
when the rhetoric car crashes –That solves our offense on this
flow, with the K as an independent DA
c. Microfascism DA: Our microfacism impacts – This is solves their
offense – The terminal impact to all the affirmative framework
arguments is our ability to create positive change in the world.
Microfascism is limit by which we all are constrained from
creating that positive change – That’s Ballantyne 7 and seem.
This means addressing is the key internal link to affecting
change. If we win this argument it comparatively outweighs all
their standards
d. Fascism DA: Disconnect yourself from the state, from
collectives, from everything bigger than our agency. It is only
when desire is confined and controlled, added to some larger
pool, that we lose sight of our ability to form unique judgments
and come to unique conclusions. Recognizing this individualism
is necessary to challenge fascism
Deleuze and Guattari 1987 [Gilles and Felix, Renowned Philosophers, Nomadists and top-of the-line
Fashionistas, A Thousand Plateaus pg 158-159]
We come to the gradual realization that the BwO is not at all the opposite of the organs. The organs are not its
enemies. The enemy is the organism. The BwO is opposed not to the organs but to that
organization of the organs called the organism. It is true that Artaud wages a struggle against the organs, but at the same time what
he is going after, what he has it in for, is the organism: The body is the body. Alone it stands. And in no need of organs. Organism it
the BwO and its
never is. Organisms are the enemies of the body.11 The BwO is not opposed to the organs; rather,
"true organs," which must be composed and positioned, are opposed

to the organism, the organic organization of the organs. The judgment of God, the
system of the judgment of God, the theological system, is precisely the operation of He who makes an organism, an organization of
organs called the organism, because He cannot bear the BwO, because He pursues it and rips it apart so He can be first, and have
the organism be first. The organism is already that, the judgment of God, from which medical doctors benefit and on which they
base their power . The organism is not at all the body, the BwO; rather, it is a
stratum on the BwO, in other words, a phenomenon of accumulation, coagulation,
and sedimentation that, in order to extract useful labor from the BwO,
imposes upon it forms, functions, bonds, dominant and hierarchized
organizations, organized transcendences. The strata are bonds, pincers. "Tie me up if you
wish." We are continually stratified. But who is this we that is not me, for the subject no less than the
organism belongs to and depends on a stratum? Now we have the

answer: the BwO is that glacial reality where the alluvions, sedimentations,
coagulations, foldings, and recoilings that compose an organism —and also a signification and
a subject—occur. For the judgment of God weighs upon and is exercised against the BwO; it is the BwO that undergoes it. It is
in the BwO that the organs enter into the relations of composition called the organism. The BwO howls: "They've made me an
organism! They've wrongfully folded me! They've stolen my body!" The judgment of God uproots it from its immanence and makes it
an organism, a signification, a subject. It is the BwO that is stratified. It swings between two poles, the surfaces of stratification into
which it is recoiled, on which it submits to the judgment, and the plane of consistency in which it unfurls and opens to
experimentation. If the BwO is a limit, if one is forever attaining it, it is because behind each stratum, encasted in it, there is always
another stratum. For many a stratum, and not only an organism, is necessary to make the judgment of God. A perpetual and violent
combat between the plane of consistency, which frees the BwO, cutting across and dismantling all of the strata, and the surfaces of
stratification that block it or make it recoil. Let us consider the three great strata concerning us, in other words, the ones that most
directly bind us: the organism, signifiance, and subjectification. The surface of the organism, the angle of signifiance and
interpretation, and the point of subjectification or subjection. You will be organized, you will be an organism, you will articulate your
body—otherwise you're just depraved. You will be signifier and signified, interpreter and interpreted—otherwise you're just a
deviant. You will be a subject, nailed down as one, a subject of the enunciation recoiled into a subject of the statement—otherwise
you're just a tramp. To the strata as a whole, the BwO opposes disarticulation (or n articulations) as the property of the plane of
consistency, experimentation as the operation on that plane (no signifier, never interpret!), and nomadism as the movement (keep
moving, even in place, never stop moving, motionless voyage, desubjectification). What does it mean to disarticulate, to cease to be
an organism? How can we convey how easy it is, and the extent to which we do it every day? And how necessary caution is, the art
of dosages, since overdose is a danger. You don't do it with a sledgehammer, you use a very fine file. You invent selfdestructions
that have nothing to do with the death drive. Dismantling the organism has never meant killing yourself, but rather opening the body
to connections that presuppose an entire assemblage, circuits, conjunctions, levels and thresholds, passages and distributions of
intensity, and territories and deterritorializations measured with the craft of a surveyor. Actually, dismantling the organism is no more
difficult than dismantling the other two strata, signifiance and subjectification. Signifiance clings to the soul just as the organism
clings to the body, and it is not easy to get rid of either. And how can we unhook ourselves from
the points of subjectification that secure us, nail us down to a
dominant reality? Tearing the conscious away from the subject in order to
make it a means of exploration, tearing the unconscious away from signifiance and
interpretation in order to make it a veritable production: this is assuredly no more or less difficult than tearing the body
away from the organism. Caution is the art common to all three; if in
dismantling the organism there are times one courts death, in slipping away
from signifiance and subjection one courts falsehood, illusion and hallucination and psychic death. Artaud weighs and measures
every word: the conscious "knows what is good for it and what is of no value to it: it knows which thoughts and feelings it can
receive without danger and with profit, and which are harmful to the exercise of its freedom. Above all, it knows just how far its own
being goes, and just how far it has not yet gone or does not have the right to go without sinking into the unreal, the illusory, the
unmade, the unprepared . . . a Plane which normal consciousness does not reach but which Ciguri allows us to reach, and which is
there is in human existence another plane, obscure
the very mystery of all poetry. But
and formless, where consciousness has not entered, and which

surrounds it like an unilluminated extension or a menace, as the case
may be. And which itself gives off adventurous sensations,
perceptions. These are those shameless fantasies which affect an
unhealthy conscious. . . . I too have had false sensations and
perceptions and I have believed in them."18
3. If we prove an impact to the microfascism then it is arbitrary
and irresponsible to ignore those impacts
4. Their framework arguments all link to the K
a. Attempting to impose arbitrary limits upon the activity and

language and what can and cannot be said is the externalization
of their internal policing of the game which links hard to all of
microfacism impacts
b. State centric approach are at the root of our criticism and
impacts
c. This means they have to beat the thesis of our K before gaining
offense on this flow
5. Predictable – They should be able to defend the assumptions

their plan makes
6. Ground – They still can weigh their advantages against us
7. Extend our role of the ballot from the 1NC. Our framework comes first –
society is structured around the modes of desire and before we question
how things ought to work we have to question why things work the way
they do.
8. Our kritik is an act of short-circuiting that allows us to understand the
topic in new and creative ways, which is a pre-requisite to education. If
we win that our kritik opens up new forms of education then framework
doesn’t matter
Zizek ’3 (Slavoj, series introduction to The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche’s
Philosophy of the Two)
A short circuit occurs when there is a faulty connection in the network —faulty, of
course, from the standpoint of the network’s smooth functioning. Is not the shock of shortcircuiting, therefore, one of the best metaphors for
to take a major
a critical reading? Is not one of the most effective critical procedures to cross wires that do not usually touch:
classic (text, author, notion) and read it in a shortcircuiting way, through the lens of a
“minor” author, text, or conceptual apparatus (“minor” should be understood here in Deleuze’s sense: not “of lesser quality,” but
marginalized, disavowed by the hegemonic ideology, or dealing with a “lower,” less dignified topic)? If the minor reference is
well chosen, such a procedure can lead to insights which completely shatter and
undermine our common perceptions. This is what Marx, among others, did with philosophy and religion (short-
circuiting philosophical speculation through the lens of political economy, that is to say, economic speculation); this is what Freud and Nietzsche
did with morality (shortcircuiting the high-est ethical notions through the lens of the unconscious libidinal economy). What such a reading
the aim
achieves is not a simple “desublimation,” a reduction of the higher intellectual content to its lower economic or libidinal cause;
of such an approach is, rather, the inherent decentering of the interpreted text, which
brings to light its “unthought,” its disavowed presuppositions and consequences. And this is what “Short
Circuits” wants to do, again and again. The under-lying premise of the series is that Lacanian psychoanalysis is a privileged instrument of such
an approach, whose purpose is to illuminate a standard text or ideological formation, making it readable in a totally new way—the long history
of Lacanian interventions in philosophy, religion, the arts (from the visual arts to the cinema, music, and literature), ideology, and politics
justifies this premise. This, then, is not a new series of books on psychoanalysis, but a series of “connections in the Freudian field”—of short
Lacanian interventions in art, philosophy, theology, and ideology. “Short Circuits” wants to revive a practice
of reading which confronts a classic text, author, or notion with its own hidden
presuppositions, and thus reveals its disavowed truth. The basic criterion for the texts that will be
published is that they effectuate such a theoretical short circuit. After reading a book in this series, the reader should not
simply have learned something new: the point is, rather, to make him or her aware
of another—disturbing—side of something he or she knew all the time.
9. Their framework cedes the political – they forget that we have a real
possibility to address the world around us and creates a form of apathy
that continues the worst forms of policy making
Kappeler 1995 (Susanne, former lecturer in English, University of East Anglia,
Associate Professor The Will to Violence, pgs 9-11)
War does not suddenly break out in a peaceful society; sexual violence is not the disturbance of otherwise equal gender relations. Racist attacks do not shoot like lightning out of a non-racist sky, and the sexual exploitation of
The violence of our thinking, and

children is no solitary problem in a world otherwise just to children. most commonsense everyday especially our
personal will to violence, constitute the conceptual preparation , the ideological

armament and the intellectual mobilization which make violence the 'outbreak' of war, of sexual , of racist
possible
attacks, of murder and destruction at all. 'We are the war,' writes Slavenka Drakulic at the end of her existential analysis of the question, 'what is war?': I do not know what war is, I want to tell my friend,
but I see it everywhere . It is in the blood-soaked street in Sarajevo, after 20 people have been killed while they queued for bread. But it is also in your non-comprehension, in my unconscious cruelty towards you. in the fact that
you have a yellow form [for refugees] and I don't, in the way in which it grows inside ourselves and changes our feelings, relationships, values - in short: us. We are the war. , , And I am afraid that we cannot
hold anyone else responsible. We make war possible this , we permit it to happen. 'We are the war' - and we also are' the sexual
violence , the racist violence , the exploitation and the will to violence in all its manifestations in a society in so-called 'peacetime", for we make them possible and we permit them to happen. 'We are the
war' does not mean that the responsibility for a war is shared collectively and diffusely by an entire society - which would be equivalent to exonerating warlords and politicians and profiteers or,
'collective irresponsibility', where people are no longer held

as Ulrich Beck says, upholding the notion of
responsible for their actions , and where the conception of universal responsibility becomes the equivalent of a universal acquittal. 6 On the contrary, the object is precisely to
analyse the specific and differential responsibility of everyone in their diverse situations. Decisions to unleash a war are indeed taken at particular levels of power by those in a position to make them and to command such
collective action. We need to hold them clearly responsible for their decisions and actions without lessening theirs by any collective 'assumption' of responsibility. Yet our habit of focusing
on the stage where major dramas of power take place the tends toobscure our sight in relation to our
own competence
sphere of leading to , our own power and our own responsibility - 'powerlessness'
the well- known illusion of our apparent
and disillusionment
its accompanying phenomenon - our so-called political . Single citizens even more so those of other nations - have come to feel secure in their obvious non-responsibility for
insight that we are

such large-scale political events as, say, the wars in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina or Somalia _ since the decisions for such events are always made elsewhere. Yet our indeed
not responsible for the decisions of a Serbian general or a Croatian president tends to mislead us in to thinking that therefore
we have no responsibility at all , not even for forming our own judgment, and thus into underrating the responsibility we do have within our own sphere of action. In
particular, it seems to absolve us from having to try to see any relation between our own actions and those events, or to recognize the connections between those political decisions and our own personal decisions. It not only
shows that we participate in what Beck calls 'organized irresponsibility', upholding the apparent lack of connection between bureaucratically, institutionally, nationally and also individually organized separate competences. It also
proves the phenomenal and unquestioned alliance of our personal thinking with the thinking of the major power mongers. For we tend to think that we cannot 'do
' anything , say, about a war, because we deem ourselves to be in the wrong situation; because we are not where the major decisions
are made. Which is why many of those not yet entirely disillusioned with politics tend to engage in a form of mental deputy politics, in the style of 'What would I do if I were the general, the prime minister, the
president, the foreign minister or the minister of defence?' Since we seem to regard their mega spheres of action as the only worthwhile and truly effective ones, and since our political analyses tend to dwell there first of all, any
question of what I would do if I were indeed myself tends to peter out in the comparative insignificance of having what is perceived as 'virtually no possibilities': what I could do seems petty and futile. For my own action I obviously
desire the range of action of a general, a prime minister, or a General Secretary of the UN - finding expression in ever more prevalent formulations like ‘I want to stop this war', 'I want military intervention ', 'I want to stop this
backlash', or 'I want a moral revolution. '? 'We are this war', however, even if we do not command the troops or participate in so-called peace talks, namely as Drakulic says, in our 'non- comprehension' : our willed refusal to feel
responsible for our own thinking and for working out our own understanding, preferring innocently to drift along the ideological current of prefabricated arguments or less than innocently taking advantage of the advantages these
offer. And we 'are' the war in our 'unconscious cruelty towards you', our tolerance of the 'fact that you have a yellow form for refugees and I don 't' - our readiness, in other words, to build identities, one for ourselves and one for
refugees, one of our own and one for the 'others'. We share in the responsibility for this war and its violence in the way we let them grow inside us, that is, in the way we shape 'our feelings, our relationships, our values' according
to the structures and the values of war and violence.
10. Roleplaying authorizes sadistic violence, masking domination in

neutrality
Reed 2005 et al, Director of Command and Leadership Studies, U.S. Army War
College, 2005 [Professor George E., Guy B. Adams, Professor, Public Affairs,
University of Missouri-Columbia, Danny L. Balfour, Professor, Public and
Nonprofit Administration, Grand Valley State University, “Putting Cruelty First:
Abu Ghraib, Administrative Evil and Moral Inversion,” Paper prepared for
presentation to “Ethics and Integrity of Governance: A Transatlantic Dialogue,”
Leuven, Belgium, June 2-5, 2005 http://soc.kuleuven.be/io/ethics/paper/Paper
%20WS5_pdf/Guy%20Adams.pdf, 24-28]
Total guard aggression increased daily, even after prisoners had ceased any resistance and deterioration was visible. Prisoner rights were
redefined as privileges, to be earned by obedient behavior. The experiment was planned for two weeks, but was terminated after six days. Five
prisoners were released because of extreme emotional depression, crying, rage and/or acute anxiety. Guards forced the prisoners to chant
filthy songs, to defecate in buckets that were not emptied, and to clean toilets with their bare hands. They acted as if the prisoners were less
than human and so did the prisoners (Haney, Banks and Zimbardo, 1973, p.94): At the end of only six days we had to close down our mock
prison because what we saw was frightening. Itwas no longer apparent to us or most of the subjects where they
ended and their roles began. The majority had indeed become "prisoners” or "guards,"no longer able to clearly differentiate
between role-playing and self. There were dramatic changes in virtually every aspect of their behavior,
thinking and feeling. In less that a week, the experience of imprisonment undid (temporarily) a lifetime of learning;
human values were suspended, self-concepts were challenged , and the ugliest, most base, pathological side of
human nature surfaced. We were horrified because we saw some boys ("guards") treat other boys as if they were despicable animals, taking
pleasure in cruelty, while other boys ("prisoners") became servile, dehumanized robots who thought only of escape, of their own
individual survival, and of their mounting hatred of the guards. This experiment suggests that group and organizational roles and social
structures play a far more powerful part in everyday human behavior than most of us would consider. And we can see clearly how individual
morality and ethics can be swallowed and effectively erased by social roles and structures. One is rarely confronted with a clear, up-or-down
decision on an ethical issue; rather,a series of small, usually ambiguous choices are made, and the
weight of commitments and of
habit drives out morality. One does not have to be morally degenerate to become caught in a web of wrongdoing that may even
cross the line into evil. The skids are further greased if the situation is defined or presented as technical, or calling for
expert judgment, or is legitimated, either tacitly or explicitly, by organizational authority, as we shall see below. It becomes
an even easier choice if the immoral behavior has itself been masked, redefined through a moral a fairly powerful explanation for at least some
of what happened at Abu Ghraib. But it also does not fully fit the specifics of the situation. Unlike the Stanford experiments, the guards did not
act in an isolated and controlled environment, but were part of a larger organizational structure and political environment. They interacted
regularly with all sorts of personnel, both directly and indirectly involved with the prisoners. They were in a remarkably chaotic environment,
were by and large poorly prepared and trained for their roles, and were faced with both enormous danger and ambiguity. However, like the
Stanford Prison Experiment, tacit permission was available to those who chose to accept it. In his ground-breaking book, The Destruction of the
European Jews, Raul Hilberg observed that a consensus for and the practice of mass murder coalesced among German bureaucrats in a manner
that (Hilberg, 1985, p.55), “…was not so much a product of laws and commands as it was a matter of spirit, of shared comprehension, of
consonance and synchronization.” In another study of mid-level bureaucrats and the Holocaust, Christopher Browning describes this process in
some detail as he also found that direct orders were not needed for key functionaries to understand the direction that policy was to take
(Browning, 1992, pp. 141-142): Instead, new signals
and directions were given at the center, and with a
ripple effect, these new signals set in motions waves that radiated outward… with the situations they found themselves in and the
contacts they made, these three bureaucrats could not help but feel the ripples and be affected by the changing atmosphere and course of
events. These
were not stupid or inept people; they could read the signals, perceive what was
expected of them, and adjust their behavior accordingly … It was their receptivity to such signals, and the speed
with which they aligned themselves to the new policy, that allowed the Final Solution to emerge with so little internal friction and so little
formal coordination If something as horrific and systematic as the Holocaust could be perpetrated based more on a common understanding
than upon direct orders, it should not be difficult to imagine how abuse of detainees in Iraq and elsewhere occurred, with otherwise
unacceptable behaviors substituting for ambiguous, standard operating procedures. While the Nazi Holocaust was far, far worse than anything
that has happened during the American occupation of Iraq, it has been amply demonstrated that Americans are not immune to the types of
social and organizational conditions that make it possible and seemingly permissible to violate the boundaries of morality and human decency,
in at least some cases, without believing that they were doing anything wrong. It would be naïve to assume that the
“few bad apples” acted alone, and that others in the system did not share and support the abuses as they went about their routines and did
their jobs. Before and surrounding overt acts of evil, there are many more and much less obviously evil administrative activities that lead to and
support the worst forms of human behavior. Moreover, without these instances of masked evil, the more overt and unmasked acts are less
likely to occur (Staub, 1992, pp. 20-21). The apparent willingness and comfort level with taking photos and to be photographed while abusing
prisoners seems to reflect the “normalcy” of the acts within the context of at least the night shift on Tiers 1A and 1B at Abu Ghraib (and is
hauntingly similar to photos of atrocities sent home by SS personnel in World War II). In the camps and prisons run by the U.S. military in Iraq
and Afghanistan, orders and professional standards forbidding the abuse of prisoners and defining the boundaries of acceptable behavior for
prison guards could be found in at least some locations posted on some walls, but were widely ignored by the perpetrators. Instead, we find a
high stress situation, in which the expectation was to It would be naïve to assume that the “few bad apples” acted alone, and that others in the
system did not share and support the abuses as they went about their routines and did their jobs. Before and surrounding overt acts of evil,
there are many more and much less obviously evil administrative activities that lead to and support the worst forms of human behavior.
Moreover, without these instances of masked evil, the more overt and unmasked acts are less likely to occur (Staub, 1992, pp. 20-21). The
apparent willingness and comfort level with taking photos and to be photographed while abusing prisoners seems to reflect the “normalcy” of
the acts within the context of at least the night shift on Tiers 1A and 1B at Abu Ghraib (and is hauntingly similar to photos of atrocities sent
home by SS personnel in World War II). In the camps and prisons run by the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan, orders and professional
standards forbidding the abuse of prisoners and defining the boundaries of acceptable behavior for prison guards could be found in at least
some locations posted on some walls, but were widely ignored by the perpetrators. Instead, we find a high stress situation, in which the
expectation was to extract usable intelligence from detainees in order to help their comrades suppress a growing insurgency, find weapons of
mass destruction, and prevent acts of terrorism. In this context, the power of group dynamics, social structures, and organizational ambiguities
is readily seen. The normal inhibitions that might have prevented those who perpetrated the abuses from doing these evil deeds may have
been further weakened by the shared belief that the prisoners were somehow less than human, and that getting information out of them was
more important than protecting their rights and dignity as human beings. For example, in an interview with the BBC on June 15, 2004, Brig.
General Janis Karpinski stated that she was told by General Geoffrey Miller – later placed in charge of Iraqi prisons and former commander at
Guantanamo Bay – that the Iraqi prisoners, “…are like dogs and if you allow them to believe at any point that they are more than a dog then
you’ve lost control of them.” Just as anti-Semitism was central to the attitudes of those who implemented the policy of mass murder in the
Holocaust, the abuses at Abu Ghraib may have been facilitated by an atmosphere that dehumanized the detainees. In effect, these detainees,
with their ambiguous legal status, could be seen as a “surplus population,” living outside the protections of civilized society (Rubenstein, 1983).
And whenorganizational dynamics combine with a tendency to dehumanize and/or demonize a
vulnerable group, the stage is set for the mask of administrative evil.
11. Framework’s prioritization of deliberation as a way to methodologically

bracket out our discussion cannot be viewed as value neutral, it is the
worst form of conservatism favoring the established order at the expense
of the oppressed.
Meszaros 89 (Istvan, likes Marx not Adam Smith. The Power of Ideology, p 232-
234)
Nowhere is the myth of ideological neutrality – the self-proclaimed Wertfreiheit or value neutrality of so-called ‘rigorous social science’ –
stronger than in the field of methodology. Indeed, we are often presented with the claim that the adoption of the advocated methodological
framework would automatically exempt one from all controversy about values, since they are adequate method itself, thereby saving one from
unnecessary complications and securing the desired objectivity and uncontestable outcome. Claims and procedures of this kind are, of course,
they circularly assume that their enthusiasm for the virtues of
extremely problematical. For
‘methodological neutrality’ is bound to yield ‘value neutral’ solutions with regard to

highly contested issues, without first examining the all-important question as to the conditions of possibility – or otherwise – of the postulated
systematic neutrality at the plans of methodology itself. The unchallengeable validity of the recommended procedure is supposed to be self-
evident on account of its purely methodological character. In reality, of course, this approach to methodology is
heavily loaded with a conservative ideological substance. Since, however, the plane of methodology (and ‘meta-theory’) is said to be
in principle separated from that of the substantive issues, the methodological circle can be conveniently closed. Whereupon the mere
insistence on the purely methodological character of the criteria laid down is supposed to establish the claim according to which the approach
in question is neutral because everybody can adopt it as the common frame of reference of ‘rational discourse’. Yet, curiously enough, the
proposed methodological tenets are so defined that vast areas of vital social concern are a priori excluded from their rational discourse
The effect of circumscribing in this way the scope of the one and only admissible
‘metaphysical’, ‘ideological’, etc.
approach is that it automatically disqualifies in the name of methodology itself, all those who do not fit into the
stipulated framework of discourse. As a result, the propounders of the ‘right method’ are spared the difficulties that go with
acknowledging the real divisions and incompatibilities as they necessarily arise from the contending social interests at the roots of alternative
approaches and the rival sets of values associated with them. This is where we can see more clearly the social orientation implicit in the whole
procedure. For – far from offering an adequate scope for critical enquiry – the advocated general adoption of the allegedly neutral
methodological framework is equivalent, in fact, to consenting not even to raise the issues that really matter. Instead, the stipulated ‘common’
methodological procedure succeeds in transforming the enterprise of ‘rational discourse’ into the dubious practice of producing methodology
for the sake of methodology: a tendency more pronounced in the twentieth century than ever before. This practice consists in sharpening the
recommended methodological knife until nothing but the bare handle is left, at which point the new knife is adopted for the same purpose. For
the ideal methodological knife is not meant for cutting, only for sharpening, thereby interposing itself between the critical intent and the real
objects of criticism which it can obliterate for as long as the pseudo-critical activity of knife-sharpening for tits own sake continues to be
pursued. And that happens to be precisely its inherent ideological purpose. Naturally, to speak of a ‘common’ methodological framework in
which one can resolve the problems of a society torn by irreconcilable social interests and pursuing antagonistic confrontations is delusory, at
best, notwithstanding all talk about ‘ideal communication communities’. But to define the methodological tenets of all rational discourse by
the discussion of contending
way of transubstantiating into ‘ideal types’ (or by putting into methodological ‘brackets’)
social values reveals the ideological colour as well as the extreme fallaciousness of the claimed
rationality. For such treatment of the major areas of conflict, under a great variety of forms – from the Viennese version of
‘logical positivism’ to Wittgenstein’s famous ladder that must be ‘thrown away’ at the point of confronting the question of values, and from the
favours the
advocacy of the Popperian principle of ‘little by little’ in the ‘emotivist’ theory of value – inevitably always
established order. And it does so by declaring the fundamental structural parameters

of the given society ‘of of bounds’ to the potential contestants, in the authority of the ideally ‘common’ methodology. However,
even on a cursory inspection of the issues at stake it out to be fairly obvious that to consent not to question the
fundamental structural framework of the established order is radically different according

to whether one does so as the beneficiary of the order or from the standpoint of those who find themselves at the receiving end,
exploited and oppressed by the overall determinations (and not just by some limited and more or less easily corrigible
detail) of that order. Consequently, to establish the ‘common’ identity of the two, opposed sides of a structurally safeguarded hierarchical
order – by means of the reduction of the people belong to the contending social forces into fictitious ‘rational interlocutors’, extracted from
their divided real world and transplanted into a beneficially shared universe of ideal discourse – would be nothing sort of methodological
miracle. Contrary to the wishful thinking hypostatized as a timeless and socially unspecified rational community, the elementary condition of a
truly rational discourse would be to acknowledge the legitimacy of contesting the given order of society in substantive terms. This would imply
the articulation of the relevant problems not on the plane of self-referential articulation of the relevant problems not on the plane of self-
referential theory and methodology, but as inherently practical issues whose conditions of solution point towards the necessity of radical
structural changes. In other words, it would require the explicit rejection of all fiction of methodological and meta-theoretical neutrality. But, of
course, this would be far too much to expect precisely because the society in which we live is a deeply divided society. This is why through the
dichotomies of ‘fact and value’, ‘theory and practice’, ‘formal and substantive rationality’, etc. The conflict-transcending methodological miracle
is constantly stipulated as the necessary regulative framework of the ruling ideology. What makes this approach particularly difficult to
challenge is that its value-commitments are mediated by methodological precepts to such a degree that it is virtually impossible to bring them
into the focus of discussion without openly contesting the framework as a whole. For the conservative sets of values at the roots of such
orientation remain several steps removed from the ostensible subject of dispute as defined in logico/methodological, formal/structural, and
who would suspect of ideological bias the impeccable – methodologically
semantic/analytical terms. And
sanctioned – credentials of ‘procedural rules’, ‘models and ‘paradigms’? Once, though, such rules and paradigms are
adopted as the common frame of reference of what may or may not be allowed to considered the
legitimate subject of debate, everything that enters into the accepted parameters is necessarily constrained not only by
the scope of the overall framework, but simultaneously also by the inexplicit ideological assumptions upon the basis of which the
the allegedly ‘non-ideological’
methodological principles themselves were in the first place constitution. This why
ideologies which so successfully conceal and exercise their apologetic function in the guise of neutral
methodology are doubly mystifying. Twentieth-century currents of thought are dominated by approaches that lend to articulate the
social interests and values of the ruling order through complicated – at times completely bewildering – mediations, on the methodological
plane. Thus, more than ever before, the task of ideological demystification is inseparable from the investigation of the complex dialectical
relationship between methods and values which no social theory or philosophy can escape.
A/T: Perms
Perm Frontline
1. The permutation is incoherent:
A. Our alternative is to not do the affirmative because of the

problems inherent in their foundational assumptions. It is
impossible to do the alternative and the plan simultaneously.
B. Any net benefit they claim to the permutation, including the
affirmative itself, means the permutation independently links
to the critique. The idea of evaluating an act based on certain
predictions and “solvency” flies in the face of an ethic of
experimentation that knows nothing of success or failure,
only creation. The alternative is not to rationally choose the
‘best’ course of action, but to embrace a life post ethical
appeals to life and death.
2. The calculative nature of the permutation and the unconditional
embrace of science and technology behind the 1AC strangle the
creativity of the alternative, which is another link to our
repression arguments.
And the same will be said of science: the decoded flows of knowledge are first
bound in the properly scientific axiomatics, but these axiomatics

express a bipolar hesitation. One of the poles is the great social
axiomatic that retains from science what must be retained in terms of market
needs and zones of technical innovation: the great social aggregate that makes the scientific
subaggregates into so many applications that are characteristic of and that correspond to it-in short, the set of
methods that is not content to bring scientists back to "reason" but

anticipates any deviance on their part, imposes a goal on them, and
makes scientists and science into an agency perfectly subjugated to the
formation of sovereignty (for example, the way in which non-determinism was only tolerated to a point, then
ordered to make its peace with determinism). But the other pole is the schizoid pole, in whose
proximity flows of knowledge schizophrenize, and not only flee across the social axiomatic,
but pass beyond their own axiomatics, generating increasingly

deterritorialized signs, figures-schizzes that are no longer either figurative or
structured, and reproduce or produce an interplay of phenomena without aim or
end: science as experimentation, as previously defined. In this domain as in the others,
isn't there a properly libidinal conflict between a paranoiac-
Oedipalizing element of science, and a schizorevolutionary element ?
That very conflict that leads Lacan to say there exists a drama for the scientist. ("1. R. Mayer, Cantor, I will not draw up an honor roll
of these dramas that sometimes lead to madness ... , a list that could not include itself in Oedipus, unless it were to call Oedipus in
question. "49 Since, in point of fact, Oedipus does not intervene in these dramas as a familial figure or even as a mental structure;
its intervention is determined by an axiomatic acting as an oedipalizing factor, resulting in a specifically scientific Oedipus.) And in
contrast to Lautreamont's song that rises up around the paranoiac-Oedipal-narcissistic pole-"O rigorous mathematics . . ..
Arithmetic! Algebra! Geometry! Imposing trinity! Luminous triangle!"-There is another song: 0 schizophrenic mathematics,
uncontrollable and mad desiring-machines!
3. Perm does not allow for the revolution within the judges mind.
Extend our second DnG ’72 capitalism will destroy attempts at
reform. We must revolt without it.
4. Calls for direct action are justified by a fundamental gap or
pause in the process of thinking – the affirmative’s reliance on
doing something is always justified by ignoring the fundamental
questions of how that action treats those who are subordinated
Johnston 04 [JOHNSTON, interdisciplinary research fellow in
psychoanalysis at Emory University, 2004 Adrian, Psychoanalysis,
Culture & Society, December v9 i3 p259 page infotrac]
The height of Zizek's philosophical traditionalism, his fidelity to certain lasting truths too precious to cast away in a postmodern
frenzy, is his conviction that no worthwhile praxis can emerge prior to the careful and deliberate formulation of a correct conceptual
framework. His references to the Lacanian notion of the Act (qua agent-less occurrence not brought about by a subject) are
especially strange in light of the fact that he seemingly endorses the view that theory must precede practice, namely, that
deliberative reflection is, in a way, primary. For Zizek, the foremost "practical" task to be accomplished today isn't some kind of
rebellious acting out, which would, in the end, amount to nothing more than a series of impotent, incoherent outbursts. Instead,
given the contemporary exhaustion of the socio-political imagination
under the hegemony of liberal-democratic capitalism, he sees the
liberation of thinking itself from its present constraints as the first
crucial step that must be taken if anything is to be changed for the
better. In a lecture given in Vienna in 2001, Zizek suggests that Marx's call to break out of the
sterile closure of abstract intellectual ruminations through direct,
concrete action (thesis eleven on Feuerbach--"The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the
point is to change it") must be inverted given the new prevailing conditions of
late-capitalism. Nowadays, one must resist succumbing to the

temptation to short-circuit thinking in favor of acting, since all such
rushes to action are doomed; they either fail to disrupt capitalism or
are ideologically co-opted by it.
Perm: Do Both
1. Extend D&G: The perm is disingenuous – it’s not enough to simply
engage in our line of flight when it’s convenient and simply tolerate
the bankrupt ethic of capitalism the rest of the time. In order to
restore life to a valuable state, it’s try or die for the alt.
2. The perm completely bankrupts the alternative, the middle ground
between the schizophrenic process of problemitization and
embracing a capitalist discourse doesn’t exist – it’s try or die for the
alt.
3. You have 2 options:
(a) The perm fails because the alt is 100% competitive – we
reject the entirety of the affirmative and all of its foundational
assumptions. If it’s competitive, you vote negative.
(b) The perm severs out of the affirmative advocacy. This denies
us stable link ground and is an example of negative will to power – a
new link and a voting issue for fairness.
4. The perm still links: It’s still an attempt to expand consumption to
save the status quo. In order to truly overcome capitalism’s
stranglehold, we need to charge on as the revolutionary. This means
any net benefit they claim associated to the perm proves it’s a failure.
Perm: All Other Instances
1. This is nonsensical: The other instances they talk about aren’t in
this room – we’re not saying that the aff is responsible for all
capitalist relation; we’re saying their specific instance of relation to
the system is bad.
2. Extend D&G: We must fight the dominating relations at every
instance – only way of ensuring that we don’t slip back into the
stranglehold of domination.
3. Cross apply the answers from the perm frontline.
4. This is not an argument – you wouldn’t accept racism in one
instances because you had the opportunity to reject it in other
instances – if we win our framing of impacts, you have to reject the
aff’s desire-production first and can only do this by rejecting the
affirmative
5. Every instance is key – this decision is between competing
philosophies, not competing actions. It’s like saying, “We agree with
nonviolence, except when we don’t”
Perm: Double-Bind
1. There’s no double-bind: We’re not trying to overcome all other
governmental acts for growth in the status quo. If we claimed global
solvency, this might be an actual argument but if the alt resolves the
link debate, then it’s enough to vote neg.
2. The alt is mutually exclusive to the aff: we cannot wholly affirm the
schizophrenic ethic AND make attempts to extend capitalism at the
same time.
3. If the alt has ANY RISK of coming to terms with the overcoming bad
relations, then you vote neg.
Perm: Do the Alternative
First, The perm severs the entirety of the aff – The alternative is to
reject the entirety of the affirmative plan and embrace the problems
they try to solve– Voting issue
Strategy skew- not knowing whether the plan will change makes
it impossible for the negative to form a cohesive strategy.
Ground- the affirmative can permute to do the CP which hurts
competitive equity. The negative will always lose because they
can spike out of our offense.
No Stable Advocacy –they will spike out of parts of plan and
mitigate the possibility of discussing those issues – Kills
education
Destroys K ground- the aff could sever parts of plan to avoid K
lnks.
This is a voter for fairness and education.
Second, Their rhetoric is still in this round – The only way to gain in
round solvency is to fundamentally challenge and provide a counter
rhetoric, which can only be accessed through the alternative
Interpassivity DA
The call for reform without complete abandonment of capitalist
coordinates leads to passive acceptance of capitalism that coopts the
alt
Zizek 02 (Slavoj, Slavoj, Žižek is a senior researcher at the Institute of
Sociology University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, and a professor at
the European Graduate School.[4] He has been a visiting professor at,
among others, the University of Chicago, Columbia
University, London Consortium, Princeton University, New York
University, The New School, the University of Minnesota,
the University of California, Irvine and the University of Michigan. He
is currently the International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the
Humanities at Birkbeck, University of London and president of
the Society for Theoretical Psychoanalysis, Ljubljana, Revolution at
the gates p.169- 171)
Indeed, since the "normal" functioning of capitalism involves some kind of disavowal of the basic
principle of its functioning (today's model capitalist is someone who, after ruthlessly
generating profit, then generously shares parts of it, giving large donations to churches, victims of ethnic or
sexual abuse etc., posing as a humanitarian), the ultimate act of transgression is -to assert this principle
directly, depriving it of its humanitarian mask. I am Therefore tempted to reverse Marx's Thesis 11: the first task today
is Precisely not to succumb to the temptation to act, to intervene directly and Change things (which then inevitably ends in a cul-de-sac of
debilitating impossibility: "What can we do against global capital? "), but to question he hegemonic ideological coordinates. In short, our
historical moment is ,till that of Adorno:To the question "What should we do?" I can most often truly answer only with "I don't know." I can
only try to analyse rigorously what there is. Here people reproach me: When you practise criticism, you are also obliged to say how one should
make it better. To my mind, this is incontrovertibly a bourgeois prejudice. Many times in history it so happened that the very works which
pursued purely theoretical goals transformed consciousness, and thereby also social reality. 5If, today, we
follow a direct call to
act, this act will not be performed in an empty space - it will be an act within the hegemonic
ideological coordinates- those who "really want to do something to help people" get
-involved in (undoubtedly honourable) exploits like Medecins sans frontieres -,Greenpeace, feminist and anti-racist
campaigns, which are all not only tolerated but even supported by the media, even if they seemingly encroach an economic territory (for
example, denouncing and boycotting companies which do not respect ecological conditions, or use child labour - they are tolerated
and supported as long as they do not get too close to a certain limit. This kind of activity
provides the perfect example of interpassivity: of doing things not in order to achieve
something, but to prevent something from really happening, really changing . All this frenetic
humanitarian, politically Correct, etc., activity fits the formula of "Let's go on changing something all the time so that, globally, things will
remain the same!". If standard Cultural Studies criticize capitalism, they do so in the coded way hat exemplifies Hollywood liberal paranoia: the
enemy is "the system", the hidden "organization", the anti-democratic "conspiracy", not simply capitalism and state apparatuses. The
problem with this critical stance is not only that it replaces concrete social analysis with a
struggle against abstract paranoiac fantasies, but that - in a typical paranoiac gesture - it
unnecessarily redoubles social reality, as if there were a secret Organization behind the
"visible" capitalist and state organs. What we should accept is that there is no need for a secret " organization-within- an-
organization": the "conspiracy" is already in the "visible" organization as such, in the capital
system, in the way the political space and state apparatuses work.
A/T: Capitalism Good
Frontline
1. The bad outweighs the good, c/a the impact work from earlier.
2. Even if there are SOME good things about capitalism, we solve
the bad.
3. Reject their evidence- information has been commodified; there
is an economic incentive to falsely portray capitalism as
beneficial
Marsh 95 [Professor of Philosophy at Fordham University, PhD from
Northwestern University (James, Critique Action and Liberation, p
296-7]
(D) We witness the development of the culture industry in media such as
newspapers, magazines, radio, movies, and television. A capitalist "identity logic" extends its
sway over more and more of national and social reality, incorporating
or denying or completely absorbing or obliterating the noncapitalist
or precapitalist other. Such industries are genuine industries owned
by big corporate giants such as CBS' or ABC and, therefore, interested in making
money and in legitimizing money-making as a way of life. They play ,
therefore, the economic role of selling products and the ideological role of encouraging
attitudes serving corporate objectives in advertising, programming, and reporting. Chomsky, as

we have seen, shows the biased way U.S. media reported on the elections in EI Salvador, Nicaragua, and Guatemala in the 1980s.
By all the reasonable standards of a free, democratic election, such as multiplicity of candidates, free press, lack of pressure to vote,
and absence of terror, Nicaragua's was far more democratic than either Guatemala's or El Salvador's. Yet according to media like
The New York Times or CBS, Nicaragua's election approached being totalitarian and EI Salvador and Guatemala were virtual
showplace exercises in democracy. (E) Politics is progressively commodified . More and more,
rather than being an enterprise of communicative praxis, politics becomes an exercise of selling the president. Rather than being a
discussion of issues, politics becomes an exercise in public relations and marketing; good looks become more important than good
ideas. Nixon's bad appearance in the 1960 debates with Kennedy was as significant or more significant than Nixon's bad ideas. (F)
the explosion of new information technologies such as
We note
computers, data banks, and VCRs interacting with other media such as television, radio, and
movies in such a way as to enhance these and give them new life. Here again, the same double economic and ideological roles are
played out. IBM and Apple are businesses selling products, inviting each one of us to purchase a very expensive home computer.
The information available through computers becomes useful to buying and selling, and stock market transfers are rendered
efficient, expanded, and centralized in a way that they were not before. Computers contribute to a process of automation in which
human beings are replaced with technology, production rendered more profitable, and capitalist control more efficient. Relative
surplus value arises in a new guise. Old friends, or enemies, come dressed in new clothes bearing gifts. This work of art very
: the basic capitalist control
powerfully and succinctly sums up the points made in the preceding discussion
of media and society, the way in which television functions as a part of a consciousness industry, the role
of the media in making money and legitimizing capitalist hegemony
and legitimacy, the reification and commodification of the individual
consumer, the winning of assent to a degraded, unjust status quo. One is tempted to say to the postmodernist after
reading such lines, "mode of information, indeed," except that such a response would be one-sided. It is still the same mode of
production, I would argue, the same capitalist beast in modem dress, but the role of information is an aspect of a new regime of
Information as Baudrillard, Poster, and others have
capitalist accumulation, what I will later call "flexible accumulation."
defined it has become essential to capitalism in the way that science, technology, mass media, and
an interventionist state did earlier. I do not wish to overstate or oversimplify the above point. Even though a hegemony is exercised
by the consciousness industry, such hegemony is always going to be contested, contradictory, won from a context of struggle
among competing groups. In contrast to the impression sometimes given by theorists such as Baudrillard and Adorno, hegemony is
late capitalist media are caught in a
never total. Like the late capitalist state,
contradictory tension between accumulation and legitimization,

capitalist oligarchy and democracy. Like the state, any given constellation of media policies and
programming is contested terrain, an outcome of struggle. For this reason significant differences can be present between different
time periods. In the 1930s in the United States, the Federal Communication Commission was established to insure that media
operate in "the public interest, convenience, and necessity." Because of democratic pressures exerted from below, the necessity
and legitimacy of regulation was institutionalized. In the 1960s and 1970s the media gave far more play to diversity of opinion and
Bush led efforts to
critical leftist opinion, programming, and activities than in the 1980s, in which Reagan and
restrict diversity of opinion in programming, decrease government

regulation of media, and inhibit criticism of capitalism. In the 1960s the left used the
media to publicize its own activities and agenda; in the 1980s a more conservative media responded by not reporting or
the takeover of NBC by General
underreporting such events and such an agenda. In the 1980s
Electric highlighted the growing, tighter link between media and big
business. Media are not only businesses committed to making money but tend to legitimize and
publicize and glorify money-making as a way of life and to inhibit or
discourage critique from the left. Thus. an intrinsic contradiction exists

between the media's institutionalized commitment to open, free,
disinterested reporting of news and their commitment to
accumulation.
AT: “Aff = Good Cap”
Single-issue campaigns like the affirmative are nothing more than
masking reforms that promote the grips of the system. The only
escape from capitalism is ideological destruction, anything less only
serves to promote it.
Herod 2006, political activist, Columbia graduate, 06 (James,
“Strategies that have failed”
http://site.www.umb.edu/faculty/salzman_g/Strate/GetFre/05.htm)
10. Single-issue campaigns. We cannot destroy capitalism with single-issue campaigns.
Yet the great bulk of the energies of radicals is spent on these campaigns . There are dozens of them:
campaigns to preserve the forests, keep rent control, stop whaling, stop animal experiments, defend abortion rights, stop toxic dumping,
stop the killing of baby seals, stop nuclear testing, stop smoking, stop pornography, stop drug testing, stop drugs, stop the war on drugs, stop police brutality, stop union busting, stop red-
lining, stop the death penalty, stop racism, stop sexism, stop child abuse, stop the re-emerging slave trade, stop the bombing of Yugoslavia, stop the logging of redwoods, stop
the spread of advertising, stop the patenting of genes, stop the trapping and killing of animals for furs, stop irradiated meat, stop genetically modified foods, stop human cloning, stop the death squads in
Colombia, stop the World Bank and the World Trade Organization, stop the extermination of species, stop corporations from buying politicians, stop high
stakes educational testing, stop the bovine growth hormone from being used on milk cows, stop micro radio from being banned, stop global warming, stop the militarization of space, stop the killing of the oceans,
and on and on.What we are doing is spending our lives trying to fix up a system which generates
evils far faster than we can ever eradicate them. Although some of these campaigns use direct action (e.g., spikes in the trees to stop the chain
saws or Greenpeace boats in front of the whaling ships to block the harpoons), for the most part the campaigns are directed at passing
legislation in Congress to correct the problem. Unfortunately, reforms that are won in one decade,
after endless agitation, can be easily wiped off the books the following decade, after the
protesters have gone home, or after a new administration comes to power . These struggles all have value and
are needed. Could anyone think that the campaigns against global warming, or to free Leonard Peltier, or to aid the East Timorese ought to be abandoned? Single issue
campaigns keep us aware of what's wrong, and sometimes even win. But in and of
themselves, they cannot destroy capitalism, and thus cannot really fix things. It is utopian to believe that we
can reform capitalism. Most of these evils can only be eradicated for good if we destroy
capitalism itself and create a new civilization. We cannot afford to aim for anything less.
Our very survival is at stake. There is one single-issue campaign I can wholehearted
endorse: the total and permanent eradication of capitalism.
AT: Realism
1. No link: We don’t advocate a breakdown of the state.
2. Realism isn’t true:
A) Doesn’t assume nonstate actors like terrorists organizations
or Greenpeace.
B) At the head of every state is still an irrational individual –
security is zero-sum and so you never know what the state is going to
do.
C) Free trade is a counterexample to realism: proves that not
everything revolves around the states.
3. Realism has nothing to do with capitalism: under realism, all states
are treated as identical units; means their authors don’t assume our
critique.
AT: Morality Based Turns / Claims
Morality impacts make no sense in a capitalist world: moral questions will
inevitably be subordinated to capitalism.
Trainer 1996 – Senior Lecturer, School of Social Work, University of New South Wales [Ted, Towards a Sustainable Economy, Jon Carpenter Oxford Publishing, pp. 79-80]
The need for a moral economy Clearly,a major problem with our economic theory and practice is that they
leave little place for morality. Many extremely important decisions affecting people's welfare are made
without reference to what would be morally acceptable. They are made solely on the
basis of what will make most money. It has been argued above that there are many other, usually much more important factors, such as what things humans
need, what developments would build better cornrnunities and political systems, what would preserve cultural uniqueness, and especially what would maximise ecological sustainability. Decisions
which maximise returns to owners of capital often have adverse effects in several or all
of these areas, yet in our economy this factor is allowed to determine what is done . No other
economic system humans have ever developed has functioned in this way. All previous economies ensured that 'moral' factors, such as social customs setting a 'just price', were the main determinants of
They
economic activity. Market forces and the profit motive were typically given little or no role. Our present economic system and the theory which underlies it obscure the great misery they cause.
deceive us into accepting grossly inhuman consequences. Several sections of this book explain how our economic system is the
main factor producing the hunger and deprivation suffered by hundreds of millions of people. Yet this causal connection is not well understood, because we have been led to
believe that the market system is natural, efficient and desirable, and that it 'rewards
factors of production in proportion to their contributions'. This prevailing ideology leads
most people to believe that we are not exploiting the Third World and we are not causing
hunger; we are only trading with them, investing and doing normal business. As Bookchin says, ' ... our present economy is grossly immoral... The
economists have literally "demoralised" us and turned us into moral cretins'. I Similarly, economic theory claims that when an item
becomes scarce its price rises automatically, as if this is a law of nature independent of human will. In fact, the price rises only because individual sellers eager to maximise their income put it up as quickly as they
can. Our economic theory obscures the fact that it is not scarcity but human greed which makes prices rise. Above all, economic theory leads us to think that the supremely important goal is to 'get the economy
The fact that this siphons wealth to the rich, deprives the poor, develops the
going', to stimulate growth.
wrong industries and in the Third World starve millions is obscured.

AT: No Solvency / Inevitable / Cede the Pol
Ours is a violent job that can never be done. No, we will not succeed. Yes,
there will be violence that can at times be insurmountable. But nonetheless
we must continue and we must engage as the schizophrenic.
DELEUZE AND GUATTARI 1972 , Anti-Oedipus, 381-2
What, finally, is the opposition between schizoanalysis and psychoanalysis, when the negative and positive tasks of
schizoanalysis are taken as a whole? We constantly contrasted two sorts of unconscious or two interpretations of the unconscious: the one schizoanalytic, the other psychoanalytic; the one
schizophrenic, the other neurotic-Oedipal; the one abstract and nonfigurative , the other
imaginary; but also the one really concrete, the other symbolic; the one machinic, the
other structural; the one molecular, microphysical, and micrological, and the other molar or statistical; the one material, the other
ideological; the one productive, the other expressive. We have seen how the negative task of schizoanalysis must
be violent, brutal: defamiliarizing, de-oedipalizing, decastrating; undoing theater, dream, and fantasy; decoding, de
territorializing-a terrible curettage, a malevolent activity. But everything happens at the same time. For at the same time the process is
liberated-the process of desiring-production, following its molecular lines of escape that

already define the mechanic's task of the schizoanalyst. And the lines of escape are still
full molar or social investments at grips with the whole social field: so that the task of
schizoanalysis is ultimately that of discovering for every case the nature of the libidinal
investments of the social field, their possible internal conflicts, their relationships with the preconscious investments of the same field, their possible conflicts with these-in
short, the entire interplay of the desiring-machines and the repression of desire. Completing the process and not arresting it , not making it turn about in
the void, not assigning it a goal. We'll never go too far with the deterritorialization, the decoding of flows. For the
new earth ("In truth, the earth will one day become a place of healing") is not to be found in the neurotic or perverse reterritorializations that arrest the process or assign it goals; it is no more behind than ahead,
it coincides with the completion of the process of desiring-production , this process that
is always and already complete as it proceeds, and as long as it proceeds. I t therefore
remains for us to see how, effectively, simultaneously, these various tasks of
schizoanalysis proceed.
AT: Pragmatism
Understanding capitalism’s pervasive tendencies and the
psychological reasoning behind the system allows us to escape
current modes of political thought – searching for pragmatic political
solutions locks us into the dominant and oppressive structures of the
status quo.
Zizek 04 [Zizek, professor of sociology at the Institute for Sociology,
Ljubljana, 2004; (Slavoj, Žižek is a senior researcher at the Institute of
Sociology University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, and a professor at
the European Graduate School.[4] He has been a visiting professor at,
among others, the University of Chicago, Columbia
University, London Consortium, Princeton University, New York
University, The New School, the University of Minnesota,
the University of California, Irvine and the University of Michigan. He
is currently the International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the
Humanities at Birkbeck, University of London and president of
the Society for Theoretical Psychoanalysis, Ljubljana, “Iraq: The
Borrowed Kettle – Utopia and the Gentle Art of Killing.” Pg. 113-114,
http://books.google.com/books?
id=LGxif5RsttUC&printsec=frontcover&dq=the+borrowed+kettle&ei=v
GtoSsahEZHyMrGk3aUB)]
Democracy qua ideology functions
Thus the present crisis compels us to rethink democracy itself as today’s Master-Signifier. principally
as the space of a virtual alternative: the very prospect of a change in

power, the looming possibility of this change, makes us endure the
existing power relations – that is to say, these existing relations are stabilized, rendered tolerable, by the false opening. (In a strict homology, subjects accept there
The opponents of capitalist

economic situation if it accompanied by an awareness of the possibility of change – ‘good luck is just around the corner’.)
globalization like to emphasize the importance of keeping the dreams

alive: global capitalism is not the end of history, it is possible to think
and act differently only full
– what, however, if it is this very lure of a possible change which guarantees that nothing will actually change? What if it
acceptance of the desperate closure of the present global situation

that can push towards actual change? the virtual alternative In this precise way,
displays an actuality of its own it is a positive ontological ; in other words,
constituent of the existing order.

AT: Clarify World
We do not need to identify what the world looks like after our alternative.
Our “no” to the face of capitalism occurs within the current oppressive
bourgeois society as a dynamic force. Living in a world where we have
economic consciousness is unhappy consciousness. The good life starts
after we begin the struggle against the falsehood of the bourgeois society.
Bonefeld 09(Werner, Reader in the Department of Politics: University of York UK, “Negativity and Revolution: Adorno and
Political Activism”, http://books.google.com/books/about/Negativity_and_Revolution.html?id=ED0QAQAAIAAJ)IG
To say no to something is simple. But to say what the no is is difficult .

For one, the no is not external to but operates within society’s false
totality. Like Marx’s summons of class struggle as the motor of history, the no drives the negative
world forward. It is its dynamic force (see Heinrich 1982). Furthermore, to say what
the no is compromises the no insofar as it becomes positive in its
affirmative yes to something that has no valid content except the false
totality of bourgeois society itself. The no is immanent to the false society; it belongs to its concept.
Horkheimer’s (1981: 150) statement “I can say what is wrong, but I cannot say what is
right” is thus apt. The no not only drives the negative world forward, it
also posits uncertainty. Adorno’s negative dialectics ponders the practical dimension of this uncertainty, cannot
accept it and rejects it as pseudo-activity – the collapse of working-class politics in the face of Fascism and Nazism has left a
permanent imprint. Adorno’s conception of bourgeois society entails the experience of the concept. The experience of the concept is
Auschwitz. In conclusion, Adorno’s negative dialectics has to be studied, especially in
miserable times. Its courageous delivery of the concept of bourgeois
society operates like the proverbial mole which, according to Marx,
prepares for the revolution by tunneling through the defenses. The mole is a
philosophical mole. Once its work is done, the mole departs. Its departure demands that Adorno’s
confrontation of the concept of reality with its experience be brought

down to “the real life-activity” (see Marx 1978: 154) of the unhappy
consciousness in struggle. Man’s existence as an economic category
does not entail reduction of consciousness to economic
consciousness. It entails the concept of economy as an experienced
concept, and economic consciousness as an experienced consciousness. At the
very least, economic consciousness is an unhappy consciousness. It is
this consciousness that demands reconciliation: “freedom turns

concrete in the changing forms of repression as resistance to
repression. There has been as much free will as there were men with the will to be free” (Adorno 1973: 265). That is to
say, Adorno’s (1974: 39) statement that one cannot live honestly in the false totality of
bourgeois society is only partially correct – an honest life begins already

in the struggle against the falsehood of bourgeois society. In distinction to
Adorno, then, those who claim to want freedom but refrain from struggling
against bourgeois society contradict themselves.

A/T: Capitalism Inevitable
AT: Cap Inevitable—General
We are the only alternative—extend Tumino—our task is to achieve the
intellectual conditions for revolution, not the revolution itself
Their stubborn pragmatism conceals a fetish for the system—universalism
shatters this
Johnston ‘4 Adrian Johnston, interdisciplinary research fellow in psychoanalysis at Emory University, December 2004, Journal for the
Psychoanalysis of Culture & Society, v9 i3 p259
Furthermore, Zizek claims, the fetishist, by clinging to some object endowed with an
excessive, disproportionate significance, is able to appear to others, not as a delusional
pervert adrift upon the clouds of his/her peculiar fantasies, but, rather, as a hardened, pragmatic realist. The fetishist is
someone who can, whether through stoicism or sarcasm, tolerate the harshness and difficulty of daily existence--" fetishists are not
dreamers lost in their private worlds, they are thoroughly "realists," able to accept the way things effectively
are--since they have their fetish to which they can cling in order to cancel the full
impact of reality" (Zizek, 2001c, p 14). However, if the fetish-object is taken away from the
fetishist, this cynical facade of pragmatic resignation disintegrates,
plunging the subject into depression, despair, or even psychosis (in other
words, the fetishist, bereft of his/her fetish, undergoes what Lacan calls "subjective destitution"; see Zizek, 2001c, p 14). The upshot
of all this is the proposal of a specific guideline for a hermeneutics of

suspicion to be exercised with respect to the manifest, fashionable
attitudes of cynical resignation and pessimistic realism prevalent amongst the
denizens of today's capitalist polis--"So, when we are bombarded by claims that in our post-ideological cynical era nobody believes in the
proclaimed ideals, when we encounter a person who claims he is cured of any beliefs, accepting social reality the way it is, one should always
counter such claims with the question: OK, but where is the fetish that enables you to (pretend to) accept reality "the way it is?"" (Zizek, 2001c,
p 15). Naturally, Zizek reminds readers that Marx himself already understood the essentially fetishistic nature of money and commodities
(Marx's descriptions of these entities make reference to "magic," "mystification," and "perversion," to the obfuscation of the actual conditions
of material reality by pathological fantasies condensed into the form of objects circulating within the socio-economic process of exchange; see
if the small salaries and various
Marx, 1906, pp 81, 105; 1967b, pp 826-827). The implication is hence that
little techno-gadget toys of today's late-capitalist subjects were to be

taken away from them, their pretense to being realistically accepting
of the status quo would be dropped immediately (Zizek, 1999b, p 68). In the Zizekian
contemporary world, fetishism isn't an aberrant, deviant phenomenon, but, instead, a virtually innate structural feature of social reality, a
necessary coping technique for the subjects of reigning ideologies. Although one might have the distinct impression that these concepts are
meant to be specific to the historical conditions of late-capitalist societies, Zizek speaks of the dynamic involving cynicism, fetishism, and the
displacement of belief as an ahistorical necessity, a universal feature of the human condition--"the phenomenon of the "subject supposed to
believe" is ... universal and structurally necessary" (Zizek, 1997, p 106). He then proceeds to stipulate that, "by means of a fetish, the subject
"believes through the other"" (Zizek, 1997, p 120). So, fetishism and the "subject supposed to believe" are inherent to any and every human
reality. At this level, Zizek alights upon an answer to the question as to why capitalism in particular appears to have become so triumphantly
successful in ideologically marketing itself as the only tenable socio-economic option around. As Zizek himself remarks, the contemporary
political imagination has reached a point of debilitating closure; barring a cataclysmic breakdown prompted by an internal economic implosion
or an externally imposed catastrophe (whether imposed by nature or "terror"), capitalism appears, in the social imaginary, as the new
"thousand year Reich," as capable of enduring indefinitely in the absence of any contingent traumatic disruptions. Predominant collective
fantasies concerning contemporary politics thus terminate with the forced choice of "capitalism or nothing": either the positive socio-economic
program of capitalist, liberal-democratic ideology, or the negative alternative of an anarchic, apocalyptic lack of any system whatsoever (rather
than, for example, the choice between competing ideological visions such as capitalism versus communism). According to this pervasive
mindset, capitalism may very well be rotten, but it's the only viable alternative going (Zizek, 1999b, p 55; 2000c, p 10). One cannot help but hear
echoes of this dilemma summed up in the title of Lacan's nineteenth seminar: "... ou pire" ("... or worse") (see Zizek, 1989, p 18; 1996, p 4;
1997, p 105, 120; 2001b, p 166). One is similarly reminded of Winston Churchill's comments regarding democracy (made during his November
11th, 1947 speech to the British House of Commons)--"No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that
democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time."
History is not over. We represent the global majority who are oppressed by
capital. The failure of revolutionary politics is not a historical necessity—we can
still win
Murphy et al. ‘4 John Murphy, Professor of Sociology at the University of Miami, Manuel Caro Associate Professor of Sociology at
Barry University, and Jung Min Choi, Professor of Sociology at San Diego State Universty, “Globalization With A Human Face,” 2004 p2-3
What is diabolical is that the market is touted to hold everyone’s future. Because persons no longer direct history, but are simply products of
this process, there appears to be no alternative to the spread of markets and their worldwide integration. And anyone who chooses another
approach to conceptualizing order—an alternative social or economic logic—is simply obstinate and denying reality. The logic of the market is
deemed irrefutable. Furthermore, the image that is emanating from most political leaders in Europe and North America is that utopian thought
is passé. The days of what Marcuse called the “Great Refusal” are long past.4 For many observers, history has delivered the best of possible
worlds—an economic windfall to select groups that will eventually enhance everyone. What persons need now are patience and perseverance,
groups are becoming restless. In their opinion, the
and the magic of the market will do the rest. But many
ideology of the market has become stale and an impediment to

achieving a better life. Stated simply, they have not abandoned their utopian ideals of fairness and justice, and are
looking for ways to realize these aims. In some cases, revolutionary fervor persists. But in general, they have decided to challenge the inherent
They are saying “enough,” and are
ability of history to deliver a more propitious future.
searching for alternative models of economic regulation and social

order. As a result, large numbers of persons have been protesting in most major cities over the spread and costs of neoliberalism.
Although most mainstream politicians have been deaf to these calls for a more responsible order, the chants for a new direction continue. And
contrary to the claims made by many pundits, these protesters have
not abandoned their utopian impulse and have decided to make a
different history. In other words, they have recognized that only ideology can
bring history to an end, and that the recent picture created by this
political device is an illusion. They have understood, accordingly, that history ends only
when no more persons are left to decide their own fate. The invitation
extended to join the globalized world is thus considered by many to
be a ruse to get persons to jettison their own perspectives on the
future. To prosper, all they have to do is assimilate to specific political mandates that have been cloaked in historical necessity. But critics
of globalization have decided to change the rules of history and defy this view of progress. Their refusal, however, will not necessarily destroy
the newly globalized world has
civilization, as some conservative critics claim, but merely expose how
been rigged in favor of the rich and ignores the needs and desires of
most persons. The powerful and their supporters scream that these
challenges are irrational and doomed to fail. Without a doubt, if these
powerful forces continue to meddle in the social experiments of
others, defeats will likely occur. But these failures have nothing to do
with flaunting the laws of history or human nature. They occur most
often because the rich and powerful want to discredit alternatives to
their worldview and thus undermine any threats to their social or
economic privileges.
Saying there’s no alt to cap is the real utopian fantasy—prefer dialectical theory
Johnston ‘4 Adrian Johnston, professor of philosophy at University of New Mexico, "The Cynic's Fetish: Slavoj Zizek and the Dynamics
of Belief," International Journal of Zizek Studies, Vol. 1, 2004
A brief remark by Žižek hints that, despite his somewhat pessimistic assessment of traditional Marxism, he basically agrees with the Marxist
the demise of capitalism is an inevitable, unavoidable
conviction that
historical necessity—“The ultimate answer to the reproach that the

radical Left proposals are utopian should thus be that, today, the true
utopia is the belief that the present liberal-democratic capitalist
consensus could go on indefinitely, without radical changes .”151 This
hurling of the charge of utopianism back at those making it is quite
convincing. In fact, any system proclaiming to be the embodiment of “the
end of history” invariably appears to be utopian. Given what is known
about the merciless march of history, believing that an ultimate,
unsurpassable socio-political arrangement finally has arrived is
almost impossible. So, one should indeed accept as true the
unlikelihood of capitalism continuing on indefinitely; it must
eventually give way to something else, even if this “x” cannot be
envisioned clearly from within the present context. Nonetheless, Žižek’s own theorizing
calls for a great deal of cautious reservation about the consequences of embracing this outlook as true, of falling into the trap of (to invoke this
motif once more) lying in the guise of truth. Just as the combination of a purely negative, critical Marxism with the anticipation of the event of
the act-miracle threatens to turn into an intellectual fetish (in the Žižekian ideological sense of something that renders the present reality
bearable), so too might acknowledging the truth of capitalism’s finitude have the same unfortunate side-effect. One can tolerate today’s
capitalism, because one knows that it cannot last forever; one can passively and patiently wait it out (at one point, Žižek identifies this
anticipation of indeterminate change-yet-to-come as a disempowering lure, although he doesn’t explicitly acknowledge that his own work on
ideology sometimes appears to be enthralled by just such a lure152). In both cases, the danger is that the very analyses developed by Žižek in
his assault upon late-capitalist ideology might serve to facilitate the sustenance of the cynical distance whose underlying complicity with the
present state of affairs he describes so well.
AT: Cap Inevitable—Greed
They naturalize historical formations—greed is a product of structural economic
incentives—any other explanation is arbitrary and illogical
Alt solves—extend Tumino—the development of communism as historical
necessity aligns individual and common interest around society that provides
for the needs of all as determined by all
AT: Cap Inevitable—Environmentalism
Accepting capitalism is particularly damning to environmentalism—human
survival is possible only if we reject their ‘crackpot realist’ unwillingness to face
capital’s imminent collapse
Blackwater ’12 Bill Blackwater, freelance writer and journalist, associate editor of the quarterly Renewal: A Journal of Social
Democracy, “The Denialism of Progressive Environmentalists,” Monthly Review, June 2012, Vol. 64, Issue 2, p. 10-21
The supposed trump card of Nordhaus and Shellenberger, and all such progressive
environmentalists, is their purported realism. In practice this is simple
conformity with the interests of the dominant economic and political
power structures of the day. This means acceding to the related
imperatives of financialized capitalism: accepting that both
opportunities for growth be continually expanded, and that the self-
identification of the electorate as materialistic consumers be fostered
and pandered to—even if that means occluding the grounds for
collective action. It is in these terms that they attempt to redefine environmentalism, and in the process
disparage the efforts of all environmentalists whose arguments pose
uncomfortable challenges to the status quo. They characterize all who
are not with them as utopians, for them the ultimate in damning with
faint praise. Mixed into the realism of the progressive
environmentalist is a love of power. It stands to reason, they believe, that
anyone who does not work within the terms set by the powerful will
never share in power, and is therefore a fool. They regard the green movement as a whole precisely as the wider New
Democrat/New Labour mentality regards the left as a whole: well-meaning, woolly, oppositionalist, self-indulgent, self-defeating, and pathetic.
Ideologically pure the others may be; yet if they sincerely cared about the interests they said they were fighting for, they ought to fall into line,
however much they might detest it, behind the realists who might actually wield some practical influence. There is no alternative. At other
times less crude versions of this doctrine, especially ones which promised real hope of reforming the system from within and of gaining power
to change power, have had much to recommend them; this is the foundation for the historic successes of social democracy. But things are
in this context, environmental limits preclude
different now. Above all,
continuation of the status quo. Progressive environmentalists pride

themselves on their realism and in being intimates of the power
structures of the present. However, those same structures are doomed to
collapse, and belief in them is only sustained by denial, so this
realism is in fact the very height of fantasy—“crackpot realism,” to adapt
the phrase C. Wright Mills used to describe the mentality of the Cold War.12
A/T: Growth Good
Unsust. – Monopoly Capital
Monopoly capitalism’s tendancy towards short-term growth leads to long-run
stagnation—wealth centralization in corporations and finance restricts macro-
level liquidity and intellectual innovation
Foster and McChesney ’12 John Bellamy Foster, professor of sociology at University of Oregon, and Robert W. McChesney,
Gutgsell Endowed Professor of Communication, University of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign, “The Endless Crisis,” Monthly Review, May 2012, vol.
64, issue 1, pp. 1-28
Our own analysis in this book begins in many ways where Sweezy (and Harry Magdoff) left off, and carries forward as well the analysis of John
What Sweezy called the
Bellamy Foster and Fred Magdoff in The Great Financial Crisis: Causes and Consequences (2009).40
“intricately related” aspects of monopolization, stagnation, financialization, and

globalization have produced a new historical phase, which we refer to as
“monopoly- finance capital.” In this period the Triad economies are locked in a
stagnation-financialization trap, while linked to the growth in the emerging
economies via the global labor arbitrage—whereby multinational corporations
exploit the differences in wage levels in the world in order to extract surplus
profits. The result is the worsening of the overall problem of surplus capital
absorption and financial instability in the center of the world economy. In this book we
are particularly concerned with how this is working out at the global level, with considerable focus (in the later chapters) on how this is related
the central problem remains overaccumulation within the
to the Chinese economy. Yet,
Triad, where the United States, despite its declining hegemony, still constitutes
the trend-setting force in the world system of accumulation. The deepening
effects of stagnation in the U.S. economy can be seen in Chart 2, showing the long-run
downward trend in the growth rate of industrial production in the United
States. Nor is the United States alone in this respect. Since the 1960s West Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Italy, and Japan have
all seen even larger declines, when compared to the United States, in their trend-rates of growth of industrial production. In the case of Japan
industrial production rose by 16.7 percent in 1960–70 and by a mere 0.04 percent in 1990–2010.41 The story shown in Chart 2 is
one of deepening stagnation of production— already emphasized by Sweezy and Magdoff in the 1970s and
‘80s. Chart 3, in contrast, reveals that this led—especially from the 1980s on—to a shift in the economy from
production to speculative finance as the main stimulus to growth. Thus the FIRE
(finance, insurance, and real estate ) portion of national income expanded from
35 percent of the goods-production share in the early 1980s to over 65 percent

in recent years. The so-called economic booms of the 1980s and ‘90s were powered
by the rapid growth of financial speculation leveraged by increasing debt,
primarily in the private sector. The dramatic rise in the share of income
associated with finance relative to goods production industries has not,
however, been accompanied by an equally dramatic rise of the share of jobs in
financial services as opposed to industrial production. Thus employment in FIRE as
a percentage of employment in goods production over the last two decades has
remained flat at about 22 percent. This suggests that the big increase in income
associated with finance when compared to production has resulted in outsized
gains for a relatively few income recipients rather than a corresponding increase
in jobs.42 The rapid expansion of FIRE in relation to goods production in the U.S.
economy is a manifestation of the long-run financialization of the economy , i.e., the
shift of the center of gravity of economic activity increasingly from production (and production-related services) to speculative finance. In
the face of market saturation and vanishing profitable investment opportunities

in the “real economy,” capital formation or real investment gave way before the
increased speculative use of the economic surplus of society in pursuit of capital
gains through asset inflation. As Magdoff and Sweezy explained as early as the 1970s, this could have an
indirect effect in stimulating the economy, primarily by spurring luxury
consumption. This has become known as the “wealth effect,” whereby a portion
of the capital gains associated with asset appreciation in the stock market, real
estate market, etc. is spent on goods and services for the well-to-do, adding to
the effective demand in the economy.43 Yet, the stimulus provided by
financialization has not prevented a multi-decade decline in the role of
investment in the U.S. economy. Thus net private nonresidential fixed
investment dropped from 4 percent of GDP in the 1970s to 3.8 percent in the
‘80s, 3 percent in the ‘90s, and 2.4 percent in 2000–2010 .44 At the heart of the
matter is the declining long-term growth rate of investment in manufacturing,
and more particularly in manufacturing structures (construction of new or refurbished manufacturing
plants and facilities), as shown in Chart 4.45 Even with declining rates of investment growth,
productivity increases in industry have continued, leading to the expansion of

excess productive capacity (an indication of the overaccumulation of capital). This can be seen in Chart 5 showing the long-
term slide in capacity utilization in manufacturing. High and rising levels of unused (or excess) capacity
have a negative effect on investment since corporations are naturally reluctant

to invest in industries where a large portion of the existing capacity is standing
idle. The U.S. automobile industry leading up to and during the Great Recession (like
the worldwide industry) was faced with huge amounts of unused capacity—equal to
approximately onethird of its total capacity. A 2008 Businessweek article underscored the global auto glut:
“With sales tanking from Beijing to Boston, automakers find themselves in an embarrassing position. Having indulged in a global orgy of factory-
building in recent years, the industry has the capacity to make an astounding 94 million vehicles each year. That’s about 34 million too many
The decreasing
based on current sales, according to researcher CSM Worldwide, or the output of about 100 plants.”46
utilization of productive capacity is paralleled by what we referred to in 2004 as “The

Stagnation of Employment,” or the growing unemployment and
underemployment that characterizes both the U.S. economy and the economies
of the Triad in general. According to the alternative labor underutilization measure, U6, of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, a
full 14.9 percent of the civilian work force (plus marginally attached workers)
were unemployed or underemployed on a seasonally adjusted basis in the
United States in February 2012.47 In these circumstances, the U.S. economy, as we
have seen, has become chronically dependent on the ballooning of the financial
superstructure to keep things going. Industrial corporations themselves have

became financialized entities, operating more like banks in financing sales of
their products, and often engaging in speculation on commodities and
currencies. Today they are more inclined to pursue the immediate, surefire gains
available through merger, acquisition, and enhanced monopoly power than to
commit their capital to the uncertain exigencies associated with the expansion
of productive activity. Political-economic power has followed the financial
growth curve of the economy, with the economic base of political hegemony
shifting from the real economy of production to the financial world, and
increasingly serving the interests of the latter, in what became known as the
neoliberal age.48 The main key to understanding these developments, however, remains the Sweezy Normal State. The long-
term trends associated with economic growth, industrial production,
investment, financialization, and capacity utilization (as shown in Charts 1–5 above) all point to
the same phenomenon of a long-term economic slowdown in the U.S. and the
other advanced industrial economies. A central cause of this stagnation
tendency is the high, and today rapidly increasing, price markups of monopolistic
corporations, giving rise to growing problems of surplus capital absorption.
Taking the nonfarm business sector as a whole, the price markup on unit labor
costs (the ratio of prices to unit labor costs) for the U.S. economy over the entire post-Second
World War period averaged 1.57, with a low of around 1.50 in the late 1940s.
However, from the late 1990s to the present the markup on unit labor costs —what
the great Polish economist Michal Kalecki referred to as the “degree of monopoly”— has climbed sharply, to 1.75 in
the final quarter of 2011. As stated in The Economic Report of the President, 2012: “The markup has now
risen to its highest level in post-World War II history, with much of that increase
taking place over the past four years. Because the markup of prices over unit
labor costs is the inverse of the labor share of output, saying that an increase in
the price markup is the highest in postwar history is equivalent to saying that
the labor share of output has fallen to its lowest level.” 49
Unsust. – Jevon’s Paradox
Try or die—the growth imperative risks total planetary destruction and social
breakdown
Foster et al. ’10 John Bellamy Foster, professor of sociology at University of Oregon, Brett Clark, assistant professor of sociology at
North Carolina State University, and Richard York, associate professor of sociology at University of Oregon, “Capitalism and the Curse of Energy
Efficiency,” Monthly Review, November 2010, Vol. 62, Issue 6, pp. 1-12
The result is the production of mountains upon mountains of commodities,
cheapening unit costs and leading to greater squandering of material resources.
Under monopoly capitalism, moreover, such commodities increasingly take the form
of artificial use values, promoted by a vast marketing system and designed to
instill ever more demand for commodities and the exchange values they
represent—as a substitute for the fulfillment of genuine human needs.
Unnecessary, wasteful goods are produced by useless toil to enhance purely
economic values at the expense of the environment. Any slowdown in this
process of ecological destruction, under the present system, spells economic
disaster. In Jevons’s eyes, the “momentous choice” raised by a continuation of business
as usual was simply “between brief but true [national] greatness and longer
continued mediocrity.” He opted for the former—the maximum energy flux. A century and a half later, in our much
bigger, more global—but no less expansive—economy, it is no longer simply
national supremacy that is at stake, but the fate of the planet itself. To be sure, there
are those who maintain that we should “live high now and let the future take
care of itself.” To choose this course, though, is to court planetary disaster. The
only real answer for humanity (including future generations) and the earth as a whole is to
alter the social relations of production, to create a system in which efficiency is
no longer a curse—a higher system in which equality, human development,
community, and sustainability are the explicit goals.
Unsust. – Peak Resources
Resource extraction necessarily peaks under capitalist exchange—marginal
costs outweigh benefits of increasingly expensive production
Korowicz ’11 David Korowicz, physicist & human-systems ecologist at Feasta & independent consultant, “On the cusp of collapse:
complexity, energy, and the globalised economy,” Fleeing Vesuvius, 10/8/2011, http://fleeingvesuvius.org/2011/10/08/on-the-cusp-of-
collapse-complexity-energy-and-the-globalised-economy/
The phenomenon of peaking — be it in oil, natural gas, minerals or even fishing
— is an expression of the following dynamics. With a finite resource such as oil, we
find in general that which is easiest to exploit is used first. As demand for oil
increases, and knowledge and technology associated with exploration and
exploitation progress, production can be ramped up. New and cheap oil
encourages new oil-based products, markets and revenues, which in turn
provide revenue for investments in production. For a while this is a self-
reinforcing process but eventually the reinforcement is weakened because the
energy, material and financial costs of finding and exploiting new production
start to rise. These costs rise because, as time goes on, new fields become more
costly to discover and exploit as they are found in smaller deposits, in deeper
water and in more technically demanding geological conditions. In some cases,
such as tar sands, the oil requires very advanced processing and high energy and
water expenditures to be rendered useful. This process is another example of
declining marginal returns. The production from an individual well will peak and
decline. Production from an entire oilfield, a country and the whole world will
rise and fall. Two-thirds of oil-producing countries have already passed their
individual peaks. For example, the United States peaked in 1970 and the United
Kingdom in 1999. The decline has continued in both cases. It should be noted that both
countries are home to the worlds’ best universities, most dynamic financial
markets, most technologically able exploration and production companies, and
stable, pro-business political environments. Nevertheless, in neither case has
decline been halted. As large old fields producing cheap oil decline, more and more effort must be
made to maintain production with the discovery and production from smaller
and more expensive fields. In financial terms, adding each new barrel of production (the
marginal barrel) becomes more expensive. Sadad al-Huseini said in 2007 that the technical floor (the basic cost of
producing oil) was about $70 per barrel on the margin, and that this would rise by $12 per annum (assuming demand was maintained by
economic growth). [15] This rapid escalation in the marginal cost of producing oil is recent. In early 2002, the marginal cost of a barrel was $20.
It is sometimes argued that there is a huge amount of oil in deposits such as the
Canadian tar sands. The questions this claim raises are “When will it be on-
stream?”, “At what rate can oil be made available?”, “What is the net energy
return?” and “Can society afford the cost of extraction?” If less available net
energy from oil were to make us very much poorer, we could afford to pay even
less. Eventually, production would no longer be viable as economies could no longer
afford the marginal cost of a barrel. In a similar vein, our seas contain huge reserves of
gold but it is so dispersed that the energetic and financial cost of refining it
would far outweigh any benefits (Irish territorial waters contain about 30 tons).
Unsust. – Environment
Capitalism’s unsustainable—environmental externalities—prefer systemic
theory
Foster ’11 John Bellamy Foster, professor of sociology at the University of Oregon, “Capitalism and the Accumulation of Catastrophe,”
Monthly Review, 12/1/2011, http://monthlyreview.org/2011/12/01/capitalism-and-the-accumulation-of-catastrophe
Human purposes are extraordinarily fragile
In analyzing the causes of the conservation of catastrophe, McNeill explained: “
because they never take full account of the circumstances on which they
impinge, and every so often act as triggers, provoking results that were not
imagined by those who precipitated them. It follows…that the more skillful human beings
become at making over natural balances to suit themselves, the greater the
potential for catastrophe.”4 If we were to look for an historical antecedent for this argument, we could not do better than to turn to Frederick Engels’s
Dialectics of Nature, written in the 1870s. In Engels’s words: “Every day that passes we are acquiring a better understanding of these [nature’s] laws and getting to perceive both the immediate
and the more remote consequences of our interference with the traditional course of nature.” As a result of the development of science, we are “more than ever in a position to realize, and
hence to control…the more remote natural consequences of at least our day-to-day production activities.” Consequently, human beings increasingly “not only feel but also know their oneness
the present mode of production is

with nature.” Nevertheless, the contradiction enters in when we recognize that “
predominantly concerned only about the immediate, the most tangible result,”
and proceeds on that basis only. “Surprise is expressed that the more remote
effects of actions directed to this end [of economic development and wealth
accumulation] turn out to be quite different, are mostly quite the opposite in character.” We discover too
late that in the pursuit of our self-interested and shortsighted ends we are
undermining the very conditions of production. “What cared the Spanish
planters in Cuba,” Engels asked, when “they burned down forests on the slopes of the
mountains and obtained from the ashes sufficient fertilizer for one generation
of very highly profitable coffee trees—what cared they that the heavy tropical
rainfall afterwards washed away the unprotected upper stratum of the soil,
leaving behind only bare rock!” In heedlessly removing forests for the sake of
production and profits people unwittingly remove everything forests provide: The
people, who in Mesopotamia, Greece, Asia Minor and elsewhere, destroyed the forests to obtain cultivable land, never dreamed that by removing along with the forests the collecting centers
and reservoirs of moisture that they were laying the basis for the present forlorn state of those countries. When the Italians of the Alps used up the pine forests on the southern slopes, so
carefully cherished on the northern slopes, they had no inkling that by doing so they were cutting at the roots of the dairy industry of their region; they had still less inkling that they were
thereby depriving their mountain springs of water for the greater part of the year and making it possible for them to pour still more furious torrents on the plains during the rainy seasons. All
our growing science in this area, Engels added, was negated if we could not address the reality of capitalist production and its dire effects on the environment—thereby inviting the “revenge”
of nature.5 The late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw the development of an acute awareness among natural scientists of the destruction of the natural environment, extending to
concerns over local and regional climate change. The power of the human social system to transform the earth in destructive ways was recognized as never before. This was evident in the
work of such leading scientific figures as Horace Bénédict de Saussure (1740–99), Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859), Matthias Schleiden (1804–81), Charles Lyell (1797-1875), George
Perkins Marsh (1801–82), Charles Darwin (1809–82), and Carl Nikolaus Fraas (1810–75). Growing apprehensions regarding the disastrous consequences of the human transformation of the
environment arose initially out of a recognition of the negative, long-term effects of recent European expansion into previously unknown or relatively inaccessible regions, particularly the
tropics and island environments, and to some extent the Alpine regions of Europe. Moreover, the increasing awareness of the human capacity to degrade whole regions encouraged scientists
to investigate the role of human agency in the desertification of parts of the Middle East, North Africa, and Mediterranean Europe.6 The Swiss geologist De Saussure concluded in 1779, as a
result of his studies of Alpine lakes, that water levels had decreased in modern times due to the cutting of forests.7 Likewise the German geographer Alexander von Humboldt determined in
his explorations that the water level in a lake in Venezuela, which he visited in 1800, had diminished due to deforestation. In a much-quoted passage, he wrote: “By felling the trees which
cover the tops and sides of mountains, men in every climate prepare at once two calamities for future generations; want of fuel and scarcity of water.”8 The German botanist Schleiden, one of
the pioneers in cell theory, wrote extensively on the human destruction of the natural environment. Schleiden was particularly concerned with climate change in historical times, and saw
humanity as a factor in triggering such changes. In carrying out “his” actions, “man,” he argued in The Plant: A Biography (1848), brings about “results which surprise even himself, because he
does not at the moment mark the gradually accumulating consequences of his labours…nor led by necessary knowledge foresee the final results.” There were strong indications in the
historical records, Schleiden insisted, “that those countries which are now treeless and arid deserts, part of Egypt, Syria, Persia, and so forth, were formerly thickly wooded, traversed by
streams,” but were now “dried up or shrunk within narrow bounds” and exposed to the full force of the sun. He attributed these changes to the environment in historical time primarily to the
disappearance of forests by human hand. “Behind him,” Schleiden concluded, “he [man] leaves the Desert, a deformed and ruined land” and is guilty of the “thoughtless squandering of
vegetable treasures…. Here again in selfish pursuit of profit, and, consciously or unconsciously, following the abominable principle of the great moral Vileness which one man has expressed,
‘après nous le déluge,’ he [man] begins anew the work of destruction.”9 About the same time as Schleiden’s discussion of climate change, the German agronomist Fraas published his
influential work, Climate and the Plantworld (1847), which focused on the human destruction of the forests of Mesopotamia, Persia, Palestine, Egypt, and southern Europe. Arguing against
seeing such environmental change as due purely to natural causes, he emphasized the importance of human beings in generating more arid climates in these regions. “The developing culture
of people,” Fraas wrote, “leaves a veritable desert behind it.”10 Both Lyell and Darwin in England were concerned with the enormous destruction that humanity had in recent times wrought
on the environment, and with questions of climate change. Lyell noted in his Principles of Geology in 1832: “The felling of forests has been attended, in many countries, by a diminution of rain,
as in Barbados and Jamaica.” Looking at these processes dialectically, he argued: “There can be no doubt that the state of the climate, especially the humidity of the atmosphere, influences
vegetation, and that, in its turn, vegetation reacts upon the climate.” Lyell called this “the reciprocal action of vegetation and climate.” Humanity increasingly interfered with this reciprocal
action by clearing forests. Even more important than deforestation in altering the overall environment, for Lyell, was “the drainage of lakes and marshes,” since this greatly modified “the
general climate of a district.”11 Darwin provided his most impassioned testimony on the human destruction of the environment in relation to his visit to the isolated island of St. Helena during
the famous voyage of the Beagle. In his 1839 Journal of Researches into the Geology and Natural History of the Various Countries Visited During the Voyage of the HMS Beagle he commented
extensively on the devastating deforestation wrought since the introduction of goats to the island at the beginning of European settlement in 1502. “So late as the year 1716,” he wrote, there
were many trees [in the area previously called the Great Wood], but in 1724 the old trees had mostly fallen; and as goats and hogs had been suffered to range about, all the young trees had
been killed…. The extent of surface probably covered by wood at a former period, is estimated at no less than two thousand acres; at the present day scarcely a single tree can be found there.
It is also said that in 1709 there were quantities of dead trees in Sandy Bay; this place is now so utterly desert that nothing but so well attested an account [the records left by Alexander
Beatson] could have made me believe that they could ever have grown there.12 The growing anxiety of scientists over human destruction of the natural environment, including local and
regional climate change, had a considerable effect on Marx and Engels. Not only did they pay constant attention to developments in natural science—they were close students of the work of
Schleiden, Fraas, Lyell, and Darwin, and were familiar with the contributions of De Saussure and Humboldt—but they added to this their own historical-materialist critique of capitalist-
ecological destruction. Marx admired Fraas, both as an agronomist and for his analysis of climate change. He regarded Fraas’s Climate and the Plantworld, in particular, as “proving that climate
and flora change in historical times,” i.e. in the period of human history. Summing up Fraas’s views, Marx wrote: “With cultivation—depending on its degree—the ‘moisture’ so beloved by the
peasants gets lost (hence also the plants migrate from south to north)…. The first effect of cultivation is useful, but finally devastating through deforestation, etc…. The conclusion is that
cultivation—when it proceeds in natural growth and is not consciously controlled (as a bourgeois he [Fraas] naturally does not reach this point)—leaves deserts behind it. Persia, Mesopotamia,
etc., Greece. So once again an unconscious socialist tendency!”13 Likewise Engels took careful notes from Fraas’s book, writing that it constituted “the main proof that civilization is an
antagonistic process that, in its form up to the present, has exhausted the land, devastated the forests, rendered the land unfertile for its original crops and made the climate worse. Prairies
and the increased heat and dryness of the climate are the consequences of culture [civilization].”14 In Capital Marx echoed Schleiden’s earlier argument, contending that capital accumulation
the critique of
is heedless in the destruction of its own human and natural bases, operating on the principle of “Après moi le déluge!”15 At all times
environmental destruction developed by Marx and Engels pointed to the

conservation of catastrophe under capitalism. Engels wrote in The Dialectics of Nature that human beings,
through conscious action in accord with rational science, are capable of rising to
a considerable extent above “the influence of unforeseen effects and
uncontrolled forces.” Yet, even with respect to “the most developed peoples of
the present day” there is “a colossal disproportion between the proposed aims
and the results arrived at,” such “that unforeseen effects predominate and…the
uncontrolled forces are more powerful than those set into motion according to
plan.” The reason for this was that as long as production, in class-dominated society, was itself
“subject to the interplay of unintended effects from uncontrolled forces” and
achieved “its desired end only by way of exception,” more often producing “the
exact opposite,” a rational approach to nature was impossible .16 Marx’s most direct contribution to the
critique of ecological destruction of course was his theory of metabolic rift, which I have examined extensively elsewhere. This was derived from what Marx called “Liebig’s soil exhaustion
theory,” whereby industrialized agriculture by removing the nutrients (such as nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium) from the soil and shipping them to the cities, sometimes hundreds and
Marx employed the concept of metabolism

thousands of miles, undermined the recirculation of these nutrients back to the soil.
to explain the necessary relation of human beings to the earth through

production, and argued that a rift or break had developed in the metabolic
cycle. Hence, this “eternal natural condition for the lasting fertility of the soil”
demanded its “systematic restoration.” Nevertheless, the metabolic rift was
“irreparable” for capitalist society. Driven by its accumulation motive, capital
was unable to limit its destructiveness or to follow the precepts of natural
science. Indeed, “the more a country proceeds from large-scale industry as the
background of its development,” Marx argued, “the more rapid is the process of
destruction.” The problems created by this rift in the human-natural metabolism would therefore
accumulate, even if they were shifted around—creating a growing imperative of
ecological restoration. Indeed, it was here that Marx stressed that it was “one of Liebig’s immortal merits” to have developed “from the point of view of natural
science the negative, i.e. destructive side of modern agriculture” (emphasis added).17 Similar views on the rising scale of ecological degradation in capitalist society were to be expressed by E.
Ray Lankester, a friend of Darwin, Huxley, Marx, and William Morris, and the leading Darwinian biologist in England in the generation after Darwin himself. Lankester read and benefitted from
Marx’s Capital and was one of the two members of the British Royal Society at Marx’s funeral. He was a strong materialist and exhibited socialist sympathies, albeit of the more Fabian variety.
He was also the most powerful critic of ecological destruction in his time, known for his essays on the extinction of species and human degradation of the environment.18 In his article, “The
Effacement of Nature by Man,” written before the First World War, Lankester pointed to the unconscious destruction of the earth. “Very few people,” he wrote, have any idea of the extent to
which man…has actively modified the face of Nature, the vast herds of animals he has destroyed, the forests he has burnt up, the deserts he has produced, and the rivers he has polluted. It is
[in]…the cutting down and burning forests of large trees that man has done the most harm to himself and the other living occupants of many regions of the earth’s surface…. Forests have an
immense effect on climate, causing humidity of both the air and the soil, and give rise to moderate and persistent instead of torrential streams…. Areas of destruction of vegetation [were]
often (though not always), both in Central Asia and North Africa (Egypt, etc.), started by the deliberate destruction of forest by man. “It is not ‘science,’” Lankester insisted, “that will be to
blame for these horrors”: the destruction of the earth and the natural environment of living species, undermining the conditions of “future generations.” Rather, should civilization-threatening
disasters “come about they will be due to the reckless greed and mere insect-like increase of humanity.” Although depicting uncontrolled population growth as a factor in ecological
degradation, Lankester had no doubt about the main force at work, declaring elsewhere that capitalist businesses were “necessarily by their nature, devoid of conscience,” and were
impersonal mechanisms “driven by laws of supply and demand.”19 Lankester was the mentor of Arthur Tansely, another materialist scientist and Fabian-style socialist, who founded the British
Ecological Association. Tansley is most famous for introducing the concept of ecosystem—in conflict with the idealist, indeed outright racist, strand of ecology, associated with General Smuts
in South Africa. The socialist wing of the ecological movement—including leading Marxist scientists such as Lancelot Hogben and Hyman Levy, but also figures like Tansley and H.G. Wells—
were strongly opposed to the idealist-racist ecology promoted by Smuts and his adherents. But it was Tansley who introduced the most effective critique. In his famous 1935 article on “The
Use and Abuse of Vegetational Concepts and Terms,” Tansley developed the ecosystem concept as the basis for a materialist ecology, relying heavily on the dialectical-systems analysis
provided in Levy’s The Universe of Science. Central to Tansley’s argument was the recognition of “the destructive human activities of the modern world.” Humanity, he argued, was “an
exceptionally powerful biotic factor which increasingly upsets the equilibrium of previous ecosystems and eventually destroys them.” Human beings were thus capable of what he called
“catastrophic destruction” in relation to the environment. This meant that scientific-materialist ecology needed to be introduced as a rational counter to such irrational tendencies imbedded in
contemporary society.20 At about the same time that Tansley introduced the ecosystem concept, another protégé of Lankester, the esteemed British biologist, J.B.S. Haldane, one of the
originators of the neo-Darwinian synthesis and a Marxist, wrote an essay entitled “Back to Nature,” critically taking up this slogan already present in his time. Haldane argued that humanity
might have to give up some of the wasteful “artificialities” of commodity society in order to maintain a sustainable relation to the earth. Yet, the real need in this respect, he insisted, was to
create an entirely different socioeconomic system, beyond capitalism; in which case the more essential aspects of civilization, representing genuine human needs, could be preserved.21
Hence, even prior to the Second World War, ecologists, particularly those who combined their concern for nature with socialist views, were clear that a radical change in the relation between
production and the environment was needed—one requiring foresight and planning. The Heterogeneity of Ends and the Need for Rational Ecological Planning The argument that I have
advanced up to this point suggests that ecological science can be thought of as arising out of the growing conflict between the developing capitalist system and the planetary environment. The
birth of scientific ecology represented the slowly emerging recognition of what Marx called the “negative, i.e. destructive side” of industrialization “from the point of view of natural science.”
Some of the most perceptive scientists, especially those with a socialist bent, recognized already in the nineteenth century (and in the opening decades of the twentieth century) that humanity
had become a natural force, unconsciously unleashing unprecedented ecological destruction on the earth. Going against the dominant celebration of capitalist industrialization as an unalloyed
triumph over nature, some of the most acute observers in the scientific community were aware, a century or more ago, that catastrophe in the human relation to nature had not been
overcome, but rather had been in a sense conserved, even accumulating in potential with the development of human productive powers. Just as the short-term power of humanity over nature
increased along with the scale of the economy, so did the long-run potential for ecological (and economic) catastrophe. For dialectical thinkers like Marx and Engels the social-ecological
problem was seen through the prism of a materialist-dialectical philosophy of revolutionary social change. This can be understood in terms of what is known as the “heterogeneity (or
individual and
heterogony) of ends”—a concept introduced by the German psychologist and philosopher Wilhelm Wundt in his Ethics (1886). Wundt argued that
collective goals shift over time as a result of the unforeseen effects on the
natural and social environment. The pursuit of immediate aims often produces
unintended negative consequences, leading to radically new conditions and
actions—a “mutation of motives.” For Wundt the contradiction associated with the
heterogeneity of ends was most tragically apparent in societies “where egoism
rules supreme.” The question there was: “What do the living care for future generations? ‘Après nous le déluge,’ they will say, until the flood sweeps them away with the
words on their lips.”22 Yet, the heterogeneity of ends also stood for the capacity of human
beings to respond in radically new ways to changing conditions. Ironically, given the nature of Wundt’s
critique, the heterogeneity of ends is often associated in today’s scholarship with “invisible hand explanations” of social organization such as those of Adam Smith, whereby the pursuit of
individual greed is seen as leading paradoxically to the greater good for society as a whole. Conservative twentieth-century thinkers like Michael Polanyi and Friedrich Hayek expanded this into
a theory of “spontaneous order,” fundamental to contemporary neoliberalism. In this view, the unintended consequences of selfish and acquisitive behavior, if left to themselves, inevitably
produce social equilibrium, in an analogue to divine providence. This has generated a kind of secular religion dominating the approach to economy and environment in capitalist society, which
supposedly obviates the need for a social role for science, rational planning, or democratic agency.23 Yet, the more dialectical view of the heterogeneity of ends associated with thinkers such
the unintended consequences

as Hegel, Marx, and Wundt, is far removed from this one-sided notion of spontaneous order. It suggests instead that
of our actions can be negative as well as positive, producing disequilibrium as

well as equilibrium, destruction as well as construction—and giving rise to a
radical transmutation of motives in response to crises/catastrophes . Wundt clearly drew his
inspiration in part from Hegel’s complex notion of the “cunning of reason,” which emphasized that the “passions of individuals” governing historical action frequently lead to tragedy, loss, and
when Marx argued (from a socialist-

destruction—out of which human reason, for Hegel, ultimately triumphs (by means of the modern bourgeois state).24 Hence,
materialist rather than liberal-idealist standpoint) that there was a tendency for cultivation to leave deserts
behind it, and that this necessitated rational, scientific planning—constituting

what he called “an unconscious socialist tendency”—he was presenting a
dialectical notion of the heterogeneity of ends with respect to human-natural
interactions. In this view, the advent of ecological crisis/catastrophe necessitates
conscious, collective action aimed at the “systematic restoration” of the human
metabolism with nature. What was being called for, in the emerging ecological thought of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, was the rational
regulation of the human-nature relation. However, “this regulation” of the social-ecological metabolism, Engels observed, “requires something more than knowledge. It requires a complete
revolution in our hitherto existing mode of production, and simultaneously a revolution in our whole contemporary social order.”25 “So active has civilization been” in the “destruction” of
natural conditions, Marx critically observed in relation to forests, that “everything that has been done for their conservation and protection is insignificant in comparison.”26 The contradictory
result of such meager attempts to protect natural conditions under the prevailing social order is often simply to strengthen the main tendency to destruction. Thus the capitalist system has
long sought to overcome problems of (1) deforestation, by very limited reforestation; (2) drought and desertification, simply through irrigation and drawing down groundwater sources; (3)
species extinction, by protecting a few keystone species; and (4) depletion of soil nutrients, through the production of synthetic fertilizers. This constitutes an overall ameliorative approach to
conservation, which, due to the very limited and contradictory nature of the “solutions,” is in many ways self-defeating, reinforcing the accumulation of catastrophe. Thus, the overuse of
nitrogen and phosphorus fertilizers, introduced in response to systematic soil depletion, has contributed massively today—a century and a half after the soil depletion problem was diagnosed
by Liebig—to the eutrophication of surface water bodies (a condition in which nutrient-rich waters induce the growth of algae resulting in the depletion of dissolved oxygen, threatening fish
and other aquatic animals). This has become a major factor in the generation of dead zones in coastal waters. The failure to arrest rampant deforestation, desertification, and species
extinction, evident over the centuries, is now worsening global climate change, as each of these destructive impacts on the local and regional environments interact with global warming. All of
in a regime in which capital accumulation is the beginning-

this points to the unavoidable reality that
and-end-all, a sustainable relation to the environment is impossible. “Disaster

capitalism,” as Naomi Klein has called it, is a reflection, not simply of neoliberalism, but of the
underlying tendencies of the system itself.27 So universally disastrous has capitalism become today that our only hope is that a
radical mutation of motives may arise as a result of these changed conditions—giving birth to a historic movement to reverse the course of destruction.
AT: Empirically denied/no impact
Centralization makes the coming collapse worse than in the past
The integration and speed of processes (financial information, capital
movement, supply-chains, component lifetimes, etc.) within the globalised
economy suggest that a collapse will be much faster than those that have gone
before. Furthermore, the level of delocalisation and complexity upon which we
depend, and our lack of localised fall-back systems and knowledge, suggests
that the impacts may be very severe for the most advanced economies. No
country or aspect of human welfare will escape significant impact. Our understanding and
expectations of the world have been shaped by our experience of economic growth. The dynamic stability of that
growth has habituated us to what is ‘normal’. That normal must soon shatter . Our
species’ belle époque is passing and its future seems more uncertain than ever before.
AT: No Limits
Visions of limitless growth must be understood in their historical circumstances
—baby boomer economists have never known anything else, and presume it
will always be this way—only historical and structural analysis shows these
utopian ideologies for what they are
64, issue 1, pp. 1-28
In 1982, speaking three-and-a-half decades after his famous debate with Schumpeter, Sweezy told his listeners at the
Harvard Economics Club that the stagnation question arising out of the Great
Depression had been “dropped without any satisfactory answer…. Reality is
now posing it again,” demonstrating that “the burial of stagnation was, to say the
least, premature.” However, what had fundamentally changed things since (beyond the
growth in government spending) was the increased reliance on the promotion of credit/debt
as a long-term stimulus to counter stagnation: Let me digress for a moment to point out that the fact
that the overall performance of the economy in recent years has not been much worse than it actually has been,
or as bad as it was in the 1930s, is largely owing to three causes : (1) the much
greater role of government spending and government deficits ; (2) the enormous
growth of consumer debt, including residential mortgage debt, especially during the 1970s;
and (3) the ballooning of the financial sector of the economy which, apart from the
growth of debt as such, includes an explosion of all kinds of speculation, old and
new, which in turn generates more than a mere trickledown of purchasing
power into the “real” economy, mostly in the form of increased demand for
luxury goods. These are important forces counteracting stagnation as long as they last, but there is always the danger that if
carried too far they will erupt in an old-fashioned panic of a kind we haven’t
seen since 1929–33 period. 36 There could hardly have been a more far-sighted
description of the contradictions of U.S. capitalism , pointing ahead to the Great
Financial Crisis of 2007–09, and to the conditions of severe economic stagnation
that arose in its wake. These warnings, however, went unheeded, and no resurrection of the stagnation debate occurred in
the 1980s. Addressing the failure of younger generations of left economists to take up the question, Magdoff and Sweezy observed in
Stagnation and the Financial Explosion in 1987: We both reached adulthood during the 1930s, and it was then
that we received our initiation into the realities of capitalist economics and politics. For us economic stagnation in its
most agonizing and pervasive form, including its far-reaching ramifications in every aspect of social life, was
an overwhelming personal experience. We know what it is and what it can
mean; we do not need elaborate definitions or explanations. But we have gradually learned, not altogether to our surprise of
course, that younger people who grew up in the 1940s or later not only do not share but also do not understand
these perceptions. The economic environment of the war and postwar periods
that played such an important part in shaping their experiences was very
different. For them stagnation tends to be a rather vague term, equivalent perhaps to a longer-than-usual recession but with no
implications of possible grave political and international repercussions. Under these circumstances, they find it
hard to relate to what they are likely to regard as our obsession with the
problem of stagnation. They are not quite sure what we are talking about or what all the fuss is over. There is a
temptation to say: just wait and see, you’ll find out soon enough .37 Yet, rather than ending
with such a pronouncement, Madgoff and Sweezy went on to explain in the remainder of their book why a stagnation tendency was so deeply
embedded in mature monopoly-capitalist societies, prone to market saturation, and why financialization had emerged as a desperate and
ultimately dangerous savior. In their chapter on “Production and Finance,” they introduced a systematic analysis of the relation of the
productive base of the economy to the financial superstructure (or as they also called it the relation of the “real economy” to finance),
accounting for the increasingly shaky financial structure on top of a “stagnant productive sector.”38 In his final article, “More (or Less) on
Sweezy depicted the
Globalization,” written in 1997, fifty years after the Sweezy-Schumpeter debate,
overaccumulation problem of developed capitalism in terms of three conditions :

(1) growing monopolization at the global level with the expansion of
multinational corporations, (2) the slowing down (or deepening stagnation) of the
Triad economies, and (3) the “financialization of accumulation process.” For Sweezy,
these three trends were “intricately related” and anyone wanting to understand
the future of the capitalist economy needed to focus on their interrelation, and
their presence within a capitalist system that was more and more globalized .39
Despite the optimism of your hack authors, finite limits to growth exist –
countermeasures like the switch to renewables won’t prevent the crisis without
a fundamental shift in production.
The above example is revealing but also conceals the fact that, barring some kind of Buck Rogers breakthrough,7 the prospective energy
limits to growth’ exist, no matter what
reckoning is not a happy one, and moots all fanciful predictions. In short, ‘
the director of the IMF thinks, and the current energy brouhaha is a sign of their
drawing near. As a result of this, certain good things are being stirred up, such as the search for more fuel-efficient cars, even if this
has for its chief motive the putting of more cars on the road. Along the same lines, resource substitution is always on the agenda, but this, too,
requires great inputs of energy, and, in the case of plastics and other synthetics, the direct transforming of petroleum and coal. It is a
plain illusion that the informational commodities on which modern, ‘post-industrial’
capitalism has learned to thrive sit more lightly on the earth .8 The infrastructure for the
information age is as impressive in its way as the railroads, and much less likely to be recyclable — for the simple reason that
informational commodities require the miniaturization of highly complex
assemblies involving many substances, in contrast to the relatively homogeneous bases of older industrial
processes. How are we to reclaim economically the many rare metals joined together in even modest personal computers, as these become
obsolete the day before they are made? Do we burn them in huge numbers — as I have been told takes place in China — and thereby release
So long, therefore, as growth is the alpha and omega of the
yet more dioxin into the ecosphere?
economy, we will be eternally chasing our tails in an ever-widening circle of

accumulation. Meanwhile, the industrial system remains utterly dependent on fossil fuels inputs that are radically non-renewable. I
say ‘radically’ to underscore the fact that the whole of capitalist society runs on high-energy chemical bonds laid down by living beings and
concentrated over hundreds of millions of years. Thus we rob the past. The only substitute for this needed concentration is the utterly
unacceptable alternative of nuclear power, with its indisposable wastes. Other modalities, principally the vaunted solar alternative, are simply
too diffuse and too expensive to concentrate to serve the needs of contemporary society much less one that continues to grow according to the
plan of the capitalist elites. It is too easily forgotten that in using solar power, one is starting with what nature had long ago concentrated into
the low-entropy fuels we get at the petrol station. It is life’s gift of low entropy that is essential to the industrial system and that cannot he
replaced except at ruinously high expenditures of energy Electric cars may he non-polluting, but the generation of electricity is not — nor
should we forget that even before the vast increase in electrical generation required to propel our motor vehicle fleet, there is tremendous
pressure to expand the electrical generation grid, now breaking down in places such as California. Again, hydrogen fuel cells offer a non-
polluting energy supply of great promise — but how are we to obtain the hydrogen except by splitting methane or water molecules, once more
requiring prodigious amounts of electricity?’0 In their haste to excoriate the admittedly gruesome energy schemes of the Bush administration,
environmental liberals often overlook the fact that the president is simply being candid in stating that what he asks for is what capitalism
demands. It scarcely bears saying that all measures of increasing the renewability and efficiency
and decreasing the pollution of energy sources — that is, all ‘soft-energy paths — are to be
endorsed, and for the same reason one endorses recycling. What cannot be supported is the illusion
that these measures of themselves can do more than retard the slide toward
ecocatastrophe — a fall that may become precipitous once the inevitable occurs and fossil fuels become uneconomical to extract,
that is effectively run out, as expected within the next half—century 12 Only a basic change in patterns of
production and use can allow ecologically appropriate technologies to have

their beneficial effect. But this means a basic change in need patterns and in the whole way life is lived, which means an
entirely different foundation for society. To the extent to which expectation of technological fixes
blinds us to this, technology may be said to stand in the way of resolving the
ecological crisis.
AT: Growth Inevitable
Large-scale economic growth is a historical aberration, and it’s decidedly non-
linear
We have come to regard continued economic growth as normal, part of the natural order of things. Recessions are viewed as an aberration
in historical
caused by human and institutional weakness, the resumption of economic growth being only a matter of time. However,
terms, economic growth is a recent phenomenon. Angus Maddison has estimated

that Gross World Product (GWP) grew 0.32% per annum between 1500 and 1820;
0.94% (1820-1870); 2.12% (1870-1913); 1.82% (1913-1950); 4.9% (1950-1973);
3.17% (1973-2003), and 2.25% (1820-2003). [3] We tend to see global economic growth in terms of change. We
can observe it through increasing energy and resource flows, population, material wealth, complexity and, as a general proxy, GWP. This can be
viewed from another angle. We could say that the globalising growth economy has experienced a
remarkably stable phase for the last 150 years. For example, it did not grow linearly
by any percentage rate for any time, decline exponentially, oscillate
periodically, or swing chaotically. What we see is a tendency to compound
growth of a few percent per annum, with fluctuations around a very narrow
band. At this growth rate, the system could evolve, unsurprisingly, at a rate to
which we could adapt. The sensitivity felt by governments and society in
general to very small changes in GDP growth shows that our systems have
adapted to a narrow range of variation. Moving outside that range can provoke
major stresses. Of course small differences in aggregate exponential growth have major effects over time, but here we are
concentrating upon the stability issue only. The growth process itself has many push-pull drivers: in
human behaviour; in population growth; in the need to maintain existing

infrastructure and wealth against entropic decay; in the need to employ those
displaced by technology; in the response to new problems; and in the need to
service debt that forms the basis of our economic system.
AT: Growth Resilient
The global economy has some resiliencies but isn’t systemically concrete
One of the great virtues of the global economy is that while factories may fail and links in a supply-chain break, the economy can quickly adapt
This is a measure of the resilience within the
by fulfilling its needs elsewhere or finding substitutes.
globalised economy and is a natural feature of a de-localised and networked

complex adaptive system. But it is true only within a certain context. There are
common platforms or ‘hub infrastructure’ that maintain the operation of the
global economy and the operational fabric as a whole, and the collapse of such
hubs is likely to induce systemic failure. Principal among these are the monetary
and financial system, accessible energy flows, transport infrastructure,
economies of scale and the integrated infrastructures of information technology
and electricity.
Link Turn
In a world without capitalism, human nature drives people to continue to
innovate without monetary incentive
Terry ’80 Roger Terry, author and reviewer, Economic Insanity, 1980, pp. 178-181
While I admit that competition does spur technological growth, and that the by-products of corporate warfare have benefited society in many
competition has also brought us the waste and
ways, I have come to two other beliefs: first, that
inefficiency of planned obsolescence, the curse of a decimated environment,

artificial growth that is becoming a straitjacket rather than a liberating force,
and an economy based on adversarial relationships rather than cooperative
ones; and second, that competition is not the only impetus for improving the human
condition. Indeed, I submit that a noncompetitive environment would actually free
people to be more innovative, more creative, and more directly motivated to make life better for
one another. Regardless of the competitive or noncompetitive nature of their
environment, human beings have an innate desire to improve their individual

and collective condition. And in a noncompetitive environment the risks of failure that deter all but the most daring
innovators would be gone. In short, if we removed the rewards for self-interested innovation, I believe more people would be inclined to share
Ben Franklin's attitude and motives for better¬ing the lives of their neighbors
Only the elimination of capitalism makes sustainable growth possible

Meszaros ‘7 Istvan Meszaros, Hungarian Marxist philosopher and Professor Emeritus at U. Sussex. “The Only Viable Economy,”
Monthly Review, 2007 http://www.monthlyreview.org/0407meszaros.htm
the
The nightmare of the "stationary state" remains a nightmare even if one tries to alleviate it, as John Stuart Mill proposed, through
illusory remedy of "better distribution" taken in isolation. There can be no such

thing as "better distribution" without a radical restructuring of the production
process itself. The socialist hegemonic alternative to the rule of capital requires
fundamentally overcoming the truncated dialectic in the vital interrelationship
of production, distribution, and consumption. For without that, the socialist
aim of turning work into "life's prime want" is inconceivable . To quote Marx: In a higher phase
of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labour, and therewith also the antithesis between
after labour has become not only a means of life but
mental and physical labour, has vanished;
life's prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-round development of the
individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly --
only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and
society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his
needs! 15
These are the overall targets of socialist transformation, providing the compass of the journey and simultaneously also the
Within such a vision of the

measure of the achievements accomplished (or failed to be accomplished) on the way.
hegemonic alternative to capital's social reproductive order there can be no

room at all for anything like "the stationary state," nor for any of the false
alternatives associated with or derived from it." The all-round development of
the individuals," consciously exercising the full resources of their disposable
time, within the framework of the new social metabolic control oriented toward the production of "co-operative wealth,"
is meant to provide the basis of a qualitatively different accountancy : the
necessary socialist accountancy, defined by human need and diametrically
opposed to fetishistic quantification and to the concomitant unavoidable waste.
This is why the vital importance of growth of a sustainable kind can be
recognized and successfully managed in the alternative social metabolic
framework. Such an alternative order of social metabolic control would be one
where the antithesis between mental and physical labor -- always vital for
maintaining the absolute domination over labor by capital as the usurper of the
role of the controlling historical subject -- must vanish for good. Consequently,
consciously pursued productivity itself can be elevated to a qualitatively higher
level, without any danger of uncontrollable waste, bringing forth genuine -- and not narrowly profit-
oriented material -- wealth of which the "rich social individuals" (Marx), as autonomous historical subjects (and rich precisely in that sense) are
fully in control.
Radicalism
Fears of growth decline is ideological blackmail concealing systemic exploitation
Zizek ‘4 Slavoj Zizek, Professor of Sociology at the Institute for Sociology, Ljubljana University, Winter 2004, Critical Inquiry 30, p. 316-17
If the Left were to choose the “principled” attitude of fidelity to its old program, it would simply marginalize itself. The task is a much harder
one: to rethink thoroughly the leftist project, beyond the alternative of accommodating new circumstances and sticking to the old attitude.
Apropos of the disintegration of state socialism two decades ago, one should not forget that, at approximately the same time, the Western
social democratic welfare state ideology was also dealt a crucial blow, that it also ceased to function as the imaginary able to arouse a collective
passionate following. The notion that the time of the welfare state has passed is today a piece of commonly accepted wisdom. What these two
defeated ideologies shared is the notion that humanity as a collective subject has the capacity to somehow limit impersonal and anonymous
sociohistoric development, to steer it in a desired direction. Today, such a notion is quickly dismissed as ideological or totalitarian; the
social process is again perceived as dominated by an anonymous Fate beyond social control.
The rise of global capitalism is presented to us as such a Fate, against which one
cannot fight; one either adapts oneself to it or one falls out of step with history
and is crushed. The only thing one can do is to make global capitalism as human
as possible, to fight for global capitalism with a human face (this is what, ultimately, the Third Way is— or, rather, was – about).
Whenever a political project takes a radical turn, the inevitable blackmail pops
up: “of course these goals are in themselves desirable; however, if we do all of this, international capital will boycott us, the growth
rate will fall, and so on.” The sound barrier, the qualitative leap that occurs when one expands the quantity from local communities to
wider social circles (up to the state itself), will have to be broken, and the risk will have to be taken to organize
larger and larger social circles along the lines of the self-organization of excluded marginal
communities. Many fetishes will have to be broken here; who cares if growth stalls and even becomes negative?
Did we not get enough of the high growth rate whose effects in the social body
were mostly felt in the guise of the new forms of poverty and dispossession? What
about a negative growth that would translate into a qualitatively better, not higher, standard of living for the wider popular strata? That would
have been an act in today’s politics – to break the spell of automatically endorsing the frame, to break out of the debilitating alternative of
either we just directly endorse free market globalization or we make impossible promises about how to have one’s cake and eat it, too, of how
to combine globalization with social solidarity.
AT: Innovation
Growth breeds systemic complexity which reduces marginal returns and
restricts innovation
Complexity can be measured in several ways — as the number of connections
between people and institutions, the intensity of hierarchical networks, the
number of distinct products produced and the extent of the supply-chain
networks required to produce them, the number of specialised occupations, the
amount of effort required to manage systems, the amount of information
available and the energy flows required to maintain them. By all these
measures, economic growth has been associated with increasing complexity . [4] As
a species, we had to become problem solvers to meet our basic needs, deal with
status anxiety and respond to the new challenges presented by a dynamic

environment. The problem to be solved could be simple such as getting a bus or buying bread; or it could be complex, such as
developing an economy’s energy infrastructure. We tend to exploit the easiest and least costly
solutions first. We pick the lowest hanging fruit or the easiest extractable oil
first. As problems are solved new ones tend to require more effort and complex
solutions. A solution is framed within a network of constraints . One of the
system constraints is set by the operational fabric, comprising the given
conditions at any time and place which support system wide functionality. For
modern developed economies this includes functioning markets, financing,
monetary stability, operational supply-chains, transport, digital infrastructure,
command and control, health services, research and development
infrastructure, institutions of trust and socio-political stability. It is what we
casually assume does and will exist, and which provides the structural
foundation for any project we wish to develop. Our solutions are also limited by
knowledge and culture, and by the available energetic, material, and economic
resources available to us. The formation of solutions is also shaped by the interactions with the myriad other interacting
agents such as people, businesses and institutions. These add to the dynamic complexity of the
environment in which the solution is formed, and thus the growing complexity
is likely to be reinforced as elements co-evolve together. As a result, the process of
economic growth and complexity has been self-reinforcing . The growth in the size of the
networks of exchange, the operational fabric and economic efficiencies all provided a basis for further growth. Growing
complexity provided the foundation for developing even more complex

integration. In aggregate, as the operational fabric evolves in complexity it provides the basis to build more complex solutions. The net
benefits of increasing complexity are subject to declining marginal returns — in other
words, the benefit of rising complexity is eventually outweighed by its cost. A
major cost is environmental destruction and resource depletion . There is also

the cost of complexity itself. We can see this in the costs of managing more
complex systems, and the increasing cost of the research and development
process. [5] When increased complexity begins to have a net cost, then
responding to new problems arising by further increasing complexity may be no
longer viable. An economy becomes locked into established processes and
infrastructures, but can no longer respond to shocks or adapt to change. For the
historian Joseph Tainter, this is the context in which earlier civilisations have
collapsed. [6]
AT: Solves Itself
Growth intrinsically can’t solve itself – every expansion of capital by necessity
becomes the justification for further expansion. Even if some can remove
themselves from exploitation, someone else will always be ready to take their
place.
The depth of Marx’s insight should be appreciated: capital is quantitative in its core, and imposes the
regime of quantity upon the world: this is a ‘necessity’ for capital. But capital is equivalently
intolerant of necessity; it constantly seeks to go beyond the limits that it itself has
imposed, and so can neither rest nor find equilibrium: it is irremediably self-contradictory. Every
quantitative increase becomes a new boundary, which is immediately
transformed into a new barrier. The boundary/barrier ensemble then becomes
the site of new value and the potential for new capital formation, which then becomes
another boundary/barrier, and so forth and on into infinity — at least in the logical schemata of capital. Small wonder that the society formed
on the basis of producing for the sake of capital before all else is restlessly dynamic, that it introduces new forms of wealth, and continually
makes the past forms obsolete, that it is obsessed with change and acquisition — and that it is a disaster for ecologies. Since each
this becomes the prescription for the ‘generalized
boundary/barrier is a site for commodity formation,
commodity production’ that is one of capital’s hallmarks . Needless to say, the process does not
occur neatly, as though capitalists sat around and selected their spots for new commodities. To some degree, of course, they do — imagine
network executives trying to develop new sitcoms, or the auto manufacturers a new line of four-wheel drives. But the more interesting
unplanned and more or less spontaneous actions of the system create novel
examples are those where the
conjunctures, which are then seized upon as new places for profitable activity.
The prospects, dear to capitalists, of making businesses out of trading pollution credits or the pharmaceutical industry’s search for new
The constant
antibiotics to meet the new diseases unleashed by ecological destabilization itself are examples of this kind.
creation of anxieties and needs by the restless movement of the system is

constantly funnelled into the circuits of new commodity activity. Does capitalism create an
isolated, anxiety-ridden self whose survival requires being placed upon a market? Well, then, capital will also step in to create commodities to
service this tensely narcissistic state of being — articles of fashion and image, with technologies to service these and a cultural apparatus to go
along — in the case of fashion, say a whole range of magazines, photographic studios, advertising agencies, public relations firms,
Capital’s regime of profitability is one of permanent instability
psychotherapies, etc, etc.
and restlessness. Even in the ruling class, no one ‘rules’ without perpetually proving himself, and the CEO must not only produce
profit but more importantly, increase the rate of profit, or be swiftly tossed aside. One cannot rest content with the given, but must constantly
Growth is simply equated with survival as a capitalist, for anyone who
try to expand it.
fails to grow will simply disappear, his assets acquired by another. No matter
how much one has, one never really has anything: everything must be proved to exist anew the next
day. Hence that well-known trait of the bourgeoisie: no matter how rich they become, they always need to become richer. All the
fabulous ‘growth’ of the last decade has not, by one iota, reduced the drive to
accumulate still more, nor can it ever so long as capital reigns . The sense of having and
possessing dominates all others, precisely because its reality can never be secured. Strictly speaking, individuals can step off
this wheel — make their fortune and retire to raise polo ponies or cabbages. But they cease
thereby being personifications of capital, and others immediately step forward
to take their role.
Capitalism creates systemic ignorance of its inherent ecological destruction
Kovel ‘7 Joel Kovel, former adjunct professor of anthropology at the Graduate Facility in the New School for Social Research and former
Distinguished Professor of Social Studies at Bard, The Enemy of Nature: The End of Capitalism Or the End of the World?, 2007, p. 62
As Kyoto is discredited, the possibility of a socialist alternative emerges, and, with it, the second theme enters. The deciding matter is the
Capitalism is unsustainable as a total system, not simply because it overproduces, but
question of sustainability.
because the whole world it makes is incompatible with ecological balance . As we

have seen, capital generates a society of addiction , as an overweening ego reproduces
itself along the fault lines of destabilized ecosystems . As a result, an immense degree
of self-deception and denial is built into the debate on climate , which tends to minimize the
degree of damage to come, along with the degree of change necessary to build a world that no longer spews intolerable amounts of carbon in
craving for the technological fix that will enable continuing lives of
the air. Hence the
reckless consumerism with the cocoon provide by capital . Trusting blindly in its innovative powers,
people defend themselves against the “really inconvenient truth,” that capitalism led us into this nightmare
and does not have the least clue as to how to free us from it.
AT: Economic Reform Solves
The global economy is a complex-adaptive system—single interventions cannot
hope to effectively forecast and change its macro-level trajectory
The eruption of the EyjafjallajÖkull volcano in Iceland led to the shut-down of
three BMW production lines in Germany, the cancellation of surgery in Dublin,
job losses in Kenya, air passengers stranded worldwide and dire warnings about
the effects the dislocations would have on some already strained economies.
During the fuel depot blockades in the UK in 2000, the supermarkets’ just-in-
time supply-chains broke down as shelves emptied and inventories vanished.
Anxiety about the consequences rose to such an extent that the Home Secretary, Jack Straw,
accused the blockading truckers of “threatening the lives of others and trying to
put the whole of our economy and society at risk”. The collapse of Lehman
Brothers helped precipitate a brief freeze in the financing of world trade as
banks became afraid to accept other banks’ letters of credit. [1] Just as we never consider the
ground beneath our feet until we trip, these glimpses into the complex webs of inter-
dependencies upon which modern life relies only come when part of that web
fails. When the failure is corrected, the drama fades and all returns to normal.
However, it is that normal which is most extraordinary of all . Our daily lives are
dependent upon the coherence of thousands of direct interactions , which are
themselves dependent upon trillions more interactions between things,
businesses, institutions and individuals across the world. Following just one track; each morning I
have coffee near where I work. The woman who serves me need not know who picked the berries, who moulded the polymer for the coffee
maker, how the municipal system delivered the water to the café, how the beans made their journey or who designed the mug. The captain of
the ship that transported the beans would have had no knowledge of who provided the export credit insurance for the shipment, who made
the steel for the hull, or the steps in the complex processes that allow him the use of satellite navigation. And the steel-maker need not have
known who built the pumps for the iron-ore mine, or how the oxygen for the furnace was refined. Every café has customers like me who can
only buy coffee because we are exchanging our labours across the world in ways that are dependent upon the globalised infrastructure of IT
systems, transport and banking. The systems and the myriad businesses upon which they depend are only viable because there are economies
of scale. Our global infrastructure requires millions of users across the world, the ship needs to carry more than coffee beans, and my café
needs more than a single customer. The viability of my morning coffee requires the interactive economic and productive efforts of the
the global economy, and thus our civilisation,
globalised economy. Thinking this way enables us to see that
is a single system. This system’s structure and dynamics are therefore central to
understanding the implications of ecological constraints and, in particular for
this analysis, peak oil.[2] Here are some of its principal features. The global economy is self-organising The usually
seamless choreography of the global economy is self-organising. The complexity
of understanding, designing and managing such a system is far beyond our
abilities. Self-organisation can be a feature of all complex adaptive systems, as
opposed to ‘just’ complex systems such as a watch. Birds do not ‘agree’ together that arrow shapes
make good sense aerodynamically, and then work out who flies where. Each bird simply adapts to its local environment and path of least effort,
with some innate sense of desire and hierarchy, and what emerges is a macro-structure without intentional design. Similarly, our global system
emerges as a result of each person, company and institution, with their common and distinctive histories, playing their own part in their own
The self-organisation reminds us
niche, and interacting together through biological, cultural and structural channels.
that governments do not control their own economies. Nor does civil society.
The corporate or financial sectors do not control the economies within which
they operate. That they can destroy the economy should not be taken as
evidence that they can control it.
AT: Tech Solves
Advancements in innovation breed net greater consumption, requiring ever
more innovation—this magnifies the link to our catastrophe accumulation
arguments
Technological optimists have tried to argue that the rebound effect is small, and
therefore environmental problems can be solved largely by technological
innovation alone, with the efficiency gains translating into lower throughput of energy and materials (dematerialization).
Empirical evidence of a substantial rebound effect is, however, strong. For example,
technological advancements in motor vehicles, which have increased the
average miles per gallon of vehicles by 30 percent in the United States since
1980, have not reduced the overall energy used by motor vehicles. Fuel
consumption per vehicle stayed constant while the efficiency gains led to the
augmentation, not only of the numbers of cars and trucks on the roads (and the
miles driven), but also their size and “performance” (acceleration rate, cruising speed, etc.)—so
that SUVs and minivans now dot U.S. highways. At the macro level, the Jevons
Paradox can be seen in the fact that, even though the United States has
managed to double its energy efficiency since 1975, its energy consumption has
risen dramatically. Juliet Schor notes that over the last thirty-five years: energy expended
per dollar of GDP has been cut in half. But rather than falling, energy demand
has increased, by roughly 40 percent. Moreover, demand is rising fastest in those
sectors that have had the biggest efficiency gains—transport and residential
energy use. Refrigerator efficiency improved by 10 percent, but the number of
refrigerators in use rose by 20 percent. In aviation, fuel consumption per mile
fell by more than 40 percent, but total fuel use grew by 150 percent because
passenger miles rose. Vehicles are a similar story. And with soaring demand,
we’ve had soaring emissions. Carbon dioxide from these two sectors has risen
40 percent, twice the rate of the larger economy. Economists and environmentalists who try to measure
the direct effects of efficiency on the lowering of price and the immediate rebound effect generally tend to see the rebound effect as relatively
once the
small, in the range of 10 to 30 percent in high-energy consumption areas such as home heating and cooling and cars. But
indirect effects, apparent at the macro level, are incorporated, the Jevons
Paradox remains extremely significant. It is here at the macro level that scale effects
come to bear: improvements in energy efficiency can lower the effective cost of
various products, propelling the overall economy and expanding overall energy
use.31 Ecological economists Mario Giampietro and Kozo Mayumi argue that the Jevons Paradox can only be understood in a macro-
improvements in efficiency result in changes in the matrices of
evolutionary model, where
the economy, such that the overall effect is to increase scale and tempo of the
system as a whole.32
Even if innovation in the abstract can be effective, capitalism redirects it
towards unsustainable ends
Most analyses of the Jevons Paradox remain abstract, based on isolated technological effects, and removed from the historical process. They
fail to examine, as Jevons himself did, the character of industrialization. Moreover, they are still further removed from a realistic understanding
An economic system devoted to profits,
of the accumulation-driven character of capitalist development.
accumulation, and economic expansion without end will tend to use any
efficiency gains or cost reductions to expand the overall scale of production.
Technological innovation will therefore be heavily geared to these same
expansive ends. It is no mere coincidence that each of the epoch-making
innovations (namely, the steam engine, the railroad, and the automobile) that dominated the eighteenth,
nineteenth, and twentieth centuries were characterized by their importance in
driving capital accumulation and the positive feedback they generated with
respect to economic growth as a whole—so that the scale effects on the
economy arising from their development necessarily overshot improvements in
technological efficiency.33 Conservation in the aggregate is impossible for
capitalism, however much the output/input ratio may be increased in the
engineering of a given product. This is because all savings tend to spur further capital
formation (provided that investment outlets are available). This is especially the case where core
industrial resources—what Jevons called “central materials” or “staple products”—are concerned.
Resolving growth’s externalities is impossible within a system which is founded
upon them
Lock-in can be defined broadly as an inability to deal with one problem by changing a sub-system in the economy without negatively modifying
our current just-in-time food system and agricultural
others upon which we depend. For example,
practices are hugely risky. As the current economic crisis tightens, those
involved in food production and distribution strive for further efficiencies and
economies of scale as deflation drives their prices down. The lower prices help
maintain welfare and social peace, and make it easier for consumers to service
their debts, which in turn supports our battered banks, whose health must be
preserved or the bond market might not show up at a government auction. As a
result, it is very hard to do major surgery on our food systems if doing so required
higher food prices, decreased productivity and gave a poor investment return .
However, the primary lock-in process is the growth economy itself. We are
attempting to solve systemic ecological problems within systems that are

themselves dependent upon increasing resource depletion and waste . We are
embedded within economic and social systems whose operation we require for
our immediate welfare. But those systems are too optimized, interconnected and
complex to comprehend, control and manage in any systemic way that would
allow a controlled contraction while still maintaining our welfare.
Tech solves none of our alienation or inequality arguments—technological
advances in the context of capitalism only cement status quo domination by
focusing even more power in the hands of the bourgeoise.
Wilkie ‘1 Rob Wilkie, professor in the English department at University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, “Class, Labor and the "Cyber": A Red
Critique of the "Post-Work" Ideology,” Red Critique, Spring 2001, http://redcritique.org/spring2001/classlaborandthecyber.htm
Technological determinism—an idealist theory of capitalist development
presupposing the complete automation of production as the means to
overcoming the core antagonism between capital and labor—has emerged in
the discourses of the left and the right as an attempt to reconcile the
heightened contradictions of capitalism today between the forces and relations
of production, more commonly recognized and discussed in mainstream presses
as the crisis of "globalization." Taking recent developments in communication technologies—the development of the
internet and other "global" information networks required for the organizing of profit production on a transnational scale—as evidence of the
first signs of the coming of a "post-work" epoch of "cyber-machines," the dominant presupposition of the "end of work" declarations by such
theorists as Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Ulrich Beck, and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri is that the development of "cyber" technologies
transforms the primary means of profit production from the exploitation of labor to the "harvesting" of information, thus providing the means
for the liberation of labor from within the limits of capitalist production. This theory of a "cyber-capitalism"
beyond the exploitation of labor—which, as I will argue, is more in line with the "spectral values" of a Weberian
theory of capitalism—far from representing the avant-garde of a new stage of capitalism
is, in actuality, an attempt to legitimate the capitalist mode of production by

presenting production, as Marx argues, "as encased in eternal natural laws independent
of history, at which opportunity bourgeois relations are then quietly smuggled
in as the inviolable natural laws on which society in the abstract is founded"
(Gründrisse 87). That technological determinism has become the dominant manner for understanding advances in the forces of production can
a recent New York
be seen in the way in which such developments are represented in mainstream newspapers. For example,
Times article entitled "Aping Biology: Computer Guides Automated Evolution of a Robot," hailed the creation of a
machine that produces other machines as the first sign of a future in which
robots will entirely replace human labor. The author states, "In the future this technique
could be used to design robots that assemble parts in factories, clean up
chemical spills, or vacuum a home" (online); that is to say, that in the future there will be no
form of "work" that cannot be replaced by that of a machine . However, what is
obscured in this and other celebrations of self-producing technology is that, as Marx
and Engels explain in The Manifesto of the Communist Party, as the forces of production develop under
capitalism, technology replaces—not simply a particular kind of labor ("manual" or

"simple" labor, as the New York Times suggests)—but living labor in general: "The various interests
and conditions of life within the ranks of the proletariat are more and more
equalized, in proportion as the machinery obliterates all distinctions of labor
and nearly everywhere reduces wages to the same low level " (492). What is
occulted in the presentation of the replacing of workers with machinery is while
that the revolutionizing of the means of production is central to capitalist
development in order to secure higher and higher profits, the substitution of
machinery for labor-power inevitably leads to a crisis of production in the
conflict between the development of the forces of production and the hindering
of the relations of production. As Ernest Mandel argues, it is ridiculous to assume the emancipation of labor from the
automation of capital: "The conclusion is obvious: with increasing automation, increasing organic
composition of capital and the onset of a fall in the total man-hours worked by
productive laborers, it is impossible in the long run seriously to continue to
increase real wages and at the same time maintain a constant mass of surplus
value" (210). In suggesting that the contradiction between capital and labor is one of a "residual" dominance of "simple" labor that can be
eliminated by the automation of production, the article "Aping Biology" substitutes the division of labor between "simple" and "complex" labor
that capitalism produces for the cause of exploitation itself, thus proposing that freeing "simple" labor through the automation of production
will eliminate the binary class division by elevating all workers to the level of "complex" laborers. Leaving aside that such a de-
it is capitalism that
hierarchicalization of the division of labor is not possible under capitalism, this argument ignores that
simplifies and increasing eliminates laborers in the drive to reduce socially

necessary labor time in order to intensify exploitation and increase the rate of
profit. In other words, the automation of production is not outside of, but rather is
firmly within the capitalist mode of production. The substitution of the
secondary antagonism between simple and complex labor for that of the
fundamental antagonism between capital and labor is an attempt to
manufacture in the interests of the ruling class resignation among workers to
the ideology that the automation of production somehow will liberate them
from the chains of wage-labor when, in fact, as long as technological
advancement is harnessed to the interests of capitalism, it only further
heightens the contradictions between capital and labor. While advancements in
technology make possible the meeting of the needs of all, the subjection of such
advancements to the production of profit means that what disappears is not
"work" (in the abstract), but rather the means by which millions of workers can meet
their basic needs. The contradiction of the systematic immiseration of the
working class from technological advancement is thus ideologically transformed
in dominant discussions of technology into a "liberatory" potentiality from
within the capitalist relations of production. It is such that the technological determinism that informs
dominant discourses today is thus not simply the "invention" of bourgeois theorists—it is not the effect of "self-generating" ideas—but reflects
While technological advances in the
the real material conditions in which the class struggle is being waged.
means of production have created the potential to meet the needs of the
world's population, the concentration of capital in the hands of the ruling class
means that rather than having their needs met, workers today are subjected to
the most brutal, and intensified, division of labor in which they become, as Marx and
Engels argue, "an appendage of the machine " (491). It is only a revolutionary theory—one
that can explain how the drive of capitalism for increasing profits hinders the
development of the relations of production by turning the development of the
forces of production into means for escalating exploitation and not for meeting
needs—that can enable the proletariat to understand that it is not "technology"
that is at issue, but the capitalist who uses technology to increase exploitation
and, in turn, what is necessary is the seizing of the means of production and
transforming them from the production of profit to the meeting of needs.
AT: Renewables Solve
Free markets for renewables decimate solvency and magnify social inequality
Parr ’13 Adrian Parr, The Wrath of Capital, 2013, p. 15-17
A rising powerful transnational industry is emerging around the research and
development of new technologies that are designed to offset and even save the human race
from global heating. Solar thermal power, electricity generated from wind, and, more recently, advances in geoengineering
(one such initiative reflects solar heat away from the earth) are just a few examples of new green products
entering the market, some of which I critically evaluate in chapter 2 on the voluntary carbon-offset economy. I am modestly
optimistic about these technologies and hope we will continue to put the power of human imagination and problem solving to work in ways
as we work to build a
that might help mitigate climate change and even make life on a heating planet worth bearing. That said,
green free-market economy, where is the incentive to question the economic

framework that is used as the basis for green technological advancement? It is
important to ask the following questions: Who will "own" the patents on new green technologies?
Who will have access to them, and how much will access cost? A few preliminary questions
should be raised around the problem of the political economy in the context of solar power technologies. If solar energy is part of our common
are these technologies part
wealth, are the technologies used to access this resource also part of the global commons? Or
of the free-market economy? If they are, then solar power is just another
commodity to be bought and sold on the free market. Solar technologies are
more effective in certain contexts, such as the United States, southern Europe, and Australia. Given that
solar efficiency decreases the farther you go from the equator, where does this
leave countries such as Russia and Norway? How do you offset the cost of solar
panel installation? Does this mean poor countries with an abundance of solar
power will attract solar power investment? And what are the terms and
conditions of such investment? There is the great potential for solar power to be generated in the developing countries
of the African continent, but such a project would require enormous financial and political investment. Who will bear the burden of this
investment, and how are the benefits to be calculated and distributed? In addition, how can Africans be assured that such investment in their
countries will not end up as a distorted form of colonization? In chapter 8, I raise concerns over the geopolitics of U.S. HIV I AIDS programs for
Africans, looking at the ways in which such humanitarianism is implicated in the geopolitics of oil capitalism. These questions invite
consideration of the political economy and its neoliberal manifestation in particular. Neoliberalism has its roots in the political philosophy of
Adam Smith, who argued in favor of curbing government restrictions and removing the barriers to economic growth. As an economic system,
liberalism really kicked in throughout the 1900s, suffering only a brief setback during the Great Depression of the 1930s. With the laissez-faire
policies of U.K. prime minister Margaret Thatcher (1979-1990) and the fortieth U.S. president Ronald Reagan (1981-1989), a more virulent
By and large, neoliberalism has
strain of liberalism emerged during the 1980s, hence the neo in neoliberalism.
bastardized the fundamentals of liberalism-namely, freedom, rights, and individual choice. In the
name of celebrating individual responsibility and choice, neoliberal policies have
resulted in cutbacks on govern - ment spending, mass privatization, trickle-
down economics, deregulation, open competition, and the gradual
deterioration of the commons. 24 A green free market cannot be presented as
the solution that will automatically- pardon the analogy here-kill two birds with one stone
(new opportunities for market growth and cuts in emissions). The green free market favors the current
system of privatization at the expense of exploring new economic alternatives;
for this reason, it is mere cronyism . It panders to neoliberal forces by
commercializing global heating. In so doing, it reinforces the structural distortions of
economic neoliberalism. There is no direct correlation between global green economic output and
socioeconomic equity, which will happen only if there are mechanisms in place that
can recognize that a green economy has to be fine-tuned in a way that allows it
to become a transformative force that can prompt the development of
economic opportunities for the poor, be a means for wealth redistribu - tion,
and shift the dominant cultural value away from privileging competition,
private-property ownership, and wealth accumulation. An economy is not just a
mode of production; it is also a productive force. It has the potential to change
the current material conditions of life that constitute neoliberalism as the
dominant mode of social, political, economic, and cultural life. This potential
calls for a reconsideration of capital as a transformative mode of social
organization, whereby the definition of society is expanded to include the
flourishing of nonhuman species; ecological cycles, and future lives .
Green tech won’t save anyone—capitalism needs the contradiction of resource
scarcity to drive innovation and growth—economic interests overwhelm
solvency
Harris 11 (Jerry. "Going Green to Stay in the Black: Transnational Capitalism and Renewable Energy." Perspectives on Global
Development and Technology 10.1 (2011): 41-59. Print.)
Marxists environmentalist John Bellamy Foster (1994) makes the point that capitalism can never fundamentally solve the environmental crisis
because it is inherently a system of unending growth and accumulation. As subjectively appealing this argument is for the left, I believe it is
. By environmentally redesigning production,
misplaced in the sense of what capitalism can and cannot do
energy, transportation, architecture and agriculture, capitalism can maintain a

market for goods that reduces inputs and energy. It may not be able to
accomplish this for all commodities, but enough to significantly lessen its abuse
of our planet. If accomplished the cataclysmic clash between capitalism and nature may be postponed for a significant amount of
time. But whether or not the capitalist class has the political will to carrying out
these transformations is another question. Judging by its failures in Kyoto,

Copenhagen and elsewhere capitalism may lose any shred of political legitimacy
long before it can act in a qualitatively transformative manner . To be sure, there are socially-
responsible corporations, scientists and economists who understand the full nature of the challenge ahead. As Kevin Parker, global head of
Deutsche Bank Asset Management said, “the cost of inaction is the extinction of the human race. Period” (Broder 2009). But significant
restraints exist. With short-term focus among neo-liberal speculators, feeble efforts of neo-Keynesian reformers and sabotage by fossil fuel
Chained to the constraints
lobbyists the capitalist system may be unable to respond within the limits of ecological time.
of its economic dogma, important sectors of the capitalist class are unable to
react with long-term planning and the investments needed to build a
sustainable economy. A few examples tell the story. Out of a total of 2,810 climate-change lobbyists in Washington, only 138
support renewable energy (Goodell 2010). And from the total of $250-$300 billion in global energy subsidies, $200 billion go to fossil fuels and
). It is clear that neither the neo-
only $16 billion for renewables (United Nations Environment Programme 2008
liberal nor neo-Keynesian wing of the transnational capitalist class can meet the
challenge. What needs to emerge is a new green hegemonic bloc providing
political leadership with a dominant culture and ideology. Such a change is possible, but even so
green capitalism faces another set of historic problems. What the transnational capitalist class cannot
change is its need for profits and power won through competitive combat.
Therefore, movements towards monopolization, economic rationality and the
exploitation of labor cannot be resolved within the parameters of green
capitalism. There will be a continuing drive to defeat or acquire competing corporations resulting in bankruptcy and unemployment.
Constant pressure to lower costs resulting in lower wages, less benefits and
sweatshop conditions wherever possible. And the need to externalize costs
results in greater burdens on governments and citizens . As Marx pointed out, revolutions occur
when the relations of production hold back the necessary development of society, not the inability of capitalism to revolutionize technology.
Therefore, the contradiction between labor and capital is still key. Green capitalism may very well have the
ability to develop the appropriate technology, but not the means to fully
realize its social organization.
Clean energy production subsidies only pad the pockets of fossil fuel
corporations—the only way out is fundamental economic change
Zehner ’12 Ozzie Zehner, visiting scholar at UC-Berkeley, “Ozzie Zehner: Alternatives to alternative energy,” Bulletin of the Atomic
Scientists 68(5), September 2012, pp. 1-7
the fossil fuel industry as well. I have interviewed people in that industry, and they’re
Zehner: I’m highly critical of
not concerned about electric cars or wind turbines or solar cells at all. They remind me
that it takes a lot of fossil fuel to make a battery. The subsidies to electric cars
ultimately work to the fossil fuel industry’s advantage because they’re a subsidy
to car culture. People in the fossil fuel industry are afraid of regulations and of losing their own subsidies, but solar energy
production isn’t keeping them up at night. They really just don’t care. The threat
is something that is made up in the public imagination. BAS: Renewable energy proponents would
argue that technologies such as solar and wind power aren’t perfect, but that we can’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Aren’t some of
these technologies good enough to make a difference for climate change, given the urgency of the problem? Zehner: First, when we look at the
numbers from researchers like Severin Bornstein and Gregory Nemet, they’ve found that, if we want to advance solar technology, building
fabrication plants is an enormously expensive way to move the technology forward. It would be better to simply spend the money on R&D. And
second, there’s only so much room on the stage. We should focus our spending on
strategies that would have the largest impact, and in my mind that’s on the
demand-reduction side. There’s plenty of low-hanging fruit there. Third, in the United
States, because of this boomerang effect, pursuing production and reduction at the
same time might make the problems we’re confronting worse. Until some
backstops are in place, we cannot assume that an increase in alternative energy
capacity will offset conventional energy production or yield positive
environmental impacts.
A/T: Utopian
AT: Alt = Utopian—Try or Die
Thinking in a utopian manner is an imperative for survival. The risk that we
don’t actualize anything is outweighed by the risk that we do.
Zizek ‘4 Slavoj Zizek, Senior Researcher at the Institute for Social Studies in Ljubljana, 2004, Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle, p. 122-24
The year 1990 – the year of the collapse of Communism – is commonly perceived as the year of the collapse of political utopias: today, we live
in a post-utopian time of pragmatic administration, since we learned the hard lesson of how noble political utopias end in totalitarian terror. . . .
As I noted above, however, the first thing to remember here is that this alleged collapse of utopias was followed by the ten-year rule of the last
grand utopia, the utopia of global capitalist liberal democracy as the ‘end of history’ – 9/11 designates the end of this utopia, a return to the
real history of new walls of conflict which follow the collapse of the Berlin Wall. It is crucial to perceive how the ‘end of utopia’ repeated itself in
a self-reflexive gesture: the ultimate utopia was the very notion that, after the end of utopias, we were at the ‘end of history’. The first thing to
utopia has nothing to do with imagining
do here is to specify what we mean by utopia: in its essence,
an impossible ideal society; what characterizes utopia is literally the

construction of a u-topic space, a social space outside the existing
parameters, the parameters of what appears to be ‘possible’ in the
existing social universe. The ‘utopian’ gesture is the gesture which
changes the co-ordinates of the possible. That was the kernel of the Leninist ‘utopia’ which rose
from the ashes of the catastrophe of 1914, in his settling of accounts with Second International orthodoxy: the radical imperative to smash the
bourgeois state, which meant the state as such, and to invent a new communal social form without a standing army, police or bureaucracy, in
which all could take part in the administration of social affairs. For Lenin, this was no theoretical project for some distant future —in October
1917, he claimed: ‘we can at once set in motion a state apparatus constituted of ten if not twenty million people’. This urge of the moment is
the true utopia. What one should stick with is the madness (in the strict Kierkegaardian sense) of this Lenininst utopia — and, if anything,
Stalinism stands for a return to realistic ‘common sense’. It is impossible to overestimate the explosive potential of The State and Revolution —
in this book, ‘the vocabulary and grammar of the Western tradition of politics was abruptly dispensed with’. What this means is, again, that
utopia’ is a matter of
utopia has nothing to do with idle dreaming about ideal society in total abstraction from real life:
innermost urgency, something we are pushed into as a matter of

survival , when it is no longer possible to go on within the parameters
of the ‘possible’. This utopia has to be opposed both to the standard
notion of political utopias, books containing projects which were
basically not even intended to be realized (from its first supreme case, Plato’s Republic, up to
Thomas More’s Utopia and — not to be forgotten De Sade’s Philosophy in the Boudoir) and to what is usually
referred to as the utopian practice of capitalism itself: commodities evoking utopian

pleasures, the libidinal economy that relies on the dynamic of continuously generating new transgressive desires and practices, right up to
necrophilia (think of the recent proposals to make corpses available to those who need them for their satisfaction).
AT: Alt = Utopian—Epistemology
Their utopianism claims are a product of a flawed epistemological approach to
politics that forecloses possibility for ANY political change.
Zizek 2k Slavoj Zizek, Senior Researcher at the Institute for Social Studies in Ljubljana, 2000. Contingency, Hegemony, Universality, p. 323-
24.
How, then, are we to answer today’s predominant consensus according to which the age of ideologies — of grand ideological projects like
Socialism or Liberalism — is over, since we have entered the post-ideological era of rational negotiation and decision-making, based upon the
neutral insight into economic, ecological, etc. necessities? This consensus can assume different guises, from the neoconservative or Socialist
refusal to accept it and consummate the loss of grand ideological projects by means of a proper ‘work of mourning’ (different attempts to
resuscitate global ideological projects) up to the neoliberal opinion according to which the passage from the age of ideologies to the post-
ideological era is part of the sad but none the less inexorable process of the maturation of humanity —just as a young man has to learn to
accept the loss of grand enthusiastic adolescent plans and enter the everyday adult life of realistic compromises, the collective subject has to
learn to accept the withering-away of global utopian ideological projects and the entry into the post-utopian realist era . The first thing to note
the neutral reference to the necessities of the market economy,
about this neoliberal cliché is that
usually invoked in order to categorize grand ideological projects as
unrealistic utopias, is itself to be inserted into the series of great modern

utopian projects. That is to say — as Fredric Jameson has pointed out — what characterizes utopia
is not a belief in the essential goodness of human nature , or some similar naive notion, but, rather, belief in some
global mechanism which, applied to the whole of society, will automatically bring about the
balanced state of progress and happiness one is longing for — and, in this
precise sense, is not the market precisely the name for such a mechanism
which, properly applied, will bring about the optimal state of society? So, again, the first
answer of the Left to those - Leftists themselves —who bemoan the loss of the utopian impetus in our societies should be that this impetus is
alive and well — not only in the Rightist ‘fundamentalist’ populism which advocates the return to grass-roots democracy, but above all among
the advocates of the market economy themselves.’2 The second answer should be a clear line of distinction between utopia and ideology:
no less ideological
ideology is not only a utopian project of social transformation with no realistic chance of actualization;
is the anti-utopian stance of those who ‘realistically’ devalue every

global project of social transformation as ‘utopian’, that is, as unrealistic dreaming and/or
harbouring ‘totalitarian’ potential— today’s predominant form of ideological ‘closure’
takes the precise form of mental block which prevents us from

imagining a fundamental social change, in the interests of an allegedly ‘realistic’ and mature’ attitude.
AT: Alt = Utopian—Ethics
We must be ethically committed to the utopian project. The problem with your
arguments is that you assume a certain structure of rationality—but far from
being purely descriptive, this rationality is a normative product of capitalist
ideology. By excluding exteriority the “rational” is forced to give up the ethical
project itself. Anti-capitalism is the ONLY way to reclaim meaning
Marsh ’95 James L Marsh, Professor of Philosophy at Fordham University CRITIQUE, ACTION, AND LIBERATION, 95 P. 334-335
The basic question concerning the possibility of socialism, then, is the
rationality of utopian thinking. If scientism and positivism or some of their offshoots such as the postmodern
pragmatism of Rorty exhaust the definition of reason, then utopian thinking is irrational and the human mind must confine itself to the straight
then the
jacket of empirical fact. If, on the other hand, my dialectical phenomenological definition of reason is correct,
thinking of utopia is not only legitimate but necessary. Reflection and freedom and
praxis are essentially utopian in their full, unfolding life. Denial of utopia mutilates freedom and
reason.6 We can appreciate this point more deeply by focusing phenomenologically on my experience of myself as an incarnate subject
in the world. First of all, questioning is essential to the life of reason, and any questioning points beyond the data to a future answer arrived at
in a future insight and judgment. A scientist hit on the head by an apple asks questions that point toward a future answer. Any question negates
the given set of facts and anticipates a new future.7> Next, on the level of insight and conceptualization we arrive at a universal that is not
exhausted by any particular manifestation or instance. ''Triangle'' is not exhausted by this particular triangular thing, "justice" by this particular
example of justice, "beauty" by this particular painting. Moreover, no particular, sensible incarnation matches the perfection of the ideal. These
on a
instances of "triangle," "justice," "beauty," respectively, are not perfect; they have cracks, blemishes, and impurities.8 Further,
reflective, ethical level I constitute through reflection and choice

myself as an end in a community of ends. This ethical norm has the
same inexhaustibility and perfection as any universal, but in addition
is the ethical obligation to realize the ideal. If, therefore, I am essentially and eidetically an
experiencing, understanding, judging, and choosing subject and the current social situation is irrational and unjust in not respecting that reality,
I have three choices. I can capitulate to the situation and in so doing reduce or renounce my humanity, or I can live a double life in thinking
utopian thoughts and pursuing a nonutopian life, or I can pursue the utopia of a full economic, social, and political democracy that is worthy of
such a rational, free subject and incarnates in its institutions full respect for such a subject. Only the last option is fully consistent with the life of
we may affirm a threefold exteriority to the
incarnate reason and freedom. Finally,
irrational, exploitative capitalist system: exteriority as past, present,

and future. Exteriority as past is the laborer initially confronting
capital as deprived of means of production, land, and means of
consumption; as present exteriority is labor confronting capital as
nothing, poor, more and more deprived of skill, surplus value, and
even of employment; and as future exteriority is the utopia of
liberation that is suggested by, demanded by, and called for by the
alienated present. Such utopia as norm and goal calls into question
our alienated bourgeois present. "Exteriority" or "the other" in this book has at least five moments or stages
of articulation: as phenomenologically described, as ethically evaluated, as hermeneutically interpreted, as critically judged, and as anticipated
in an utopian manner. Our affirmation of "utopia" as essential and implied by ''rationality" in the full sense just completes and fills out our
ethics and hermeneutics and critique
affirmation of exteriority as linked to rationality. A rationality and freedom and
and praxis not open to exteriority are incomplete, truncated,

mutilated. Exteriority is the positive ground enabling us to go fully
beyond a merely negative dialectic. 9 We affirm, then, the ethical
necessity of pursuing ethical community and democratic socialism as
the rational embodiment of that vision. Here it is important to be clear about the difference between
acquisitive, empirical reason and constitutive, ethical reason. Ethical community as utopia is not
primarily something I stand back and predict objectively and

scientifically; it is something to which I commit myself ethically and
politically.An example from the sphere of personal morality should make the difference clear. When a friend,
relative, teacher, or minister counsels an alcoholic to confront her habit, she is not
making a prediction. Indeed, it may seem unlikely, given this particular person's past
history, that she will lick her habit. Nonetheless, the moral obligation
to get over her habit remains. Similarly, an obligation exists to get
over our capitalism as a social equivalent of drunkenness. If the argument of this
chapter is correct, we cannot renounce such an attempt at transcendence
without giving up on the ethical project or curtailing that project by

confining it to the sphere of intimate, interpersonal relations. I am a good father or
husband or lover in my private life, but I remain exploitative, cruel, and inhumane in my public, capitalistic life . Such ethical
renunciation or curtailment is the death or mutilation of the human;

denial of utopia is a living death. Ideologies of scientific elitism, therefore, as they function in capitalist
society are correct if there is no such thing as ethical, constitutive reason operating in community. If such constitutive reason is possible and
actual in human beings as human in community, then scientific elitism is false. Men and women acting democratically and participatively do
have a capacity to understand themselves and their lives in a way that is cogent and in touch with reality. Indeed, many of the popular
movements in Europe, England, and the United States in the last twenty years such as feminism, environmentalism, civil rights, and antiwar
movements, often acting against the advice or opinions of experts, have shown themselves to be right and effective. In the Vietnam War, for
example, millions of people in the United States taking to the streets in protest proved the "best and the brightest" in the White House,
Pentagon, and State Department wrong. The "best and the brightest" according to the standards of scientific elitism proved to be deluded. The
presence of an ethical, political rationality in all of us as human invalidates scientific elitism at its core. As I am arguing it here, a fundamental
link exists among dialectical phenomenology, ethical, constitutive rationality, and democracy. Philosophy and ethics, properly understood, are
To think in a utopian manner, then, about community and
antielitist. 10
socialism is to free ourselves from the excessive hold that science

and technology exert over our minds and imaginations. We begin to see that science
and technology and expertise, even though they are legitimate within their own proper domains, do not exhaust or monopolize the definition
of reason and other forms of reason and knowledge that are more informative, profound, and fundamental. Indeed, compared to certain
expressions of art or ethics or philosophy or religion, science and technology are relatively superficial. What revelatory power does a scientific
equation have compared to Hamlet's "To be or not to be" speech? What does an empirical study of human populations show me about human
life compared to the insight of Marx's Capital? What can a factual study of war show about its horrors compared to Picasso's Guernica ?11 To
the extent, therefore, that science and technology dominate in the twentieth century as not only the highest forms of reason but the only
forms of reason, they shove other, more profound, more reflective, more fundamental forms of reason to the side and twentieth-century
industrial society emerges as an inverted, topsy-turvy, absurd world. What seems normal, factual, rational, and sane in such a world is in fact
We begin to suspect and see that science and
abnormal, apparent, irrational, and absurd.
technology appear as the highest and only forms of reason because

capitalism has appropriated science and technology for its own ends
as productive force and ideology. In science and technology
capitalism has found the forms of rationality most appropriate for
itself, perfectly manifesting it, mirroring it, and justifying it. In such an
absurd, inverted, topsy-turvy world, fidelity to the life of reason
demands critique, resistance, and revolutionary transcendence. One
has to pierce the veil of such a world, see through it as absurd rather
than accepting it as normal and sane. The prevailing rationality is
profoundly irrational.12
A/T: State Good
The primary function of superstructure is to stabilize the base—interventions at
the political level only give the false impression of change but are absorbed by
the system
Farrelly ’11 Colin Carrelly, “Patriarchy and Historical Materialism,” Hypatia, vol. 26 no. 1 (Winter 2011)
The canonical statement of Marx’s synchronic materialism is the famous base/superstructure metaphor described in The 1859 Preface. Marx
the economic structure of society is the real foundation of
claims that
society ‘‘on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to

which correspond definite forms of social consciousness’’ (McLellan 1977, 389).
This statement has caused much debate and disagreement among defenders and critics of Marx. Is Marx a reductionist? How can the economic
structure of society be conceptually distinct from its legal and political superstructure? Analytical Marxists attempt to rescue Marx’s synchronic
materialism from the ambiguities and difficulties that are entailed in the base/superstructure metaphor. Following an earlier modification I
made to Cohen’s functionalist account of historical materialism (Farrelly 2005, 431), let us define the base and superstructure of society as
Base (economic structure): the whole set of relations between
follows:
producers and non-producers, producers and particular kinds of

productive forces, and non-producers and particular kinds of
productive forces. Superstructure: legal, political, religious, and other
noneconomic institutions. It is essential to note that it is de facto, and not de jure,
ownership that constitutes the relations of production, for the base of society would
not be conceptually distinct from the superstructure if the ownership in question were legal (as oppose to de facto) ownership. Utilizing the
notion of effective ownership, we can then identify the different kinds of economic structures different societies possess by reference to the
effective control different classes of people (producers and non-producers) have over different productive forces (the means of production and
labor power). In a slave society, for example, slave owners have a monopoly over
all the productive forces. They own the slaves and the land, tools, and
so on necessary to satisfy the basic material needs of the population.
In a feudal society, the immediate producers own some of their labor
power. They are not slaves, but they are obligated to produce a
surplus that is appropriated by the lord who owns the land they till. In
capitalist societies the producers own their labor power but the
bourgeoisie have a monopoly over the means of production (such as raw
materials, tools, and so on).4 As a functionalist explanation, synchronic materialism
maintains that the economic structure of society determines the

superstructure. So the answer to the questions: ‘‘Why the
superstructure of capitalism?,’’ or ‘‘Why the super-structure of feudalism?,’’ or ‘‘Why the superstructure of
slavery?’’ lies with the function these superstructures serve for different
economic structures (that is, relations of production) in different historical epochs. To

assert that the economic structure determines the superstructure is
to assert that the superstructure ‘‘supervenes’’ upon the economic
structure. The standard definition of supervenience is: B-properties supervene on A-properties if no two possible situations are
identical with respect to their A-properties while differing in their B-properties. (Chalmers 1996, 35) Applying the notion of natural5
No two societies
supervenience to Marx’s historical materialism, I maintain that synchronic materialism asserts that S1:
can be identical with respect to their economic structure while

differing in their superstructure. (Farrelly 2005, 432) A central appeal of the supervenient interpretation of
synchronic materialism is that it avoids economic determinism, which reduces the
superstructure to a mere epiphenomenon. Allen Wood describes this common interpretation of

Marx’s account of history: The Marxian conception of society is sometimes described as ‘‘economic determinism.’’ By this it is often meant that
Marx’s theory takes one aspect of social life (the ‘‘economic’’ aspect) to be the crucial one on which all others depend. Marx, according to this
account, either reduces all of social life to economics, or he regards the rest of social life as an epiphenomenon of economics, or else as a series
of effects proceeding entirely from ‘‘economic’’ causes. This interpretation of Marx, it seems to me, is fundamentally mistaken. (Wood 1972,
249–50) Wood is certainly correct in asserting that this interpretation of Marx is fundamentally mistaken. Economic
structures need superstructures. The idea that the superstructure is ‘‘inert’’ contravenes what Marx actually
argued. As Keith Graham points out, Marx acknowledges that a religious form of life can influence material relations (Graham 1992, 45). Marx
claims that ‘‘Protestantism, by changing almost all the traditional holidays into working days, played an important role in the genesis of capital’’
(Marx 1976, 387, n. 92) Furthermore, if Marx’s primacy of the material meant that the nonmaterial was inert, then many of Marx’s own
theories would be redundant. Why does Marx go to such great lengths to condemn capitalism and attempt to raise the consciousness of the
proletariat if ideas are mere residue? Having clarified the basic concepts and challenges that arise with respect to Marx’s synchronic
Because the
materialism, we are now in a position to expand synchronic materialism to address the issue of patriarchy.
supervenience relation does not negate the possibility of a two-way

causal relation between the base and superstructure, synchronic
materialism can accommodate the reality that patriarchal components of the
superstructure, like religion and the laws and social practices governing the family, have a profound
impact on the relations of production, in particular on the relations that pertain to a woman’s
reproductive and caring labor. Condoning rape and domestic abuse, or prohibiting divorce, or socially chastising ‘‘spinsters’’ and ‘‘whores’’ all
help reinforce and perpetuate the patriarchal relations of production. These relations make women economically dependent upon men by
ensuring that access to resources and the means of production are mediated through women’s sexual ties to men. Not only can synchronic
it also explains
materialism accommodate the fact that superstructures can cause changes in the economic structure, but
why certain forms of superstructures arise rather than other forms. Why,
for example, does slavery arise? Why is it that the earliest law codes established the patriarchal family rather than a family that treated males
The creation of superstructures is not arbitrary. They
and females equally?
happen for a reason. Lerner explains how superstructures reinforce the relations of patriarchy: Women’s sexual
subordination was institutionalized in the earliest law codes and enforced by the full power of the state. Women’s cooperation in the system
was secured by various means: force, economic dependency on the male head of the family, class privileges bestowed upon conforming and
dependent women of the upper classes, and the artificially created division of women into respectable and not-respectable women. (Lerner
1986, 9) The ‘‘invention of slavery,’’ argues Lerner, represented an important watershed in human history. Slavery could become
institutionalized only when people were able to form the mental concept of the possibility that such dominance could actually work (Lerner
1986, 76–77). The subordination of members of one’s own group (that is, women) helped men form the concept that other people (for
example, outsiders) could be ‘‘slaves’’ and subordinated. ‘‘The oppression of women antedates slavery and makes it possible’’ (77). So
necessity created the first relations of production—the sexual division of labor—and
then those same oppressive relations of production were extended to
include other humans (including male slaves), which in turn determined the
creation of new superstructures typical of slave societies. Synchronic materialism
thus posits what can be called the superstructure stabilizing thesis: T4—Superstructure stabilizing thesis: The
superstructure stabilizes the economic structure. Societies with

identical economic structures must have identical superstructures
because their economic structures can be stabilized only by a
superstructure that permits the effective ownership of the relations in
question. In other words, the superstructure of capitalism could not have
arisen in a slave or feudal society, as the legal structure of capitalism
(such as the granting of civil and political liberties) would not have stabilized feudal relations of
production. In feudalism the economic structure required workers who lived in the countryside and were bound to the land they
toiled. A capitalist superstructure would permit immediate producers to
sell their labor power and move to cities, which serves an important
need when manufacturing technologies exist, but jeopardizes
production in agrarian societies.
A/T: No Solvency / Inevitable
Ours is a violent job that can never be done. No, we will not succeed. Yes, there will be
violence that can at times be insurmountable. But nonetheless we must continue and
we must engage as the schizophrenic.
DELEUZE AND GUATTARI 1972 , Anti-Oedipus, 381-2
What, finally, is the opposition between schizoanalysis and psychoanalysis , when the negative and positive tasks of schizoanalysis are taken as a whole? We constantly contrasted two sorts
of unconscious or two interpretations of the unconscious: the one schizoanalytic, the other psychoanalytic; the one schizophrenic, the other neurotic-Oedipal; the one abstract and
nonfigurative , the other imaginary; but also the one really concrete, the other symbolic; the one machinic, the other structural ; the one molecular,
microphysical, and micrological, and the other molar or statistical; the one material, the other ideological ; the one productive, the other expressive. We have seen how the negative
task of schizoanalysis must be violent, brutal: defamiliarizing, de-oedipalizing, decastrating; undoing theater, dream, and fantasy; decoding, de territorializing-a terrible
curettage, a malevolent activity. But everything happens at the same time. For at the same time the process is liberated-the process of desiring-production ,
following its molecular lines of escape that already define the mechanic's task of the schizoanalyst . And the lines of escape are still full molar
or social investments at grips with the whole social field: so that the task of schizoanalysis is ultimately that of discovering for every case the
nature of the libidinal investments of the social field, their possible internal conflicts, their relationships with the preconscious investments of the same field, their possible conflicts with these-in
short, the entire interplay of the desiring-machines and the repression of desire. Completing the process and not arresting it , not making it turn about in the void, not assigning it a goal. We'll
never go too far with the deterritorialization, the decoding of flows. For the new earth ("In truth, the earth will one day become a place of healing") is not to be found in the neurotic or
perverse reterritorializations that arrest the process or assign it goals; it is no more behind than ahead, it coincides with the completion of the process of desiring-production , this
process that is always and already complete as it proceeds, and as long as it proceeds. I t therefore remains for us to see how, effectively,
simultaneously, these various tasks of schizoanalysis proceed.
A/T: Cede the Political
Cede the political fails – reinforces capitalism and strengthens the right
Dean 8 (Joan, Politics Without Politics, political theorist,
http://publishing.eur.nl/ir/darenet/asset/15161/oratiejodidean.pdf)JFS
Democracy, though, is inadequate as a language and frame for left political aspiration. Here are two reasons why; there are
others. First, the right speaks the language of democracy. It voices its goals and aspirations in democratic terms. One of
the reasons given for the U.S. invasion of Iraq, for example, was the goal of bringing democracy to the Middle East. Similarly,
leftists in the United States urge inclusion and participation, and so do those on the political right. The right complains about the exclusion of
conservatives from the academy and God from politics. They, too, try to mobilize grass-root support and increase
participation. There is nothing particularly left, then, about inclusion and participation. These are elements of democracy
the right also supports. This rightwing adoption of democratic ideals prevents the left from occupying the position of
a political alternative to the right—if left positions are the same right ones then the left isn’t an alternative . Slavoj
Zizek describes this situation where one’s enemy speaks one’s language as “victory in defeat” (2008, p. 189). When one's enemy accepts one's
terms, one's point of critique and resistance is lost, subsumed. The dimension of antagonism (fundamental opposition) vanishes. A second
reason democracy is inadequate as an expression of left aspiration is that contemporary democratic language employs and
reinforces the rhetoric of capitalism: free choice, liberty, satisfaction, communication, connection, diversity. Like any media savvy
corporation, democratic activists want to ensure that voices are heard and opinions registered. Corporations and activists
alike are united in their preoccupation with awareness: people need to be aware of issues, of products , of products
as signs of issues. In this concrete sense, Zizek is right to claim that attachment to democracy is the form our attachment to
capital takes (2002, p. 273; 2008, p. 184). In the consumption and entertainment-driven setting of the contemporary United States, one’s
commitments to capitalism are expressed as commitments to democracy. They are the same way of life, the same daily
practices of “aware-ing” oneself and expressing one’s opinion, of choosing and voting and considering one’s choice a vote and one’s vote a
choice.
A/T: Transition Wars
Non-unique and alt solves—extend Tumino—capital’s exacerbation of the
contradiction between mass exploitation and wealth centralization makes social
collapse inevitable—only a question of whether we are guided to communism
through class politics
Capitalism will continually appeal to fear of collapse to justify its existence -
these rely on a logic that is epistemologically disabling and self-fulfilling
Zizek ’97 Slavoj Zizek, Senior Researcher in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Ljubljana and Codirector of the Center for
Humanities at Birkbeck College, "Multiculturalism, or, the Cultural Logic of Multinational Capitalism," New Left Review, No. 224, 1997, pp.25-27
financial crisis is a permanent state of things the reference to which
Today,
legitimizes the demands to cut social spending, health care, support of culture and scientific research, in short, the
dismantling of the welfare state. Is, however, this permanent crisis really an
objective feature of our socio-economic life? Is it not rather one of the effects of
the shift of balance in the ‘class struggle’ towards Capital, resulting from the
growing role of new technologies as well as from the direct internationalization
of Capital and the co- dependent diminished role of the Nation-State which was
further able to impose certain minimal requirements and limitations to
exploitation? In other words, the crisis is an ‘objective fact’ if and only if one accepts in
advance as an unquestionable premise the inherent logic of Capital—as more and more
left-wing or liberal parties have done. We are thus witnessing the uncanny spectacle of social-democratic parties which came to power with the
between-the-lines message to Capital ‘we will do the necessary job for you in an even more efficient and painless way than the conservatives’.
in today’s global socio-political circumstances, it is practically
The problem, of course, is that,
impossible effectively to call into question the logic of Capital: even a modest
social-democratic attempt to redistribute wealth beyond the limit acceptable to
the Capital ‘effectively’ leads to economic crisis, inflation, a fall in revenues and
so on. Nevertheless, one should always bear in mind how the connection between
‘cause’ (rising social expenditure) and ‘effect’ (economic crisis) is not a direct objective causal one:
it is always-already embedded in a situation of social antagonism and struggle . The
fact that, if one does not obey the limits set by Capital, a crisis ‘really follows’, in
no way ‘proves’ that the necessity of these limits is an objective necessity of
economic life. It should rather be conceived as a proof of the privileged position
Capital holds in the economic and political struggle, as in the situation where a stronger partner
threatens that if you do X, you will be punished by Y, and then, upon your doing X, Y effectively ensues.
Once the transition is underway, autonomous communities act together in
resistance to capital – capitalism will be on the ropes, faced with resistance on
an unprecedented scale
If such events as O’Connor envisions were to come to pass, they would not yet be ecosocialism, but they would form a kind of self-generative
and non-linear dialectic that can rapidly accelerate the motion toward ecosocialism. After all, it is the ‘tens of thousands of local and regional
experiments and practices’ who would have had to join with communities of activation to make this possible, and whose power would be
accordingly magnified by it. And being magnified, the Zapatistas, and the Gaviotistas, and the Indymedia centres that connect them, and the
politicized collectives of farmers from around the world, and the teacher’s associations, and the ecologically radicalized fractions of the labour
movement, and the little Bruderhof-like manufacturing collectives making ecologically sane products with the aid of local credit unions, and
all the ten thousand locally originating but universally striving community
formations — all would come together in solidarity to make such an event , and, in its
aftermath, to press for further transformation. There is no point in predicting a scenario according to which this will
expand, beyond the condition that it occur in the context of capital’s incapability of regulating the ecological crisis. At some time within this
span, the communities arising from the process may be imagined to grow to a point of relative autonomy such that they can begin providing
material support for activists, with bases of operation and — in the case of those considerable number of communities producing food, wool,
hemp, solar technology and so on — the actual means of subsistence for people engaged in revolutionary struggle. It must also be presumed —
a large but feasible order that these people will have developed the spiritual and psychological strength enabling them to go forward. For there
should be no mistake: the struggle for ecosocialism is no technical or voluntaristic process, but a radical transforming of self as well as world to
link up in ever-widening and deepening solidarity Here is where post-patriarchal values will come forward, radicalizing human being itself for
the struggle. Now the movement of events is self-sustaining, rapid and dramatic.Communities of place and of
praxis increasingly coalesce to form miniature societies, and these enter into
relations with others both inside and outside the national boundary. Capital may be expected to respond with heightened
efforts at repression. A heroic phase begins, with much sacrifice. The awesome might of the capital system now
encounters a set of factors it has never dealt with before:  The forces against it
are both numerous and dispersed.  They operate with changed needs, and on
the basis of a kind of production capable of sustaining itself with small inputs and labour-
intensive technologies; and they have secure bases and ‘safe houses’ in the intentional communities of resistance, now extending across
national boundaries.  Their many allies in the interstices of the mainstream society are capable of forming support groups and ‘underground
the oppositional forces are capable of
railroads’.  As with all successful forms of revolutionary protest,
shutting down normal production through strikes, boycotts, and mass actions.  The forces of capital
have lost confidence, and are further undermined by support for the revolution
within the alternative parties and their various niches in the state. This extends to armies and police. When the first of these lays down their
The behaviour of the revolutionaries is
arms and joins the revolution, the turning point is reached.
spiritually superior, and the examples they set are given credibility and
persuasiveness by the brute facts of the crisis and the gathering realization that
what is at stake here is not so much the redistribution of wealth as the
sustenance of life itself. Thus it could be that in an increasingly hectic period, millions of people take to the streets, and join
together in global solidarity — with each other, with the communities of resistance, and with their comrades in other nations — bringing
With
normal social activity to a halt, petitioning the state and refusing to take ‘no’ for an answer, and driving capital into ever smaller pens.
defections mounting and the irreducible fact all around that the people demand
a new beginning in order to save the planetary ecology, the state apparatus
passes into new hands, the expropriators are expropriated, and the 500-year regime of capital
falls.
The transition away from capitalist society doesn’t entail the violence described
in your cheesy impact turns – the first step toward change is a radical rejection
of reformist half-steps that only buy time for capital.
Do we call, then, for the immediate abolition of money, wage labour and
commodity exchanges, along with all market relations and businesses? Absolutely not: measures of
this sort recapitulate the Pol Pot or Stalinist solution, and they ride as heavily over humanity and nature as did slavery. They are
forms of violence that tear apart ecosystems human and natural alike. An ecocentric people will not
need to repress the accumulation of capital because such a people will be free
from exploitation, and the drive to accumulate will not arise from the ground of freely associated labour. The problem is to get to
that ground, in the course of which present ways of production need to be traversed and transformed and not knocked over. But first it must
be envisioned. To create that vision, a radical rejection of capitalist ways is necessary .
We should reject, therefore, the phoney tolerance espoused by green economics toward preserving a ‘diversity’ that gives a substantial role to
In this real world, all forms of
capitalist firms. One might as well try to raise weasels and chickens in the same pen.
capital, including the oxymoronic ‘natural capital’ that is supposed to rescue us,
are swiftly caught up in the flood-tide of accumulation. My intention is not at all to disparage the
virtue of a small economic or community unit . Quite the contrary: as we shall explore in the last chapter, small-size
enterprises are an essential part of the path towards an ecological society, as well as the building blocks of that society There is a question,
rather, about perspective: whether the small units are to be capitalist or socialist in orientation, and whether they are seen as ends in
need
themselves or integrated with a more universal vision. For both of these sets of choices, I would argue for the latter position: the units
to be consistently anti-capitalist, and they need to exist in a dialectic with the whole
of things. For human beings are not rodents, who live in burrows. Nor are we insects, creatures who thrive at a small scale, because of
which they cannot use skeletons or lungs, or any of the organs necessary for larger organisms. Humans are, by nature, large, expansive,
universalizing creatures. We need different degrees of realization to express our being, grandeur as well as intimacy, the large grain as well as
the fine. We need the equivalent of skeletons to support us, and specialized organs to meet our species’ needs. Thus I should think that in an
ecologically realized world there would exist significant sectors of large-scale activity, for example, rail and communications systems and power
grids, just as world cities would flourish as sites of universality. I hope I may be forgiven for insisting that New York, Paris, London and Tokyo not
be taken down in an ecological society, but more fully realized; and that the nightmare cities of global capital the Jakartas and Mexico Citys —
will be restored to similar states of being. This restoration in its many forms comes back to the question of the emancipation of labour, and not
just waged labour, but all compulsive forms of our creativity, including most definitely the alienation of women’s household work, and the
stifling of children in schools. The fact is that the great bulk of humankind are throttled in their
humanity, and overcoming this is far more significant than any tinkering from above with a corrupt economy. This truth is either lost on
the ecological economists or mystified out of existence. Any sense of real people, and real popular
struggle, are abstracted from mandarin texts such as An Introduction to Ecological Economics. Yes,
the authors do call for a ‘living democracy’, which is certainly a good thing. But life is struggle, especially in a class society where
antagonisms are built into the social process. Yet for Ecological Economics, living democracy is ‘a broad process to discuss
and achieve consensus on these important issues. This is distinct from the polemic and divisive political
process that seems to hold sway in many countries today’ Thus we need ‘to engage all members of society in a substantive dialogue about the
future they desire and the policies and instruments necessary to bring it about’.25 The image evoked is like one of the official murals that
decorate post offices in which the European settlers/invaders are solemnly greeted by the Indians to deliberate on matters of mutual concern.
Where sweatshops re-impose slavery within the capitalist system while untold
millions of people in the middle are consigned to mall culture and the rat race,
consensus is not exactly an illuminating term, and some divisive polemics , well-
chosen and coupled with proper action, can do a great deal of good. False reconciliation is not the
path out of a world as unjust as this. The demand for justice is the pivot about
which labour will be emancipated; it must also be a foundation of overcoming the ecological crisis.
A/T: Think Tanks
Think tanks operate in an anti-academic environment where policy analysis
panders to special interests to procure more funding - prefer our academic
evidence not funded by large corporations
Wallace-Wells ‘3 Benjamin Wallace-Wells, editor of the Washington Monthly, "In the Tank," Washington Monthly, 3 December
2003, accessed 1/31/10 http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2003/0312.wallace-wells.html
Consequently, business interests have been forced to find less rule-bound venues for
the hundreds of millions of dollars they have available to influence the policy
process, and think tanks have become one of the places of choice. As 501(c)3 charitable
institutions, think tanks are not bound by hospitality restrictions, and so can offer
public servants a movable feast of fancy policy- seminar lunches and all-
expense-paid fact-finding trips to foreign countries. Think tanks provide ideal
cover for the advancement of a funder's economic or political agenda by
shaping the intellectual atmosphere that surrounds Washington decision-
makers, a process Steven Clemons of the centrist New America Foundation calls "deep lobbying." Think tank scholars
enjoy more credibility when quoted in newspapers, speaking on TV, or testifying
on the Hill than do paid industry spokesmen, even when both are making the
same arguments, and even when the expert's scholarship is laughably bad. And
short of endorsing specific candidates for political office, there are no restrictions on what think tanks can
say in these venues--or what they can write in the policy briefs that flood congressional offices. Such freedom is perfectly defensible. One
wouldn't want to limit scholarly free speech and inquiry. But as think tanks like AEI have garnered lucrative
grants from corporations and industry trade groups, incentives have mounted to
pick their experts and tailor their intellectual product to suit the givers'
interests, even if that means cutting corners on scholastic rigor. AEI is not necessarily the
most aggressive player in the "deep lobbying" game. Indeed, many of its scholars remain intellectually independent and ideologically
idiosyncratic. Nor is AEI the only right-of-center think tank to advocate both deregulation and conservative social and foreign policy. It has,
however, arguably done the best job of marrying these ideas into an overall worldview that supports the conservative political movement--a
worldview perhaps best exemplified by AEI scholar Michael Novak, who in books like The Catholic Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism argues that
the government has a Christian imperative to cut taxes. It's easy, then, to understand why AEI was so eager to recruit, and ignore the failings of,
John Lott, whose arguments against gun restrictions pleased both the libertarian and social conservative wings of the GOP. Of course,
conservative think tanks have no monopoly on ridiculous theories, sloppy research, agenda-driven reasoning, and pathological groupthink. All
of this is endemic to many universities, where liberal scholars reign and Democrats--more so than Republicans--turn to for policy ideas,
expertise, and validation. The difference is that academia is governed by some basic rules of conduct. Books and papers are peer-reviewed. Up-
and-coming scholars know that their work will be scrutinized by tenure committees. Universities have established procedures to investigate
Think tanks, by contrast, have few such systems of
accusations of fraud and punish those found guilty of it.
internal checks. Behavior that would be considered a firing offense in academia

is not necessarily considered in the think-tank world, especially when a scholar's
work advances the institution's political mission and attracts funding .
A/T: Morality Based Turns / Claims
Morality impacts make no sense in a capitalist world: moral questions will inevitably
be subordinated to capitalism.
Trainer 1996 – Senior Lecturer, School of Social Work, University of New South Wales [Ted, Towards a Sustainable Economy, Jon Carpenter Oxford Publishing, pp. 79-80]
The need for a moral economy Clearly, a major problem with our economic theory and practice is that they leave little place for morality. Many extremely important
decisions affecting people's welfare are made without reference to what would be morally acceptable. They are made solely on the basis of
what will make most money. It has been argued above that there are many other, usually much more important factors, such as what things humans need, what developments would build better cornrnunities
and political systems, what would preserve cultural uniqueness, and especially what would maximise ecological sustainability. Decisions which maximise returns to owners of capital often
have adverse effects in several or all of these areas, yet in our economy this factor is allowed to determine what is done . No other economic system
humans have ever developed has functioned in this way. All previous economies ensured that 'moral' factors, such as social customs setting a 'just price', were the main determinants of economic activity. Market forces and the
They deceive us into accepting grossly inhuman
profit motive were typically given little or no role. Our present economic system and the theory which underlies it obscure the great misery they cause.
consequences. Several sections of this book explain how our economic system is the main factor producing the hunger and deprivation suffered by hundreds of millions of people. Yet this causal connection is not well
understood, because we have been led to believe that the market system is natural, efficient and desirable, and that it 'rewards factors of
production in proportion to their contributions'. This prevailing ideology leads most people to believe that we are not exploiting the Third
World and we are not causing hunger; we are only trading with them, investing and doing normal business. As Bookchin says, ' ... our present economy is grossly immoral... The
economists have literally "demoralised" us and turned us into moral cretins'. I Similarly, economic theory claims that when an item becomes scarce its price rises automatically, as if this is a law of
nature independent of human will. In fact, the price rises only because individual sellers eager to maximise their income put it up as quickly as they can. Our economic theory obscures the fact that it is not scarcity but human greed
The fact that this siphons wealth to the rich,
which makes prices rise. Above all, economic theory leads us to think that the supremely important goal is to 'get the economy going', to stimulate growth.
deprives the poor, develops the wrong industries and in the Third World starve millions is obscured.
A/T: DnG Bad/extra other ish
A/T: Material Conditions
First, Turn – Deleuzian theory is accessible to everyone
Bryden ’07 (Mary, Professor of European Literature, French, Cardiff University, “Gilles Deleuze: Travels in Literature”, 2007, pg. 3-,
JCook.)
In the previous century,the French writer Xavier de Maistre had¶appealed to his readers, in his Voyage
autour de ma chambre, to join him¶ on a forty-two-day journey within the confines of his
room. Extolling¶ the virtues of stationary travel – it costs nothing; it is

undertaken without¶ the hindrances of cold and damp, and without the worry of
being¶ accosted by thieves; it is available to those in poor health, and to those ¶
frightened of potholes – he views all the elements of the enclosed space ¶ as
allies in his exploration, the armchair because it promotes meditation, ¶ the bed
because it is the theatre of both birth and death. With¶ these resources, ‘les heures glissent alors sur
vous, et tombent en silence¶ dans l’éternité, sans vous faire sentir leur triste passage’11 [hours slip¶ over you, and fall
silently into eternity, without letting you feel their ¶ sad passing].¶ Attempting, if not to
replicate, then to commune with, this experience¶ of micro-journeying, the writer Alain de Botton experimented with ¶ what he called a ‘de
Maistrean journey around Hammersmith’, an area¶ chosen because he was so well acquainted with it.12 Convinced that de¶ Maistre’s work
sprang from the insight that ‘the pleasure we derive from¶ journeys is perhaps dependent more on the mindset with which we¶ travel than on
the destination we travel to’ (Botton, p. 246), he identifies¶ receptivity as the chief characteristic of that mindset. Hence, in the ¶ course of his
peregrination around Hammersmith, the role of receiver or¶ perceiver took precedence over that of potential arriver, as he attempted ¶ to look
afresh at the apparently familiar elements of the neighbourhood,¶ chipping away to find ‘latent layers of value’ (Botton, p. 251). His¶ conclusion
(which in fact concludes the entire study) is that ‘Xavier de¶ Maistre was gently nudging us to try, before taking off for distant hemispheres, ¶ to
notice what we have already seen’ (Botton, p. 254).¶ Is this, then, the mode privileged by Deleuze and Guattari when they ¶ advance the notion
of the ‘voyageur immobile’? Certainly it would be¶ difficult to forego receptivity as a prerequisite to becoming. As John¶ Hughes suggests, ‘a
kind of innate truancy’ is required if a text is to lead¶ to ‘creative thought, and new affects’.13 However, receptivity in this ¶ travelling,
Bottonesque sense is a kind of enhanced repetition, an¶ attempt ‘to notice what we have already seen’. It involves a deliberate ¶ concentration
upon the structure, history and provenance of the organic¶ or built environment: ‘We are alive to the layers of history beneath ¶ the present
The¶ Deleuzian ‘voyageur immobile’, on the other hand, is
and take notes and photographs’ (Botton, p. 247).
not concerned¶ with recording or archiving. Becomings are anti-historical in the

sense¶ that they are always forward-bound trajectories, spending, dissolving, ¶
and transforming rather than saving, consolidating, and preserving. ¶ They are
also anti-personal in the sense that they do not cluster around ¶ contrasts such as
‘This is me when concentrating on travelling to my¶ destination’ or ‘This is me
when absorbing the ambient details I normally¶ miss when travelling’. Rather, they
are associated with the play of¶ affects and percepts, which are what subjective
affections and perceptions¶ become when they are impersonal, liberated from
an origin within¶ a particular individual. In this way, ‘This is me, intently gathering¶ and organising the strands of
history and social organisation which are¶ perceptible in this neighbourhood’ becomes an infinitely extensible¶ composite swarm, such as
‘Here are: coffee smell-street garbage-morning¶ sun-ginger cat in doorway-shout
of child …’. From among these intersections,¶ individuals form and proceed. This
is indeed how Deleuze and¶ Guattari characterise their own writing endeavours,
to which their individual¶ names are attached, they say, purely in
acknowledgement of¶ habitual practice, since ‘un livre n’a pas d’objet ni de sujet, il est fait de¶ matières
diversement formées, de dates et de vitesses très différentes’¶ (MP, p. 9) [ a book has no object or subject, it is
made of variously¶ formed materials, of very different dates and speeds]. ¶ A
Deleuzian ‘voyageur immobile’, then, is not on the trail of an ¶ explanation, of an
architectural, psychoanalytical, or social history.¶ Neither is s/he attempting to
evoke or replicate cultures through the¶ processes of imagination, in the way in which
Huysmans’ des¶ Esseintes becomes a virtual London tourist. Rather, s/he is entering a¶ rhizomatic flux in which
multiple becomings are potentially available.¶ A rhizome provides for Deleuze

and Guattari a hard-working figure of¶ becomings since rhizomes proliferate
through underground, horizontal¶ networks rather than by the vertical, rooted
structure associated¶ with trees: ‘N’importe quel point d’un rhizome peut être connecté¶ avec n’importe quel autre,
et doit l’être. C’est très différent de l’arbre¶ ou de la racine qui fixent un point, un ordre’ (MP, p. 13) [Any point of¶ a rhizome
can be connected with any other, and must be. This is very ¶ different from the
tree or the root, which determine a point, an order].¶ Rhizomes thus have no
determinate shape or direction, and may travel¶ great distances, transforming
apparent obstacles (worms, rocks) into¶ intersecting topographical features, as
described by Patty Sotirin in an¶ essay on the concept of becoming-woman: ‘The rhizomatic roots of¶ mint plants may break through a
seemingly impenetrable concrete¶ retaining wall, one molecule at a time; the detachment of each¶ concrete particle by the collocation of a
Any gardener who has attempted to remove such
plant particle has its own¶ singularity’.14
underground¶ colonisers is aware of their committed and yet unpredictable ¶

versatility. Moreover, Deleuze and Guattari typically maximise the rhizome¶ figure to
include other proliferative configurations – a living¶ tumble of rats’ bodies, the rampant progress of a virus, or
the recuperative¶ capacities of ant colonies.¶
A/T: 1AC Ends in Genocide etc.
1. The negatives Rhetoric would have you assume that the 1AC ends in ______.
They attempt to perfectly fix the world, to perfectly know the chaos, but this is
impossible. Embracing the insecurity, however, is the only way to produce a
fearlessness necessary to avoid the internalization of fascism that capitalism
brings. We solve all of this offense and the 1AC. That’s the DnG evidence from
the 1AC.
2. The status quo is already pain, but the difference is that we try to securitize
and plan for chaos. This seperates us from the true reality of the world that is
chaos. The system tells you that death is bad, that schizophrenia is bad, but it
only hurts the system. Only rejecting this call for security opens us up to the
revolutionary potential of lines of flight and it is the only way we can truly
appreciate the world as it is, not our mixed up fantasy of what we want it to be.
Deleuze '83 (Gilles, Prof of Philosophy @ U of Lyon, Paris, and Lycees, Nietzsche and Philosophy, p. 25-27, AD: 7/8/09) jl
The game has two moments which are those of a dicethrow — the dice that is thrown and the dice that falls back. Nietzsche presents the
dicethrow as taking place on two distinct tables, the earth and the sky. The earth where the dice are thrown and the sky where the dice fall
back: "if ever I have played dice with the gods at their table, the earth, so that the earth trembled and broke open and streams of fire snorted
forth; for the earth is a table of the gods, and trembling with creative new words and the dice throws of the gods" (Z III "The Seven Seals" 3 p.
245). "0 sky above me, you pure and lofty sky! This is now your purity to me, that there is no eternal reason-spider and spider's web in you; that
you are to me a dance floor for divine chances, that you are to me a god's table for divine dice and dicers" (Z III "Before Sunrise" p. 186). But
these two tables are not two worlds. They are the two hours of a single world, the two moments of a single world, midnight and midday, the
hour when the dice are thrown, the hour when the dice fall back. Nietzsche insists on the two tables of life which are also the two moments of
the player or the artist; "We
temporarily abandon life, in order to then temporarily fix our gaze upon
it."The dicethrow affirms becoming and it affirms the being of becoming. It is not a matter of
several dicethrows which, because of their number, finally reproduce the same combination. On
the contrary,it is a matter of a single dicethrow which, due to the number of the combination produced,comes to
reproduce itself as such.It is not that a large number of throws produce the repetition of a combination but rather the number of
the combination which produces the repetition of the dicethrow. The dice which are thrown once are the affirmation of chance, the
combination which they form on falling is the affirmation of necessity. Necessity is affirmed of chance in exactly the sense that being is affirmed
of becoming and unity is affirmed of multiplicity. It will be replied, in vain, that thrown to chance, the dice do not necessarily produce the
winning combination, the double six which brings back the dicethrow. This is true, but only insofar as the player did not know how to affirm
chance from the outset. For, just as unity does not suppress or deny multiplicity, necessity does not suppress or abolish chance. Nietzsche
identifies chance with multiplicity, with fragments, with parts, with chaos: the chaos of the dice that are shaken and then thrown.
Nietzsche turns chance into an affirmation.The sky itself is called "chance-sky", "innocence-sky" (Z III "Before Sunrise"); the
reign of Zarathustra is called "great chance" (Z IV "The Honey Offering" and III "Of Old and New Law Tables"; Zarathustra calls himself the
"redeemer of chance"). "By chance, he is the world's oldest nobility, which I have given back to all things; I have released them from their
servitude under purpose . . . I have found this happy certainty in all things: that they prefer to dance on the feet of chance" (Z III "Before
Sunrise" p. 186); "My doctrine is `Let chance come to me: it is as innocent as a little child!' " (Z III "On the Mount of Olives" p. 194). What
Nietzsche calls necessity (destiny) is thus never the abolition but rather the combination of chance itself. Necessity is affirmed of chance in as
much as chance itself affirmed. For there is only a single combination of chance as such, a single way of combining all the parts of chance, a way
which is like the unity of multiplicity, that is to say number or necessity. There are many numbers with increasing or decreasing probabilities,
but only one number of chance as such, one fatal number which reunites all the fragments of chance, like midday gathers together the
scattered parts of midnight.This is why it is sufficient for the player to affirm chance once in order to
produce the number which brings back the dicethrow. 22 To know how to affirm chance is to
know how to play.But we do not know how to play, "Timid, ashamed, awkward, like a tiger whose leap has failed. But what of that you
dicethrowers! You have not learned to play and mock as a man ought to play and mock!" (Z IV "Of the Higher Man" 14 p. 303). The bad
player counts on several throws of the dice, on a great number of throws. In this way he makes
use of causality and probability to produce a combination that he sees as desirable .He posits this
combination itself as an end to be obtained, hidden behind causality. This is what Nietzsche means when he speaks of the eternal spider, of the
spider's web of reason, "A kind of spider of imperative and finality hidden behind the great web, the great net of causality — we could say, with
Charles the Bold when he opposed Louis XI, "I fight the universal spider" (GM III 9). To
abolish chance by holding it in the
grip of causality and finality, to count on the repetition of throws rather than affirming chance,
to anticipate a result instead of affirming necessity — these are all the operations of a bad
player. They have their root in reason, but what is the root of reason? The spirit of revenge, nothing but the spirit of revenge, the spider (Z II
"Of the Tarantulas").Ressentiment in the repetition of throws, bad conscience in the belief in a purpose. But, in this way, all that will ever be
obtained are more or less probable relative numbers. That the
universe has no purpose, that it has no end to hope
for any more than it has causes to be known — this is the certainty necessary to play well (VP III
465).The dicethrow fails because chance has not been affirmed enough in one throw. It has not
been affirmed enough in order to produce the fatal number which necessarily reunites all the
fragments and brings back the dicethrow.We must therefore attach the greatest importance to the following conclusion:
for the couple causality-finality, probability-finality, for the opposition and the synthesis of these terms, for the web of these terms, Nietzsche
substitutes the Dionysian correlation of chance necessity, the Dionysian couple chance-destiny. Not
a probability distributed
over several throws but all chance at once; not a final, desired, willed combination, but the fatal
combination, fatal and loved, amor fati; not the return of a combination by the number of
throws, but the repetition of a dicethrow by the nature of the fatally obtained number
A/T: Crash is a Signifying Machine
First, The bodies in Crash we embrace are not signifying machines, but they are
expression machines – Accesses all your offense
Holtmeier ’09 (Matthew. PhD, Film Studies | expected completion in 2012 | University of St Andrews, St Andrews, Scotland¶ Master
of Arts, English | English Studies Emphasis, Spring 2008 | Western Washington University, Bellingham, WA ¶ Bachelor of Arts, English |
Literature Emphasis-Cum Laude, Spring 2006 | Western Washington University, Bellingham, WA. Many more quals -
http://www.matthewholtmeier.com/CV. “Scars, Cars, and Bodies without Organs: Technocolonialism
in J.G. Ballard’s Crash”, 2009.)
(http://www.leonardo.info/LEA/DispersiveAnatomies/DA_holtmeier.pdf. JCook.) Accessed 8/10/12.
he bodies are not "puritanical, repressive," not the

Baudrillard goes on further to explain that t
"'signifying¶ machine' as Deleuze would say," but instead "glistening and seductive, or
unpolished and innocent.¶ Seductive because it has been stripped of meaning, a
simple mirror of torn bodies," [3] echoing what¶ Deleuze would call a ‘plane of immanence.’
Baudrillard makes an important point when he comments on the¶ fact that the bodies in Ballard’s novel do not represent
signifying machines, but bodies stripped of meaning .¶ Baudrillard doesn't emphasize enough,
however, that the bodies of Crash are seductive because in the act¶ of being stripped of meaning, they are no longer simple signifying
machines:they do not 'make meaning'¶ through signification, but expression. To borrow
the arguments of Deleuze concerning the plane of¶ immanence: at this point signification is no longer
important, because transcendence, or recourse to a¶ transcendental idea or

image, is not an option – only the here-and-now *action* and *becoming* in
the plane¶ of immanence. I argue, beyond what Baudrillard briefly notes, that Ballard presents a
psychopathology as¶ an assemblage of 'expressing machines' rather than
'signifying machines.' This is more than what Bradley¶ Butterfield calls an exploration “as a symbol among symbols” [4] in his
article discussing the ‘Ballard-¶ Baudrillard connection.’ If we look at Ballard’s characters in terms of what they *express*, we see that the ¶
bodies physically perform an orgasm, and through this act they express far more than ‘signs’ could allow for; ¶ if there is signification, it comes
*through* such expression. I believe that it is important, however, to look at ¶ the significance of such expression, at what such expression can
communicate to a reader. Exploring¶ Ballard’s psychopathology in relation to the orgasms it engenders allows the reader to begin to
denaturalize¶ Vaughn’s community, which comes together to wreck bodies for pleasure. In the marks on their bodies, ¶ traces are left which
lead to the languages that communicate the expression of these bodies. In these ¶ languages, we find that the bodies of Crash are not
revolutionary epiphenomena, but a people that have¶ been colonized by technology: a techno-colonized people whose bodies have been
stripped of their previous¶ operation and forced into a new set of functions. I will return to the colonial effects of technology later, after ¶
illustrating the particular methodology I take towards the relationship among the body, sexuality, and ¶ technology.
A/T: Scientists Prove Deleuze Wrong (Ev Indict)
First, No link – This evidence is very specific to scientists proving Deleuze’s ideas
of visual perception – Definitely not what we’re talking about.
Second, No implication - Even if Deleuze’s thoughts of visual perception are

wrong, it doesn’t affect his ideas of the Oedipal
A/T: DnG Coopted by Cap
First, DnG might be coopted by capitalism, but their ideas still hold
revolutionary potential for us. We’re separate from their philosophy even if
we’re borrowing ideas from them. They have to win that our particular act of
resistance has already been commodified – otherwise we can always hop to a
new line of flight once the old one has been coopted
Second, Can’t be coopted – schizophrenic politics means that the system will
never be able to identify and codify us like it does in the SQuo – That’s Seem
Third, Only the aff gets coopted by capitalism – capitalism will take your
attempt to solve problems and turn it into a tactic for profit – That’s Kuswa ‘04
Fourth, Capitalism is literally the thing our alternative tries to crash away from.
That’s the alt debate
A/T: Chaos Turns
First, If the alternative to chaos is structure then give me chaos – current

structures only leads to systematic violence and disposal of whole populations –
That’s Seem and Ballantyne 7
Second, This generates uniqueness for the alternative- its try or die to break
from the non chaotic controlled status qup
Third, We might not know what happens post alternative, but that’s the point.
We shouldn’t seek pure safety inside our National-Highway-Traffic-Safety-
Administration-approved bubbles. Chaos can be beautiful, but we can never
know that beauty in the world of the aff – That’s Koppensteiner ‘09
Fourth, There is no internal link – no reason chaos leads to violence
Fifth, There is no impact to death
Sixth, We should free ourselves from the fascism of the future’s certainty.
Instead, we should seek a new form of social interaction that affirms our ability
to shape ourselves and produce a personally fulfilling future.
Seem 72 (Mark, translator for Deleuze and Guattari works, Anti-Oedipus, pg xx – xxiii)
To be anti-oedipal is to be anti-ego as well as anti-homo, willfully attacking all reductive psychoanalytic and political
analyses that remain caught within the sphere of totality and unity, in order to free the multiplicity of desire
from the deadly neurotic and Oedipal yoke. For Oedipus is not a mere psychoanalytic construct, Deleuze and Guattari explain.
Oedipus is the figurehead of imperialism, "colonization pursued by other means, it is the interior colony, and we shall see that even here at
home . . .it is our intimate colonial education." This internalization of man by man, this "oedipalization," creates a new meaning
for suffering, internal suffering, and a new tone for life: the depressive tone . Now depression does not just come about
one fine day, Anti-Oedipus goes on, nor does Oedipus appear one day in the Family and feel secure in remaining there. Depression and Oedipus
are agencies of the State, agencies of paranoia, agencies of power, long before being delegated to the family. Oedipus is the figure of power as
such, just as neurosis is the result of power on individuals. Oedipus is everywhere. For anti-oedipalists the ego, like Oedipus, is "part of those
things we must dismantle through the united assault of analytical and political forces."* Oedipus is belief injected into the unconscious, it is
what gives us faith as it robs us of power, it is what teaches us to desire our own repression. Everybody has been oedipalized and neuroticized
at home, at school, at work. Everybody wants to be a fascist. Deleuze and Guattari want to know how these beliefs
succeed in taking hold of a body, thereby silencing the productive machines of the libido. They also want to know how the
opposite situation is brought about, where a body successfully wards off the effects of power. Reversing the Freudian
distinction between neurosis and psychosis that measures everything against the former, Anti-Oedipus concludes: the neurotic is the one on
whom the Oedipal imprints take, whereas the psychotic is the one incapable of being oedipalized, even and especially by psychoanalysis. The
first task of the revolutionary, they add, is to learn from the psychotic how to shake off the Oedipal yoke and the effects of power,
in order to initiate a radical politics of desire freed from all beliefs. Such a politics dissolves the mystifications of
power through the kindling, on all levels, of anti-oedipal forces -the schizzes-flows-forces that escape coding, scramble
the codes, and flee in all directions: orphans (no daddy-mommy-me), atheists (no beliefs), and nomads (no habits, no territories). A
schizoanalysis schizophrenizes in order to break the holds of power and institute research into a new collective
subjectivity and a revolutionary healing of mankind. For we are sick, so sick, of our selves! It is actually not accurate to
say that Deleuze and Guattari develop the schizoanalytic approach, for, as they show, it has always been at work in writers like Miller or
Nietzsche or Artaud. Stoned thinking based on intensely lived experiences: Pop Philosophy. To put it simply, as does Miller, "everybody
becomes a healer the moment he forgets about himself." And Miller continues: "Reality is here and now, everywhere, gleaming through every
reflection that meets the eye. . . . Everybody is a neurotic, down to the last man and woman. The healer, or the analyst, if you like, is only a
super-neurotic. . . . To be cured we must rise from our graves and throw off the cerements of the dead. Nobody can do it for another-it is a
private affair which is best done collectively." Once we forget about our egos a non-neurotic form of politics becomes possible, where
singularity and collectivity are no longer at odds with each other, and where collective expressions of desire are possible. Such a politics
does not seek to regiment individuals according to a totalitarian system of norms, but to de-normalize and de-
individualize through a multiplicity of new, collective arrangements against power. Its goal is the transformation of
human relationships in a struggle against power. And it urges militant groups, as well as lone individuals, to analyze and fight
against the effects of power that subjugate them: "For a revolutionary group at the preconscious level remains a subjugated group, even in
seizing power, as long as this power itself refers to a form of force that continues to enslave and crush desiring-production. . . . A subject-group,
on the contrary, is a group whose libidinal investments are themselves revolutionary, it causes desire to penetrate into the social field, and
subordinates the socius or the forms of power to desiring-production; productive of desire and a desire that produces, the subject-group always
invents mortal formations that exorcize the effusion in it of a death instinct; it opposes real coefficients of transversality to the symbolic
determinations of subjugation, coefficients without a hierarchy or a group superego." There can be no revolutionary actions, Anti-
Oedipus concludes, where the relations between people and groups are relations of exclusion and segregation.
Groups must multiply and connect in ever new ways, freeing up territorialities for the construction of new social
arrangements. Theory must therefore be conceived as a toolbox, producing tools that work ; or as Ivan Illich says, we
must learn to construct tools for conviviality through the use of counterfoil research. When Illich speaks of "convivial reconstruction," he is very
close to Deleuze and Guattari's notion of a 'desiring-revolution." Like Deleuze and Guattari Illich also calls for a radical reversal of the
relationships between individuals and tools or machines: "This reversal would permit the evolution of a life-style and of a political system which
give priority to the protection, the maximum use, and the enjoyment of the one resource that is almost equally distributed among all people:
personal energy under personal ~ontrol."~ All three authors agree that such a reversal must be governed by a collective political process, and
not by professionals and experts. The ultimate answer to neurotic dependencies on professionals is mutual self-careas Freed from a
psychoanalytic framework, the political group or collective cannot, however, push aside the problem of desire. Nor can it leave desire in the
hands of new experts. It must analyze the function of desire, in itself and in the groups with which it is involved. What is the function of desire,
Anti-Oedipus asks, if not one of making connections? For to be bogged down in arrangements from which escape is possible is to be neurotic,
seeing an irresolvable crisis where alternatives in fact exist. And as Deleuze and Guattari comment, "perhaps it will be discovered that the only
incurable is the neurotic." We defend so cautiously against our egoically limited experiences, states Laing in The Politics of Experience, that it is
not surprising to see people grow defensive and panic at the idea of experiencing ego-loss through the use of drugs or collective experiences.
But there is nothing pathological about ego-loss, Laing adds; quite the contrary. Ego-loss is the experience of all mankind, "of the primal man, of
Adam and perhaps even [a journey] further into the beings of animals, vegetables and mineral^."^ No age, Laing concludes, has so lost touch
with this healing process as has ours. Deleuze and Guattari's schizoanalytic approach serves to begin such a healing process. Its major task
is to destroy the oedipalized and neuroticized individual dependencies through the forging of a collective
subjectivity, a nonfascist subject-anti-Oedipus. Anti-Oedipus is an individual or a group that no longer functions in
terms of beliefs and that comes to redeem mankind, as Nietzsche foresaw, not only from the ideals that
weighed it down, "but also from that which was bound to grow out of it, the great nausea, the will to nothingness, nihilism;
this bell-stroke of noon and of the great decision that liberates the will again and restores its goal to the earth and his hope to man; this
Antichrist and antinihilist. . . He must come one day.-"10 Unlike Nietzsche's antinihilist, however, Deleuze and Guattari's anti-Oedipus is not
alone. Anti-Oedipus is not the superman. It is not transcendent. Where Nietzsche grew progressively more isolated to the point of madness,
Deleuze and Guattari call for actions and passions of a collective nature, here and now. Madness is a radical
break from power in the form of a disconnection. Militancy, in Deleuze and Guattari's framework, would learn from madness but
then move beyond it, beyond disconnections and deterritorializations, to ever new connections. A politics of desire would see loneliness and
depression as the first things to go. Such is the anti-oedipal strategy: if man is connected to the machines of the universe, if he
is in tune with his desires, if he is "anchored," "he ceases to worry about the fitness of things, about the
behavior of his fellow-men, about right or wrong and justice and injustice. If his roots are in the current of life he
will float on the surface like a lotus and he will blossom and give forth fruit . . . . The life that's in him will manifest itself in
growth, and growth is an endless, eternal process. The process is everything."ll It is this process-of desiring-production-that Anti-Oedipus sets
out to analyze. For if desire is repressed in a society, Deleuze and Guattari state, this is hardly because "it is a desire for the mother or for the
death of the father; on the contrary, desire becomes that only because it is repressed, it takes that mask on under the reign of the repression
that models the mask for it and plasters it on its face. . .. The real danger is elsewhere. If desire is repressed, it is because every position of
desire, no matter how small, is capable of calling into question the established older of a society: not that desire is asocial; on the contrary. But
it is explosive; there is no desiring-machine capable of being assembled without demolishing entire social sectors."
A/T: Pol Pot
First, No Link – One person reading the philosophy is not descriptive of our
alternative
Second, Turn the alt is the only escape from the Pol Pot regime – their
revolution was to imagine their perfect society than work towards that the alt
abandons final goals
A/T: Fight Club Turn
First, Lines of flight work and are good--a line of flight is what you experience
when something like a work of art inspires you to change the way you think or
act. Even if that line of flight, that inspiration, eventually leaves it's okay
because you can get reinspired by something else.
Second, That means that there's no impact to this argument, all lines of flight
eventually fail so that's why we keep moving between them, abiding by the
Deleuzian rule of thumb: static thought is death.
Third, That also means we have an impact turn--switching between lines of

flight is good because trying to follow the same one after the inspiration leaves
means the line of flight turns into a line of death as it gets coopted by the State
and capitalism.
Fourth, there is no guarantee of a catastrophic end--Fight Club is a fictional story

with a specific narrative structure and the only way to end the story is to
violently conclude the line of flight. There is no overarching narrative to life--we
are not bound to that same fate.
A/T: DnG Use Binaries
Our kritik does not devolve into biunivocal thinking or become an exercise in
binaries. Rather, our concepts fold into one another to produce multiplicities of
meaning.
Bell ‘10 (David, PhD candidate @ Univ. of Nottingham. “Fail Again. Fail Better: Nomadic Utopianism in Deleuze and Guattari and Yevgeny
Zamyatin.” Political Perspectives, 4:1)
So far I have identified and explained a small number of Deleuze and Guattari’s neologistic concepts. The attentive reader will have noted that
these usually come in pairs - smooth and striated space; the immanent and the transcendent and, of course, the state and the nomad. I have
tried to show how one of these concepts is linked to the life and the opening of new spaces for life whilst the other seeks to close off
It would be easy, therefore, to argue that Deleuze and Guattari
possibilities for new ways of being.
have created a binary system of the kind they purport to despise: yet that
would miss a crucial aspect of their theory. For these conceptual pairs concepts
do not function as binary opposites. Rather - and here I will introduce a further Deleuzeo-Guattarian
neologistic pair- they ‘deterritorialize’ and ‘reterritorialize’ into one another. These terms vary in
meaning across Deleuze and Guattari’s works, but I will be following Adrian Parr in stating that ‘ to deterritorialize is to free
up the fixed relations that contain a body all the while exposing it to new
organisations’ (in Parr, 2005: 67). Nomadic thought is a deterritorializing force
smoothing over the striated spaces created by state thought, but state thought
is able to immediately reterritorialize and striate the newly created smooth
space. Simon Tormey and Jules Townshend liken this to Sartre’s concept of the ‘practicoinert’: the moment when revolutionary ideals
become victorious and ossify into established norms, closing off opportunities for future change (2006: 45).
A/T: IDF
First, Even if the IDF have learned from DnG, they still don’t know how to
counter their tactics – means the alternative still solves
Kullenberg ’6 (Christopher.Ph.D-candidate in Theory of Science at GÃ¶teborg University. His major research interests are in the fields of Science and
Technology Studies (STS), philosophy and sociology. He is currently working on a thesis describing the role of statistics in the constitution of modern societies.
Christopher is also interested in the mediation of social change through technology, as well as post-humanist aspects of continental philosophy and their
implications for political change. He is the editor of the Resistance Studies Magazine. “Philosophy, Resistance and War”. December 21st, 2006.)
(http://resistancestudies.org/?p=45. JCook.) Accessed 8/8/12.
Now, according to Deleuze and Guattari, there is an opposition between what they call the State-
apparatus and the War machine. The primary objective for the State-apparatus
is to make smooth spaces striated in order to control the movements of the War
machine. One way of doing this is to build high walls, as on the West Bank. But there is
one problem. The War machine works with a different logic than the monstrous State-
apparatus – it is even ontologically different. It connects rhizomatically, and gains power

through multiplication rather than by metric numbers. This way, it can never be quenched by striating a
landscape with wallsonly,it always finds a flight line of escape. What we see on the picture (above)
is a strange discursive battle written on the wall, but this type of resistance is only superficial. Thepower of resistance is in the
creative(but often violent and repulsive) attempts at breaking through. Building a wall may work
statistically, but it will not change resistance at its core. The IDF has learned the
tactics of striating smooth spaces, but they have hardly solved the problem of
rhizomatic resistance. My suggestion, is not only that the IDF changes politics,
but also heads back to the library to re-read A Thousand Plateaus.
Second, The IDF cooption backfires because it doesn’t take control of the
resistance. It reproduces oppositional discourse creating resentmentamong
Palestinians – only weakens Israel
Pampinella ’9 (Stephen.Writer with the Antilibrary.“A Thousand Plateaus.” January 5, 2009.)
(http://antilibrarium.wordpress.com/2009/01/05/. JCook.)Access 8/8/12.
This discussion of space is especially interesting in a military context given that IDF Brigadier General
Shimon Navehhas incorporated the smooth-striated space concept to describe a new
tactical approach in attacking insurgent threats, commonly known as ‘walking through walls’ (see this article, and
these couple posts). Naveh had misappropriated Deleuzeand Guattarito think about space
only in a physical sense: by walking through walls to kill an enemy , soldiers are
smoothing out otherwise striated (physical) space. However, these tactics only serve
to reproduce the social stratum that separates ‘Israelis’ from ‘Palestinians’ , as
well as the war machine that makes necessary the use of violence against
subjects that are outside the state. In other words,a strategy of ‘walking though walls’
has the social effect creating hostile perceptions of threat between the IDF and
its adversaries, just as indiscriminately using airpower can erode political
support for military action. If the attempted smoothing of space is not accomplished by the state simultaneously
appropriating (and controlling) the war machine, it will ultimately weaken, if not destroy the state .
Third, At worst, this is a disad to the perm. The IDF are an example of why it’s
bad to incorporate the state with our nomadic tactics –they simultaneously
striate Palestinian space with walls and road blocks while smoothing that space
with nomadic innovations – only this produces violence.
A/T: Crash Bad/Deontology
First, tag me
Holtmeier ’09 (Matthew. PhD, Film Studies | expected completion in 2012 | University of St Andrews, St Andrews, Scotland¶ Master
of Arts, English | English Studies Emphasis, Spring 2008 | Western Washington University, Bellingham, WA ¶ Bachelor of Arts, English |
Literature Emphasis-Cum Laude, Spring 2006 | Western Washington University, Bellingham, WA. Many more quals -
http://www.matthewholtmeier.com/CV. “Scars, Cars, and Bodies without Organs: Technocolonialism
in J.G. Ballard’s Crash”, 2009.)
(http://www.leonardo.info/LEA/DispersiveAnatomies/DA_holtmeier.pdf. JCook.) Accessed 8/10/12.
The Politics of Group Sex¶ As I have shown earlier,the characters in Crash participate in a major language, sexuality, but make
a minor¶ use of it, performing acts of techno-sexuality. In doing so, they create a minor community, similar to
what¶ Deleuze and Guattari call a ‘minor literature.’ In the words of Deleuze and Guattari: “A minor literature¶
doesn’t come from a minor language; it is rather that which a minority

constructs within a major language”¶ [5]. Vaughn’s small community of crash victims constitutes a minority with
their dangerous acts of sex, but¶ intercourse itself, as a practice of the wider continental culture, is a major language. In order to explore the ¶
relevance of this minor interaction it is important to apply to Vaughn’s minor community the three aspects of ¶ minor literatures that Deleuze
and Guattari have developed. Although my application differs in the sense that¶ I am applying it to communities rather than ‘literatures,’ the
method of analyzing the ‘minor’ product, as well¶ its theoretical implications, are close enough to use Deleuze and Guattari’s original text.
Deleuze and¶ Guattari explain: “The three characteristics of minor literature are the deterritorialization of language, the ¶ connection of the
individual to a political immediacy, and the collective assemblage of enunciation” [5]. In ¶ locating the languages with which the bodies of Crash
work I have shown the deterritorializations from major¶ sexualities to eventual reterritorializations prompted by their participation with
Vaughn’s community, but such¶ territorializations engender the consequences of *political immediacy* and *assemblages of enunciation*
that¶ minor literatures develop as well.¶ Minor literatures are political: Deleuze and Guattari maintain that their “cramped space forces each
individual¶ intrigue to connect immediately to politics. The individual concern thus becomes all the more necessary, ¶ indispensable, magnified,
because a whole *other* story is vibrating within it” (my emphasis) [5]. As opposed¶ to Grundmann’s argument that the bodies of Crash engage
the bodies engage in *hyperpolitical*
in discrete sex acts, rather than proclaiming¶ sexual identity, I propose
acts because they do not have the *room* to¶ engage in discrete sex acts. To do so
would be to communicate through a channel divorced from the¶ vernacular, vehicular, referential, and mythic languages I have described. A
discrete sex act as described by¶ Grundmann would require one to invent an ‘entirely new sex,’
otherwise sex acts link immediately back to¶ body-politics through their
histories or what Hayles calls a “skeuomorph.” And the bodies of Crash *do* link¶ back to body-politics – questions of hetero-
normativity, technology, and perversity – as the reader is required ¶ to question why James is not sexually stimulated by a sex act of the larger
why must James touch a vehicle
culture, but instead must rely on¶ technology to perform organic functions. Indeed,
and experience scars in¶ order to experience an orgasm? Ballard’s text becomes
an “immense metaphor” as Jean Baudrillard put it,¶ but a perplexing one that leads its reader down the path to
a techno-sexuality; it asks the reader to question¶ the significance of perverse technologies as
they are hyperpoliticized by Ballard’s interplay of languages.¶The reader is forced to recognize

the techno-colonization taking progress, as native languages are rendered¶ unimportant, and replaced with the
words of the colonizers – in this case Vaughn’s community, the freeways,¶ and a burgeoning techno-sexuality.¶ Furthermore, in minor
an author may construct an¶ enunciation but it
literatures “everything takes on a collective value” [5]:
becomes the voice of many as it articulates unspoken values or beliefs . Because a

minor¶ literature is a construction of the minority participating in a major discourse it creates spaces of expression ¶ that were previously
unaddressed, or possibly even suppressed. We may read Vaughn’s community as a¶ minor literature because of the way it takes on collective
values and creates a coherent community around a¶ radical sexuality, which separates it from conventional sexualities and creates a space
within conventional¶ sexuality for technology and acts of sex to come together. For Deleuze and Guattari, “ The literary
machine¶ [as a minor literature] thus becomes the relay for a revolutionary
machine-to-come, not at all for ideological¶ reasons but because the literary
machine alone is determined to fill the conditions of a collective enunciation ¶
that is lacking elsewhere” [5]. Vaughn, the author of this minor community initiates a movement from “the¶ individuated
animal to the pack or to a collective multiplicity” [3], and invites others to contemplate the radical ¶ sexuality of the highway. But,
because minor communities allow participants “to express another possible ¶
community and to forge the means for another consciousness and another
sensibility” [5], they promote the¶ possibilities and reconceptions, marked by readers like
Sobchack as dangerous. Through the vastly¶ reconceptualized ways of experiencing
freeway technology Baudrillard claims that Ballard constructs a world ¶ free of

moral consideration, and asks “is it good or bad? We can’t say” [3]. Though perhaps we
cannot label¶ the psychopathologies of Crash as ‘good’ or ‘bad,’ Lamberti suggests an alternative that does not rely upon a ¶ binary. She
positions Crash according to Ballard’s idea that the book presents ‘an extreme metaphor for an ¶ extreme situation,’ but a metaphor up for
consideration rather than a metaphor for its own sake. For¶ example, Lamberti notes that Cronenberg’s adaptation had a sort of timeliness,
because of the way the film¶ was released in Italy when teenage car crashes were at an all time high – creating Crash as a sort of ¶ catalyst for
It is our task as
moral consideration. Her end-stance, however, engages Crash for its exploratory nature as she ¶ suggests that “
readers and as audiences to consciously acknowledge and establish new ¶

borders” [9], which suggests engaging the ideas within Crash without laying claim
to a morality of Crash.
A/T: Post-Modernism Bad for Indigenous Peoples
First,They've basically just made a huge part of the 2AC a double-turn with the
aff. Their argument is one of the biggest DA's against their aff – Insert analysis
*you should see immediately if you have specific evidence linking the aff to
indigenous oppression*
Second, The only hope of survival for indigenous peoples and others is the
regeneration of post-modern spaces. The impact is death and dehumanization.
It is try or die for the alt.
Esteva and Prakash ’98 (“Grassroots Post-modernism: Remaking the Soil of Cultures”. Gustavo Esteva. Former Professor and
President of the 5th World Congress on Sociology. Grass roots activist. Madhu Suri Prakash. President in Charge of Educational Theory and
Practice at Penn State University. Zed books Ltd. 1998. ISBN I 85649 545 0. Accessed from aaaaarg.org Pg 3. – M.E.)
the "social
Dramatically exacerbating five centuries of modernization during the past four "Development Decades" (Sachs, 1992),
minorities" are consuming3 the natural and cultural spaces of the world's
"social majorities"- with the stated intentions of developing them for "progress," economic growth and humanization.¶ For
their part, with sheer guts and a creativity born out of their desperation, the "social
majorities" continue resisting the inroads of that modern world into their
lives,in their efforts to save their families and communities, their villages, ghettoes and
barrios, from the next fleet of bulldozers sent to make them orderly or clean. Daily, the
blueprints ofmodernization, conceived by conventional or alternative planners for
their betterment, leave "the people" less and less human. Forced out of their
centuries-old traditional communal spacesinto the modern world, they suffer every
imaginable indignity and dehumanization by the minorities who inhabit it. The
only hope of a human existence, of survival and flourishing for the "social
majorities,"therefore,lies in the creation and regeneration of post-modern
spaces.
Third, The aff doesn’t offer a path for liberation for natives either – Means no
impact to the alt. compared to the plan
Fourth, Our theory offers American Indians some way of understanding their
own oppression better – That’s Ballantyne 7
Fifth, Even if borders are key for American Indian self-determination, letting the
USFG decide where to draw the roads is bad because it needs to be the tribe’s
decision where to draw that line – That’s Grande’s argument
Sixth, Turn – Deleuzian theory is accessible to everyone, allowing solvency to
spillover and stop the oppression towards American Indians
Bryden ’07 (Mary, Professor of European Literature, French, Cardiff University, “Gilles Deleuze: Travels in Literature”, 2007, pg. 3-,
JCook.)
In the previous century,the French writer Xavier de Maistre had¶appealed to his readers, in his Voyage
autour de ma chambre, to join him¶ on a forty-two-day journey within the confines of his
room. Extolling¶ the virtues of stationary travel – it costs nothing; it is

undertaken without¶the hindrances of cold and damp, and without the worry of
being¶ accosted by thieves; it is available to those in poor health, and to those ¶
frightened of potholes – he views all the elements of the enclosed space ¶ as
allies in his exploration, the armchair because it promotes meditation, ¶ the bed
because it is the theatre of both birth and death. With¶ these resources, ‘les heures glissent alors sur
vous, et tombent en silence¶ dans l’éternité, sans vous faire sentir leur triste passage’11 [hours slip¶ over you, and fall
silently into eternity, without letting you feel their ¶ sad passing].¶ Attempting, if not to
replicate, then to commune with, this experience¶ of micro-journeying, the writer Alain de Botton experimented with ¶ what he called a ‘de
Maistrean journey around Hammersmith’, an area¶ chosen because he was so well acquainted with it.12 Convinced that de¶ Maistre’s work
sprang from the insight that ‘the pleasure we derive from¶ journeys is perhaps dependent more on the mindset with which we¶ travel than on
the destination we travel to’ (Botton, p. 246), he identifies¶ receptivity as the chief characteristic of that mindset. Hence, in the ¶ course of his
peregrination around Hammersmith, the role of receiver or¶ perceiver took precedence over that of potential arriver, as he attempted ¶ to look
afresh at the apparently familiar elements of the neighbourhood,¶ chipping away to find ‘latent layers of value’ (Botton, p. 251). His¶ conclusion
(which in fact concludes the entire study) is that ‘Xavier de¶ Maistre was gently nudging us to try, before taking off for distant hemispheres, ¶ to
notice what we have already seen’ (Botton, p. 254).¶ Is this, then, the mode privileged by Deleuze and Guattari when they ¶ advance the notion
of the ‘voyageur immobile’? Certainly it would be¶ difficult to forego receptivity as a prerequisite to becoming. As John¶ Hughes suggests, ‘a
kind of innate truancy’ is required if a text is to lead¶ to ‘creative thought, and new affects’.13 However, receptivity in this ¶ travelling,
Bottonesque sense is a kind of enhanced repetition, an¶ attempt ‘to notice what we have already seen’. It involves a deliberate ¶ concentration
upon the structure, history and provenance of the organic¶ or built environment: ‘We are alive to the layers of history beneath ¶ the present
The¶ Deleuzian ‘voyageur immobile’, on the other hand, is
and take notes and photographs’ (Botton, p. 247).
not concerned¶ with recording or archiving. Becomings are anti-historical in the

sense¶ that they are always forward-bound trajectories, spending, dissolving, ¶
and transforming rather than saving, consolidating, and preserving. ¶ They are
also anti-personal in the sense that they do not cluster around ¶ contrasts such as
‘This is me when concentrating on travelling to my¶ destination’ or ‘This is me
when absorbing the ambient details I normally¶ miss when travelling’. Rather, they
are associated with the play of¶ affects and percepts, which are what subjective
affections and perceptions¶ become when they are impersonal, liberated from
an origin within¶ a particular individual. In this way, ‘This is me, intently gathering¶ and organising the strands of
history and social organisation which are¶ perceptible in this neighbourhood’ becomes an infinitely extensible¶ composite swarm, such as
Here are: coffee smell-street garbage-morning¶ sun-ginger cat in doorway-shout
‘
of child …’. From among these intersections,¶ individuals form and proceed. This
is indeed how Deleuze and¶ Guattari characterise their own writing endeavours,
to which their individual¶ names are attached, they say, purely in
acknowledgement of¶ habitual practice, since ‘un livre n’a pas d’objet ni de sujet, il est fait de¶ matières
diversement formées, de dates et de vitesses très différentes’¶ (MP, p. 9) [a book has no object or subject, it is
made of variously¶ formed materials, of very different dates and speeds]. ¶ A

Deleuzian ‘voyageur immobile’, then, is not on the trail of an ¶ explanation, of an
architectural, psychoanalytical, or social history.¶ Neither is s/he attempting to
evoke or replicate cultures through the¶ processes of imagination, in the way in which
Huysmans’ des¶ Esseintes becomes a virtual London tourist. Rather, s/he is entering a¶ rhizomatic flux in which
multiple becomings are potentially available.¶ A rhizome provides for Deleuze

and Guattari a hard-working figure of¶ becomings since rhizomes proliferate
through underground, horizontal¶ networks rather than by the vertical, rooted
structure associated¶ with trees: ‘N’importe quel point d’un rhizome peut être connecté¶ avec n’importe quel autre,
et doit l’être. C’est très différent de l’arbre¶ ou de la racine qui fixent un point, un ordre’ (MP, p. 13) [Any point of¶ a rhizome
can be connected with any other, and must be. This is very ¶ different from the
tree or the root, which determine a point, an order].¶ Rhizomes thus have no
determinate shape or direction, and may travel¶ great distances, transforming
apparent obstacles (worms, rocks) into¶ intersecting topographical features, as
described by Patty Sotirin in an¶ essay on the concept of becoming-woman: ‘The rhizomatic roots of¶ mint plants may break through a
seemingly impenetrable concrete¶ retaining wall, one molecule at a time; the detachment of each¶ concrete particle by the collocation of a
Any gardener who has attempted to remove such
plant particle has its own¶ singularity’.14
underground¶ colonisers is aware of their committed and yet unpredictable ¶

versatility. Moreover, Deleuze and Guattari typically maximise the rhizome¶ figure to
include other proliferative configurations – a living¶ tumble of rats’ bodies, the rampant progress of a virus, or
the recuperative¶ capacities of ant colonies.¶
A/T: “Schizophrenics are suffering”
First, No link – There is a clear distinction between Schizoanalysis and clinical
schizophrenia
Marks ‘ 98 (John Marks, Gilles Deleuze: Vitalism and Multiplicity, 1998, p. 96-98)
Schizophrenia and the Schizophrenic ¶ A schizophrenic out for a walk is a better model than a neurotic lying on the analyst's couch. (AO, 2) ¶ As
we have seen already, the concept of schizophrenia and the schizophrenic is one of the most controversial in Anti-Oedipus. Even Foucault, who
praises the book so highly in his preface, admits elsewhere to being confused over the notion of schizophrenia in the book. Is it, he asks, the
way in which society imposes relations of power on individuals at a certain time? Or is schizophrenia the structure of non-Oedipal desire?11
Deleuze and Guattari seem to be saying that the social world is schizophrenic in that it puts intolerable and contradictory pressures on
individuals, but also that schizophrenia is in some ways a valid response to this situation. The situation is apparently complicated by the fact
that Deleuze and Guattari claim, although this was certainly not true, never to have seen a schizophrenic (see N, 12). However, this deliberately
provocative statement helps to explain what they mean by schizophrenia. As Brian Massumi points out, the 'schizophrenia’ that Deleuze and
Guattari seem to promote in Anti-Oedipus is not a pathological condition. It is rather a creative process of thinking differently, of 'becoming':
'Schizophrenia is a breakaway into the unstable equlibrium of continuing self-invention.' 12 Even Freud, the discoverer of the unconscious,
could not go beyond a limited conception of the ego, constrained as he was by the Oedipal formula for assigning identities: 'daddy-mommy-me'
(AO, 23). For this reason, Freud mistakenly attributes a certain autism to schizophrenia: schizophrenics are like narcissistic philosophers, who
mistake 'words for things' (AO, 23). l3For Deleuze and Guattari, on the other hand,it is undeniable that the schizophrenic, or the 'schizo',
suffers pain and trauma, but the problems of the schizo are not those of the ego , the habit of saying I: 'He is somewhere else, beyond or
behind or below these problems, rather than immersed in them9 (AO, 23). The clinical schizophrenic does not suffer from narcissism; her/his
problem is a 'social' problem. She or he has tried the experiment, but has been blocked, has become a victim of the schizoid process: ¶The
schizophrenics in hospitals are people who've tried to do something and failed , cracked up. We're not saying revolutionaries are
schizophrenics. We're saying there's a schizoid process, of decoding and deterritorializing, which only revolutionary activity can stop turning
into the production of schizophrenia. (N, 23-4) ¶ So, Deleuze and Guattari also emphasise the fact that capitalism itself is a 'schizophrenic’
process. In the same way that psychoanalysis refuses to acknowledge the desire and schizophrenia which lie at the heart of the unconscious, so
capitalism performs the same denial: 'Psychoanalysis is like capitalism: although it tends toward the limit of schizophrenia, it's constantly
evading this limit, and trying to get round it' (N, 21). The main tendency of capitalism is the decoding of flows (money-capital and labour) and
the deterritorialisation of the socius: 'All that is solid melts into the air.' Jean-Francois Lyotard argues that Deleuze and Guattari reveal the
energy which is potential within Marx's work. 14 Marx was the first to locate the fluidity and deterritorialisation which is axiomatic of
capitalism. It constantly draws near to its 'schizophrenic’ limit, but also constantly pulls back from that limit: ¶ What we are really trying to say is
that capitalism, through its process of production, produces an awesome schizophrenic accumulation of energy or charge, against which it
brings all its vast powers of repression to bear, but which nonetheless continues to act as capitalism's limit. (AO, 34) ¶ As quickly as capitialism
deterritorialises, "ancillary apparatuses', such as the forces of law and order and bureaucratic institutions, carry out a process of
reterritorialisation (AO, 35). Just as Marx reminds us that the commodity provides little information on the relations of production that
underpin it, so the schizophrenic is a figure isolated from the material process of desire (AO, 25). The 'solution' that Deleuze and Guattari
propose is a genuinely schizophrenic production of desire. ‘You haven't seen anything yet' is a key slogan of the ethics of 'schizoanalysis'. There
is always room for more perversion and more artifice (AO, 321). Capitalism always seems to step back from the brink, as it were,
reterritorialising schizophrenic energies into an axiomatic that opposes their revolutionary potential (AO, 246). The solution proposed by
Deleuze and Guattari is radical and provocative: ¶ What we say, in fact, is that there's never anything like enough consumption, never anything
like enough contrivance: people's interests will never turn in favor of revolution until lines of desire reach the point where desire and machine
become indistinguishable, where desire and contrivance are the same thing, turning against the so-called natural principles of, for example,
capitalist society. (N, 19-20)
Second, Understandings of the suffering schizo are based within the ego which
the schizo has stopped believing in. Demanding that we attend to these
problems only triangulates schizophrenia returning them to the problems the
aff/neg describes.
Deleuze and Guattari ’77 (Gilles Deleuze. Smart French Guy. Felix Guattari. Also smart, questionably French.
1977. University of Minnesota Press 1983. Thirteenth Edition. ISBN: 978-0-8166-1225-3. Pg. 22-23 -- M.E.)
There is no very great difference between false materialism and typical forms of idealism. The theory of schizophrenia is
formulated in terms of three conceptsthat constitute its trinary
schema:dissociation(Kraepelin),autism(Bleuler),and space-time or being-in-the-world (Binswanger).
The first of these is an explanatory concept that supposedly locates the specific dysfunction or primary deficiency. The second is an ideational
concept indicating the specific nature of the effect of the disorder: the delirium itself or the complete withdrawal from the outside world, "the
detachment from reality, accompanied by a relative or an absolute predominance of [the schizophrenic's] inner life." The third concept is a
to these three
descriptive one, discovering or rediscovering the delirious person in his own specific world. What is common
concepts is the fact that they all relate the problem of schizophrenia to the ego
through the intermediary of the "body image"—the final avatar of the soul, a
vague conjoining of the requirements of spiritualism and positivism. ¶ The
ego,however, is like daddy-mommy: the schizo has long since ceased to believe in it.
He is somewhere else, beyond or behind or below these problems, rather than
immersed in them.And wherever he is, there are problems, insurmountable sufferings, unbearable needs. Butwhy try to
bring him back to what he has escaped from, why set him back down amid
problems that are no longer problems to him,why mock his truth by believing that we have paid it its due by
merely figuratively taking our hats off to it?There are those who will maintain that the schizo is
incapable of uttering the word I, and that we must restore his ability to
pronounce this hallowed word. All of which the schizo sums up by saying:
they're fucking me over again. "I won't say / any more, I'll never utter the word
again; it's just too damn stupid. Every time I hear it, I'll use the third person
instead, if I happen to remember to. If it amuses them. And it won't make one
bit of difference."26 And if he does chance to utter the word I again, that won't
make any difference either. He is too far removed from these problems, too far
past them. ¶ Even Freud never went beyond this narrow and limited conception of the ego. And what prevented him from doing so
was his own tripartite formula—the Oedipal, neurotic one: daddy-mommy-me. We may well ponder the possibility that the analytic imperialism
of the Oedipus complex led Freud to rediscover, and to lend all the weight of his authority to, the unfortunate misapplication of the concept of
autism to schizophrenia. For we must not delude ourselves: Freud doesn't like schizophrenics. He doesn't like their resistance to being
oedipalized, and tends to treat them more or less as animals. They mistake words for things, he says. They are apathetic, narcissistic, cut off
from reality, incapable of achieving transference; they resemble philosophers—"an undesirable resemblance."
A/T: Schizo = Totalitarianism
First, Schizoanalysis does not have an interpretation. It escapes on many lines
of flight using the unconscious to construct desiring machines.
Deleuze and Guattari ’77 (Gilles Deleuze. Smart French Guy. Felix Guattari. Also smart, questionably French.
1977. University of Minnesota Press 1983. Thirteenth Edition. ISBN: 978-0-8166-1225-3. Pg. 180 -- M.E.)
The true misunderstandings, the misunderstandings between ethnologists (or Hellenists) and psychoanalysts, do not come from a faulty
knowledge or recognition of the unconscious, of sexuality, of the phallic nature of symbolism. In theory, everyone could reach an agreement on
this point: everything is sexual or sex-influenced (sexue) from one end to the other. Everyone knows this, beginning with the users. The
practical misunderstandings come rather from the profound difference between the two sorts of questions. Without always formulating it
clearly, the ethnologists and the Hellenists think that a symbol is not denned by what it means, but by what it does and by what is done with it.
It always means the phallus or something similar, except that what it means does not tell what purpose it serves. In a word, there is no
ethnological interpretation for the simple reason that there is no ethnographic material: there are only uses and functionings (des
fonctionnements). On this point, it could be that psychoanalysts have much to learn from ethnologists: about the unimportance of "What does
it mean?" When Hellenists place themselves in opposition to the Freudian Oedipus, it should not be thought that they put forward other
interpretations to replace the psychoanalytic interpretation. It could be that ethnologists and Hellenists will compel psychoanalysts for their
part to make a similar discovery: namely, that there is no unconscious material either, nor is there a psychoanalytic interpretation, but only
uses, analytic uses of the syntheses of the unconscious, which do not allow themselves to be defined by an assignment of a signifier any more
How it works is the sole question. Schizo-analysis
than by the determination of signifieds.
foregoes all interpretation because it foregoes discovering an unconscious

material: the unconscious does not mean anything. On the other hand the
unconscious constructs machines, which are machines of desire, whose use and
functioning schizoanalysis discovers in their immanent relationship with social
machines. The unconscious does not speak, it engineers. It is not expressive or representative,
but productive. A symbol is nothing other than a social machine that functions
as a desiring-machine, a desiring-machine that functions within the social machine, an investment of the
social machine by desire.
A/T: Structuralism
First, Structuralism treats everything in terms of binaries to reconstitute

territoriality and Oedipus. It is subservient to dominant law
Guattari ’70 (Felix Guattari. The illest mother fucker around. “The Anti-Oedipus Papers.” 1970. Edited by: Stephane
Nadaud. Translated by: Kelina Gotman. Semiotexte Publishing, 2006. ISBN: 1-58435-031-8. Pg.240-241. – M.E.)
With structuralism, everything is treated in terms of paved and degenerate

crossroad systems: bi-univocality crossroads = the phal lus-Oedipus-capital ... ¶
Archaization is an attempt to reconstitute territoriality. But in real archaic
societies, there is a specific topology for singular productive spaces. Desiring
production is not transferred to the level of the sign. The sign's
deterritorialization is completely avoided. You don't take pleasure [jouir]on the
level of signs but on the whole jouissance range. The difference is thatwith contemporary
archaization, there is no jouissance corresponding to archaized surfaces. There
is only icon-sign jouissance that juts out over pseudo-territoriality. But icon-
signs are still always under the dominant law of the maximum economy of
polyvocality. It's the binary phallus that calls the tune on the level of
unconscious overdetermination and represses all threatening diagraJl1 matism.
Archaism produces only dualizing deathly sadomasochistic jouissance, not a rich
schizo passion for abolition. It doesn’t really reestablish value multipolarity. It
just mimes polyvocality, while continuing to be subservient to the dominant law
of bivocality.
Second, our K is a DA to this argument

A/T: Subjectivity Bad/Become the Object
First, Subjectivity has the ability to build relationships without distance. This
frustrates the breaks in the individual. Their alternative is Marxist romanticism
that doesn’t solve.
Guattari ’70 (Felix Guattari. The illest mother fucker around. “The Anti-Oedipus Papers.” 1970. Edited by: Stephane Nadaud.
Translated by: Kelina Gotman. Semiotexte Publishing, 2006. ISBN: 1-58435-031-8. Pg.271-272. – M.E.)
The point is not to reduce subjectivity to that consciousness and that

consciousness only (impotent voyeurisitic fascination in Sartrian consciousness).¶Subjectivity can be an
expression of power, an affirmative, unlimitative, inclusive synthesis that
doesn’t establish relations of distance between subjects and objects, capitalizes
on “information representation,” and encodes without disempowering. ¶So, there
are two modes of subjectivity:¶one that is enunciated through signifying chains
in terms of Lacan’s (slightly modified) law: “A flattened, Cartesian signifier represents an impotent, oedipal, castrated subject
for another signifier, simultaneously a prototype of archaic alterity and the end of history”; ¶Collective enunciation,
which, on the contrary, frustrates the individuation, the corporeization, the

personalization that suture breaks inherent to the structures of: ¶Subjected
groups,¶Spheres of interest,¶Deep bodies,¶Archaic alliance rings, a form of
enunciation that, as such, is a fusional myth;¶Because, third mode, there cannot be any
collective enunciation outside the use of figure-signs and consciousness
machines.Oherwise, you fall into the Marxist romanticism of impotent fusional
consciousness and you get totally lst on the question of desire and class
interest.¶
A/T: Masochism
First, No link – Your Deleuze evidence is talking about real, whips and chains,
masochism; the object of his criticism is the term “sadomasochism”. His only
point is to contrast and separate the terms from one another, not advocate one
over the other.
Second, Turn – Sadism and masochism are necessary to one another; the
masochist needs directed sadism to derive enjoyment. Even your own evidence
is contextualized as “masochism” as reaction which means, at worst, it links to
Deleuze’s concept of ressentiment as something felt but unacted.
Third, Masochism links – The position of the masochist is purely reactive; it

seeks not to create values but rather to invert that way those burdens are
received in a revaluation of the violent sexual exchange that typifies Nietzsche’s
slave revolt in morality
Fourth, Turn – Totalized submission without aftercare drags the ego and subject
into subspace from which nothing can be achieved because of withdrawal.
London Fetish Scene ‘06[Http://www.londonfetishscene.com/wipi/index.php/subspace, accessed: 9/21/06]
Subspace(also sub space), in the context ofaBDSMscene,is the psychological state of the submissive
partner.Subspace isa metaphor forthe state the submissive's minds and bodies are in during a deeply
involving play scene.Many types of BDSM play invoke strong physical responses such as extended adrenaline surges that can cause
exhaustion.The mental aspect of BDSM also causes many submissives to mentally separate
themselves from their environment as they process the experience. Deep subspace is often
characterized as a state of deep recession and incoherence.Many submissives require aftercare.
Fifth, Alt fails – Not everyone is a masochist and most masochists are not
submissive all of the time. Takes out solvency because without a total euphoric
affirmation of masochism, their alternative becomes impossible.
A/T: Role Playing Good
First, Prove a link – We don’t provide one link as to why it’s bad – We just say
our real impacts should come first
Second, There is no truth or reality in your claims to power – the state is not an
object to be controlled and manipulated by imagining a better tomorrow. The
very notion of fiat is devoid of education.
Third, A government class solves your policy education. We would never want a
policy maker to not take those classes, and debate should be a forum to discuss
things that would not otherwise be introduced in those classes means we are
the only ones to access a unique education.
Fourth, Focus on effects without their causes is bad. We should not be
concerned with the utopian vision of the benefits of the plan without finding a
way to create the plan. This form of role playing prepares us for a kind of
thinking that has left millions of dead bodies scattered here and around the
world. Even if your framework is a fair one, that fairness only preserves a
framing which is bad. Even if everyone quits debate without your framework,
that would be a good thing.
Ellis ‘04 (andy, debate critic, message posted to edebate, archived at http://www.ndtceda.com/archives/200404/0463.html)
3)Lets make this argument perfectly clear too, its not just ok to be like i wanna work on the hill or i wanna work in the washington think tank
establishment any more than its ok to be all like well i dont like the third reich but that internship a the chancelors asitant is a good carreer
what many of the community
move, people wont say this because we are all supposed to be civil in this activity but
members usedebate as preparation for is preparation for a kind of thinking

thathas left millions of dead bodies scattered here and around the world.When
people say well I do this because I wanna be a congressman so Ihave to have
traditional debate so I can prepare I say see you don’tknow how right you are,
my experience with much actual policy making isthat it is a lot like traditional
debate, decisions made in a hermeticallysealed insular context free from public
participation and input inwhich the bodies of those most effected by the
decision are wieldedentirely out of their control, decisions are always played
out on agame board and made in a calculative way, much like debates most of
thereal policymaking is made by privileged white males in closed doorsettings,
much like traditional debate a discourse of expertise isutilized to exclude
anybody who doesn’t know the language,so yes debateis preparation for the policy
making process, but instead of a reasonwhy to keep going its a reason to take action to
intervene against thegenocidal condensation that exists within the preparatory pedagogy that jake
and a bunch of other people simply find fun...lots of people like bull fighting too, doesnt mean that your fun is free of complicty in bad
shit¶4)before you tel me about all the good policy makers who have come out of debate that would have otherwise been eviler genocidal fucks,
consider the massive amounts of lawyers and policymakers who we have taught to be better
genocideres, those folks who will now be better prosecutors better imperial planners, better
able to add liberal legitimacy to the pnac empire machine, simply put I don’t doubt that many
of you are preparing for a future in politics, my problem is with the way you prepare and what
you are preparing for.
Role of the Academic
First, We as scholars must stop ordering the world by fixing it to an historical
model or calculating view point. Instead, we must understand these processes
as events disparate from one another. This is a rupture of causality that allows
us to break out of the mold of domination.
Colebrook and Ely ’11 (Claire Colebrook is a PhD of Philosophy and Professor at Penn State, she has written articles on visual
culture, poetry, literary theory, queer theory and contemporary culture, interviewed by Michael Ely, who is basically just a giant asshat. Claire
Colebrook: The Joy of Debate - A Conversation. Accessed from: http://www.kdebate.com/colebrook.html – J.N.)
ME: In “Deleuze and the Contemporary World” you write a section entitled “The Joy of Philosophy”. In it you describe Deleuze's idea of “going
beyond the actual”. In this you conclude that we philosophize precisely because life is desire and in that questioning, we become imperceptible.
What does it mean to become imperceptible? ¶ CC: Bear in mind that these answers are interpretive. I would argue that becoming
imperceptible is tiedboth to the idea that we tend to think on a day to day level
in terms of ourselves as bounded organic beings - man as an animal who acts to
maintain his life, know the world, master the external milieu. We have an
IMAGE of ourselves - brain, mind, body and so on, that takes picturesof the
worldin terms of what it knows. But if we tried to know the world AS SUCH,
outside our point of view and perspectives, we'd recognize other ways of
experiencing, perceiving. Becoming-imperceptible is an ideal or method of
trying to think without assuming some already given figure or image of man.¶ME:
And what might we as scholars do in relation to events which seem
spontaneous and,at least too many in the Western world, imperceptible and inexplicable such as the
“Arab Spring”.¶CC: Good question. Concretely,we have to see these as events. If we compare
them to earlier revolutions and try and calculate whether they are good or bad,
then we are adopting a fixed historical and calculating viewpoint. But two
remarks Deleuze and Guattari make: desire IS revolutionary. Desire is not need
meeting demands that already have an object,defined as what has worked in the past (eg making sure
revolutions go in the good democratic direction). Desire destroys our notion of what counts as (determined good and evil). We have to
re-live, again, the play of the world, and ask about problems and the formation
of interests. They also say there is an IDEA of revolution - all the revolutions we
experience are distinct because none of them will exhaust the disturbing force
of revolutionary power. So each revolution has to be read _ not as the playing
out of fulfillment of historical causality - but a rupture with causality.
A/T: No Spillover
First, Plan doesn't pass, the debate and the arguments don't leave the room,
BUT THE DEBATERS DO. That's the reason why the aff is irrelevant, desire should
come first, and that's the reason why we spill-over.
*if you need more*
Second, The alternative is an question of desire – If we win their type of desire
production is bad you should vote them down no matter whA/T:That’s the
impact framing debate
Third, We have in round solvency - The negative’s investigation of this rhetoric
breaks its foundation of validity down. Your ballot acts as a path to multiple
interpretations that guard us from this dangerous form of rhetoric that dooms
us to the internalization of control, the Oedipal. That’s the third Kuswa ’04 card
and our Ballantyne 7 evidence from the impact debate.
A/T: T/ No Solvency B/C Using Debate
First, I've already explained our solvency, and I'll be shocked and impressed if
they can give you a warrant here.
A/T: Cede the Political
First, They're pretending the government should change with a 1 sentence plan.
This has nothing to do with the real world of politics – which consist of thousand
page bills and quid pro quos. Their switch-side and role-playing arguments
prove that they are intentionally being apolitical.
Second, Only we make the debate space political, because only we are taking
real, micro-political action in this room.
Third, Ceding the political is the point – We access specific reasons why the state
apparatus is bad – That’s the Kuswa ’04 evidence
Fourth, Non-unique – The political has been ceded the point at which
macropolitics is all that reigns and the individual is no longer included into the
machine of the state
Fifth, Link Turn - They misconstrue what it means to be political—our
micropolitics is a more direct means of engaging truly political action than the
State can ever be
*if you need more*
Sixth, Can’t turn alt solvency because our alt is all about the individual
Seventh, The only way the fascism and authoritarianism that your evidence
isolates can happen is through microfascism – Meaning we solve the root of the
impact – That’s Ballantyne 7
Eighth, The traditional resistance your evidence is in the context of is what we
are critiquing – The safe, secury, tried-and-true route of resistance and policy –
We need to embrace insecurity – That’s Koppensteiner ‘09
Ninth, New link - the Seem evidence says that we try to point to an Other as
being evil so that we can say that we’re good, their obsession with evil neocons
who are going screw everything up defines the link
Tenth, The state won’t work and creates a national identity for us
Conley ‘06 (Verena Andermatt, professor of literature at Harvard, “Borderlines; Deleuze and the Contemporary World, 95-100)
Over the last few decades, decolonisation, transportation, and electronic revolutions have transformed the world. They have led to financial
and population flows. Financial flows seem to be part of a borderless world. Today, human migrations occur on all continents. They are
producing multiple crossings of external borders that in many places have resulted in local resistance and, in reaction, to the erection of more
internal borders that inflect new striated spaces in the form of racism and immigration policy. The ultimate goal for the utopian thinker
espousing the cause of rhizomatic thinking is smooth space that would entail the erasure of all borders and the advent of a global citizenry
living in ease and without the slightest conflict over religion or ideology. In the transitional moment in which we find ourselves arguing for
smooth space can easily lead to a non-distinction between alternative spaces in which goods and currencies circulate to the detriment of the
world at large.To account for the transformation specifically of the state and its subjects in a global world, I will argue by way of recent writings
by Etienne Balibar for the continued importance of rhizomatic connectivity and also for a qualified notion of smooth space. Striated spaces will
have to be continually smoothed so that national borders would not simply encircle a territory. Borders would have to be made more
porous and nationality disconnected from citizenship so as to undo striated space inside the state by inventing new ways of being in common.
Such a rethinking of borders would lead to further transformations by decoupling the nation from the state. It would open possibilities of –
rhizomatic – connections and new spaces. It would produce new hybridseverywhere without simply a ‘withering away of the state’ as
advocated by Deleuze and Guattari. Currently, subjects (defined as humans who are asseuttis [subjected] to paternal state power)also want to
be citizens (who can individually and collectively define the qualities of their habitus or environment). Yet, the latter are still part of the
state. They are not yet entirely global, transnational citizens or cyber-citizens. While information networks seem to operate like rhizomes, it
isof continued importance to retain the notion of state but to define it with more porous, connective borderlines so as ultimately to disconnect
citizens from nationality. Deleuze and Guattari figure with other philosophers, anthropologists or sociologists who, following 1968, pay
renewed attention to space. Their focus on space reappears at the very time Cartesian philosophies undergo radical changes due to the
acceleration of new technologies and rapid globalisation. Many thinkers – Henri Lefebvre, Michel de Certeau, Jean Baudrillard, Paul Virilio –
condemn what they perceive as the increasing encroachment of technologies that quickly replace more traditional ways of being in the world.
People who find themselves out of synch with their environment urge recourse to the body and new ways of using language. Deleuze and
Guattari insert themselves into that line of thinking. Their criticism of the static order is twofold. They criticise an inherited spatial model
defined by vertical orderings that has dominated the West. In that model, space was considered to be pre-existing. It became a simple décor for
human action. Deleuze and Guattari propose not only a criticism of the static model but also invent an entirely new way of thinking space. They
propose a more horizontal – and, paradoxically, if seemingly two-dimensional, even more spatial – thinking of the world in terms of rhizomatic
lines and networks. In accordance with Deleuze and Guattari’s way of thinking through connections, the two regimes always coexist in an
asymmetrical relation. They can never be entirely separated or opposed. In ‘Rhizome’, first published in French in 1976 and translated into
English as ‘On the Line’, Deleuze and Guattari claim that for several hundred years it was believed that the world was developing vertically in
the shape of a tree (Deleuze and Guattari 1983). The choice of a tree limits possibilities. The mature tree is already contained in the seed. There
is some leeway as to form and size, but the seed will become nothing more than the tree that it is destined to be. In lieu of the tree, Deleuze
and Guattari propose an adventitious network, a mobile structure that can be likened to underground filaments of grass or the mycelia of fungi.
A rhizome moves horizontally and produces offshoots from multiple bifurcations at its meristems. It changes its form by connecting and
reconnecting. It does not have a finite or ultimate shape. Space does not pre-exist the rhizome; rather, it is created through and between the
proliferating lines. Rhizomes connect and open spaces in-between which, in the rooted world of the tree, an inside (the earth) is separated
from an outside (the atmosphere). Unlike the tree, the rhizome can never be fixed or reduced to a single point or radical core. Its movement is
contrasted with the stasis of the arborescent model. In ‘Rhizome’ the vertical, arborescent model contributes to the creation of striated spaces.
In the ebullient imagination of the two authors it appears that the latter slow down and even prevent movement of the kind they associate with
emancipation and creativity. Instead of imitating a tree, Deleuze and Guattari exhort their readers to make connections by following multiple
itineraries of investigation, much as a rhizome moves about the surface it creates as it goes. Rhizomes form a territory that is neither fixed nor
bears any clearly delimited borders. In addition to this novel way of thinking, rhizomatically, the philosophers make further distinctions
between smooth and striated spaces. Smooth spaces allow optimal circulation and favour connections. Over time, however, smooth
spaces tend to become striated. They lose their flexibility. Nodes and barriers appear that slow down circulation and reduce the number of
possible connections. Writing Anti-Oedipus in a post-1968 climate, Deleuze and Guattari propose rhizomatic connections that continually
rearticulate smooth space in order not only to criticise bourgeois capitalism with its institutions – the family, school, church, the medical
establishment (especially psychiatry) – but also to avoid what they see as a deadened or zombified state of things. They criticise the state for
erecting mental and social barriers and for creating oppositions instead of furthering connections.Institutions and the state are seen as the
villains that control and immobilize people from the top down. They argue that when the family, the church or the ‘psy’ instill guilt in a child,
mental barriers and borders are erected. The child’s creativity, indeed its mental and physical mobility are diminished in the process. Such a
condition cripples many adults who have trees growing in their heads. Deleuze and Guattari cite the example of Little Hans, a child analysed by
Freud and whose creativity, they declare, was blocked by adults who wrongly interpreted his attempts to trace lines of flight within and through
the structure of the family into which he had been born (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 14). The state, too, functions by ordering, organizing
and arresting movement, by creating relations of inclusion and exclusion. The state facilitates the creation of rigid and often ossified
institutions. It enacts laws of inclusion and exclusion that order the family and the social in general. It tries to immobilize and dominate the
social world. Yet the social cannot be entirely dominated. The organising régime of the order-word is never stable. It is constantly being
transformed. Lines detach themselves from fuzzy borders and introduce variations in the constant of the dominant order. These variations can
lead to a break and produce lines of flight that bring about entirely new configurations. Of importance in the late 1960s and 1970s is the doing
away with institutions and the state that represses subjects. In Anti-Oedipus, the philosophers show how institutions like the family and
psychiatry repress sexuality and desire in order to maximize their revenue. They argue for the creation of smooth spaces where desire can
circulate freely. In A Thousand Plateaus, the bourgeois state ordered by the rules of capitalism is criticised. Deleuze and Guattari rarely
contexualise the ‘state’ in any specific historical or political terms. Constructing a universal history of sorts, the philosophers note that the state
apparatus appears at different times and in different places. This apparatus is always one of capture. It appropriates what they call a ‘nomadic
war machine’ that never entirely disappears. The nomadic war machine eludes capture and traces its own lines of flight. It makes its own
smooth spaces. Here Deleuze and Guattari have faith in ‘subjects’ who undermine control by creating new lines of flight. These subjects deviate
from the dominant order that uses ‘order-words’ to obtain control. Order-words produce repetitions and reduce differences. They produce
molar structures and aggregates that make it more difficult for new lines to take flight. Yet something stirs, something affects a person enough
to make her or him deviate from the prescriptive meanings of these words. Deleuze and Guattari would say that the subject molecularises the
molar structures imposed by the state. People continually trace new maps and invent lines of flight that open smooth spaces. Deleuze and
Guattari call it a ‘becoming-revolutionary’ of the people. In 1980, the philosophers also claim that humans inaugurate an age of becoming-
minoritarian. The majority, symbolized by the 35-year-old, white, working male, they declare, no longer prevails. A new world is opening, a
world of becoming-minoritarian in which women, Afro-American, post-colonial and queersubjects of all kinds put the dominant order into
variation. Changes of this nature occur at the limit of mental and social territories, from unstable borders without any clearly defined
division between inside and outside. They occur in and through affects, desire and language. For Deleuze and Guattari, becoming-minoritarian
must be accompanied by a withering of the state and its institutions without which any generalized transformation would be
impossible. Thought they make clear in ‘Rhizome’ that the connections they advocate are different from those of computers that function
according to binary oppositions, the philosophers keep open the possibilities of transformations of subjectivities by means of technologies
(Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 475).Deleuze and Guattari are keenly aware both of the ways that technologies transform subjectivities and of
writing in a postcolonial, geopolitical context. Nonetheless, they write about the state in a rather general and even monolithic way
without specifically addressing a given ‘nation-state’. It is as if the real villain were a general European concept of state inherited from the
romantic age. The institutional apparatus of the state dominates and orders its subjects, preventing them from being creative or pursuing their
desires. It keeps them from making revolutionary connections (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 473). To construct rhizomes and create smooth
spaces for an optimal circulation of desire, the state, armed with its ‘order-words’, has to be fought until, finally, it withers away and, in accord
with any and every utopian scenario, all identity is undone.
Eleventh, That creates zones of inclusion and exclusion that ultimately result in
an extermination of otherness
Billig ‘95 – prof of social sciences at U of Loughborough. (Michael, “Banal Nationalism.” Sage publications. p. 80-82) CMR *Italics in
original*
Nationalists live in an international world, and their ideologyis itselfan internationalideology. Without constant observation of the world of
other nation, nationalists would be unable to claim that their nations meet the universal codes of nationhood. Nor would they have ready
access to stereotyped judgments about foreigners. Even the most extreme and unbanal of nationalists do not shut out the outside world from
consciousness, but often show an obsessive concern with the lives and outlooks of foreigners. Hitler’s Table-Talk is filled with speculations
about the characters of different nations. One illustrative example, taken from 1942, can be given. Martin Bormann had apparently lent his
Fuhrer a book entitled Juan in America, itself an indicative action. Hitler opines lengthily, while his admirers listen: ¶ The British swallow
everything they are told … [Americans] have the brains of a hen … the German Reich has two hundred and seventy opera houses – a standard
of cultural existence of which they have no conception … Spaniards and Americans simply cannot understand each other … the Americans live
like sows. (1988, pp. 604-5)¶ And so on. Hitler speaks a continuing stream of stereotypes, as he surveys the rest of the world from his camp at
Rastenburg. ¶ Social psychologists frequently assume that narrow, bigoted thinking is characterized by the use of stereotypes. If the imagining
of foreignness is an integral part of the theoretical consciousness of nationalism, then foreignness is not an undifferentiated sense of
‘Otherness’ (McDonald, 1993). Obsessively fine distinctions can be made between different grounds of foreigners. Indeed, debates and
controversies can arise about how similar or how different various groups of foreigners are to ‘us. ’ In one of the earliest studies of stereotyping,
Katz and Braly (1935) showed the extend to which white, American college students used conventional labels to characterize different ethnic
and national groups: Jews were mercenary, Turks were cruel, Germans efficient, etc. Later studies have indicated a decline in respondents’
willingness to use such generalizing stereotypes (Gilbert, 1951; Karlins et al., 1969). The stereotypes of other nations tend not to be uniformly
scornful. Some foreigners are presumed to be more meritorious than others. Thus, Katz and Brly found that some foreign national types, such
as the Germans, were praised in ways which others, especially non-European nations, were not. ¶ Stereotypes are shared, cultural descriptions
of social groups. Even respondents, who might themselves claim to be skeptical about the truths of the stereotypes, recognize a culturally
shared scale of valuations (Devine, 1989). Some foreigners are identified as being stereotyped as more admirable, and more like ‘us’ than
others. (Hagendoorn, 1993a; Hagendoorn and Hraba, 1987; Hagendoorn and Kleinpenning, 1991). Inglehart (1991), examining the national
attitudes of members of European nations, found that, with the exception of Italians, members of all nations rated their own nation as the must
trustworthy. However, not all foreigners were rated equally untrustworthy. Members of small, non-Mediterranean European nations, such as
Danes, Swiss and Dutch, tended to be rated more trustworthy, even by Mediterranean respondents. In short, it is commonplace that
stereotyped distinctions are made between different sorts of foreigners. ¶ Public opinion polls suggest that there is nothing static in the
stereotyped judgements. Foreign stocks can rise and fall, in accord with the movements of political crises. The favourable stereotypes of
Germans, which Katz and Braly (1935) found, declined as the United States prepared to enter the Second World War (Harding et al., 954). Most
dramatic was the change in American judgments of the Russians, who, in 1945, switched from being heroic allies to bitterest rivals (Yatani and
Bramel, 1989). With the collapse of Soviet communism, the American public has been presented with new enemies – whether Libyans, Iraqis or
Arabs in general. With prolonged conflicts, a ‘siege mentality’ can develop, in which stereotypes become rigid, and the enemy is demonized
with regular ferocity (Bar-Tal, 1989, 1990; Silverstein and Flamenbaum, 1989(. Sudden crises can produce quickly sharpened stereotypes, as, for
eample, the emergency of ‘the ARgie’ in the British media during the Falklands War (Harris, 1985). The quickly summoned stereotype will build
upon older cultural myths, although there might be some initial uncertainty how these should be combined. One member of the British war
cabinet was reported as wondering whether the Argentinians would actually go to war, given their half-Italian and half-Spanish ancestry.
“There’s no precedent”, he said, because “if the Spanish half is uppermost, they’ll fight, if the Italian, they won’t” (quoted in Young, 1993, p.
278). ¶ Stereotypes are often means of distinguishing ‘them’ from ‘us’, thereby contributing to ‘our’ claims of a unique identity. In the
eighteenth century, Britain developed many of its modern symbols of nationhood in conscious contradictions to French styles of nation-making
(Cannadine, 1983; Colley, 1992). English writers debated whether there should be an EnglishAcademy, but the idea was rejected as being too
French (Haugen, 1966a). The first recorded cartoon, depicting John Bull as an ‘Englishman’, also shows a Frenchman, as thin and meager as Bull
is fat and generous (Surel, 1989). In this case, the iconographic stereotype of ‘us’ was created in contrastive differentiation from the stereotype
of ‘them’. The point is not merely a historical one, but there is an implicit contrast in the stereotyped judgment of ‘them’ (McCauly et al., 1980;
Stangor and Ford, 1992). Typically, people ascribe more stereotypic traits to outgroups than to ingroups; ‘we’ often assume ‘ourselves’ as the
standard, or the unmarked normality, against which ‘their’ deviations appear notable (Quattrone, 1986). If ‘they, the French’ are stereotyped as
‘emotional’, it is with implicit reference to ‘our’ presumed, non-emotional standards. Or conversely another group might be stereotyped as
‘cold’, whereas ‘we’ will be neither ‘cold’ (too cold) nor ‘emotional’ (too emotional). ¶ There is always the possibility of projection, as Kristeva
realized in her descriptions of ‘foreignness’. ‘We’ can claim that ‘they’ possess the qualities, which ‘we’ deny in ‘ourselves’. In Western
democracies, ‘our’ tolerance is much praised by ‘ourselves’.Journalists and politicians, especially when arguing for immigration restrictions, cite
‘our’ tolerance, and ‘their’ intolerance, as a reason for excluding ‘them’, the foreigners (Barker, 1981; Van Dijk, 1991, 1992, 1993). The rhetoric
denies ‘our’ prejudice and in condenses an argumentative structure, which attributes intolerance to ‘them’; ‘our’ tolerance is threatened by
‘their’ presence; ‘they’ are either intolerant or cause intolerance; thus, ‘we’ seek to exclude ‘them’, not because ‘we’ are intolerant but, quite
the reverse, because ‘we’ are tolerant (Billig, 1991; Wetherell and Potter, 1992). In conditions of the ‘siege mentality’, it is always the ‘other’
who breaks faith, acts dishonestly and starts aggressive spirals: ‘our’ actions are justified by circumstance, but ‘theirs’ are said to reflect a
deficiency of character, indeed the very deficiencies which ‘we’ deny in ‘ourselves (Pettigrew, 1979; Rothbard and Hallmark, 1988). ¶
A/T: VtL Stuff
First, Augustine (the card most people read in college) is 100% right. Value to life
is subjective, and always available if we only choose it. But the affirmative
makes us hate life, while the alternative makes the subjective choice to
reinvigorate life. Wherever the affirmative sees unpredictability or uncertainty,
they deem life not-good-enough. They run from the chaos of life, and smother
existence itself under contempt and negation. The alternative accepts that we
are all afflicted with this condition called Life, which will certainly kill us all, and
nevertheless, we dance to its music.
Second, Yes – There is ice-cream, but what about all the fat, and the calories?
And we can play X-Box, but what if there's lag and my kill-count goes to low?
This framing guarantees that the affirmative will always find something wrong
with life, it will never be good enough and they will never be satisfied.
Third, All Augustine (again, assuming this is the card they read) really means is
that the alternative solve. We can have value, even in a word of cancer and
terrorism and poverty. If only we choose to create values and find meaning in
the world – if only we see the art in the car crash.
Fourth, Our criticism acts at a more basic level, because desiring the repression
of your desires stops you from affirming that subjective value—means the
alternative is a preqrequisite to expressing any value to life.
A/T: Threats Real
First, We aren’t critiquing threat construction – We’re critiquing control over life
Second, your attempts to perfectly see every threat and solve it links harder to
the criticism – The rhetoric of the state and capital forces us to believe an follow
this system with all of our desire and life
Third, embracing insecurity is the only solution to solving to root of real world
problems, giving us the ability to truly stop the microfascism at the basic level of
your impacts – That’s Koppensteiner ’09 and DnG ‘80
Fourth, Even if those threats are real, political approach is flawed without the
alternative – That’s Weizman ‘06
FIfth, The infinite and non-linear causes of violence are too broad and vast to be
predicted and responded to effectively-attempts to prevent disasters ultimately
lead to bureaucratic mishandling which magnifies the problem
Der Derian ‘05, Dir of Security Studies at Brow, 2k5
James "National Security, An Accident Waiting to Happen," Predicting the Present Vol 27 (3)
It often takes a catastrophe to reveal the illusory beliefs we continue to harbor in national and homeland security'. To keep us safe, we place
our faith in national borders and guards, bureaucracies and experts, technologies and armies. These and other instruments of national security
are empowered and legitimated by the assumption that it falls upon the sovereign country to protect us from the turbulent state of nature and
anarchy that permanently lies in wait offshore and over the horizon for the unprepared and inadequately defended. But this parochial fear,
posing as a realistic worldview, has recently taken some very hard knocks. Prior to September 11, 2001, national borders were thought to be
necessary and sufficient to keep our enemies at bay; upon entry to Baghdad, a virtuous triumphalism and a revolution in military affairs were
touted as the best means to bring peace and democracy to the Middle East; and before Hurricane Katrina, emergency preparedness and an
intricate system of levees were supposed to keep New Orleans safe and dry. The intractability of disaster, especially its unexpected,
unplanned, unprecedented nature,erodes not only the very distinction of the local, national, and global, but, assisted and amplified by an
unblinking global media, reveals the contingent and highly interconnected character of life in general . Yet when it comes to dealing with
natural and unnatural disasters, we continue to expect (and, in the absence of a credible alternative, understandably so, if not certainty and
total safety at least a high level of probability and competence from our national and homeland security experts However, between the mixed
metaphors and behind the metaphysical concepts given voice by US Homeland Security Director Michael Chertoff early into the Katrina crisis,
there lurks an uneasy recognition that this administration— and perhaps no national government—is up to the task of managing incidents that
so rapidly cascade into global events. Indeed, they suggest that our national plans and preparations for the "big one"—a force-five hurricane,
terrorist attack, pandemic disease—have become part of the problem, not the solution. His use of hyberbolic terms like "ultra-catastrophe" and
"fall-out" is telling: such events exceed not only local and national capabilities, but the capacity of conventional language itself. An easy
deflection would be to lay the blame on the neoconservative faithful of the first term of US President George W. Bush, who, viewing through an
inverted Wilsonian prism the world as they would wish it to be, have now been forced by natural and unnatural disasters to face the world as it
really is—and not even the most sophisticated public affairs machine of dissimulations, distortions, and lies can close this gap. However, the
discourse of the second Bush term has increasingly returned to the dominant worldview of national security, realism, and if language is, as
Nietzsche claimed. a prisonhouse, realism is its supermax penitentiary. Based on linear notions of causality, a correspondence theory of truth,
and the materiality' of power, how can realism possibly account ^—let alone prepare or provide remedies—for complex catastrophes, like the
toppling of the World Trade Center and attack on the Pentagon by a handful of jihadists armed with box-cutters and a few months of flight-
training? A force-five hurricane that might well have begun with the flapping of a butterfly's wings? A northeast electrical blackout that
started with a falling tree limb in Ohio? A possible pandemic triggered by the mutation of an avian virus? How, for instance, are we to measure
the immaterial power of the CNN-effect on the first Gulf War, the Aljazeera effect on the Iraq V\'ar, or the Nokia-effect on the London terrorist
bombings? For events of such complex, non-linear origins and with such tightly-coupled, quantum effects, the national security' discourse of
realism is simply not up to the task. Worse, what if the "failure of imagination" identified by the 9/11 Commission is built into our national and
homeland security systems? What if the reliance on planning for the catastrophe that never came reduced our capability to flexibly respond
and improvise for the "ultra-catastrophe" that did? What if worse-case scenarios, simulation training, and disaster exercises—as well as border
guards, concrete harriers and earthen levees—not only prove inadequate but might well act as force-multipliers—what organizational theorists
identify as "negative synergy" and "cascading effects" —that produce the automated bungling {think Federal Emergency Management Agency)
that transform isolated events and singular attacks into global disasters? Just as "normal accidents" are built into new technologies—from the
Titanic sinking to the Chernobyl meltdown to the Challenger explosion—we must ask whether "ultra-catastrophes" are no longer the exception
but now part and parcel of densely networked systems that defy national management; in other words, "planned disasters." What, then, is to
be done? A first step is to move beyond the wheel-spinning debates that perennially keep security discourse always one step behind the global
event. It might well be uni-, bi-, or multi-polar, but it is time to recognize that the power configuration of the states-system is rapidly being
subsumed by a hetero-polar matrix, in which a wide range of different actors and technological drivers arc producing profound global effects
through interconnectivity. Varying in identity, interests, and strength, these new actors and drivers gain advantage through the broad
bandwidth of information technology', for networked communication systems provide the means to traverse political, economic, religious, and
cultural boundaries, changing not only how we interpret events, but making it ever more difficult to maintain the very distinction of intended
from accidental events. According to the legal philosopher of Nazi Germany, Carl Schmitt, when the state is unable to deliver on its traditional
promissory notes of safety, security, anti-well-being through legal, democratic means, it will necessarily exercise the sovereign "exception:"
declaring a state of emergency, defining friend from foe, and, if necessary, eradicating the threat to the state . But what if the state. Facing the
global event, cannot discern the accidental from the intentional? An external attack from an internal auto-immune response? The natural as
opposed to the "planned disaster"? The enemy within from the enemy without? We can, as the United States has done since September 11,
continue to treat catastrophic threats as issues of national rather than global security', and go it alone. However, once declared,
bureaucratically installed, and repetitively gamed, national states of emergency grow recalcitrant and become prone to even worse disasters.As
Paul Virilio, master theorist of the war machine and the integral accident once told me: "The full-scale accident is now the prolongation of total
war by other means."
A/T: Democracy Checks
First, I guess that's why the US has never committed genocide, has never taken
away due process rights, and has never engaged in imperialism.
Second, Doesn’t check microfacism – microfascism is the infestation of the
police into your mind. When an entire population convinces themselves
genocide is necessary democracy produces thA/T:This is the root of all of our
impacts – That’s Ballantyne 7
A/T: T/ No Solvency B/C Using Debate
First, I've already explained our solvency, and I'll be shocked and impressed if
they can give you a warrant here.
A/T: Extinction First
First, DnG args fit within this framework – large scale extinction only becomes
possible when microfascism rampant within ourselves make our collective
suicide rational – That’s Ballantyne 7 from the impact debate
Second, The desire analysis explained above means this argument is irrelevant
Third, Cross apply our meaning to life claims - Extinction first relies upon the
assumption that the society that we are upholding is valuble – their political
method precludes our society from creating its own meaning and value
Fourth, loss of value to life, in terms of desire, is the worst impact – There’s no
reason to live if you can’t affirm what you desire – That’s Seem
A/T: Reterritorialization Inevitable
AT: Deterr/Reterr Inevitable – Deterritorializations are not doomed to capture
by the state apparatus. The whole point of our argument is that the war
machine breaks the process of deterritorialization and reterritorialization to
enable new flows of desire to emerge.
Voithofer & Foley 2009 (Rick, Ohio State Univ., and Alan, Syracuse Univ.
“(Re)territorializing Literacies in Urban Landscapes.” AERA Conference Paper,
San Diego, CA.)
Deleuze and Guattari refer to the body without organs (BwO) "not as a notion or
concept but a practice or set of practices" (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, pp. 149-150) that represent the
potential for someone to act outside the constraints of individualized rehearsals
of state2 produced priorities (about in this instance education and literacy). In this case we use “state” to
mean any official discourse, or more broadly discourses that carry social
authority, as opposed to individual authority. According to Deleuze and Guattari this can only
be achieved with others through “becomings” that dismantle (in the case of this paper)
static notions of literacy. The process of becoming is achieved through the
deterritorialization of dominant, Eurocentric, middle class constructions of
literacy that rigidly impose hierarchical rules that package literacy practices into discrete categorized units
with singular coded meanings and identities (i.e., literate vs. illiterate). The deterritorialization of literacy can
move towards a reterritorialization of literary within a rhizomatic zone of

multiplicity, where meanings and operations flow freely between texts,
individuals, and groups, resulting in a dynamic, constantly changing set of
interconnected entities with fluid individual boundaries. The ultimate goal is a
reterritorialization (remapping of beliefs, models, literacies, understandings) that is not necessarily
identical to the prior territory, but does not disavow it. Deleuze and Guattari call this collective grass
routes process a “war machine”, which emerges from common concerns for freedom. The
war machine de/reterritorializes so that it may fracture sanctioned flows of

power.
AT: D&G use binaries – Our kritik does not devolve into biunivocal thinking or
become an exercise in binaries. Rather, our concepts fold into one another to
produce multiplicities of meaning.
Bell 2010 (David, PhD candidate @ Univ. of Nottingham. “Fail Again. Fail Better:
Nomadic Utopianism in Deleuze and Guattari and Yevgeny Zamyatin.” Political
Perspectives, 4:1)
So far I have identified and explained a small number of Deleuze and Guattari’s neologistic concepts. The attentive reader will have noted that
these usually come in pairs - smooth and striated space; the immanent and the transcendent and, of course, the state and the nomad. I have
tried to show how one of these concepts is linked to the life and the opening of new spaces for life whilst the other seeks to close off
It would be easy, therefore, to argue that Deleuze and Guattari
possibilities for new ways of being.
have created a binary system of the kind they purport to despise: yet that
would miss a crucial aspect of their theory. For these conceptual pairs concepts
do not function as binary opposites. Rather - and here I will introduce a further Deleuzeo-Guattarian
neologistic pair- they ‘deterritorialize’ and ‘reterritorialize’ into one another. These terms vary in
meaning across Deleuze and Guattari’s works, but I will be following Adrian Parr in stating that ‘ to deterritorialize is to free
up the fixed relations that contain a body all the while exposing it to new
organisations’ (in Parr, 2005: 67). Nomadic thought is a deterritorializing force
smoothing over the striated spaces created by state thought, but state thought
is able to immediately reterritorialize and striate the newly created smooth
space. Simon Tormey and Jules Townshend liken this to Sartre’s concept of the ‘practicoinert’: the moment when revolutionary ideals
become victorious and ossify into established norms, closing off opportunities for future change (2006: 45).
A/T: Psychoanalysis
AT: Psychoanalysis – Lack is wack. Lack is not a defining characteristic of desire
and the rhetorical turn of psychoanalysis implies that the key to desire is
transcendent beyond experience.
Bell 2010 (David, PhD candidate @ Univ. of Nottingham. “Fail Again. Fail Better:
Nomadic Utopianism in Deleuze and Guattari and Yevgeny Zamyatin.” Political
Perspectives, 4:1)
In the psychoanalytic language of Anti-Oedpius and A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari take influence from Lacan and posit ‘desire’ as
where desire is traditionally considered as a subordinate
the essence of becoming. Yet
product of lack (the subject desires what it lacks), Deleuze and Guattari are adamant that
‘desire does not lack anything; it does not lack its object’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 2004a: 28).
Rather, it is an immanent essence, a ‘process of production without reference to
any exterior agency’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 2004b: 170-171) - without reference to a transcendent
ideal: ‘Clement Rosset puts it very well: every time the emphasis is put on a lack that desire
supposedly suffers from as a way of defining its object, “the world acquires as
its double some other sort of world…there exists some other place that contains
the key to desire (missing in this world)”’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 2004a: 28). Desire is therefore an eternal
force of becoming: it does not cease with the realization of a ‘lack’ . Rather, it
creates its own lack and - once this lack is fulfilled starts the whole process
again: ‘everything stops dead for a moment, everything freezes in place - and
then the whole process will begin over again’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 2004a: 8). Eugene W.Holland likens this
to Lacan’s metonymy of desire, in which a desired object loses its desirable qualities as soon as it is realized (in Stivale, 2005: 61).
Kritik Comes First
The kritik is a pre-requisite. Deleuze’s theory can be applied in practice to
redefine our perspectives and create a better system.
Weizman 2k6 (Eyal, Israeli journalist, “The Art of War,” Fireze Magazine Issue
99, May 2006, Online)
Although you do not need Deleuze to attack Nablus, theory helped the military reorganize by providing a new language in which to speak to
itself and others. A ‘smart weapon’ theory has both a practical and a discursive function in redefining urban warfare. The practical or tactical
function, the extent to which Deleuzian theory influences military tactics and manoeuvres, raises questions about the relation between
theory and practice. Theory obviously has the power to stimulate new sensibilities, but it may also help to explain, develop or even justify
ideas that emerged independently within disparate fields of knowledge and with quite different ethical bases. In discursive terms, war – if it
is not a total war of annihilation – constitutes a form of discourse between enemies. Every military action is meant to communicate
something to the enemy. Talk of ‘swarming’, ‘targeted killings’ and ‘smart destruction’ help the military communicate to its enemies that it has
the capacity to effect far greater destruction. Raids can thus be projected as the more moderate alternative to the devastating capacity that
the military actually possesses and will unleash if the enemy exceeds the ‘acceptable’ level of violence or breaches some unspoken
agreement. In terms of military operational theory it is essential never to use one’s full destructive capacity but rather to maintain the potential
to escalate the level of atrocity. Otherwise threats become meaningless.
AT: Cede the Political
Cede the political fails – reinforces capitalism and strengthens the right
Dean 8 (Joan, Politics Without Politics, political theorist,
http://publishing.eur.nl/ir/darenet/asset/15161/oratiejodidean.pdf)JFS
Democracy, though, is inadequate as a language and frame for left political aspiration. Here are two reasons
why; there are others. First, the right speaks the language of democracy. It voices its goals and aspirations
in democratic terms. One of the reasons given for the U.S. invasion of Iraq, for example, was the goal of
bringing democracy to the Middle East. Similarly, leftists in the United States urge inclusion and participation, and so
do those on the political right. The right complains about the exclusion of conservatives from the academy and God from politics.
They, too, try to mobilize grass-root support and increase participation. There is nothing particularly
left, then, about inclusion and participation. These are elements of democracy the right also supports. This
rightwing adoption of democratic ideals prevents the left from occupying the position of a political
alternative to the right—if left positions are the same right ones then the left isn’t an alternative.
Slavoj Zizek describes this situation where one’s enemy speaks one’s language as “victory in defeat” (2008, p. 189). When one's
enemy accepts one's terms, one's point of critique and resistance is lost, subsumed. The dimension of antagonism (fundamental
opposition) vanishes. A second reason democracy is inadequate as an expression of left aspiration is that
contemporary democratic language employs and reinforces the rhetoric of capitalism: free choice, liberty,
satisfaction, communication, connection, diversity. Like any media savvy corporation, democratic activists want to
ensure that voices are heard and opinions registered. Corporations and activists alike are united in their
preoccupation with awareness: people need to be aware of issues, of products, of products as signs of
issues. In this concrete sense, Zizek is right to claim that attachment to democracy is the form our attachment to
capital takes (2002, p. 273; 2008, p. 184). In the consumption and entertainment-driven setting of the contemporary United
States, one’s commitments to capitalism are expressed as commitments to democracy. They are the
same way of life, the same daily practices of “aware-ing” oneself and expressing one’s opinion, of choosing and voting and
considering one’s choice a vote and one’s vote a choice.
Corporatization
1. The free market is a myth—corporatization constrains all of their impact
turns
Mendoza ’13 Kerry-Anne Mendoza, “THE MYTH OF THE FREE MARKET: YOU’LL FIND A UNICORN BEFORE YOU FIND A FREE MARKET,”
Climate & Capitalism, 2/28/2013, http://climateandcapitalism.com/2013/02/28/like-unicorns-the-free-market-is-a-myth
While arguments in favour of inviting private interests into the public services
rests on the idea of competition, corporations themselves are rabidly anti-
competition . If a McDonalds opens opposite a Burger King, Burger King aren’t
over the moon that the capitalist theory of competition is being exercised,
they’re figuring out how to kill the opposition. The argument goes that the consumer is the ultimate
beneficiary of this struggle, as the consumer will be tempted by lower prices and better quality goods to win them over. These arguments
it makes sense for the corporation to seek out a
overlook some key issues. They ignore that
monopoly – so a free market gained monopoly would have no different traits than
a socialised monopoly – except democratic accountability would be removed .
They also fail to consider that the consumer is not solely a consumer, they are also a member of their society so may well be
impacted by the competition in more than one way (i.e. they might benefit from a price cut as
a consumer, but lose their job as a result of the bigger corporation pushing their
employer out of the market). The facts bear this theory out. With the rise in ‘free market’ policies of the Thatcher and
Reagan governments in 1980’s US and UK, perhaps we would see a dramatic rise in competition? Surely this new, free market would end
In
monopolies and usher in a new era of dynamic, consumer responsive businesses vying for attention. Let us use food as a case study.
1990, only 10-20 percent of global food retail was delivered by supermarkets.
Today, that figure has soared to 50-60 percent. That is, over half of all food sold in the world, is sold
through supermarkets. The UK has lost 90% of its specialists food retailers – that is butchers, bakers and fisheries – since the 1950’s. In Britain
today, 97% of food purchased, is bought in supermarkets, with only four corporations making up 76% of those sales. In the US, 72% of food is
As these figures continue an upward trend, we can see that
purchased in supermarkets.
monopolies are being created in food production. If we take a look and test the theory that the
consumer would benefit from this process of corporate battle, proponents of the idea point to the drop in the proportion of household budgets
in developed countries spent on food. During the rise of the supermarket since the 1950s, the percentage of the US household budget spent on
with supermarkets
food dropped from 32% to 7%. In the UK the proportion spent on food has dropped from 33% to 15%. But,
making record profits, and household food budgets down, who is paying the
price for our food? The answer is the farmer and the environment. In Brazil, more
than 75,000 farmers have been delisted by the big supermarkets. Thailand’s top
supermarket chain has carved its supplier list from 250 to just ten. The tiny
country of Lesotho has actually all but killed off its domestic farming industry
with 99% ofits food purchased through supermarkets utilising foreign agri-
business. Seventy years ago, there were nearly seven million American farmers,
today there are two million. Between 1987 and 1992 the US lost 32,500 farms a year and now 75% of US produce comes
from just 50,000 farming operations. Family farming and smallholding has been the big victim of the supermarkets. This means farmers in
developing countries being exploited, and consumers in developed countries so far removed from their food chain that they could not tell the
The inflation in food prices in recent years has been masked
difference between beef and horse.
not only by supermarkets pressurising food producers to ever decreasing

incomes and unsustainable farming practices, but the makeup of our food is
being diluted…in short, the price might stay the same but we are getting less for
that price. The still breaking horse meat scandal is just one example of this.
2. Corporate domination makes regulatory structures irrelevant—leads to
bureaucratic inefficiencies and serial policy failure
The market is being constituted by a decreasing number of businesses , fewer
new businesses are being launched and the monopolies created that produce
negative impacts on communities across the globe. What keeps the free market free? What keeps a
free market free? As we have seen above, it is not in the interest of the corporation to maintain a free market. The corporation
has no reason to apply any kind of ethics whatsoever. Adidas employs child and
sweatshop labour in the Far East because it is cheaper than employing people
on a living wage, with decent terms and condition. So, historically the government, as the purported
servant of the people has been the enforcer of rules necessary to restrain the ‘market’ from behaviours which, while logical from point of view
the logic of the corporation is then to seek
of the corporation, lead to undesirable social outcomes. However,
maximum influence over the regulator. In this case, corporations use their vast
wealth to buy influence in houses of parliament or government across the
globe. In the US, by 2011 the largest thirty corporations spent more that year on
lobbying government than they spent on taxes. Big oil alone spent over $169m
in lobbying the US government in 2009. Between 1998 and 2008 (the year of the bailout) the US Banking Sector
spent $3.4bn lobbying for deregulation, reduced capital requirements and avoiding the regulation of derivatives (which caused the financial
crisis). When they aren’t lobbying, they are simply gaining positions of power within the government itself to directly redraft legislation to suit
them. In the UK, corporations with outstanding tax issues with the HMRC (the tax collector) are currently in working groups with the HMRC to
redraft the very tax rules they are doing their best to avoid. The largest accountancy forms are also using consultancy positions within
government as tax policy advisors, to market themselves to tax evading corporations to help break the rules they wrote. In the US, there
appears to be revolving door between Monsanto (controversial purveyor of genetically modified foods)
and the Food Regulating Agencies. Islam Siddiqui, vice-president of Monsanto-
funded lobby group CropLife is now a negotiator for the US Trade
Representative on agriculture.Roger Beachy, a former director of a Monsanto-
funded plant science centre has become the director of the National Institute of
Food and Agriculture. Michael Taylor, former vice president of Monsanto, is now the
deputy commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA – the US’s food and drug regulator). There is a major
problem here. The outcomes of the above are that when corporations break the law, they are either
not tried or given a fine which comes nowhere near the profits reaped by
breaking the law. And worse, corporations are buying the drafting of laws which
make their unethical and damaging behaviour legal. We have seen recently that banks have instituted
fraud on a global scale by simply making up the LIBOR rate, the base interest rate, at the cost of savers and pensioners and to the benefit of
their traders who specialise in debt, not capital. In 1950, corporate taxes made up 30% of federal revenues in the US. By 2012, this had fallen to
just7%. In the UK, Corporation Tax rates were cut from 52% to 35% over just two years between 1984-6 and has continued to be cut until it
stands at just 21% today.
3. Rejecting the whole system is key—anything less yields too much grounds
to the false freedom of the market
Corporations do not want any rules which stand in the way of making profit . Left
unregulated, they would simply operate in ways which maximised their profits regardless of social outcomes. When we introduce a regulator,
corporations seek to and succeed in compromising them. The issue is not to blame one or other of the
players, but the game of capitalism itself. Pulling our heads out of the sand It is time to get real. There are a
number of sheer economic realities which also undermine the idea of the so called free market. I would recommend reading Professor Steve
whether it be sheer mathematical reality,
Keen’s Debunking Economics to get a better handle on those. But
or social reality, the free market myth is nothing but a nonsense. It is a self
serving nonsense propagandised by its beneficiaries. In 2008, the banks did not
uphold the principle of free market values and keeping the state out of the
market – they begged the state to use tax payer money to cover their debts
whilst only they enjoyed the profits. The IMF recently estimated that this
bailout has so far cost the taxpayers of the world £7.12 trillion ($11.9trn). That is the equivalent
of a £1,779 hand out to every last human being on earth. The truth is that most of the globe now labours under corporatized states. Every new
policy is tested against the reaction to it by ‘the market’, as if it were this free, independent aggregated assessment of the worthiness of state
actions. It is not. It is simply big businesses reaction to the action of the state. All the market reaction tells you is whether or not a cabal of
not only is the market not free, but it never
corporations think they can make a profit from it. In conclusion,
can be. It requires legislation to prevent rational corporate behaviour which

would undermine it, and any regulator (state or otherwise) will be corrupted by
corporations seeking to influence them. The sooner we abandon this madness,
the sooner we can answer the bigger question: how do we create a means of
economic organisation which has the highest chance of meeting our social
goals? Surely, underneath all this GDP growth nonsense is a basic ambition to increase living standards around the world, to raise the
levels of health, education, social cohesion and progress (technological, scientific etc) across the globe such that we can all benefit from it whilst
not destroying our planet. We labour away under a system which forces us to abandon ideas and aspirations to deliver these goals for the sake
The answer cannot be to
of a limited number of overbearingly powerful people and corporations to increase their profits.
unleash these people on the world without even the token regulation they have
now, but to fundamentally transform our social, political, economic and
environmental organisation. We must abandon the myth of the free market,
just as we gave up on Santa Claus and Unicorns – it is time to put away childish
things so we can become grown up caretakers of ourselves, each other and the
planet.
Financialization
1. Capitalism is unsustainable—financialization and monopolization makes
wealth expansion prone to lurches in growth and industry bubble
collapses
64, issue 1, pp. 1-28
In factwarnings of a housing bubble and the threat of a severe financial collapse in
the four years leading up to the crisis were so numerous as to make it difficult, if
not impossible, to catalogue them all. The problem, then, was not that no one saw
the Great Financial Crisis coming. Rather the difficulty was that the financial
world, driven by their endless desire for more, and orthodox economists, prey
to the worship of their increasingly irrelevant models, were simply oblivious to
the warnings of heterodox economic observers all around them. Mainstream
economists had increasingly retreated back into a Say’s Law view (the notion that supply
creates its own demand), which argued that severe economic crises were virtually
impossible.21 The failure of orthodox economics to perceive the financial bubble prior to the Great Financial Crisis is now well
established in the literature. 22 What we are suggesting here, however, is something different: that the same
economics of innocent fraud has hindered orthodox economists from perceiving

until now an even bigger fault line of the mature capitalist economy, the
tendency to long-term economic stagnation. Indeed, it is the slow growth or
stagnation that has been festering for decades which explains not only
financialization, manifested in a string of financial bubbles, but also the deep
economic malaise that has set in during the period of financial deleveraging. A
realistic analysis today thus requires close examination of the dangerous feedback
loops between stagnation and financialization. In How Markets Fail Cassidy argues that the two most
prescient economic analyses of our current economic malaise, and its relation to the dual phenomena of financialization and stagnation, were
provided by: (1) Hyman Minsky, a heterodox, post-Keynesian economist, who developed a theory of financial instability in relation to
contemporary capitalism, and (2) Paul Sweezy, a Marxist economist, who saw what he termed the “financialization of the capital accumulation
process” as a response to the stagnation tendency of mature monopoly-capitalist economies.23 As Cassidy observes about the tradition that
grew up around Sweezy: During the 1980s and ‘90s, a diminishing band of Marxist
economists, centered around The Monthly Review, a small New York journal that had been eking out an existence since the 1940s,
focused on what they termed the “financialization” of U.S. capitalism, pointing out that
employment in the financial sector, trading volumes in the speculative markets,
and the earnings of Wall Street firms were all rising sharply. Between 1980 and
2000, financial industry profits rose from $32.4 billion to $195.8 billion, according to
figures from the Commerce Department, and the financial sector’s share of all domestically
produced profits went from 19 percent to 29 percent. Paul Sweezy, a Harvard-trained octogenarian
who had emerged from the same Cambridge cohort as Galbraith and Samuelson, and who wrote what is still the best introduction to Marxist
To a free market economist, the rise of Wall
economics, was the leader of the left-wing dissidents.
Street was a natural outgrowth of the U.S. economy’s competitive advantage in

the sector. Sweezy said it reflected an increasingly desperate effort to head off
economic stagnation. With wages growing slowly, if at all, and with investment
opportunities insufficient to soak up all the [actual and potential] profits that
corporations were generating, the issuance of debt and the incessant creation of
new objects of financial speculation were necessary to keep spending growing.
“Is the casino society a significant drag on economic growth?” Sweezy asked in a 1987 article
he cowrote with Harry Magdoff. “Again, absolutely not. What growth the economy has
experienced in recent years, apart from that attributable to an unprecedented

peacetime military build-up, has been almost entirely due to the financial
explosion.”24 For Cassidy, it was the reasoned historical analysis of capitalism
developed by Minsky and Sweezy that allowed each of them to perceive the
dramatic transformations leading up to the early twenty-first century crisis. “Minsky
and Sweezy didn’t agree on everything, but their highly developed critical faculties allowed them to see, well before many mainstream
that a new model of financially driven capitalism had emerged.” Indeed, the
economists,
“wordwide slump” that had its origins in the United States in 2007
“demonstrated that Minsky and Sweezy had been right when they said the
fortunes of the economy at large couldn’t be divorced from what happened on
Wall Street.” For Sweezy, in particular, stagnation and financialization represented
coevolutionary phenomena caught in a “symbiotic embrace.” 25
Socialism or Barbarism
1. Capitalism generates internal contradictions that make social upheaval
inevitable - there's only a question of whether socialism or barbarism
emerge victorious
Tumino ‘1 Stephen Tumino, professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh, "What is Orthodox Marxism and why it matters now
more than ever," Red Critique, Spring 2001, accessed 1/3/10 http://www.redcritique.org/spring2001/whatisorthodoxmarxism.htm
It is only Orthodox Marxism that explains socialism as an historical inevitability
that is tied to the development of social production itself and its requirements.
Orthodox Marxism makes socialism scientific because it explains how in the
capitalist system, based on the private consumption of labor-power (competition), the
objective tendency is to reduce the amount of time labor spends in reproducing
itself (necessary labor) while expanding the amount of time labor is engaged in
producing surplus-value (surplus-labor) for the capitalist through the introduction of
machinery into the production process by the capitalists themselves to lower
their own labor costs. Because of the competitive drive for profits under
capitalism it is historically inevitable that a point is reached when the technical
mastery—the amount of time socially necessary on average to meet the needs of society through the processing of natural resources—
is such that the conditions of the workers worsen relative to the owners and
becomes an unbearable global social contradiction in the midst of the ever
greater mass of wealth produced. It is therefore just as inevitable that at such a
moment it obviously makes more sense to socialize production and meet the
needs of all to avoid the explosive social conflicts perpetually generated by
private property than to maintain the system at the risk of total social collapse
on a world scale. "Socialism or barbarism" (Luxemburg) is the inevitable choice faced by
humanity because of capitalism. Either maintain private property and the exploitation of labor
in production, in which case more and more social resources will go into policing
the growingly desperate surplus-population generated by the technical
efficiency of social production, or socialize production and inaugurate a society
whose founding principle is "from each according to his ability, to each
according to his needs" (Marx, Critique of the Gotha Program, Selected Works, 325) and "in which the free
development of each is the condition for the free development of all " (Manifesto of the
Communist Party, Selected Works, 53).
Metabolic Rifts
1. Capitalism creates metabolic rifts within its environment leading to
resource depletion and social collapse
Clark and York ‘8 Brett Clark, assistant professor of sociology at North Carolina
State University, and Richard York, coeditor of Organization & Environment and
associate professor of sociology at the University of Oregon, “Rifts and Shifts:
Getting to the Root of Environmental Crises,” Monthly Review, Vol. 60, Issue 06,
November 2008
The issue of capitalism’s destructive metabolic relation to nature was raised by
Marx in the nineteenth century. The German chemist, Justus von Liebig, in the
1850s and ’60s, employed the concept of metabolism in his studies of soil
nutrients. He explained that British agriculture, with its intensive methods of
cultivation to increase yields for the market, operated as a system of robbery,
destroying the vitality of the soil. Liebig detailed how the soil required specific
nutrients—nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium—to maintain its ability to
produce crops. As crops grew they took up these nutrients. In earlier societies,
the produce of nature was often recycled back to the land, fertilizing it. But the
concentration of land ownership, which involved the depopulation of rural
areas, and the increasing division between town and country, changed this
process. Food and fiber were shipped from the countryside to distant markets.
In this, the nutrients of the soil were transferred from the country to the city
where they accumulated as waste and contributed to the pollution of the cities,
rather than being returned to the soil. This caused a rupture in the nutrient
cycle. Marx, who was influenced by Liebig’s work, recognized that soil fertility
and the conditions of nature were bound to the historical development of social
relations. Through his studies of soil science, Marx gained insights in regard to
the nutrient cycle and how soil exhaustion was caused. On this basis he
provided a materialist critique of modern agriculture, describing how capitalist
operations inevitably produced a metabolic rift, as the basic processes of
natural reproduction were undermined, preventing the return to the soil of the
necessary nutrients.6 The transfer and loss of nutrients was tied to the
accumulation process. Marx described how capital creates a rupture in the
“metabolic interaction” between humans and the earth, one that is only
intensified by large-scale agriculture, long-distance trade, and massive urban
growth. With these developments, the nutrient cycle was interrupted and the
soil continually impoverished. He explained that the drive for the accumulation
of capital “reduces the agricultural population to an ever decreasing minimum
and confronts it with an ever growing industrial population crammed together
in large towns; in this way it produces conditions that provoke an irreparable
rift in the interdependent process of social metabolism, a metabolism
prescribed by the natural laws of life itself. The result of this is a squandering of
the vitality of the soil, which is carried by trade far beyond the bounds of a
single country.”7 The development of capitalism, whether through colonialism,
imperialism, or market forces, expanded the metabolic rift to the global level, as
distant regions across the oceans were brought into production to serve the
interests of capitalists in core nations. While incorporating distant lands into the
global economy—a form of geographical displacement—helped relieve some of
the demands placed on agricultural production in core nations, it did not serve
as a remedy to the metabolic rift. The systematic expansion of production on a
larger scale subjected more of the natural world to the dictates of capital. The
consequence of this, as Marx noted, is that “it disturbs the metabolic interaction
between man and the earth, i.e. it prevents the return to the soil of its
constituent elements consumed by man in the form of food and clothing; hence
it hinders the operation of the eternal natural condition for the lasting fertility
of the soil.”8
Ideology
1. Their impact turns are ideological defenses to justify a crisis-prone system
Zizek ‘9 Slavoj Zizek, critique guy, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, 2009, p. 25-27
This anti-ideological description is, of course, patently false: the very notion of capitalism as a neutral
social mechanism is ideology (even utopian ideology) at its purest. The moment of truth in this description is
nonetheless that, as Alain Badiou has put it, capitalism is effectively not a civilization of its own,
with a specific way of rendering life meaningful. Capitalism is the first socio-
economic order which de-totalizes meaning: it is not global at the level of
meaning (there is no global "capitalist world view:' no "capitalist civilization" proper; the fundamental lesson of globalization is precisely
that capitalism can accommodate itself to all civilizations, from Christian to Hindu and Buddhist). Capitalism's global
dimension can be formulated only at the level of truth-without-meaning, as the

"Real" of the global market mechanism. The problem here is not, as Sorman claims, that
reality is always imperfect, and that people always need to entertain dreams of
impossible perfection. The problem is one of meaning, and it is here that
religion is now reinventing its role, rediscovering its mission of guaranteeing a
meaningful life to those who participate in the meaningless functioning of the
capitalist machine. This is why Sorman's description of the fundamental difficulty of capitalist ideology is so misplaced: From the
intellectual and political standpoint, the great difficulty in administering a capitalist system is that it does not give rise to dreams: no one
descends to the street to manifest in its favor. It is an economy which changed completely the human condition, which has saved humanity
from misery, but no one is ready to convert himself into a martyr of this system. We should learn to deal with this paradox of a system which
nobody wants, and which nobody wants because it doesn't give rise to love, which is not enchanting, not a seducer. This description is, again,
if there was ever a system which enchanted its subjects with dreams (of
patently untrue:
freedom, of how your success depends on yourself, of the run of luck which is just around the corner, of unconstrained pleasures . . . ) , then
it is capitalism. The true problem lies elsewhere: namely; how to keep people's
faith in capitalism alive when the inexorable reality of a crisis has brutally
crushed such dreams? Here enters the need for a "mature" realistic
pragmatism: one should heroically resist dreams of perfection and happiness
and accept bitter capitalist reality as the best (or the least bad) of all possible
worlds. A compromise is necessary here, a combination of fighting illusory utopian expectations and giving people enough security to
accept the system. Sorman is thus no market-liberal fundamentalist or extremist; he proudly mentions that some orthodox followers of Milton
There is no
Friedman accused him of being a communist because of his ( moderate) support of the welfare state:
contradiction between State and economic liberalism; on the contrary, there is

a complex alliance between the two. I think that the liberal society needs a
welfare state, first, with regard to intellectual legitimacy-people will accept the
capitalist adventure if there is an indispensable minimum of social security.
Above this, on a more mechanic level, if one wants the destructive creativity of
capitalism to function, one has to administer it. Rarely was the function of
ideology described in clearer terms-to defend the existing system against any
serious critique, legitimizing it as a direct expression of human nature: An
essential task of democratic governments and opinion makers when confronting
economic cycles and political pressure is to secure and protect the system that
has served humanity so well, and not to change it for the worse on the pretext
of its imperfection . . . . Still, this lesson is doubtless one of the hardest to translate into language that public opinion will
accept. The best of all possible economic systems is indeed imperfect. Whatever the truths uncovered by economic science, the free market is
finally only the reflection of human nature, itself hardly perfectible.
Radicalism
1. Radical politics demands that pragmatic considerations be thrown aside
in a momentary embrace of a better future—a radical act blurs the
coordinates of what is possible, changing the way the political realm is
organized
Zizek ‘4 Slavoj Zizek, Senior Researcher at the Institute for Social Studies in Ljubljana, 2004, Organs Without Bodies, p. 203-05
A revolutionary process is not a well-planned strategic activity with no place in it for a full
immersion into the Now without regard to long-term consequences. Quite the contrary: the suspension of all strategic
considerations based on hope for a better future, the stance of on attaque, et puis, on le verra (Lenin often
referred to this slogan of Napoleon), is a key part of any revolutionary process . Recall the staged performance of
“Storming the Winter Palace” in Petrograd on the third anniversary of the October Revolution (November 7, l92O). Thousands of workers, soldiers, students, and
artists worked round the clock, living on kasha (tasteless wheat porridge), tea, and frozen apples, preparing the performance at the very place where the event
“really took place” three years earlier. Their work was coordinated by army officers as well as by avant-garde artists, musicians, and directors, from Malevich to
Meyerhold. Although this was acting and not “reality’ the soldiers and sailors were playing themselves—many of them not only actually participated in the event of
1917 but were also simultaneously involved in the real battles of the Civil War that were raging in the nearby vicinity of Petrograd, a city under siege and suffering
from severe shortages of food. A contemporary commented on the performance: “The future historian will record how, throughout one of the bloodiest and most
brutal revolutions, all of Russia was acting.”26 And the formalist theoretician Viktor Shklovski noted that “some kind of elemental process is taking place where the
living fabric of life is being transformed into the theatricaL’27 We all remember the infamous, self-celebratory First of May parades that were one of the supreme
signs of recognition of the Stalinist regimes. If one needs proof of how Leninism functioned in an entirely different way, are such performances not the supreme
proof that the October Revolution was definitely not a simple coup d’etat by the small group of Bolsheviks but an event that unleashed a tremendous emancipatory
potential? Does the “Storming of the Winter Palace” staging not display the force of a sacred (pagan?) pageant, of the magic act of founding a new community? It is
here that Heidegger should look when he wrote about founding a state as the event of truth (and not to the Nazi rituals); it is, perhaps, here that there occurred the
only meaningful “return of the sacred.” In short, it is here that, perhaps, one should look for the realization of Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk, of what he aimed at with
the designation of his Parsifal as Bflhnenweihfestspiel (sacred festival drama): if ever, then, it was in Petrograd of 1919, much more than in ancient Greece, that, “in
intimate connection with its history, the people itself that stood facing itself in the work of art, becoming conscious of itself, and, in the space of a few hours,
rapturously devouring, as it were, its own essence.” This aestheticization, in which the people quite literally “plays itself’ certainly does not fall under Benjamin’s
indictment of the Fascist “aestheticization of the political:’ Instead of abandoning this aestheticization to the political Right, instead of a blanket dismissal of every
mass political spectacle as “proto Fascist” one should perceive, in this minimal, purely formal, difference of the people from itself, the unique case of “real life”
differentiated from art by nothing more than an invisible, formal gap. The very fact that, in historical documentaries, movie shots from this reconstruction (as well
as from Eisenstein’s 1927 October) of the storming of the Winter Palace are often presented as documentary shots is to be taken as an indication of this deeper
identity of people playing themselves. The archetypal Eisensteinian cinematic scene rendering the exuberant orgy of revolutionary destructive violence (what
Eisenstein himself called “a veritable bacchanalia of destruction”) belongs to the same series. When, in October, the victorious revolutionaries penetrate the wine
cellars of the Winter Palace, they indulge in the ecstatic orgy of smashing thousands of the expensive wine bottles. In Bezhin Meadow, the village Pioneers force
their way into the local church and desecrate it, robbing it of its relics, squabbling over an icon, sacrilegiously trying on vestments, heretically laughing at the
statuary. In this suspension of goal-oriented instrumental activity, we effectively get a kind of Bataillean “unrestrained expenditure”—the pious desire to deprive
the revolution of this excess is simply the desire to have a revolution without revolution. However, this “unrestrained expenditure” is not enough. In a revolution
proper, such a display of what Hegel would have called “abstract negativity” merely, as it were, wipes the slate clean for the second act, the imposition of a New
in a truly radical political act, the opposition between a “crazy”

Order. What this means is that,
destructive gesture and a strategic political decision momentarily breaks down.

This is why it is theoretically and politically wrong to oppose strategic political
acts, as risky as they might be, to radical “suicidal” gestures a la Antigone, gestures of pure
self-destructive ethical insistence with, apparently, no political goal. The point is not
simply that, once we are thoroughly engaged in a political project, we are ready to
risk everything for it, inclusive of our lives, but, more precisely, that only such an
“impossible” gesture of pure expenditure can change the very coordinates of
what is strategically possible within a historical constellation. Another expression of this excess is an unexpected feature of all
outbursts of revolt. Several years ago, there was a rebellion of Cuban refugees detained at the Guant~inamo base. Its direct cause was that one group of refugees
received lower quality orange juice than another group. The very trifling character of what triggered the violent uprising is indicative: not a big injustice or large-
scale suffering but a minimal, ridiculous difference, especially for people who just came from Cuba, a country with severe food shortages. Does this not make it clear
that the cause immediately triggering a rebellion is, by definition, trifling, a pseudo cause signalling that what is at stake is the relationship to the Other?
Overproduction
1. Overproduction—all corrective measures only aggravate eventual
collapses
Wolff ‘9 Richard D. Wolff, Professor of Economics Emeritus, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and currently a Visiting Professor in
the Graduate Program in International Affairs of the New School University in New York, “Peak Oil and Peak Capitalism,” The Oil Drum,
3/27/2009, http://www.theoildrum.com/node/5245
The concept of peak oil may apply more generally than its friends and foes
realize. As we descend into US capitalism’s second major crash in 75 years (with
another dozen or so “business cycle downturns” in the interval between crashes), some signs suggest we are at peak
capitalism too. Private capitalism (when productive assets are owned by private individuals and groups and when
markets rather than state planning dominate the distribution of resources and products) has repeatedly demonstrated
a tendency to flare out into overproduction and/or asset inflation bubbles that
burst with horrific social consequences. Endless reforms, restructurings, and
regulations were all justified in the name not only of extricating us from a crisis
but also finally preventing future crises (as Obama repeated this week). They all failed to do
that. The tendency to crisis seems unstoppable, an inherent quality of
capitalism. At best, flare outs were caught before they wreaked major havoc,
although usually that only postponed and aggravated that havoc. One recent case in
point: the stock market crash of early 2000 was limited in its damaging social
consequences (recession, etc.) by an historically unprecedented reduction of interest

rates and money supply expansion by Alan Greenspan’s Federal Reserve. The
resulting real estate bubble temporarily offset the effects of the stock market’s
bubble bursting, but when real estate crashed a few years later, what had been
deferred hit catastrophically . Repeated failure to stop its inherent crisis
tendency is beginning to tell on the system. The question increasingly insinuates itself even into discourses
with a long history of denying its pertinence: has capitalism, qua system, outlived its usefulness?
Repeated state interventions to rescue private capitalism from its self-destructive crises or from the political movements of its victims yielded
longer or shorter periods of state capitalism (when productive assets are owned or significantly controlled or regulated by state officials and
state capitalisms have
when state planning dominates markets as mechanisms of resource and product distribution). Yet
not solved the system’s crisis tendencies either. That is why they have
repeatedly given way to oscillations back to private capitalism (e.g. the Reagan “revolution” in
the US, the end of the USSR, etc.) Moreover, the history of FDR’s efforts to counteract the Great
Depression teaches fundamental lessons about capitalism as a system that

cannot forever be deferred. Since the New Deal reforms then all stopped short
of transforming the structure of corporations, they left in place the corporate
boards of directors and shareholders who had both the incentives and resources
to evade, undermine and abolish those reforms. Evasion was their focus until
the 1970s, and abolition since. Capitalism systematically organizes its key
institutions of production – the corporations – such that their boards of
directors, in properly performing their assigned tasks, produce crises, then
undermine anti-crisis reforms, and thereby reproduce those crises .
Demand
1. Capitalism cannot sustain a totalizing economic structure – demand
failure
Kotz ‘2 David M. Kotz, Department of Economics and Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts,
"Globalization and Noeliberalism," Rethinking Marxism, Vol. 12 No. 2, Summer 2002, p. 3, accessed 1/31/10
http://people.umass.edu/dmkotz/Glob_and_NL_02.pdf
Neoliberalism appears to be problematic as a dominant theory for contemporary capitalism.The stability and survival of
the capitalist system depends on its ability to bring vigorous capital
accumulation, where the latter process is understood to include not just economic
expansion but also technological progress. Vigorous capital accumulation permits
rising profits to coexist with rising living standards for a substantial part of the
population over the long-run.2 However, it does not appear that neoliberalism
promotes vigorous capital accumulation in contemporary capitalism. There are a number of reasons
why one would not expect the neoliberal model to promote rapid accumulation. First, it gives rise to a problem of
insufficient aggregate demand over the long run, stemming from the powerful
tendency of the neoliberal regime to lower both real wages and public spending .
Second, the neoliberal model creates instability on the macroeconomic level by
renouncing state counter-cyclical spending and taxation policies, by reducing

the effectiveness of "automatic stabilizers" through shrinking social welfare
programs,3 and by loosening public regulation of the financial sector. This
renders the system more vulnerable to major financial crises and depressions .
Third, the neoliberal model tends to intensify class conflict, which can potentially
discourage capitalist investment.4 The historical evidence confirms doubts about

the ability of the neoliberal model to promote rapid capital accumulation . We will
look at growth rates of gross domestic product (GDP) and of labor productivity. The GDP growth rate provides at least a rough approximation of
the rate of capital accumulation, while the labor productivity growth rate tells us something about the extent to which capitalism is developing
the forces of production via rising ratios of means of production to direct labor, technological advance, and improved labor skills.5
AT: Freedom
1. Liberal freedom isn’t—workers are slaves to subsistence wages—they
trade in freedom of production for the paltry choice of choosing which
crappy car they can drive to the factory.
(if necessary)
2. In practice this leads to corporate totalitarianism—real freedom requires
resolving class antagonism
Cotter ‘2 Jennifer Cotter, Assistant Professor of English at William Jewell College, “Feminism Now,” Red Critique, March/April 2002,
http://redcritique.org/MarchApril02/feminismnow.htm
The notion of "freedom" as ownership, control, and "liberty" over one's own
"identity" (one's "I") or person is itself founded on private property as a necessary
precondition. As Marx demonstrated, over 150 years ago, the right to "liberty"—for control over
one's own person and identity—is "a question of the liberty of man regarded as
an isolated monad, withdrawn into himself . . . not founded upon the relations
between man and man, but rather on the separation of man from man" ("On the
Jewish Question" 42). Moreover, "the practical application of the right to liberty", Marx explained, "is
the right to private property . . . the right to enjoy one's fortune and to dispose
of it as one will, without regard for other men and independently of society. It is
the right of self-interest" (42). On these terms, Marx argues, equality "is only the equal right to liberty . . . namely that every
[human] is equally regarded as a self-sufficient monad" ("On the Jewish Question" 42). This understanding of
"freedom" as "liberty" of the nomadic subject is, in fact, quite useful to

transnational capital in the international division of labor (for example those corporations which
have come to the maquiladoras to secure sources of cheap labor) because it allows the ruling class to extract
greater amounts of surplus-value from workers without having to turn as much

of its profits over to the cost of social reproduction and public welfare. One
striking example of the way in which the ideology of the "self-sufficient monad"
enables the cutting of reproduction costs for capital are the "self-help
settlements" in Mexico made up of casas des cartónes (shacks built of scraps and cardboard) the
standard housing of the extremely poor in Mexico and a common place of residence for a vast number of maquiladora workers and their
In these "self-help settlements" of cardboard shacks, there is no publicly
families.
funded infrastructure: no paved streets, sidewalks, no electricity, no plumbing

and sewer services, or clean drinking water. While some of these "self-help settlements" eventually achieve
the status of "Colonias", and therefore become entitled to some public funding for paved roads and sidewalks, this process can take 20 years
and, even then, "Colonias" still contain substandard living conditions brought on by unmet needs such as "lack of sufficient water or sewer
By regarding the maquiladora workers who live in
services to meet the residential needs" (Arriola 1).
these "settlements" as "self-sufficient" and therefore, not in need of public

funds, the Mexican government is able to offer its citizens at a cheap wage to
attract transnational corporations. Moreover, these transnational corporations,
who extract surplus-value from these workers for private profit, are prevented
from having to turn money over to the state to support the cost of social
reproduction for the workers who have produced the surplus value to begin
with. The maquiladoras and the living conditions of its workers are not a "special case" that is "autonomous" from the social relations of
production but, in fact, part of the daily workings of class society and production for profit not needs. What is taken for
granted in the notion of "freedom" as "liberty" of the "self-sufficient monad" in

all of her "differences" (i.e., freedom to seize one's own "I" free from regulation), are the unequal material
conditions in a society based on private property and class relations . In such a society,
those who own the means of production are able to command over the surplus-
labor of others and, therefore, privately determine the uses toward which
collectively produced resources are put. What this means for workers is a
continual decrease in their standard of living from not only shouldering the
burden of the cost of their own reproduction, but producing surplus-value for
the profit of the ruling class. Moreover, as Marx argues, "the political suppression of private property"—that is, the fact
that it is not legally or politically recognized as what qualifies one as a citizen, as a political subject endowed with "rights"—"not only does not
abolish private property; it actually presupposes its existence" ("On The Jewish Question" 33). While in the notion of "freedom" as "liberty"
there is a formal denial of "private property" as a qualification for being a political subject of the state, private property and the capacity to
command over the labor of others that it enables—as well as other differences that stem from this basic inequality such as education,
differences in access to health care, nutrition, clean drinking water, quality housing and protection from the elements, etc—are still allowed to
Totally excluded in this
"act after their own fashion" as "personal", "singular", "autonomous" differences in civil society.
notion of "freedom", which is based on freedom of "private property" is

freedom from private property and exploitation and for social and economic
well being for all persons.
AT: War
1. Capital drives war—that’s the 1NC impact—finite domestic resources and
international competition pushes countries to invade others to sustain
growth—that risks nuclear extinction. Liberal peace is a farce concealing
constant exploitation and occupation.
2. This best explains present social and international conflicts
Everest ’12 Larry Everest, “WAR AND GLOBAL CAPITALISM: “Money for Jobs Not for War”: American Chauvinism and Reformist
Illusions,” Global Research, 5/24/2012, http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=31024
The slogan also promotes the idea that the political powers-that-be—if pressured by enough people—could scale back their military, stop
attacking other countries, and instead use the money for jobs, education, and other social welfare programs at home. But that’s not how the
Wars, invasions, and occupations are not policies of one set of
system actually operates!
politicians or another, or arbitrary choices made by this or that president. At this

stage in history, capitalism is a global system, with the U.S. the world’s most dominant
capitalist-imperialist power, presiding over a worldwide empire of exploitation.

This empire rests on the domination of the oppressed countries where the vast
majority of humanity lives, and on control of labor, markets, and resources. This
entails the violent suppression of the masses of people in the dominated areas
—and also entails fighting off challenges from other imperialists as well as rising
forces in those countries that stand in the way. This requires a monstrously
huge military that is deployed worldwide, with bases in over 100 countries, and
wars when necessary. The wars for domination in the Middle East, Central Asia,
and elsewhere don’t “interfere” with the functioning of U.S. capital—they’re
absolutely essential to it, and to the U.S.’s overall global dominance. This is why the U.S. rulers are
compelled—and willing to—spend trillions on the military, including during periods of
severe economic and fiscal stress, no matter who happens to sit in the White
House or Congress. This system of global capitalism-imperialism headed by the U.S. is the main
source of the horrors that torment so many across the globe— from the ethnic
cleansing and slow genocide of the Palestinian people by the U.S. and Israel, to
the mass incarceration and slow genocide of Black people in the U.S.; from the
rape of the planet to the systematic degradation and violence against women —
here and around the world; from the extreme deprivation and starvation faced
by billions across the planet to the growing poverty and desperation faced by
millions in the U.S. The rulers in these imperial metropoles distribute some of the spoils of
empire to provide a higher standard of living than in the oppressed countries
and buy social peace and loyalty at home (which “Money for Jobs, Not For War” encourages). People in the
U.S. should reject that foul pact! The vast majority in the U.S. have a profound interest in making common cause with oppressed people
worldwide, not in siding with “their” rulers. That means fostering a morality that declares: “American lives are not more important than other
people’s lives!”—not pandering to American chauvinism, which strengthens the system responsible for so much misery. It means people
shouldn’t appeal to those on the top to “spend more on jobs,” but to clearly and unequivocally demand a STOP to the horrors the U.S. is
committing around the world.
AT: Heg
1. Hegemony is disasterous under capital—cross-apply foster—increasing
global interventions to preserve resource flows take on higher stakes as
weaponization spreads and deepens—the nuclear face-off with Iran is just
another step in capital’s attempts at global domination
2. Heg unsustainable—continued capitalist crises
Layne ’12 Christopher Layne, Robert M. Gates Chair in Intelligence and National Security at the George Bush School of Government and
Public Service at Texas A&M University, noted neorealist, “This Time It’s Real: The End of Unipolarity and the Pax Americana,” International
Studies Quarterly (2012) 56, 203-213
Contrary to the way their argument was portrayed by many of their critics, the 1980s declinists did not claim either that the United
States already had declined steeply, or that it soon would undergo a rapid, catastrophic decline. Rather, they pointed to
domestic and economic drivers that were in play and which, over time, would
cause American economic power to decline relatively and produce a shift in
global distribution of power. The declinists contended that the United States was afflicted
by a slow—’’termite’’—decline caused by fundamental structural weaknesses in the
American economy.7 Kennedy himself was explicitly looking ahead to the effects this termite decline would have on United
States’ world role in the early twenty-first century. As he wrote, ‘‘The task facing American statesman over the next decades. .. is to recognize
that broad trends are under way, and that there is a need to ‘manage’ affairs so that the relative erosion of the United States’ position takes
place slowly and smoothly, and is not accelerated by policies which bring merely short-term advantage but longer-term disadvantage’’
(Kennedy 1987:534; my emphasis). When one goes back and re-reads what the 1980s declinists pinpointed as the drivers of American decline,
their analyses look farsighted because the same drivers of economic decline are at the center of
debate today: too much consumption and not enough savings; persistent trade
and current account deficits; chronic federal budget deficits and a mounting
national debt; and de-industrialization. Over time, 1980s declinists said, the United
States’ goals of geopolitical dominance and economic prosperity would collide.
Today, their warnings seem eerily prescient. Robert Gilpin’s 1987 description of America’s economic and grand
strategic plight could just as easily describe the United States after the Great Recession: With a decreased rate of
economic growth and a low rate of national savings, the United States was
living and defending commitments far beyond its means. In order to bring its
commitments and power back into balance once again, the United States would
one day have to cut back further on its overseas commitments, reduce the
American standard of living, or decrease domestic productive investment even
more than it already had. In the meantime, American hegemony was threatened by a
potentially devastating fiscal crisis. (Gilpin 1987:347–348) In the Great Recession’s wake—doubly so since it is far
from clear that either the United States or global economies are out of the woods—the United States now is facing the dilemmas that Gilpin
and the other declinists warned about.
3. Squo decline in influence is irrecoverable—economics, overstretch, anti-
Americanism
Walt ‘11 Stephen M. Walt, professor of international affairs at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, “The End of the American Era,”
The National Interest, 10/25/11, http://nationalinterest.org/article/the-end-the-american-era-6037
When a state stands alone at the pinnacle of power, however, there is nowhere
to go but down. And so Americans have repeatedly worried about the possibility of decline—even when the prospect was remote. Back in 1950, National Security Council Report 68 warned that Soviet
acquisition of atomic weapons heralded an irreversible shift in geopolitical momentum in Moscow’s favor. A few years later, Sputnik’s launch led many to fear that Soviet premier Nikita S. Khrushchev’s pledge to “bury” Western
capitalism might just come true. President John F. Kennedy reportedly believed the USSR would eventually be wealthier than the United States, and Richard Nixon famously opined that America was becoming a “pitiful, helpless
giant.” Over the next decade or so, defeat in Indochina and persistent economic problems led prominent academics to produce books with titles like America as an Ordinary Country and After Hegemony.1 Far-fetched concerns
about Soviet dominance helped propel Ronald Reagan to the presidency and were used to justify a major military buildup in the early 1980s. The fear of imminent decline, it seems, has been with us ever since the United States
reached the zenith of global power. Debates about decline took on new life with the publication of Paul Kennedy’s best-selling Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, which famously argued that America was in danger of “imperial
overstretch.” Kennedy believed Great Britain returned to the unseemly ranks of mediocrity because it spent too much money defending far-flung interests and fighting costly wars, and he warned that the United States was headed
down a similar path. Joseph Nye challenged Kennedy’s pessimism in Bound to Lead: The Changing Nature of American Power, which sold fewer copies but offered a more accurate near-term forecast. Nye emphasized America’s
unusual strengths, arguing it was destined to be the leading world power for many years to come. Since then, a host of books and articles—from Charles Krauthammer’s “The Unipolar Moment,” G. John Ikenberry’s Liberal
Leviathan and Niall Ferguson’s Colossus to Fareed Zakaria’s The Post-American World (to name but a few)—have debated how long American dominance could possibly last. Even Osama bin Laden eventually got in on the act,
proclaiming the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan fatal blows to American power and a vindication of al-Qaeda’s campaign of terror. Yet for all the ink that has been spilled on the durability of American primacy, the protagonists have
The issue has never been whether the United States was about to
mostly asked the wrong question .
imitate Britain’s fall from the ranks of the great powers or suffer some other
form of catastrophic decline. The real question was always whether what one
might term the “American Era” was nearing its end. Specifically, might the United
States remain the strongest global power but be unable to exercise the same
influence it once enjoyed? If that is the case—and I believe it is—then Washington must devise a grand strategy that acknowledges this new reality but still uses America’s enduring
assets to advance the national interest. THE AMERICAN Era began immediately after World War II. Europe may have been the center of international politics for over three centuries, but two destructive world wars decimated
these great powers. The State Department’s Policy Planning Staff declared in 1947 that “preponderant power must be the object of U.S. policy,” and its willingness to openly acknowledge this goal speaks volumes about the
imbalance of power in America’s favor. International-relations scholars commonly speak of this moment as a transition from a multipolar to a bipolar world, but Cold War bipolarity was decidedly lopsided from the start. In 1945,
for example, the U.S. economy produced roughly half of gross world product, and the United States was a major creditor nation with a positive trade balance. It had the world’s largest navy and air force, an industrial base second
to none, sole possession of atomic weapons and a globe-circling array of military bases. By supporting decolonization and backing European reconstruction through the Marshall Plan, Washington also enjoyed considerable goodwill
in most of the developed and developing world. Most importantly, the United States was in a remarkably favorable geopolitical position. There were no other great powers in the Western Hemisphere, so Americans did not have to
worry about foreign invasion. Our Soviet rival had a much smaller and less efficient economy. Its military might, concentrated on ground forces, never approached the global reach of U.S. power-projection capabilities. The other
major power centers were all located on or near the Eurasian landmass—close to the Soviet Union and far from the United States—which made even former rivals like Germany and Japan eager for U.S. protection from the Russian
bear. Thus, as the Cold War proceeded, the United States amassed a strong and loyal set of allies while the USSR led an alliance of comparatively weak and reluctant partners. In short, even before the Soviet Union collapsed,
America’s overall position was about as favorable as any great power’s in modern history. What did the United States do with these impressive advantages? In the decades after World War II, it created and led a political, security
and economic order in virtually every part of the globe, except for the sphere that was directly controlled by the Soviet Union and its Communist clients. Not only did the United States bring most of the world into institutions that
were largely made in America (the UN, the World Bank, the IMF, and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade), for decades it retained the dominant influence in these arrangements. In Europe, the Marshall Plan revitalized
local economies, covert U.S. intervention helped ensure that Communist parties did not gain power, and NATO secured the peace and deterred Soviet military pressure. The position of supreme allied commander was always
reserved for a U.S. officer, and no significant European security initiative took place without American support and approval. (The main exception, which supports the general point, was the ill-fated Anglo-French-Israeli attack on
Egypt during the Suez crisis of 1956, an adventure that collapsed in the face of strong U.S. opposition.) The United States built an equally durable security order in Asia through bilateral treaties with Japan, South Korea, Australia,
New Zealand, the Philippines and several others, and it incorporated each of these countries into an increasingly liberal world economy. In the Middle East, Washington helped establish and defend Israel but also forged close
security ties with Saudi Arabia, Jordan, the shah of Iran and several smaller Gulf states. America continued to exercise a position of hegemony in the Western Hemisphere, using various tools to oust leftist governments in
Guatemala, the Dominican Republic, Chile and Nicaragua. In Africa, not seen as a vital arena, America did just enough to ensure that its modest interests there were protected. To be sure, the United States did not exert total
control over events in the various regional orders it created. It could not prevent the revolution in Cuba in 1959 or Iran in 1979, it failed to keep France from leaving NATO’s integrated military command structure in 1966, and it did
not stop Israel, India, North Korea and Pakistan from acquiring nuclear weapons. But the United States retained enormous influence in each of these regions, especially on major issues. Furthermore, although the U.S. position was
sometimes challenged—the loss in Vietnam being the most obvious example—America’s overall standing was never in danger. The U.S. alliance system in Asia held firm despite defeat in Indochina, and during the 1970s, Beijing
formed a tacit partnership with Washington. Moreover, China eventually abandoned Marxism-Leninism as a governing ideology, forswore world revolution and voluntarily entered the structure of institutions that the United States
had previously created. Similarly, Tehran became an adversary once the clerical regime took over, but America’s overall position in the Middle East was not shaken. Oil continued to flow out of the Persian Gulf, Israel became
increasingly secure and prosperous, and key Soviet allies like Egypt eventually abandoned Moscow and sided with the United States. Despite occasional setbacks, the essential features of the American Era remained firmly in place.
Needless to say, it is highly unusual for a country with only 5 percent of the world’s population to be able to organize favorable political, economic and security orders in almost every corner of the globe and to sustain them for
decades. Yet that is in fact what the United States did from 1945 to 1990. And it did so while enjoying a half century of economic growth that was nearly unmatched in modern history. And then the Soviet empire collapsed, leaving
the United States as the sole superpower in a unipolar world. According to former national-security adviser Brent Scowcroft, the United States found itself “standing alone at the height of power. It was, it is, an unparalleled
situation in history, one which presents us with the rarest opportunity to shape the world.” And so it tried, bringing most of the Warsaw Pact into NATO and encouraging the spread of market economies and democratic institutions
THE
throughout the former Communist world. It was a triumphal moment—the apogee of the American Era—but the celebratory fireworks blinded us to the trends and pitfalls that brought that era to an end.
PAST two decades have witnessed the emergence of new power centers in
several key regions. The most obvious example is China, whose explosive
economic growth is undoubtedly the most significant geopolitical development
in decades. The United States has been the world’s largest economy since roughly 1900, but China is likely to
overtake America in total economic output no later than 2025. Beijing’s military
budget is rising by roughly 10 percent per year, and it is likely to convert even
more of its wealth into military assets in the future. If China is like all previous
great powers—including the United States—its definition of “vital” interests will
grow as its power increases—and it will try to use its growing muscle to protect
an expanding sphere of influence. Given its dependence on raw-material
imports (especially energy) and export-led growth, prudent Chinese leaders will
want to make sure that no one is in a position to deny them access to the
resources and markets on which their future prosperity and political stability
depend. This situation will encourage Beijing to challenge the current U.S. role
in Asia. Such ambitions should not be hard for Americans to understand, given that the United States has sought to exclude outside
powers from its own neighborhood ever since the Monroe Doctrine. By a similar logic, China is bound to feel uneasy if Washington maintains a
network of Asian alliances and a sizable military presence in East Asia and the Indian Ocean. Over time, Beijing will try to convince other Asian
states to abandon ties with America, and Washington will almost certainly resist these efforts. An intense security competition will follow.
The security arrangements that defined the American Era are also being
undermined by the rise of several key regional powers, most notably India,
Turkey and Brazil. Each of these states has achieved impressive economic
growth over the past decade, and each has become more willing to chart its
own course independent of Washington’s wishes. None of them are on the verge of becoming true
global powers—Brazil’s GDP is still less than one-sixth that of the United States, and India and Turkey’s economies are even smaller—but
each has become increasingly influential within its own region. This gradual
diffusion of power is also seen in the recent expansion of the G-8 into the so-
called G-20, a tacit recognition that the global institutions created after World
War II are increasingly obsolete and in need of reform. Each of these new
regional powers is a democracy, which means that its leaders pay close
attention to public opinion. As a result, the United States can no longer rely on
cozy relations with privileged elites or military juntas. When only 10–15 percent of Turkish citizens
have a “favorable” view of America, it becomes easier to understand why Ankara refused to let Washington use its territory to attack Iraq in
2003 and why Turkey has curtailed its previously close ties with Israel despite repeated U.S. efforts to heal the rift. Anti-Americanism is less
The rise of new
prevalent in Brazil and India, but their democratically elected leaders are hardly deferential to Washington either.
powers is bringing the short-lived “unipolar moment” to an end, and the result
will be either a bipolar Sino-American rivalry or a multipolar system containing
several unequal great powers. The United States is likely to remain the strongest, but its overall lead has
shrunk—and it is shrinking further still. Of course, the twin debacles in Iraq and
Afghanistan only served to accelerate the waning of American dominance and
underscore the limits of U.S. power. The Iraq War alone will carry a price tag of
more than $3 trillion once all the costs are counted, and the end result is likely
to be an unstable quasi democracy that is openly hostile to Israel and at least
partly aligned with Iran. Indeed, Tehran has been the main beneficiary of this ill-
conceived adventure, which is surely not what the Bush administration had in mind when it dragged the country to war. The
long Afghan campaign is even more likely to end badly, even if U.S. leaders
eventually try to spin it as some sort of victory. The Obama administration finally got Osama bin Laden,
but the long and costly attempt to eliminate the Taliban and build a Western-style
state in Afghanistan has failed. At this point, the only interesting question is whether
the United States will get out quickly or get out slowly . In either scenario, Kabul’s fate will ultimately
be determined by the Afghans once the United States and its dwindling set of allies leave. And if failure in Afghanistan
weren’t enough, U.S. involvement in Central Asia has undermined relations with
nuclear-armed Pakistan and reinforced virulent anti-Americanism in that
troubled country. If victory is defined as achieving your main objectives and ending a war with your security and prosperity
enhanced, then both of these conflicts must be counted as expensive defeats. But the Iraq and Afghan wars were not
simply costly self-inflicted wounds; they were also eloquent demonstrations of the limits of
military power. There was never much doubt that the United States could
topple relatively weak and/or unpopular governments —as it has in Panama, Afghanistan, Iraq and,
most recently, Libya—but the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan showed that unmatched
power-projection capabilities were of little use in constructing effective political

orders once the offending leadership was removed. In places where local
identities remain strong and foreign interference is not welcome for long, even
a global superpower like the United States has trouble obtaining desirable
political results. Nowhere is this clearer than in the greater Middle East , which has been
the main focus of U.S. strategy since the USSR broke apart. Not only did the Arab Spring catch Washington
by surprise, but the U.S. response further revealed its diminished capacity to
shape events in its favor. After briefly trying to shore up the Mubarak regime,
the Obama administration realigned itself with the forces challenging the
existing regional order. The president gave a typically eloquent speech
endorsing change, but nobody in the region paid much attention. Indeed, with
the partial exception of Libya, U.S. influence over the entire process has been
modest at best. Obama was unable to stop Saudi Arabia from sending troops to
Bahrain—where Riyadh helped to quell demands for reform—or to convince
Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad to step down. U.S. leverage in the post-Mubarak
political process in Egypt and the simmering conflict in Yemen is equally
ephemeral. One gets a vivid sense of America’s altered circumstances by comparing the U.S. response to the Arab Spring to its actions
in the early years of the Cold War. In 1948, the Marshall Plan allocated roughly $13 billion in direct grants to restarting
Europe’s economy, an amount equal to approximately 5 percent of total U.S. GDP . The
equivalent amount today would be some $700 billion, and there is no way that
Washington could devote even a tenth of that amount to helping Egypt, Tunisia,
Libya or others. Nor does one need to go all the way back to 1948. The United States forgave $7 billion
of Egypt’s foreign debt after the 1991 Gulf War; in 2011, all it could offer Cairo’s
new government was $1 billion worth of loan guarantees (not actual loans) and
$1 billion in debt forgiveness. America’s declining influence is also revealed by its repeated failure to resolve the Israeli-
Palestinian dispute. It has been nearly twenty years since the signing of the Oslo accords in September 1993, and the United States has had a
monopoly on the “peace process” ever since that hopeful day. Yet its efforts have been a complete failure, proving beyond doubt that
Washington is incapable of acting as an effective and evenhanded mediator. Obama’s call for “two states for two peoples” in his address to the
Arab world in June 2009 produced a brief moment of renewed hope, but his steady retreat in the face of Israeli intransigence and domestic
, these events herald a sharp decline in
political pressure drove U.S. credibility to new lows. Taken together
America’s ability to shape the global order. And the recent series of economic
setbacks will place even more significant limits on America’s ability to maintain
an ambitious international role. The Bush administration inherited a rare budget surplus in 2001 but proceeded to cut
federal taxes significantly and fight two costly wars. The predictable result was a soaring budget deficit and a rapid increase in federal debt,
problems compounded by the financial crisis of 2007–09. The latter disaster required a massive federal
bailout of the financial industry and a major stimulus package, leading to a short-term
budget shortfall in 2009 of some $1.6 trillion (roughly 13 percent of GDP). The
United States has been in the economic doldrums ever since, and there is scant
hope of a rapid return to vigorous growth. These factors help explain Standard & Poor’s U.S. government
credit-rating downgrade in August amid new fears of a “double-dip” recession. The Congressional Budget Office
projects persistent U.S. budget deficits for the next twenty-five years —even under its
optimistic “baseline” scenario—and it warns of plausible alternatives in which total federal
debt would exceed 100 percent of GDP by 2023 and 190 percent of GDP by
2035. State and local governments are hurting too, which means less money for
roads, bridges, schools, law enforcement and the other collective goods that
help maintain a healthy society. The financial meltdown also undermined an
important element of America’s “soft power,” namely, its reputation for
competence and probity in economic policy. In the 1990s, a seemingly robust economy gave U.S. officials
bragging rights and made the “Washington Consensus” on economic policy seem like the only game in town. Thomas Friedman (and other
popular writers) argued that the rest of the world needed to adopt U.S.-style “DOScapital 6.0” or fall by the wayside. Yet it is now clear that the
U.S. financial system was itself deeply corrupt and that much of its economic growth was an illusory bubble. Other states have reason to
The days when America could
disregard Washington’s advice and to pursue economic strategies of their own making.
drive the international economic agenda are over, which helps explain why it
has been seventeen years since the Uruguay Round, the last successful
multilateral trade negotiation. The bottom line is clear and unavoidable: the
United States simply won’t have the resources to devote to international affairs
that it had in the past. When the president of the staunchly internationalist Council on Foreign Relations is penning articles
decrying “American Profligacy” and calling for retrenchment, you know that America’s global role is in flux. Nor can the United States expect its
The era when
traditional allies to pick up the slack voluntarily, given that economic conditions are even worse in Europe and Japan.
the United States could create and lead a political, economic and security order
in virtually every part of the world is coming to an end. Which raises the obvious question: What
should we do about it?
AT: Poverty
1. Cap maximizes wealth centralization—key internal link to poverty
Wolff ’11 Richard D. Wolff, Professor of Economics Emeritus, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and currently a Visiting Professor in
the Graduate Program in International Affairs of the New School University in New York, “Capitalism and Poverty,” MR Zine, 11/10/2011,
http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2011/wolff111011.html
Deepening poverty has multiple causes, but the capitalist economic system is major among them. First, capitalism's periodic
crises always increase poverty, and the current crisis is no exception. More precisely,
how capitalist corporations operate, in or out of crisis, regularly reproduces
poverty. At the top of every corporation, its major shareholders (15-20 or fewer) own
controlling blocs of shares. They select a board of directors -- usually 15-20 individuals -- who
run the corporation. These two tiny groups make all the key decisions: what,
how, and where to produce and what to do with the profits. Poverty is one result of this
capitalist type of enterprise organization. For example, corporate decisions generally aim to lower the
number of workers or their wages or both. They automate, export (outsource) jobs, and
replace higher-paid workers by recruiting domestic and foreign substitutes willing to work
for less. These normal corporate actions generate rising poverty as the other side of rising profits. When poverty and its miseries "remain
always with us," workers tend to accept what employers dish out to avoid losing jobs and falling into poverty. Another major
corporate goal is to control politics. Wherever all citizens can vote, workers'
interests might prevail over those of directors and shareholders in elections. To
prevent that, corporations devote portions of their revenues to finance
politicians, parties, mass media, and "think tanks." Their goal is to "shape public
opinion" and control what government does. They do not want Washington's crisis-driven budget deficits
and national debts to be overcome by big tax increases on corporations and the rich. Instead public discussion and politicians' actions are kept
focused chiefly on cutting social programs for the majority. Corporate goals include providing high and rising salaries, stock options, and
bonuses to top executives and rising dividends and share prices to shareholders.The less paid to the workers who
actually produce what corporations sell, the more corporate revenue goes to
satisfy directors, top managers, and major shareholders. Corporations also raise profits regularly
by increasing prices and/or cutting production costs (often by compromising output quality). Higher priced and poorer-
quality goods are sold mostly to working people. This too pushes them toward
poverty just like lower wages and benefits and government service cuts.
2. Poverty’s systemically understated under capitalism
Wolff ’11 Richard D. Wolff, Professor of Economics Emeritus, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and currently a Visiting Professor in
the Graduate Program in International Affairs of the New School University in New York, “Capitalism and Poverty,” MR Zine, 11/10/2011,
http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2011/wolff111011.html
The US Census Bureau recently reported what most Americans already knew. Poverty is deepening. The gap
between rich and poor is growing. Slippage soon into the ranks of the poor now confronts tens of millions of
Americans who long thought of themselves as securely "middle class." The reality is worse than the Census
Bureau reports. Consider that the Bureau's poverty line in 2010 for a family of four was $22,314. Families of four making more than
that were not counted as poor. That poverty line works out to $15 per day per person for everything: food, clothing, housing, medical care,
If you have more than $15 per day per person in your
transportation, education, and so on.
household to pay for everything each person needs, the Bureau does not count
you as part of this country's poverty problem. So the real number of US citizens living
in poverty -- more reasonably defined -- is much larger today than the 46.2 million reported by the Census Bureau. It is thus
much higher than the 15.1 per cent of our people the Bureau sees as poor. Conservatively estimated,
about one in four Americans already lives in real poverty. Another one in four is
or should be worried about joining them soon. Long-lasting and high
unemployment now drains away income from families and friends of the
unemployed who have used up savings as well as unemployment insurance. As
city, state, and local governments cut services and supports, people will have to
divert money to offset part of those cuts. When Medicare and if Social Security
benefits are cut, millions will be spending more to help elderly parents . Finally,
poverty looms for those with jobs as (1) wages are cut or fail to keep up with
rising prices, and (2) benefits -- especially pensions and medical insurance -- are
reduced.
AT: Democracy
1. Democracy mediated through capital is simply popularized terror
Zizek ‘7 Slavoj Zizek, Senior Researcher at the Institute for Social Studies in Ljubljana, "Rebespierre of the Divine Violence of Terror,"
Lacan.com, 2007, accessed 1/20/10 http://www.lacan.com/zizrobes.htm
The Orwellian proposition "democracy is terror" is thus democracy's "infinite judgment ," its highest
speculative identity. This dimension gets lost in Claude Lefort's notion of democracy as involving the empty place of power, the constitutive gap between the place
the underlying premise of

of power and the contingent agents who, for a limited period, can occupy that place. Paradoxically,
democracy is thus not only that there is no political agent which has a "natural"
right to power, but, much more radically, that "people" themselves, the
ultimate source of the sovereign power in democracy, doesn't exist as a
substantial entity. In the Kantian way, the democratic notion of "people" is a negative
concept, a concept whose function is merely to designate a certain limit : it prohibits any determinate
agent to rule with full sovereignty. (The only moment when "people exists" are the democratic elections, which are precisely the moment of the disintegration of
the entire social edifice - in elections, "people" are reduced to a mechanical collection of individuals.) The claim that people does exist is the basic axiom of
"totalitarianism," and the mistake of "totalitarianism" is strictly homologous to the Kantian misuse ("paralogism") of political reason: "the People exists" through a
determinate political agent which acts as if it directly embodies (not only re-presents) the People, its true Will (the totalitarian Party and its Leader), i.e., in the terms
of transcendental critique, as a direct phenomenal embodiment of the noumenal People... The obvious link between this notion of democracy and Lacan's notion of
'democracy' a master-signifier? Without any doubt. It is

the inconsistency of the big Other was elaborated by Jacques-Alain Miller, among others: Is
the master-signifier which says that there is no master-signifier, at least not a master-signifier
which would stand alone, that every master-signifier has to insert itself wisely among others. Democracy is Lacan's big S of the barred A, which says: I am the
signifier of the fact that Other has a hole, or that it doesn't exist. [21] Of course, Miller is aware that EVERY master-signifier bears witness to the fact that there is no
master-signifier, no Other of the Other, that there is a lack in the Other, etc. - the very gap between S1 and S2 occurs because of this lack (as with God in Spinoza,
the Master-Signifier by definition fills in the gap in the series of "ordinary" signifiers). The difference is that, with democracy, this lack is directly inscribed into the
social edifice, it is institutionalized in a set of procedures and regulations - no wonder, then, that Miller approvingly quotes Marcel Gauchet about how, in
democracy, truth only offers itself "in division and decomposition" (and one cannot but note with irony how Stalin and Mao made the same claim, although with a
"totalitarian" twist: in politics, truth only emerges through ruthless divisions of class struggle...). It is easy to note how, from within this Kantian horizon of
the "terrorist" aspect of democracy - the violent egalitarian imposition of

democracy,
those who are "surnumerary," the "part of no part" - can only appear as its
"totalitarian" distortion, i.e., how, within this horizon, the line that separates the authentic democratic
explosion of revolutionary terror from the "totalitarian" Party-State regime (or, to put it in reactionary terms, the line that separates the "mob rule of the
dispossessed" from the Party-State brutal oppression of the "mob") is obliterated.
2. No impact
Mearsheimer ‘1 John J. Mearsheimer, R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of political science at the University of
Chicago and co-director of the Program on International Security Policy, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, 2001, pp. 367-368
it has serious problems that
As challenges to realism go, democratic peace theory is among the strongest. Still,
ultimately make it unconvincing. The theory’s proponents maintain that the

available evidence shows that democracies do not fight other democracies. But
other scholars who have examined the historical record dispute this claim.
Perhaps the most telling evidence against the theory is Christopher Layne’s
careful analysis of four crises in which rival democracies almost went to war
with each other.14 When one looks at how the decision not to fight was reached
in each case, the fact that both sides were democracies appears to have
mattered little. There certainly is no evidence that the rival democracies had
benign intentions toward each other. In fact, the outcome each time was
largely determined by balance-of-power considerations. Another reason to
doubt democratic peace theory is the problem of backsliding. No democracy
can be sure that another democracy will not someday become an authoritarian
state, in which case the remaining democracy would no longer be safe and
secure.15 Prudence dictates that democracies prepare for that eventuality , which
means striving to have as much power as possible just in case a friendly
neighbor turns into the neighborhood bully. But even if one rejects these
criticisms and embraces democratic peace theory, it is still unlikely that all the
great powers in the system will become democratic and stay that way over the
long term. It would only take a non-democratic China or Russia to keep power politics in play, and both of those states are likely to be
non-democratic for at least part of the twenty-first century.16
3. Democracies aren’t free

Howard-Hassmann ‘5 Rhoda E. Howard-Hassmann, author and Canada Research Chair in Global Studies and Political Science at
Wilfrid Laurier University and Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, "The Second Great Transformation: Human Rights Leapfrogging in the Era
of Globalization," Human Rights Quarterly, 2005, MUSE
Democracy here stands as a substitute for human rights. Both Jack Donnelly and Michael Freeman have warned that political
democracy does not necessarily imply protection of human rights .35 Democratic
rule can result in majoritarian rule, undermining the rights of minorities or of
racially distinct groups, as in the all-white "democracy" of South Africa during
the apartheid era or as in Israel at present. Majoritarian democracy can also
undermine the rights of women, as in a Bahamian referendum in 2002 in which
voters decided against granting children born of Bahamian mothers and foreign
fathers the same citizenship rights as children born of Bahamian fathers and
foreign mothers.36 Nevertheless, modern democratic states buttressed by the rule of law and by a civic culture of activism and
political freedom are more likely than any other type of political system to protect human rights. And this is precisely the point. Democratic
principles of government, the rule of law, and a civic culture took centuries to emerge in Western Europe and North America, with intervening
episodes of dictatorship and fascism. Until well into the twentieth century, what are now known as human rights were systematically denied to
Rights-based liberal democratic societies certainly did not emerge
the vast majority of Westerners.
through some easy, predictable, and inevitable coincidence of capitalism and rights.
AT: Environment
1. Capitalism destroys the environment
2. Imperialism—that’s the 1NC impact—as global interventions increase in
regularity and scope, resource depletion will force more degratory
resource extraction practices
3. Infinite growth crowds out environmental health
Magdoff ’12 Fred Magdoff, Professor emeritus of plant and soil science at the Unviersity of Vermont, “Harmony and Ecological
Civilization,” Monthly Review, June 2012, Vol. 64, Issue 2, p. 1-9
The growth imperative of capitalism deserves special attention because it is one of the major
stumbling blocks with respect to harmony between humans and the
environment. Accumulation without end means using ever greater quantities of
resources—without end—even as we find ways to use resources more
efficiently. An economy growing at the very meager rate of 1 percent a year will
double in about seventy-two years, but one growing at 2 percent a year, still a
low rate, will double in size in thirty-six years. And when growing at 3 and 4
percent, economies will double in twenty-four and eighteen years respectively.
China recently has seen recorded growth rates of up to 10 percent, meaning
economic output doubles at a rate of approximately every seven years! Yet, we
are already using up resources far too fast from the one planet we have—
depleting the stocks of nonrenewable resources rapidly and misusing and
overusing resources that are theoretically “renewable.” If the world’s economy
doubles within the next twenty to thirty years this can only hasten the descent
into ecological, and probably societal, chaos and destruction. Thus capitalism
promotes the processes, relationships, and outcomes that are precisely the
opposite of those needed for an ecologically sound, just, harmonious society. In
the alienated ideology and practice of bourgeois society, Marx and Engels noted in The German Ideology, “ the relation of man
to nature is excluded from history and hence the antithesis of man to nature is
created.” Proletarians thus had the historical task of bringing their “‘existence’
into harmony with their ‘essence’ in a practical way, by means of a revolution”
(italics added).3 Only in this way could they reestablish a harmonious connection to nature and to their own production. That Marx and Engels
were referring directly to the early stages of what we now call the ecological crisis is indicated by the following: “ The ‘essence’ of
the fish is its ‘being,’ water—to go no further than this one proposition. The ‘essence’ of the freshwater fish is the water of
a river. But the latter ceases to be the ‘essence’ of the fish and is no longer a suitable
medium of existence as soon as the river is made to serve industry , as soon as it

is polluted by dyes and other waste products and navigated by steamboats, or
as soon as its water is diverted into canals where simple drainage can deprive
the fish of its medium of existence.”4
4. Environmental destruction is inevitable under capitalism because
ecological harmony is irreducible to use-value
Clark and York ‘8 Brett Clark, assistant professor of sociology at North Carolina
State University, and Richard York, coeditor of Organization & Environment and
associate professor of sociology at the University of Oregon, “Rifts and Shifts:
Getting to the Root of Environmental Crises,” Monthly Review, Vol. 60, Issue 06,
November 2008
A metabolic relationship involves regulatory processes that govern the
interchange of materials. Marx noted that natural systems, such as the nutrient
cycle, had their own metabolism, which operated independently of and in
relation to human society, allowing for their regeneration and/or continuance.
He employed, as John Bellamy Foster explains, the concept of social metabolism
to refer to “the complex, dynamic interchange between human beings and
nature” of matter and energy, which recognized how both “nature-imposed
conditions” and human actions transform this process. Each mode of production
creates a particular social metabolic order that determines the interchange
between society and nature. Such interactions influence the ongoing
reproduction of society and ecosystems.3 István Mészáros explains that a
fundamental change in the social metabolism took place with the onset of
capitalism, as a new social metabolic order came to dominate the material
interchange between society and nature. Capitalism imposes a particular form
of “productive interchange of human beings with nature,” given that its very
logic of operation is a “‘totalizing’ framework of control into which everything
else, including human beings, must be fitted, and prove thereby their
‘productive viability,’ or perish if they fail to do so.” Capitalists pursue their own
interests to maximize profit, above and beyond any other interests, subsuming
all natural and social relationships to the drive to accumulate capital. Natural
cycles and processes are subjected to the whims of the economic cycle, given
that “the only modality of time which is directly meaningful to capital is
necessary labor time and its operational corollaries, as required for securing and
safeguarding the conditions of profit-oriented time-accountancy and thereby
the realization of capital on an extended scale.” The competition of capital
produces an “ultimately uncontrollable mode of social metabolic control”
running roughshod over the regulatory processes that govern the complex
relationships of interchange within natural systems and cycles.4 Paul Sweezy
explained that the capitalist economic system “is one that never stands still, one
that is forever changing, adopting new and discarding old methods of
production and distribution, opening up new territories, subjecting to its
purposes societies too weak to protect themselves.” Thus, the tendency of
capital is to violate the natural conditions that ensure nature’s vitality,
undermining the base on which ecological and human sustainability depends . In
part, this is because capital freely appropriates nature and its bounty —it is
“purely a matter of utility.” The exploitation of nature and labor serve “as a
means to the paramount ends of profit-making and still more capital
accumulation.” Hence, the expansion and intensification of the social metabolic
order of capital generates rifts in natural cycles and process, forcing a series of
shifts on the part of capital, as it expands environmental degradation.5
AT: Disease
1. Growth breeds systemic complexity which reduces marginal returns and
restricts innovation
Complexity can be measured in several ways — as the number of connections
between people and institutions, the intensity of hierarchical networks, the
number of distinct products produced and the extent of the supply-chain
networks required to produce them, the number of specialised occupations, the
amount of effort required to manage systems, the amount of information
available and the energy flows required to maintain them. By all these
measures, economic growth has been associated with increasing complexity . [4] As
a species, we had to become problem solvers to meet our basic needs, deal with
status anxiety and respond to the new challenges presented by a dynamic

environment. The problem to be solved could be simple such as getting a bus or buying bread; or it could be complex, such as
developing an economy’s energy infrastructure. We tend to exploit the easiest and least costly
solutions first. We pick the lowest hanging fruit or the easiest extractable oil
first. As problems are solved new ones tend to require more effort and complex
solutions. A solution is framed within a network of constraints . One of the
system constraints is set by the operational fabric, comprising the given
conditions at any time and place which support system wide functionality. For
modern developed economies this includes functioning markets, financing,
monetary stability, operational supply-chains, transport, digital infrastructure,
command and control, health services, research and development
infrastructure, institutions of trust and socio-political stability. It is what we
casually assume does and will exist, and which provides the structural
foundation for any project we wish to develop. Our solutions are also limited by
knowledge and culture, and by the available energetic, material, and economic
resources available to us. The formation of solutions is also shaped by the interactions with the myriad other interacting
agents such as people, businesses and institutions. These add to the dynamic complexity of the
environment in which the solution is formed, and thus the growing complexity
is likely to be reinforced as elements co-evolve together. As a result, the process of
economic growth and complexity has been self-reinforcing . The growth in the size of the
networks of exchange, the operational fabric and economic efficiencies all provided a basis for further growth. Growing
complexity provided the foundation for developing even more complex

integration. In aggregate, as the operational fabric evolves in complexity it provides the basis to build more complex solutions. The net
benefits of increasing complexity are subject to declining marginal returns — in other
words, the benefit of rising complexity is eventually outweighed by its cost. A
major cost is environmental destruction and resource depletion . There is also

the cost of complexity itself. We can see this in the costs of managing more
complex systems, and the increasing cost of the research and development
process. [5] When increased complexity begins to have a net cost, then
responding to new problems arising by further increasing complexity may be no
longer viable. An economy becomes locked into established processes and
infrastructures, but can no longer respond to shocks or adapt to change. For the
historian Joseph Tainter, this is the context in which earlier civilisations have
collapsed. [6]
2. Even mutated pathogens don't spread widely or cause extinction
Arthur ‘3 Charles Arthur, "Future Tense: Is Mankind Doomed?" The Independent, 25 July 2003, accessed 11/24/09
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0725-04.htm
Maybe - though plenty of experienced graduate students could already have a stab. But nature knows that infectious
diseases are very hard to get right. Only HIV/Aids has 100 per cent mortality, and takes a long time to achieve it. By
definition, lethal diseases kill their host. If they kill too quickly, they aren't passed on; if too
slowly, we can detect them and isolate the infected. Any mutant smallpox or other handmade germ
would certainly be too deadly or too mild. And even Sars killed fewer people worldwide than die on
Britain's roads in a week. As scares go, this one is ideal - overblown and unrealistic.
3. Capitalism kills science—communism solves
Palecek ‘9 Mike Palecek, “Capitalism Versus Science,” In Defence of Marxism, 8/12/2009, http://www.marxist.com/capitalism-versus-
science.htm
The ultimate proof of capitalism’s hindrance of science and technology comes
not from capitalism, but from the alternative. While the Soviet Union under Stalin
was far from the ideal socialist society (something which we have explained extensively elsewhere), its
history gives us valuable insight into the potential of a nationalized planned
economy. In 1917 the Bolsheviks took control of a backwards, semi-feudal, third
world country that had been ruined by the First World War. In a matter of
decades, it was transformed into a leading super-power . The USSR would go on to
be the first to put a satellite into orbit, the first to put a man in space, and the first
to build a permanently manned outpost in space. Soviet scientists pushed the
frontiers of knowledge, particularly in the areas of Mathematics, Astronomy,
Nuclear Physics, Space Exploration and Chemistry. Many Soviet era scientists
have been awarded Nobel prizes in various fields. These successes are particularly
stunning, when one considers the state the country was in when capitalism was
overthrown. How were such advancements possible? How did the Soviet Union
go from having a population that was 90% illiterate, to having more scientists,
doctors and engineers per capita than any other country on Earth in just a few decades? The
superiority of the nationalized planned economy and the break from the madness of
capitalism is the only explanation. The first step in this process was simply the recognition
that science was a priority. Under capitalism, the ability of private companies to
develop science and technology is limited by a narrow view of what is
profitable. Companies do not plan to advance technology, they plan to build a
marketable product and will only do what is necessary to bring that product to
market. The Soviets immediately recognized the importance of the overall development of science and technology and linked it
to the development of the country as a whole. This broad view allowed them to put substantial
resources into all areas of study. Another vital component of their success was the
massive expansion of education. By abolishing private schools and providing
free education at all levels, individuals in the population were able to meet their
potential. A citizen could continue their studies as long as they were capable. By
contrast, even many advanced capitalist countries have been unable to eliminate
illiteracy today, let alone open up university education to all who are able. Under capitalism, massive financial
barriers are placed in front of students, which prevent large portions of the
population from reaching their potential. When half of the world’s population is
forced to live on less than two dollars a day, we can only conclude that massive
reserves of human talent are being wasted. The soviet government immediately tore
down all the barriers on science that strangle innovation within the capitalist
system. Patents, trade secrets, and private industry were eliminated. This
allowed for more collaborative research across fields and a free flow of
information between institutions. Religious prejudices that had long held back rational study were pushed aside.
One only has to look at the ban on stem-cell research under the Bush regime to
see the negative effects religious bigotry can have on science.
AT: Space
1. Colonization’s inevitable and there’s no rush—prefer specific scenarios for
extinction
Baum ’10 Seth D. Baum, M.S. in Electrical Engineering from Northeastern University, Research Assistant in the Rock Ethics Institute at
Pennsylvania State University, “Is Humanity Doomed? Insights from Astrobiology” Sustainability, Volume 2, 2010, p. 600, www.mdpi.com/2071-
1050/2/2/591/pdf
The fact that the universe will remain habitable for much longer than Earth will means that, if we care about long-term sustainability, then it is
extremely important for us to colonize space [38]. Colonizing space will permit us to take advantage of all that the rest of the universe has to
offer [39]. But this does not mean that we should focus our current efforts on space colonization. The reason for this is simple: Earth will
remain habitable for another billion years or so. While a billion years is quite small compared
to the universe’s lifetime, it is quite large compared to the amount of time it probably takes
to colonize space, especially given our current rapid rates of technological

change. If we are to colonize space before the world ends, then we have plenty of time to do it—as long as nothing really bad happens
first. These “really bad” things can be any global catastrophe so large that it would permanently eliminate our capacity to colonize space before
the world ends. Several phenomena may be so catastrophic, including nuclear warfare, pandemic outbreaks, ecological collapse, disruptive
technology, and of course impact from a large asteroid. Risks of these events have been called global catastrophic risks or existential risks [40]. I
will use the term existential risk here because it is our existence that is ultimately at stake. These risks are far more imminent than the end of
if we care about long-term sustainability, then we should focus our
the world. Therefore,
efforts on avoiding these catastrophes, i.e., on reducing existential risk, so that future
generations can colonize space.
2. Space exploration under capitalism will only magnify inequalities—see
Blade Runner—the alt is the only hope for equitable space travel
Dickens ’10 Peter Dickens, “The Humanization of the Cosmos—To What End?” Monthly Review, Vol. 62, Issue 6, November 2010,
http://monthlyreview.org/2010/11/01/the-humanization-of-the-cosmos-to-what-end
Society is increasingly humanizing the cosmos. Satellites have for some time
been central to the flow of information, to surveillance, and to the conduct of
warfare. As these examples suggest, however, the humanization of the cosmos is primarily
benefiting the powerful. These include major economic and military institutions.
Furthermore, the forthcoming commodification and colonization of the cosmos
is again likely to enhance the interests of the powerful, the major aerospace
companies in particular. The time has come to consider alternative forms of
cosmic humanization. These would enhance the prospects of the socially
marginalized. They would also allow humanity to develop a better
understanding of the cosmos and our relationship to it .1 Humanizing Outer Space The 1969
Apollo 11 moon landing is often seen as the high point of society’s relationship
with outer space. Nothing quite so dramatic or exotic seems to have happened
in outer space since. But nearby, parts of the solar system (including the moon, some asteroids, and
Mars) are now being routinely circled and explored and analyzed by robots . Furthermore,
President Obama has recently made important announcements regarding a new U.S. space program that involves manned missions to Mars by the mid-2030s. But
the NASA-based Constellation program to the moon and Mars has been cancelled. Instead, NASA will undertake a long-term
research and development program aimed at supporting future forms of
propulsion and exploration programs. Even more significant in the short-term is a proposed $25 billion being allocated to
NASA to kick-start commercial manned spaceflight over the next five years. New forms of transport to the International Space Station will be funded, this time using
These plans entail new relations

innovative forms of “space taxis” designed by private sector space companies.2
between the private and public sectors in the United States. Meanwhile, a presence in outer space is
being developed by other societies. This is partly because such a presence is seen as an important symbol of modernization, progress, and social unity. The Indian
government has announced a manned mission to the moon in 2013, the European Space Agency envisages projects to the moon and beyond, and the Chinese
government is planning a similar project for 2020. This last development has caused some consternation over Obama’s plans. One suggestion is that the United
States may after all be the next to send manned missions to the moon, because China’s space project is seen by some as a military threat that needs forestalling.3
Yet among these plans and proposals, it is easy to forget that outer space is already being increasingly humanized. It has now been made an integral part of the way
global capitalist society is organized and extended. Satellites, for example, are extremely important elements of contemporary communications systems. These have
enabled an increasing number of people to become part of the labor market. Teleworking is the best known example. Satellite-based communications have also
facilitated new forms of consumption such as teleshopping. Without satellite-based communications, the global economy in its present form would grind to a halt.
Satellites have also been made central to modern warfare. Combined with pilotless Predator drones, they are now being used to observe and attack Taliban and Al-
Qaida operatives in Afghanistan and elsewhere. This action is done by remote control from Creech Air Force Base at Indian Springs, Nevada. The 1980s Strategic
Defense Initiative, or “Star Wars” program, aimed to intercept incoming missiles while facilitating devastating attacks on supposed enemies. A version of the
program is still being developed, with the citizens of the Czech Republic and Poland now under pressure to accept parts of a U.S.-designed “missile defense shield.”
This is part of a wider strategy of “Full Spectrum Dominance,” which has for some time been official U.S. Defense Policy.4 Using surveillance and military equipment
located in outer space is now seen as the prime means of protecting U.S. economic and military assets both on Earth and in outer space. Less dangerously, but still
very expensively, a full-scale space-tourism industry has for some time been under active development. Dennis Tito, a multi-millionaire, made the first tourist trip
into outer space in 2001. Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic has now sold over three hundred seats at $200,000 apiece to its first tourists in outer space. The program
is due to start in 2011, with spaceports for this novel form of travel now being built in Alaska, California, Florida, New Mexico, Virginia, Wisconsin, the United Arab
Emirates, and Esrange in Sweden. Excursions circling the moon, likely to cost the galactic visitors around $100,000,000, are now under development. Since the
Renaissance period of the sixteenth century, the word “humanization” has been used to connote something beneficial, especially to human beings. As we will now
see, humanizing the cosmos is regarded in just these terms by some influential proponents of space travel and space colonization. The Space Renaissance Initiative
One response to cosmic humanization is to welcome it as an early stage of a wholly beneficial cosmic human society, one eventually encompassing the solar system
and beyond. Such is the view of the Space Renaissance Initiative, an international group of over seventy private organizations now promoting the expansion of
society into the cosmos. The aims and ideals of the Space Renaissance are made clear by the Initiative’s manifesto published in 2010. It reads: Help the Space
Economy Revolution! The global economy is entering a deep crisis, the worst since 1929. This is the second act of the “Crisis of Closed-World Ideologies”, which has
been developing throughout the 20thcentury. In 1989 the fall of the Berlin wall was the Crisis of Collectivist Ideology. The recent massive failure of the financial
system is the Crisis of Neo-Liberal Ideology. Both these ideologies failed because they are based upon a closed-world, terro-centric philosophy. There are now
almost 7 billion humans making massive demands on planet Earth: we urgently need to open the frontier, and move to a wider vision of our world, so as to access
geo-lunar system resources and energy. In short we need a new “Open World Philosophy”. The alternative would be the implosion and collapse of our civilization.5
In short, the Space Renaissance Initiative argues, society is undergoing massive social, environmental, and population crises because it is thinking too small. The
energy of the sun can, for example, be made into a source of clean power from outer space, which would solve society’s energy shortages at a stroke. The Initiative
argues that opening up the cosmos to humanity—colonizing the solar system, and opening up resources in the moon, Mars, and the asteroids—could be central to
social and environmental salvation. The progress made by the private sector in developing technologies and efficiencies for space tourism means that commercial
enterprise can now start planning to venture still further afield. The philosophical roots of the Space Initiative are no less than the sixteenth-century Italian
Renaissance and the Enlightenment. With the enlightened patronage of such families as the Medicis, an unprecedented new age of development took place: arts
knew a wonderful age of innovation, culture took on some essential principles of classical Greek philosophy, and modern science was born, with men like Leonardo
da Vinci, Michelangelo, and later Copernicus and Galileo leading the way. This movement led to the Age of Enlightenment and its most famous offspring: the
American and French Revolutions. The manifesto also praises the writings of Descartes, Voltaire, and Jefferson. The belief of these philosophers in the enterprising
individual, in freedom, in liberty, and in reason all mean that political power should be vested in the common person and not in states, kings, and nobility. The Space
Renaissance Initiative believes in these concepts, seeing them as the basis of a new, progressive, liberating, humanization of the cosmos. But there are surely major
problems here. For example, any claim that the Medici family (and similar families such as the Borgias) helped overthrow feudalism is far-fetched. The Medicis were
bankers and merchants who made their money at the center of an emerging global mercantilist capitalism, one based in Northern Italy. They used this money to
enhance their position within their feudal societies. Members of the Medicis even made themselves into popes, thus further enhancing their wealth and that of
their many illegitimate offspring. Another of the Medicis was made the Queen of France. The language used by intellectual elites of the day was Latin. This appealed
to scholars across Europe but not to the great mass of individuals living in Florence, Milan, or Venice.6 The Medicis and individuals such as Leonardo are often
celebrated as examples of “The Renaissance Universal Man,” one capable of spanning every kind of human practice such as art, music, and politics. This “Man” is
perhaps best symbolized by Leonardo’s famous image of a male human being, stretched over the circle of the cosmos, his head in the heavens and his bowels
located in earthly regions. But this Renaissance Man—or Woman—can also be seen as prefiguring the self-centered, narcissistic individualism of our own day, one
seeing the whole of the cosmos at his or her command. This kind of modern human identity has since been enhanced by consumer-based capitalism and, given the
problems it creates both for ourselves and our environment, there seems rather little reason to celebrate or restore it. The general point is that the vision
of the Space Renaissance Initiative, with its prime focus on the power of the supposedly autonomous and inventive individual,
systematically omits questions of social, economic, and military power . Similarly, the
Initiative’s focus on the apparently universal benefits of space humanization
ignores some obvious questions. What will ploughing large amounts of capital
into outer space colonization really do for stopping the exploitation of people
and resources back here on earth? The “solution” seems to be simultaneously
exacerbating social problems while jetting away from them. Consumer-led
industrial capitalism necessarily creates huge social divisions and increasing
degradation of the environment. Why should a galactic capitalism do
otherwise? The Space Renaissance Initiative argues that space-humanization is necessarily a good thing for the environment by introducing new space-
based technologies such as massive arrays of solar panels. But such “solutions” are again imaginary. Cheap electricity is most likely
to increase levels of production and consumption back on earth. Environmental

degradation will be exacerbated rather than diminished by this technological
fix. A simplistic and idealistic view of history, technology, and human agency
therefore underpins the starting point of the Space Renaissance Initiative. Humanization in this
shape—one now finding favor in official government circles—raises all kinds of
highly problematic issues for society and the environment. What would an alternative, more critical,
perspective on humanizing the cosmos tell us?
3. If your memory is foggy, let us refresh it—the commies won the space
race. Market competition makes collaborative progress on science
impossible—alt solves better
Palecek ‘9 Mike Palecek, “Capitalism Versus Science,” In Defence of Marxism, 8/12/2009, http://www.marxist.com/capitalism-versus-
science.htm
The ultimate proof of capitalism’s hindrance of science and technology comes
not from capitalism, but from the alternative. While the Soviet Union under Stalin
was far from the ideal socialist society (something which we have explained extensively elsewhere), its
history gives us valuable insight into the potential of a nationalized planned
economy. In 1917 the Bolsheviks took control of a backwards, semi-feudal, third
world country that had been ruined by the First World War. In a matter of
decades, it was transformed into a leading super-power . The USSR would go on to
be the first to put a satellite into orbit, the first to put a man in space, and the first
to build a permanently manned outpost in space. Soviet scientists pushed the
frontiers of knowledge, particularly in the areas of Mathematics, Astronomy,
Nuclear Physics, Space Exploration and Chemistry. Many Soviet era scientists
have been awarded Nobel prizes in various fields. These successes are particularly
stunning, when one considers the state the country was in when capitalism was
overthrown. How were such advancements possible? How did the Soviet Union
go from having a population that was 90% illiterate, to having more scientists,
doctors and engineers per capita than any other country on Earth in just a few decades? The
superiority of the nationalized planned economy and the break from the madness of
capitalism is the only explanation. The first step in this process was simply the recognition
that science was a priority. Under capitalism, the ability of private companies to
develop science and technology is limited by a narrow view of what is
profitable. Companies do not plan to advance technology, they plan to build a
marketable product and will only do what is necessary to bring that product to
market. The Soviets immediately recognized the importance of the overall development of science and technology and linked it
This broad view allowed them to put substantial
to the development of the country as a whole.
resources into all areas of study. Another vital component of their success was the
massive expansion of education. By abolishing private schools and providing
free education at all levels, individuals in the population were able to meet their
potential. A citizen could continue their studies as long as they were capable. By
contrast, even many advanced capitalist countries have been unable to eliminate
illiteracy today, let alone open up university education to all who are able. Under capitalism, massive financial
barriers are placed in front of students, which prevent large portions of the
population from reaching their potential. When half of the world’s population is
forced to live on less than two dollars a day, we can only conclude that massive
reserves of human talent are being wasted. The soviet government immediately tore
down all the barriers on science that strangle innovation within the capitalist
system. Patents, trade secrets, and private industry were eliminated. This
allowed for more collaborative research across fields and a free flow of
information between institutions. Religious prejudices that had long held back rational study were pushed aside.
One only has to look at the ban on stem-cell research under the Bush regime to
see the negative effects religious bigotry can have on science.
AT: Competition
1. Monopoly capitalism is no free market—wealth centralization enables
price-setting to pad profits, leading to overproduction and stagnation
64, issue 1, pp. 1-28
the last few decades have seen the intensification of a growing
In line with the foregoing,
trend today towards monopolization in the U.S. and global economies, reflected
in: (1) concentration and centralization of capital on a world scale, (2) growth of
monopoly power and profits, (3) the developing global supply chains of
multinational corporations, and (4) the rise of monopolistic finance. The total
annual revenue of the five hundred largest corporations in the world (known as the Global 500) was equal
in 2004–08 to around 40 percent of world income, with sharp increases since
the 1990s.50 This strong monopolization tendency, however, is scarcely perceived
today in the face of what is characterized in the conventional wisdom as ever-
greater competition between firms, workers, and states. We call this problem of
mistaken identity, in which growing monopolization is misconstrued as growing
competition, the “ambiguity of competition.” From the days of Adam Smith to
the present the development of monopoly power has always been seen as a
constraint on free competition, particularly in the domain of price competition. As Smith put it in The
Wealth of Nations, “The price of monopoly is upon every occasion the highest
which can be got. The natural price, or the price of free competition, on the
contrary, is the lowest which can be taken.”51 For classical political economists in the nineteenth century
competition was only intense if there were numerous small firms. However, Karl Marx had already pointed in
Capital to the concentration and centralization of capital, whereby bigger firms

beat smaller ones and frequently absorbed the latter through mergers and
acquisitions.52 This led to a vast transformation of industry in the last quarter of
the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century, as
production came to be dominated by a relatively small number of giant
corporations. As John Munkirs wrote in 1985 in The Transformation of American Capitalism, “The genesis of
monopoly capitalism (1860s to 1920s) created a stark dichotomy between society’s
professed belief in Adam Smith’s competitive market structure capitalism and
economic reality.”53 In the 1920s and ‘30s important innovations in economic theory were introduced designed to account for
this new reality, under the rubric of “the theory of imperfect competition.” The three most important pioneering attempts to alter mainstream
economic theory to take account of monopoly power were developed by Edward H. Chamberlin in The Theory of Monopolistic Competition
(1933), Joan Robinson in The Economics of Imperfect Competition (1933), and Sweezy in “Demand Under Conditions of Oligopoly” (1939).54 As
Robinson wrote, “We see on every side a drift toward monopolisation under the names of restriction schemes, quota systems, rationalisation,
The idea of a purely competitive system is
and the growth of giant companies.”55 In Chamberlin’s terms, “
inadmissible; for not only does it ignore the fact that the monopoly influence is
felt in varying degrees throughout the system, but it sweeps it aside
altogether…. In fact, as will be shown later, if either element [competition or monopoly] is to
be omitted from the picture, the assumption of ubiquitous monopoly has much
more in its favor.”56 These analyses considered a wide varieties of monopolistic and semi-monopolistic situations, describing how
price competition was diminished with monopoly, how firms were able to set their
own prices partly through “product differentiation” (a term coined by Chamberlin), and how
industries were increasingly dominated by oligopolies (a few giant firms) with
considerable monopoly power. Chamberlin, who also introduced the concept of oligopoly into economic theory,
emphasized its role in the very first chapter of his Theory of Monopolistic Competition. Sweezy’s “Demand Under Conditions of Oligopoly”
introduced a theory of oligopolistic pricing, which argued that any price-cutting by giant oligopolistic firms was enormously destructive, leading
to actual price warfare, in which firms would each lower their prices in order to retain market share and all would see their profits decline.
Hence, large firms in mature, concentrated industries soon learned to collude indirectly in raising rather than lowering prices, with the result
The most frequent result of
that prices (and more importantly profit margins) tended to go only one way—up.57
monopolistic (including oligopolistic) competition and the constraints on price competition

it imposed, according to Chamberlin, was “excess productive capacity, for which there is no
automatic corrective…. The surplus capacity is never cast off, and the result is
high prices and waste.”58
2. Intra-industrial competition doesn’t exist anymore—the dominance of
cross-industry MNCs has reduced all economics into a question of which
CEO can accumulate the most yachts
64, issue 1, pp. 1-28
even on the left the role of monopolization is far from universally accepted
Still,
today, largely because of the changes in perception brought on by increased

international competition (or transnational oligopolistic rivalry). In the 1970s core U.S. industries,
such as steel and automobiles, began to be affected by international
competition, seemingly undermining the power of U.S. monopoly capital .68 The
rise of multinational corporations, primarily in the Triad, was the vehicle for this enhanced
world competition. This caused Joan Robinson to quip, “Modern industry is a system not so
much of monopolistic competition as of competitive monopolies .”69 Some observers saw
this process of the creation of global oligopolies, which necessarily involved the amalgamation or destruction of the weaker of the national
oligopolistic firms, as a return of the nineteenth-century- style competitive system. They were mistaken. The theory of the
multinational corporation, as developed by Stephen Hymer (who is still the definitional economic theorist in this area),
saw the rise of these globe-trotting firms as the product of the growth of the
concentration and centralization of capital and monopoly power worldwide.
Rather than a competitive market structure, as envisioned in orthodox economics, what was
emerging was a system of global oligopolistic rivalry for the domination of world
production by a smaller and smaller number of global corporations. Hymer went on to
connect this to Marx’s theory of the industrial reserve army of the unemployed, explaining that the monopolistic
multinational corporations were in the process of creating a new international
division of labor based on the formation of a global reserve army, and the
exploitation of wage differentials worldwide (or the global labor arbitrage).70 This global
restructuring of production adopted a divide and rule approach to labor
worldwide. These changes were accompanied by a shift of the United States ,
beginning in around 1980s, from a massive surplus to a massive deficit country in its current
account (the combined balances on trade in goods and services, income, and net unilateral transfers), turning it into the
consumption engine of the world economy or “buyer of last resort.”71 All of this
was made possible by U.S. dollar hegemony, coupled with financialization,
whereby, as Yanis Varoufakis has argued, the United States became the Global Minotaur,
borrowing and consuming out of proportion to its own production while
providing markets for the exports of other countries.72 This can be seen in Chart 6,
showing the growth of the U.S. current account deficit (a good part of which results from the deficit in the
trade in goods and services) as a percent of GDP. During the last thirty years the United State has turned
into the world’s largest borrower, exploiting its position of financial hegemony
and drawing in surplus capital from the rest of the world—while ultimately
compounding its underlying problem of overaccumulation . At the same time, the global
labor arbitrage promoted by multinational corporations was restructuring the
world economy, transferring much of world production to the global South. The
giant corporations developed ever more complex supply chains extending to
low-wage countries, with the final goods aimed primarily at markets in the
global North, and the surplus seized in considerable part by the omnipresent
multinational firms themselves. In the 1960s 6 percent of total U.S. corporate profits came from abroad. By the 1990s
this had risen to 15 percent, and in 2000–2010 to 21 percent. 73
AT: “Workable Competition”
1. Notions of ‘workable competition’ at best understate and at worst
conceal the monopolization of the market under late capitalism—all of
our sustainability args still apply
64, issue 1, pp. 1-28
Since these theories of monopolistic competition challenged the notion of a
freely competitive system, threatening the whole structure of orthodox
economics, they were shunted aside—in an early version of the economics of
innocent fraud—into a marginal realm within economics. A set of exceptions to
perfect competition was recognized, but this was treated as outside the general
model of the economy, which remained a world of perfect and pure
competition. At the same time, economists introduced intermediary notions such as
“workable competition” (a vague notion that in practice effective competition
somehow continued) together with the idea of a new competition geared less to
price competition than to innovation, i.e., the perennial gale of Schumpeterian “creative destruction.”
Imperfect competition theory itself was reshaped to conform to the needs of
economic orthodoxy. Hence, the notion of “monopolistic competition” was
redefined simply to relate to conditions where numerous small firms were able
to exploit favorable locations or product differentiation, while excluding
oligopoly (the typical case) from the concept. Chamberlin himself was driven to object that oligopoly had been the
starting point for monopolistic competition theory and its exclusion from the theory of monopolistic competition was absurd.
“Monopolistic competition,” he complained, was “converted from an almost universal
phenomenon, which it surely is…to the relatively unimportant one of
differentiated products in the restricted case of ‘large numbers .’”59 Competition
was therefore redefined in public discourse to mean “workable competition” as
a vague analogue to perfect competition, while economists in their basic models
continued to hold onto the abstract notion of perfect and/or pure competition.
Instances of oligopolistic rivalry—i.e., the intense battles between quasi-monopolistic firms over markets, product
differentiation, and low cost position (but seldom encompassing price cutting in final consumption markets)— were often
erroneously treated as if they exemplified Smithian competition . Orthodox

figures such as Milton Friedman meanwhile continued to argue that oligopolistic
rivalry was the very antithesis of competition. It is this confused situation that gives rise to the ambiguity of
competition. 60 As Munkirs stated in The Transformation of American Capitalism: “Within the business community and the economics
profession, [John Maurice] Clark’s concept of ‘workable competition’ and Schumpeter’s ‘gales of creative destruction’ were christened ‘the new
competition.’ Simply by assigning a new meaning to the term competition, the ill effects of monopolistically competitive market structures were
defined out of existence. Yet the real world does exist.”61
4. No Link to their turns – We critique the way we relate to the
system of capitalism and the unchallenged reliance that the
affirmative stands on. Make them prove how these turns answer our
micro relations.
5. Our impacts will always outweigh their turns, the bad will always
outweigh the good – our impacts operate on the level of the self,
while theirs rely on the system itself. Even though the system
may have benefits, the way that the status quo and the aff’s
advocacy relate to that system, we’ll win impacts on a whole
other level.
6. Extend D&G from the 1NC – their impacts are inevitable in a
world where our way of being and our ethics are destroyed in
our corrupt relation to the system that drives us to damnation. In
a world where we have no reason to live, then death becomes
desirable in the system.
7. Capitalism is the root of all impacts – it controls the military by
creating the desire for war to deposit surplus capital and it
engineers genocide to check the human surplus. Their warrants
for capitalism good are mired in an insanity that believes the
capitalisms benevolent actions are apolitical when in reality the
greatest benefits of capitalism exist only as a facade to allow the
systems most cruel actions.
In the capitalist formation of sovereignty-the full body of capital money as the socius-the great
social axiomatic has replaced the territorial codes and the despotic overcodings that
characterized the preceding formations; and a molar, gregarious aggregate has formed, whose mode of
subjugation has no equal. We have seen on what foundations this aggregate operated: a
whole field of immanence that is reproduced on an always larger scale , that is

continually multiplying its axioms to suit its needs, that is filled with images and with images of images, through which desire
is determined to desire its own repression (imperialism); an unprecedented decoding and

deterritorialization, which institutes a combination as a system of differential relations
between the decoded and deterritorialized flows, in such a way that social inscription and repression no
longer even need to bear directly upon bodies and persons, but on the contrary precede them (axiomatic: regulation and application); a surplus
value determined as a surplus value of flux, whose extortion is not brought about by a simple arithmetical difference between two quantities
that are homogeneous and belong to the same code, but precisely by differential relations between heterogeneous magnitudes that are not
raised to the same power: a flow of capital and a flow of labor as human surplus value in the industrial essence of capitalism, a flow of financing
and a flow of payment or incomes in the monetary inscription of capitalism, a market flow and a flow of innovation as machinic surplus value in
a ruling class that is all the more
the operation of capitalism (surplus value as the first aspect of its immanence),
ruthless as it does not place the machine in its service, but is the servant of the
capitalist machine: in this sense, a single class, content for its part with drawing incomes that, however enormous, differ only
arithmetically from the workers' wages-income, whereas this class functions on a more profound level as creator, regulator, and guardian of the
great non-appropriated, non-possessed flow, incommensurable with wages and profits, which marks at every step along the way the interior
limits of capitalism, their perpetual displacement, and their reproduction on an always larger scale (the movement of interior limits as the
second aspect of the capitalist field of immanence, defined by the circular relationship "great flux of financing-reflux of incomes in wages-afflux
of raw profit"); the effusion of anti-production within production, as the realization or the absorption of surplus value, in such a way that the
military, bureaucratic, and police apparatus finds itself grounded in the economy itself, which directly produces libidinal investments for the
repression of desire anti-production as the third aspect of capitalist immanence, expressing the twofold nature of capitalism:
production for production's sake, but under the conditions of capital ). There is
not one of these aspects-not the least operation, the least industrial or financial mechanism-that does not
reveal the insanity of the capitalist machine and the pathological character of its
rationality: not at all a false rationality, but a true rationality of this pathological state, this insanity, "the machine works too, believe
me". The capitalist machine does not run the risk of becoming mad, it is mad from
one end to the other and from the beginning, and this is the source of its rationality. Marx's black humor, the source of Capital,
is his fascination with such a machine: how it came to be assembled, on what foundation of decoding and deterritorialization; how it works,
always more decoded, always more deterritorialized; how its operation grows more relentless with the development of the axiomatic, the
how it does not
combination of the flows; how it produces the terrible single class of gray gentlemen who keep up the machine;
run the risk of dying all alone, but rather of making us die, by provoking to the
very end investments of desire that do not even go by way of a deceptive and
subjective ideology, and that lead us to cry out to the very end, Long live capital in all its reality, in all its objective
dissimulation! Except in ideology, there has never been a humane, liberal, paternal, etc., capitalism. Capitalism is defined by a cruelty having no
Wage increases and
parallel in the primitive system of cruelty, and by a terror having no parallel in the despotic regime of terror.
improvements in the standard of living are realities, but realities that derive from a given
supplementary axiom that capitalism is always capable of adding to its

axiomatic in terms of an enlargement of its limits: let's create the New Deal;
let's cultivate and recognize strong unions; let's promote participation, the single class; let's take a step toward
Russia, which is taking so many toward us; etc. But within the enlarged reality that conditions these islands, exploitation grows
constantly harsher, lack is arranged in the most scientific of ways, final solutions
of the "Jewish problem" variety are prepared down to the last detail, and the
Third World is organized as an integral part of capitalism. The reproduction of
the interior limits of capitalism on an always wider scale has several consequences: it permits increases
and improvements of standards at the center, it displaces the harshest forms of
exploitation from the center to the periphery, but also multiplies enclaves of overpopulation in the center
itself, and easily tolerates the so-called socialist formations. (It is not kibbutz-style socialism that
troubles the Zionist state, just as it is not Russian socialism that troubles world capitalism.) There is no metaphor here:
the factories are prisons, they do not resemble prisons, they are prisons. Everything in the system is insane: this is because
the capitalist machine thrives on decoded and deterritorialized flows; it decodes and deterritorializes them still more, but while causing them to
pass into an axiomatic apparatus that combines them, and at the points of combination produces pseudo codes and artificial
reterritorializations. It is in this sense that the capitalist axiomatic cannot but give rise to new territorialities and revive a new despotic Urstaat.
The great mutant flow of capital is pure deterritorialization, but it performs an equivalent reterritorialization when converted into a reflux of
means of payment. The Third World is deterritorialized in relation to the center of capitalism but belongs to capitalism, being a pure peripheral
territoriality of capitalism. The system teems with preconscious investments of class and of interest. And capitalists first have an interest in
capitalists have an interest in
capitalism. A statement as commonplace as this is made for another purpose:
capitalism only through the tapping of profits that they extract from it. But no
matter how large the extraction of profits, it does not define capitalism . And for what
does define capitalism, for what conditions profit, theirs is an investment of desire whose nature unconscious- libidinal-is altogether different,
and is not simply explained by the conditioned profits, but on the contrary itself explains that a small-time capitalist, with no great profits or
hopes, fully maintains the entirety of his libidinal investments: the libido investing the great flow that is not convertible as such, not
appropriated as such-"nonpossession and nonwealth," in the words of Bernard Schmitt, who among modern economists has for us the
incomparable advantage of offering a delirious interpretation of an unequivocally delirious economic system (at least he goes all the way). In
short, a truly unconscious libido, a disinterested love: this machine is fantastic.
A/T: Kritiks
A/T: Anthropocentrism
1. They did not answer our root cause – that’s our Darder evidence. Social
capitalism is the root cause of the territorial war against the world and
specifically the way that we relate to the world.
2. Capitalist imperialism intercedes all that it comes near purifying
everything in its wake to commodities – culture, being, and life itself all
become appropriated
Deleuze and Guattari 1972 (Gilles and Felix; Anti-Oedipus) 194-195
It remains to be said that, in order to understand the barbarian formation, it is
necessary to relate it not to other formations in competition with it temporally and spiritually,
according to relationships that obscure the essential, but to the savage primitive formation that it supplants by imposing its own rule of law, but
the State establishes
that continues to haunt it. It is exactly in this way that Marx defines Asiatic production: a higher unity of
itself on the foundations of the primitive rural communities , which keep their ownership of the
soil, while the State becomes the true owner in conformity with the apparent objective movement that attributes the
surplus product to the State, assigns the productive forces to it in the great projects
undertaken, and makes it appear as the cause of the collective conditions of
appropriation:" The full body as socius has ceased to be the earth, it has become the body of the despot, the despot himself or his
god. The prescriptions and prohibitions that often render him almost incapable of acting make of him a body without organs. He is the sole
quasi cause, the source and fountainhead and estuary of the apparent objective movement. In place of mobile detachments from the signifying
chain, a detached object has jumped outside the chain; in place of flow selections, all the flows converge into a great river that constitutes the
sovereign's consumption: a radical change of regimes in the fetish or the symbol. What counts is not the person of the sovereign, nor even his
It is the social machine that has profoundly changed: in place
function, which can be limited.
of the territorial machine, there is the "megamachine" of the State, a functional pyramid that has the despot at its apex, an
immobile motor, with the bureaucratic apparatus as its lateral surface and its transmission gear, and the villagers at its base, serving as its
the blocks of debt become an infinite
working parts. The stocks form the object of an accumulation,
relation in the form of the tribute. The entire surplus value of code is an object
of appropriation. This conversion crosses through all the syntheses: the synthesis of production, with the hydraulic machine and
the mining machine; the synthesis of inscription, with the accounting machine, the writing machine, and the monument machine; and finally
the synthesis of consumption, with the upkeep of the despot, his court, and the bureaucratic caste. Far from seeing in the State the principle of
a territorialization that would inscribe people according to their residence, we should see in the principle of residence the effect of a movement
of deterritorialization that divides the earth as an object and subjects men to the new imperial inscription, to the new full body, to the new
socius. ' They come like fate, ... they appear as lightning appears, too terrible, too sudden."
3. No link – we never claim that there is a difference between human and
non-human, our Fasching evidence indicates that specifically for us as a
species we become trapped in a cycle of denying value to life to the other
and ourselves and this cycle of eternal damnation is bad. We never make
an objective claim that it’s worse
4. Perm do both
5. Perm reject every other instance
6. Determination of acceptable vs. unacceptable land is a tool of the state
apparatus to confine and enslave. There is no brightline distinction
between the two, making any determination possible only by the
transcendent decider, depoliticizing answers to the state control of the
environment
Halsey 2004 (Mark; teaches in the School of Law at the Flinders University of
South Australia; Environmental Visions: Deleuze and the Modalities of Nature;
Ethics & the Environment 9.2 (2004) 33-64)
The State has always had the capacity to divide and conquer. However, the
object of such divisions and conquests are neither the ‘wills’ nor ‘minds’ of the
populous but the right to categorize territories (to be inhabited, transformed, etc.). Categories
restrict movement. They control the flow and location of forces. This is why Deleuze and Guattari21 spend so much time talking
about the effects of deterritorialization. One can, in the present context, take this term quite literally. As of 1788, the
juxtaposition of bodies that had pertained in Australia for in excess of 40,000

years suffered one implosion after another. The violence of this process
received its momentum from—and took its form in relation to—something
more than orthodox weaponry (blunderbuss, knives, swords, etc.). Instead, and as has all-too-often been overlooked,
such violence was borne by a nomenclature which marginalized and even forced
into extinction other ways of naming, envisioning, or bringing forth the features of the new
world. The fact that Goolengook was once not forest, nor timber reserve, nor national park, nor impenetrable scrub but a place of
banishment for members of the Bidwell tribe, was something inconceivable to the newly formed collective assemblages of enunciation. Such
assemblages—composed not of individuals but of bodies whose speech clings doggedly to the image of thought mapped out by the
Crown/Commonwealth—promulgate/d an alien lexicon. In so doing, the State has perpetrated what can only be called a discursive assault on
The State as apparatus of capture
all before it. Deleuze and Guattari22 are therefore right when they assert that “
has a power of appropriation.” But what can be added here is that this appropriation is built on the (juridical) right
to (re)name earth as much as it is upon the capacity to capture a people, their land,
or their customs. Indeed, perhaps it is built on all these at once since one cannot or
presumably would not wish to control the latter elements were it not for the
fact that they so greatly conflicted with the bodies produced by the imperialist
lexicon.
A/T: Barbrook (Ev Indict)
First, Make them explain this argument in context of our affirmative . Our politics
doesn’t promote elitism, it causes the masses to question the desire for
domination. We’ll answer this argument when it’s specific.
Second, make them prove a warrant – This evidence has no context as to lines
of flight in terms of insecurity are bad – Merely rhizomatics resistance as
political terrorism
Third, This is a disad to the perm - The problem with the resistances Barbrook is
referring to is that they take the role of both the war machine and the state,
simultaneously. At one point they straite spaces into new specific political
formations, while simultaneously trying to use the war machine to move against
the state – This is the state apparatus capturing nomadic innovations and only
this produces your impacts.
Fourth, The burden of proof is on them: make them prove our K causes elitism
in the context of military policy
Wark 97 (McKenze, Associtate prof of media and Cultural Studies @ The New School, Delezue Contra Barbrook)
It seems singularly futile to try to claim that there is some necessary 'virus'
that passes from Deleuze to his followers. Anyone who apes the vocabulary and style of this
thinker betrays him in that moment of homage. Only that which differs from it can be thought of as
honouring it. It also seems to me to be inappropriate to see a very restricted
adoption of some Deleuzian themes in England as somehow central
expressions of of a Deleuzian legacy. I see very little common ground between the English,
American, Canadian and Australian expressions of Deleuzian thought in English , and quite frankly, the
English stuff is not necessarily the most interesting. There is a much more
diverse and distributed network of work that you would imagine from
Richard's presentation, which is strikingly Eurocentric. There is also a lack of
appreciation of the differences in local conditions.
A/T: Psychoanalysis
First, There is no impact to these arguments
Second, The fact that this model cannot explain every part of human behavior is
all we need to win – we will never be able to explain the world with one theory
only the alternative embraces multitude
Third, Psychoanalysis is flawed

Deleuze and Guattari 1972 [Anti-Oedipus 13-15]//JR
Is it not more likely that Oedipus is a requirement or a consequence of social reproduction, insofar as this latter aims at domesticating a
genealogical form and content that are in every way intractable? For there is no doubting the fact that the schizo is constantly subjected to
interrogation, constantly cross-examined. Precisely because his relationship with nature does not constitute a specific pole, the questions put to
him are formulated in terms of the existing social code: your name, your father, your mother? exercises in desiring-production, Beckett's Molloy
is cross-examined by a policeman: "Your name is Molloy, said the sergeant. Yes, I said, now I remember. And your mother? said the sergeant. I
didn't follow. Is your mother's name Molloy too? said the sergeant. I thought it over. Your mother, said the sergeant, is your mother's- Let me
think! I cried. At least I imagine that's how it was. Take your time, said the sergeant. Was mother's name Molloy? Very likely. Her name must be
Molloy too, I said. They took me away, to the guardroom I suppose, and there I was told to sit down. I must have tried to explain."12 We cannot
say that psychoanalysis is very innovative in this respect: it continues to ask its questions and develop its interpretations from the depths of the
Oedipal triangle as its basic perspective, even though today it is acutely aware that this frame of reference is not at all adequate to explain so-
called psychotic phenomena. The psychoanalyst says that we must necessarily discover Schreber's daddy beneath his superior God, and
doubtless also his elder brother beneath his inferior God. At times the schizophrenic loses his patience and demands to be left alone. Other
times he goes along with the whole game and even invents a few tricks of his own, introducing his own reference points in the model put
before him and undermining it from within ("Yes, that's my mother, all right, but my mother's the Virgin Mary, you know"). One can easily
imagine Schreber answering Freud: "Yes, I quite agree, naturally the talking birds are young girls, and the superior God is my daddy and the
inferior God my brother." But little by little he will surreptitiously "reimpregnate" the series of young girls with all talking birds, his father with
the superior God, and his brother with the inferior God, all of them divine forms that become complicated, or rather "desimplified," as they
break through the simplistic terms and functions of the Oedipal triangle. As Artaud put it:
Fourth, Links to all our arguments – static conceptions of how humans operate
only exist because we choose to believe in them – their claims are a limit upon
our freedom and creativity which precludes us finding our own meanings
A/T: Jameson
First, Jameson's understanding of totality limits political expression to the goal

of centralized parties, preventing the possibility of a politics of desire
Lambert ‘06 (Greg, "Who's Afraid of Deleuze and Guattari?")
Here, one might think that I am accusing Jameson of knavery and this might be
true if not for the realization that it is not a question of ‘correct interpretation’
as the logical deduction truth of the other system that is at issue, but rather the
political usefulness of this system in the national and cultural situation of the
United States. Above all, we must not forget the maxim that Jameson clearly announces in the conclusion of
the footnote cited earlier that ‘alliance politics is the strict practical equivalent of the
concept of totalization on a theoretical level’, which means that any attack on the
concept of ‘totality’ in the American framework poses the serious threat of
undermining the only realistic prospect that a genuine Left could come into
being in this country. In other words, for Jameson, theory is equal (‘the strict equivalent’)
topractice – again, it is only in the ideological field of consciousness that they
‘appear’ to belong to separate spheres – and for this reason any attack on
‘totality’ as a theoretical notion is to be treated on a practical level as an
attempt to forestall or to repress the formation of an alliance politics that would
reunite the already molecular collective forms of social and political interests
that define the situation in the United States. Therefore, all attacks on ‘totality’
must either be theoretically contained or must be adjusted to fit within a
systematic political strategy that serves the practical goals of alliance and
reunification of the Left in the United States.
Second, I dare them to find one warrant in their evidence or even Badiou’s book
on Deleuze as to why Deleuze is a thinker of the one or affirms singularity in
opposition to multiplicity. Their arguments only make sense if you assume the
incorrect assertion of Deleuze as a univocal thinker. Without this, their
arguments are incomprehensible. This claim is the gateway for all of their
indicts of our alternative.
Third, Turn – Badiou reads Deleuze backwards, in the context of Nietzsche.
Immanence is not a product of one-ness. Instead, using immanence to reject
transcendence allows for the one.
MAY 2K4[TODD, “ALAIN BADIOU AND THE FUTURE OF PHILOSOPHY”. EDITED BY PETER
HALLWARD, P. 73]
In order to respond to Badiou's critique, it is best, I believe, to return towhat I take to be the heart of Deleuze's philosophical motivation: the
resistance to transcendence. In this resistance, Deleuze is at his most purely Nietzschean. Nietzsche's rejection of transcendence is rooted in
his rejection of the condemnation of life by means of values exterior to it .Christianity, of course, provides the most telling example. In
Christianity, values are projected our onto a transcendent being (God) that, in turn, judges (and finds wanting) the very life that projected those
values in the first place. Life is condemned by the recourse to a transcendence that judges it. What is required, in order to counter this
transcendence, is a philosophy of immanence. Not a philosophy that just says Yes to everything in life (Nietzsche's donkey), but a philosophy
that allows for creativity and development hut does so without recourse to a transcendent that would dominate them.
Deleuze fashions his immanence in order to meet these Nietzschean requirements. And in thinking about his concept of the One, of Being, we
need to keep in mind that his concept of the One is supposed to support a thought of immanence, of anti-transcendence. In this sense, I want
to break from Badiou in what at first may seem a small way. For Badiou, it is the One that is primary to Deleuze’s philosophy: immanence falls
out from that. For me, it is immanence, the necessity of abandoning any form of transcendence , that is the fundamental requirement of
Deleuze's philosophy. The One must be conceived in terms of immanence, not the other way around.
A/T: Cohen
First, This evidence assumes a portrait of existence as inherently affirming the

dialectic of asceticism but it isn’t able to make a warranted defense of this
dialectic understanding of life; our evidence is better and more responsive to the
question of existence because ours is the only that can affirm being in its totality
which our Saurette evidence indicates is the only escape of suicidal nihilism.
A/T: Connolly
First, No link – We don’t say that the Übermensche alone has access to the
eternal recurrence of the dicethrow; this isn’t our alt, thus no offense because
even if we deviate from Nietzsche’s figure of the Übermensche that’s ok because
our Deleuzeand Guattari evidence can provide an adequate defense of the alt.
Besides, we don’t advocate the dicethrow as our alternative.
A/T: Conway
First, Conway’s reading of Deleuze collapses on itself – His understanding of

Deleuze admittedly begins from a structural reading of Nietzsche; he ignores the
underlying schizoanalytic nature of Deleuze’s Nietzsche or at least, our
Ballantyne 7 evidence that dissolves their structural reading. They have no
defense of this reading but we have unanswered offense.
Second, He only understands Deleuze in relation to the origin of Nietzsche while

Deleuze’s reading is admittedly selective; his reading is meant to support an
affirmation of chance and individual roles, not Nietzsche’s original project.
Third, Conway’s criticism of Nietzsche is actually a criticism of Heidegger’s

interpretation of the eternal return which is the opposite of Deleuze’s. Your
offense does not apply to the alternative
BELL 95[Allen, "Philosophizing the Double-Bind: Deleuze Reads Nietzsche," Philosophy Today, Vol. 39, No. 4]
The importance of “force” within Nietzsche's thought has long been recognized, at least since Heidegger. Deleuze, however, does not follow
Heidegger in identifying force as simply another name for will to power ; rather, Deleuze argues that “will to power” is the non-identifiable
differential element which allows for the identification of forces and the evaluation of the differences between them (e.g., active and
reactive, main feature, etc.), and yet “will to power” is not something separate from these forces, something which “lacks” force, or
something that acts from above, so to speak (i.e., transcends these forces); on the contrary, as differential element “will to power” "inheres or
subsists," to use a phrase of Deleuze's, within forces, but it is not to be identified with these forces - “will to power” is non-identifiable. This
notion of a non-identifiable differential element which is perhaps the most “central” notion of Deleuze's work, and he will use a number of
different terms throughout his writings to refer to it: "singularity," "aleatory point," "event," "inclusive disjunction," "incorporeal
transformation," and "becoming-x" (e.g., "becoming-animal," "becoming-woman," "becoming-imperceptible"). In Logic of Sense, for example,
he claims that an "event," as with “will to power,” is neither separable from actual bodies or states of affairs (i.e., forces), it "inheres or
subsists" in them, nor is it to be identified with them. It forever eludes such identification .
Fourth, The reterritorialization of Deleuze’s reading of Nietzsche is not a reason

to reject the alternative. The affirmation of individual roles in existence and an
affirmation of all things in our lives is the only way to reclaim joy and positive
meaning to our lives. Everything is doomed to fail or die but in their framework,
this becomes nihilism. Under our framework, it means an affirmation of being
and a reason to plunge forward without hesitation.
CONWAY 98[Daniel, Prof. Philosophy @ PennState “Tumbling Dice”, symploke 6.1, muse]
If we are to put Deleuze to work, integrating his balky engine into the construction of our own Heraclitean fire machine, then we must allow
him to reveal himself in his constitutive fragmentation and contradiction. His dice, too, must fall to earth, and the combination on which they
settle must inevitably compromise the original promise of his differential critique. The fetishized Deleuze will crash to earth, exposed as a noisy,
fractious, despotic, reterritorializing machine, but the repetition of the eternal dicethrow is thereby renewed. Bequeathed to us by the fallen
Deleuze, these fatal cubes now rest in our trembling hands. Our project, which we inherit from him, involves nothing less than the
rhizomaticdeterritorialization of schizoanalysis itself. If we are to continue his investigation of difference, rather than merely fetishize his
accomplishment, then we must undertake its self-referential development and extension. That we will eventually re-territorialize Deleuze's
fiefdom in our own image, unwittingly ordaining ourselves the high priests of the anti-priesthood,should not deter us. It is our destinytoo to
fall to earth in a final, fatal combination. As in the case of Deleuze , the meltdown and crash of our desiring machines is the non-negotiable
cost of renewing the repetition of the eternal dicethrow.
A/T: Fasching
First, The aff links harder – Trying to force a way of living that is open to the holy
community They've basically just made a huge part of the 2AC a double-turn
with the aff. Their argument is one of the biggest DA's against their aff – Insert
analysis
Fasching – Check the Fasching file*
Second, Internal ressentiment poisons “real” interaction with the world – any risk
of a link means their efforts devolve into idealist nihilism
Third, Only the K accesses the evidence – their single-minded drive is to attack
suffering – they don’t question that impulse, and thus can’t shift horizons; we
analyze history and sociology to shift horizons
A/T: Heidegger
technological mindset – Go to the Heidegger backfile*
Second, Deleuze and Heidegger differ on the question of Nietzsche and the will
to power. For Deleuze, it is not separate from the forces which it defines. Their
arguments don’t apply to the alt.
BELL 95[Allen, "Philosophizing the Double-Bind: Deleuze Reads Nietzsche," Philosophy Today, Vol. 39, No. 4]
The importance of “force” within Nietzsche's thought has long been recognized, at least since Heidegger. Deleuze, however, does not follow
Heidegger in identifying force as simply another name for will to power ; rather, Deleuze argues that “will to power” is the non-identifiable
differential element which allows for the identification of forces and the evaluation of the differences between them (e.g., active and
reactive, main feature, etc.), and yet “will to power” is not something separate from these forces, something which “lacks” force, or
something that acts from above, so to speak (i.e., transcends these forces); on the contrary, as differential element “will to power” "inheres or
subsists," to use a phrase of Deleuze's, within forces, but it is not to be identified with these forces - “will to power” is non-identifiable. This
notion of a non-identifiable differential element which is perhaps the most “central” notion of Deleuze's work, and he will use a number of
different terms throughout his writings to refer to it: "singularity," "aleatory point," "event," "inclusive disjunction," "incorporeal
transformation," and "becoming-x" (e.g., "becoming-animal," "becoming-woman," "becoming-imperceptible"). In Logic of Sense, for example,
he claims that an "event," as with “will to power,” is neither separable from actual bodies or states of affairs (i.e., forces), it "inheres or
subsists" in them, nor is it to be identified with them. It forever eludes such identification .
Third, Heidegger is wrong; identity within the eternal return is not that of
subjectivity trapped from within but rather being defined as object unto the
eternal return.
Deleuze 83[Gilles, “Nietzsche and Philosophy”, pg 47]
How does the thought of pure becoming serve as a foundation for the eternal return? All we need to do to think this thought is to stop
believing in being as distinct from and opposed to becoming or to believe in the being of becoming itself. What is the being of that which
becomes, of that which neither starts nor finishes becoming? Returning is the being of that which becomes (Revenir, l’être de ce qui devient).
‘That everything recurs is the closest approximation of a world of becoming to a world of being — high point of the meditation” (VP II
170/WP 617). This problem for the meditation must be formulated in yet another way; how can the past be constituted in time? How can the
present pass? The passing moment could never pass if it were not already past and yet to come — at the same time as being present. If the
present did not pass of its own accord, if it had to wait for a new present in order to become past, the past in general would never be
constituted in time, and this particular present would not pass. We cannot wait, the moment must be simultaneously present and past, present
and yet to come, in order for it to pass (and to pass for the sake of other moments). The present must coexist with itself as past and yet to
come. The synthetic relation of the moment to itself as present, past and future grounds it relation to other moments. The eternal return is
thus an answer to the problem of passage 8 And in this sense it must not be interpreted as the return of something that is, that is “one” or the
“same”. We misinterpret the expression “eternal return” if we understand it as “return of the same”.It is not being that returns but rather the
returning itself that constitutes being insofar as it is affirmed of becoming and of that which passes . It is not some one thing which returns
but rather returning itself is the one thing which is affirmed of diversity or multiplicity. In other words, identity in the eternal return does not
describe the nature of that which returns but, on the contrary, the fact of returning for that which differs. This is why the eternal return must
be thought of as a synthesis; a synthesis of time and its dimensions, a synthesis of diversity and its reproduction, synthesis of becoming and
the being which is affirmed in becoming, a synthesis of double affirmation. Thus the eternal return itself does not depend on a principle of
identity but on one which must, in all respects, fulfill the requirements of a truly sufficient reason.
Fourth, No link – Heidegger is a misreading of Nietzsche. At worst, even if all of
their arguments are true, our Deleuzeevidence’s problematization of
Heidegger’s Nietzsche proves that it and the alternative aren’t the same thing
which means their cards aren’t offense against our alt. Evaluate it like a disad to
our plan but our no link evidence is better.
A/T: Kettles
First, This evidence just makes an ad hominem attack on Nietzsche’s denial of an

objective truth. The question of the reality of objective truth however is irrelevant
to our criticism. Our arguments describe reality as a play of interpretations which
should be analyzed as specific bodies of knowledge which contribute to a modern
understanding. The fact that people make opposing truth claims which can only
be reduced to a particular point is not testament to the imperfection of
knowledge, but rather to the subjectivity of the will to truth and of its desire to
produce a domesticated life, purified of conflict. Absolute truth seekers are
apologists for the most radical types of violence their evidence talks about by
securing our experience of being within specific categories of existence and a
desire to achieve a monopoly on truth, thus justifying the destruction of all those
who live immorally in a world of falsity.
James Der Derian ‘93 We reject the gendered language professor of political science at the U Massachusetts-Amherst and prof of IR
at Brown 93"The political subject of violence" ed. David Campbell and Michael Dillon, p 101-105
Nietzsche and Interpretive Realism In the last analysis, "love of the neighbor" is always something secondary, partly conventional and arbitrary
—illusory in relation to fear of the neigh-bor. After the structure of society is fixed on the whole and seems secure against external dangers, it is
this fear of the neighbor that again creates new perspectives of moral valuation. —Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil Nietzsche
transvalues both Hobbcss and Marx's interpretations of securi-ty through a genealogy of modes of being. His method is not to uncover some
deep meaning or value for security, but to destabilize the intolerable fiaional identities of the past which have been created out of fear, and to
affirm the creative differences which might yield new values for the future.33 Originating in the paradoxical relationship of a contingent life and
a certain death, the history of security reads for Nietzsche as an abnegation, a resentment and, finally, a transcendence of this paradox. In brief,
the history is one of individuals seeking an impossible security from the most radical "other" of life, the terror of death which, once generalized
and nationalized, triggers a futile cycle of collective identities seeking security from alien others—who are seeking similarly impossible
guarantees. It is a story of differences taking on the otherness of death, and identities calcifying into a fearful sameness. Since Nietzsche has
suffered the greatest neglect in international theory, his reinterprctation of security will receive a more extensive treatment here. One must
begin with Nietzsche's idea of the will to power, which he clearly believed to be prior to and generative of all considerations of security. In
Beyond Good and Evil, he emphatically establishes the primacy of the will to power: "Physiologists should think before putting down the
instinct of self-preservation as the cardinal instinct of an organic being. A living thing seeks above all to discharge its strength— life itself is will
to power; self-preservation is only one of the most frequent results."34 The will to power, then, should not be confused with a Hobbesian
perpetual desire for power. It can, in its negative form, produce a reactive and resentful longing for only power, leading, in Nietzsche's view, to
a triumph of nihilism. But Nietzsche refers to a positive will to power, an active and affective force of becoming, from which values and
meanings—including self-preservation—are produced which affirm life. Conventions of security act to suppress rather than confront the fears
endemic to life, for "... life itself is essentially appropriation, injury, overpowering of what is alien and weaker; suppression, hardness,
imposition of ones own forms, incorporation and at least, at its mildest, exploitation—but why should one always use those words in which
slanderous intent has been imprinted for ages."35 Elsewhere Nietzsche establishes the pervasiveness of agonism in life: "life is a consequence
of war, society itself a means to war.” But the denial of this permanent condition, the effort to disguise it with a con-sensual rationality or to
hide from it with a fictional sovereignty, are all effects of this suppression of fear. The desire for security is manifested as a collective
resentment of difference—that which is not us, not certain, not predictable. Complicit with a negative will to power is the fear-driven desire for
protection from the unknown. Unlike the positive will to power, which produces an aesthetic affirmation of difference, the search for truth
produces a truncated life which conforms to the rationally knowable, to the causally sustainable. In The Gay Science, Nietzsche asks of the
reader "Look, isn't our need for knowledge precisely this need for the familiar, the will to uncover everything strange, unusual, and
questionable, something that no longer disturbs us? Is it not the instinct of fear that bids us to know? And is the jubilation of those who obtain
knowledge not the jubilation over the restora-tion of a sense of security?**37 The fear of the unknown and the desire for certainty combine to
produce a domesticated life, in which causality and rationality become the highest sign of a sovereign self, the surest protection against
contingent forces. The fear of fate assures a belief that everything reasonable is true, and everything true, reasonable. In short, the security
imperative pro-duces, and is sustained by, the strategies of knowledge which seek to explain it. Nietzsche elucidates the nature of this
generative relationship in The Twilight of the Idols-. The causal instinct is thus conditional upon, and excited by, the feeling of fear. The "why?*1
shall, if at all possible, not give the cause for its own sake so much as for a particular kind of cause—a cause (hat is comforting, liber-ating and
relieving. . . . That which is new and strange and has not been experienced before, is excluded as a cause. Thus one not only searches for some
kind of explanation, to serve as a cause, but tor a particularly selected and preferred kind of explanation—that which most quickly and
frequently abolished the feeling of the strange, new and hitherto unexperienced: the most habitual explanations.38 A safe life requires safe
truths. The strange and the alien remain unexamined, the unknown becomes identified as evil, and evil provokes hostility—recycling the desire
for security. The "influence of timidity," as Nietzsche puts it, creates a people who are willing to subordinate affirmative values to the
"necessities" of security: "they fear change, transitoriness: this expresses a straitened soul, full of mistrust and evil experiences."39 The
unknowable which cannot be contained by force or explained by reason is relegated to the off-world. "Trust," the "good," and other common
values come to rely upon an "artificial strength": "the feeling of security such as the Christian possesses; he feels strong in being able to trust, to
be patient and composed: he owes this artificial strength to the illusion of being protected by a god."40 For Nietzsche, of course, only a false
sense of security can come from false gods: "Morality and religion belong altogether to the psychology of error, in every single case, cause and
effect are confused; or truth is confused with the effects of believing something 10 be true; or a state of consciousness is confused with its »4l
causes. Nietzsche's interpretation of the origins of religion can shed some light on this paradoxical origin and transvaluation of security. In The
Gencalogy of Morals, Nietzsche sees religion arising from a sense of fear and indebtedness to ones ancestors: The conviction reigns that it is
only through the sacrifices and accomplish-ments of the ancestors that the tribe exists—and that one has to pay them back with sacrifices and
accomplishments: one thus recognizes a debt that constantly grows greater, since these forebears never cease, in their contin-ued existence as
powerful spirits, to accord the tribe new advantages and new strength/2 Sacrifices, honors, obedience arc given but it is never enough, for The
ancestors of the most powerful tribts are bound eventually to grow to monstrous dimensions through the imagination of growing fear and to
recede into the darkness of the divinely uncanny and unimaginable: in the end the ancestor must necessarily be transfigured into a god.4i As
the ancestors debt becomes embedded in institutions, the community takes on the role of creditor. Nietzsche mocks this originary, Hobbesian
moment: One lives in a community, one enjoys the advantages of communality (oh what advantages! we sometimes underrate them today),
one dwells protected, cared for, in peace and trustfulness, without fear of certain injuries and hostile acts to which the man outside, the "man
without peace," is exposed . . . since one has bound and pledged oneself to the community precisely with a view to injury and hostile acts.44
The establishment of the community is dependent upon, indeed it feeds upon, this fear of being left outside. As the castle wall is replaced by
written treaty, however, and distant gods by temporal sovereigns, the martial skills and spiritual virtues of the noble warrior are slowly debased
and dissimulated. The subject of the individual will to power becomes the object of a collective resentment . The result? The fear of the external
other is transvalued into the "love of the neighbor" quoted in the opening of this section, and the perpetuation of community is assured
through the internalization and legitimation of a fear that lost its original source long ago. This powerful nexus of fear, of external and internal
otherness, generates the values which uphold the security imperative. Indeed, Nietzsche locates the genealogy of even individual rights, such as
freedom, in the calculus of maintaining security: - My rights - are that pan of my power which others not merely conceded me, but which they
wish me to preserve. How do these others arrive at that? First: through their prudence and fear and caution: whether in that they expect
something similar from us in return (protection of their rights); or in that they consider that a struggle with us would be perilous or to no
purpose; or in that they sec in any diminution of our force a disadvantage to themselves, since we would then be unsuited to forming an
alliance with them in opposition to a hostile third power. Then: by donation and cession.45 The point of Nietzsche's critical genealogy is to show
that the perilous conditions that created the security imperative—and the western metaphysics that perpetuate it—have diminished if not
disappeared; yet, the fear of life persists: "Our century denies this perilousncss, and docs so with a good conscience: and yet it continues to
drag along with it the old habits of Christian security. Christian enjoyment, recreation and evaluation."46 Nietzsche's worry is that the collective
reaction against older, more primal fears has created an even worse danger the tyranny of the herd, the lowering of man, the apathy of the last
man which controls through conformity and rules through passivity. The security of the sovereign, rational self and state comes at the cost of
ambiguity, uncertainty, paradox—all that makes a free life worthwhile. Nietzsche's lament for this lost life is captured at the end of Daybreak in
a series of rhetorical questions: Of future virtues—How comes it that the more comprehensible the world has grown the more solemnities of
every kind have decreased? Is it that fear was so much the basic clement of that reverence which overcame us in the presence of everything
unknown and mysterious and taught us to fall down before the incomprehensible and plead tor mercy? And has the world not lost some of its
charm for us because we have grown less fearful? With the diminution of our fearrulness has our own dignity and solemnity, our own
fiarsomeness, not also diminished?47 It is of course in Nietzsche's lament, in his deepest pessimism for the last man, that one finds the
celebration of the overman as both symptom and harbinger of a more free-spirited yet fearsome age. Dismissive of Utopian engineering,
Nietzsche never suggests how he would restructure society; he looks forward only so far as to sight the emergence of "new philosophers" (such
as himself?) who would restore a reverence for fear and reevaluate the security imperative. Nietzsche does, however, go back to a pre-
Christian, pre-Socratic era to find the exemplars for a new kind of securi iv. In The Genealogy of Morals^ he holds up Pericles as an example, for
lauding the Athenians for their "rhatbymia"—a term that incorporates the notion of "indifference to and contempt for security."48 It is perhaps
too much to expect Nietzsche's message to resonate in late modern times, to expect, at the very time when conditions seem most uncertain
and unpredictable, that people would treat fear as a stimulus for improvement rather than cause for retrenchment. Yet Nietzsche would clearly
see these as opportune times, when fear could be willfully asserted as a force for the affirmation of difference , rather than canalized into a
cautious identity constructed from the calculation of risks and benefits.
A/T: Kurasawa
Kurasawa*
Second, Our alternative turns this - Embracing insecurity is a political statement
that produces a fearlessness necessary to avoid the internalization of fascism
that security brings. Alternatives to know and solve all problems and threats in
the world inevitably lead to our impacts and destroy solvency by reinstituting
the basis of the problem – The internalization of fascism – That’s Ballantyne 7
and Koppensteiner ’09.
Third, Micro-fascism corrupts the counter-public Kurasawa is trying to form.
Fourth, Questions about “decreasing” suffering miss the point of the criticism –
steps toward a perfectible cosmos are bad because we cannot eliminate
suffering, only mask it. It’s better to embrace that suffering rather than run
away from it.
Kain 7(Philip J, Professor of philosophy at University of Santa Clara, "Nietzsche, Eternal Recurrence, and the Horror of Existence," the
Journal of Nietzsche Studies, muse, AD: 7/2/09) jl
One might find all this unacceptable. After all, isn't it just obvious that we can change things, reduce suffering, improve existence, and make
progress? Isn't it just obvious that modern science and technology have done so? Isn't it just absurd for Nietzsche to reject the possibility of
significant change? Hasn't such change already occurred? Well, perhaps not. Even modern environmentalists might resist all this obviousness.
They might respond in a rather Nietzschean vein that technology may have caused as many problems as it has solved. The advocate of the
perfectible cosmos, on the other hand, would no doubt counter such Nietzscheanpessimism by arguing that even if technology does cause
some problems, the solution to those problems can only come from better technology. Honesty requires us to admit , however, that this is
merely a hope, not something for which we already have evidence, not something that it is absurd to doubt —not at all something obvious.
Further technology may or may not improve things. The widespread use of antibiotics seems to have done a miraculous job of improving our
health and reducing suffering, but we are also discovering that such antibiotics give rise to even more powerful bacteria that are immune to
thoseantibiotics. We have largely eliminated diseases like cholera, smallpox, malaria, and tuberculosis, but we have produced cancer and
heart disease. We can cure syphilis and gonorrhea, but we now have AIDS. Even if we could show that it will be possible to continuously
reduce suffering, it is very unlikely that we will ever eliminate it. If that is so , then it remains a real question whether it is not better to face
suffering, use it as a discipline, perhaps even increase it, so as to toughen ourselves, rather than let it weaken us, allow it to dominate us, by
continually hoping to overcome it.But whatever we think about the possibility of reducing suffering, the question may well become moot.
Nietzsche tells a story: "Once upon a time, in some out of the way corner of that universe which is dispersed into numberless twinkling solar
systems, there was a star upon which clever beasts invented knowing. That was the most arrogant and mendacious minute of 'world history,'
but nevertheless, it was only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths, the star cooled and congealed, and the clever beasts had to die"
(TL 1, 79). Whatever progress we might think we are making in reducing suffering , whatever change we think we are bringing about, it may
all amount to nothing more than a brief and accidental moment in biological time, whose imminent disappearance will finally confirm the
horror and meaninglessness of existence. Thedisagreement here is not so much about the quantity of suffering that we can expect to find in
the world but, rather, its nature. For proponents of the designed cosmos, suffering is basically accidental. It is not fundamental or central to
life. It is not a necessary part of the nature of things. It does not make up the essence of existence. We must develop virtue, and then we can
basically expect to fit and be at home in the cosmos. For the proponents of a perfectible cosmos, suffering is neither essential nor unessential.
The cosmos is neutral. We must work on it to reduce suffering. We must bring about our own fit. For Nietzsche, even if we can change this or
that, even if we can reduce suffering here and there, what cannot be changed for human beings is that suffering is fundamental and central
to life. The very nature of things, the very essence of existence, means suffering. Moreover, it means meaningless suffering—suffering for no
reason at all. That cannot be changed—it can only be concealed. Nietzsche does not reject all forms of change . What he rejects is the sort of
change necessary for a perfectible cosmos. He rejects the notion that science and technology can transform the essence of things—he rejects
the notion that human effort can significantly reduce physical suffering. Instead, he only thinks it possible to build up the power necessary to
construct meaning in a meaningless world and thus to conceal the horror of existence, which cannot be eliminated. We cannot prove the
opposite view, and I do not think we can dismiss Nietzsche's view simply because it goes counter to the assumptions of [End Page 52]
Christianity, science, liberalism, socialism, and so forth. And we certainly cannot dismiss this view if we hope to understand Nietzsche. At any
rate, for Nietzsche, we cannot eliminate suffering; we can only seek to mask it.
A/T: Levinas
*you should see immediately if you have specific evidence linking the aff to the
K*
Second, Only we allow an immediate ethical relationship to the other. Any

oedipalization ensures that relationship remains shallow and pre-scripted.
Third, Levinas’ argument doesn’t assume Oedipalization – even if they win the
obligation to the Other is primary, if we win a risk of a link, then the
internalization of fascism perverts the ethic of obligation and it becomes a
scapegoating relationship, if not useless altogether
Fourth, Oedipalization is inherent in Levinas’ interaction of the Other and the
Self –
a. The ethic of obligation only resolves ontological equality by an asymmetric

relationship in which the Other is perceived as an undesirable element in life
b. The only way the relationship is ethical is when the our microfascisms do not
dictate our every move and allow us to act – This is the only way to have a
world in which we’re driven by relationships to the other and not fascisms that
dictate action – Solves best
c. Your relationship to the other is mediated by the state – This kills the
authenticity of the relationship – We must embrace the accident to feel a true
obligation to the world and to life – Only lines of flights can allow us to make
this jump to the world of Levenas
d. Turn - An authentic relationship with the other is not based only of nearness,
but distance. The dream of encountering new worlds is an act of ontological
colonization—an ethical relationship can only begin in that gap between myself
and the other, which can only be produced through freedom of the individual.
Any other relation will inevitably trigger your impacts
Guenther '02 [Lisa, Assistant Professor of Philosophy @ Vandy, “Towards a Phenomenology of Dwelling” Canadian Journal of
Environmental Education, 7(2), Spring]
Ethos anthropoi daimon. In light of Heidegger’s translation, I propose that we interpret these words as follows: The dwelling of human beings
—our essential character, our everyday habits, and the very root of our ethics— exists not only in the nearness of, but at a distance from, an
other that both surpasses me and makes me what I am. We can think of this other as a spirit or intermediary, or as the human community; but
we can also think of the other as the entire human and more-than-human world : the plants, animals, elements, and people with whom we
inhabit the earth. An ethics of dwelling emerges from the preservation of a tension between this nearness to others, and the distance which
keeps us distinct from others. The gap between myself and the other is the space which makes ethical dwelling possible; in keeping us apart,
it also preserves the difference which makes an ethical relation possible. For this is the paradox articulated by fragment 119: that I am only
myself in being divided, that I can only become myself by risking my identity in proximity to others. In effect, the boundary that separates me
from a blade of grass, or from the moose across the river, is precisely that which grants me the possibility of approaching, addressing, and
giving to these others. Often we are tempted by the romantic idea of “fusing consciousness” with the natural world, denying that there is a
difference which keeps us apart from others and, precisely in keeping us apart, also directs us towards them . But the very possibility of an
environmental ethics of dwelling rests upon the twofold nearness and distinction from others whom we need and for whom we are
responsible. In the pages that follow, I will reflect more concretely on this relation between nearness and distance, or relation and otherness,
which emerges from my re-translation of Heidegger’s translation of ethos anthropoi daimon. I shall argue that an ethical relation with the
natural world is only possible given the gap of difference or otherness which is maintained by setting a boundary or limit to our dwelling-
space. This boundary, far from alienating us from the natural environment, actually forms the basis for an environmental ethics of dwelling.
Consider also an apartment in the city. Cities are more like beehives. When I look out a city window (turning away from the television, opening
the curtains and blinds, and peering out over the back of the couch), I see houses just like my own, arranged into rows like cells in a
honeycomb. They are inhabited by people more or less like me: people who work, come home, make spaghetti for dinner, fall asleep during the
news. And yet I can walk through this city and see things that surprise me: a man with green hospital pants tied around his head, calmly walking
his dog. A cat stalking a bird. Fireweed pushing through a crack in the sidewalk. For cities leak too, even in spite of themselves. The air
conditioning may be on, the stereo may be blaring; but a storm outside can knock this out in less than a minute. Thus cities tend to show
themselves most clearly just there, where they fail: a robin’s nest in the mailbox; a leaking tap; the sound of an argument next door. In these
moments of disruption we realize what the city tries most to conceal: that we dwell in relation to others, and that we can only be there if others
are there, too. While the cabin and the apartment are undoubtedly very different sorts of dwelling-space, both offer a glimpse into the ethical
significance of dwelling. While there is much to say here, I want to focus on one aspect in particular: the relation between inside and outside in
a home. The inside of a place can exist only thanks to the boundary (the walls, floor, and roof) which separates it from the outside. Without this
sense of a place hollowed out from the world at large, there could be no dwelling, no intimacy, no home in which I welcome friends and
strangers. The boundary that separates inside from outside need not be visible or material; for even among people who dwell under the open
sky, there is the sense of a socially interior space, a space which is described more by trails and hunting grounds than by walls and floorboards.
Dwelling requires a sense of the inside: an intimate space where I belong with others who do not, properly speaking, belong to me. If the
boundary which creates this interior space were absolute and impermeable, then life within its bounds would be impossible. We need windows
and doors; we need wood for the stove and air to breathe. Thus dwelling occurs neither inside nor outside but in the tension between the
two: in the interaction of spaces which have something to give one another precisely because they are not the same. The dwelling of human
beings, the root of our ethics and the very character of our existence, occurs in the nearness of, but distinction from, an other, an outside, a
complex of human and more-than-human beings who both transcend me, and let me become who I am. Though our contemporary cities
have largely neglected this tension between inside and outside, ancient Greek cities were founded upon the principle of a boundary or city
wall, which both sets limits on the city’s proper sphere, and establishes a connection between the human community and the cosmos in
which it dwells. In his book, H2O and the Waters of Forgetfulness, Ivan Illich (1985) describes the way Greek cities were ritually traced out upon
the earth in relation to heavenly bodies, the flight of birds, or the movement of clouds. For the Greeks, a city could only be founded in relation
to that which exceeds it, that which is not the city but nevertheless is the condition for its very existence. An ethos of ritual and custom
inaugurated the city once a site 42 Lisa Guenther had been divined; a team of one female and one male ox pulled a plough around the cosmic
shape of the city, the driver lifting the plough at intervals to make thresholds or city gates, places where the interior would meet and interact
with the external world. Illich (1985) calls this ritual of inauguration “a sacred marriage of heaven and earth” (p. 15), an “opposition and
wedding of right and left,” inside and outside, animal and human (p. 14). Without this collaboration of more-than-human others—the stars, the
clouds, the oxen, the birds, and the ground into which the template is etched—the human city could not come into being. And yet this relation
between the city and the more-thancity only comes into view when the city-space is marked off from that which exceeds it and from which it
emerges. The Greeks, we might say, had an ethos of city-dwelling: an understanding that human beings need to dwell with one another, but
that we can only do so by dwelling within the limits of a boundary which both separates us from and aligns us with an exterior which is
other-than-human and more-thanhuman. One could argue, of course, that the Greeks built walls around their cities not because of their deep
sensitivity to the nature of ethical dwelling, but rather to protect themselves from armies and “barbarians” and beasts from the wild. For it is
also true—and especially true in the history of the West—that boundaries have been erected in the spirit of exclusion and self-protection
rather than in pursuit of harmonious dwelling. Thus we must turn to the past not in order to repeat its mistakes, but rather to learn how not to
repeat them; we need the retrospective gaze of history not only to find inspiration for the future from the past, but also to mark the line which
separates past from future, and opens a different horizon. The Greeks may not have conceived the city wall as a boundary which separates and
connects humanity with the more-than-human world; and Heraclitus may not have understood his words as the starting-point for
environmental ethics. And yet, when we remember these ancient words and customs, we are given the responsibility to hear both what has
been said in the past, and how this saying resonates for the future. For Heidegger, to remember is not to make the past “present” through re-
presentation, but rather to preserve from the past a meaning which exists ecstatically in relation to the future. By letting an ethical sense of the
boundary address the traditional history of the boundary as an instrument of exploitation and self-assertion, we open up the possibility of new
meanings for old words. We need to remember the history of Western culture in this way in order to understand why our own cities are the
way they are, and how they could be otherwise. We cannot change the way we dwell simply by wiping the slate clean and starting over; any
change in habits must arise first from an examination of our current habits and the conditions under which they were formed . For Ivan Illich
(1985), “To dwell means to inhabit the traces left by one’s own living, by which one always retraces the lives of one’s ancestors” (p. 8). What
does this sense of dwelling mean for the future of our cities? Drive into Vancouver or Toronto Towards a Phenomenology of Dwelling 43 —for
one cannot help but drive there—and witness the hundreds of kilometres of occupied space sprawling out of our mega-cities. This is no longer
dwelling space, but rather what Illich calls “garages for living,” storage-space for human enterprise. Now, more than ever, we need to
recuperate a sense of dwelling within limits : not in order to protect ourselves from the wilderness (as perhaps the ancient Greeks were
concerned to do) but rather to protect the wilderness from ourselves. We must do this not only because our physical existence depends
upon it, but also because without this relation to, and distinction from, others we cannot become who we are: namely, human beings whose
character is our ethos. And yet we cannot stop here. For ultimately, and more essentially, we must set a limit to human dwelling not for our
own sake, but for the sake of the other, making room for an other not out of enlightened self-interest, but out of respect and hospitality . I
propose, arising from this brief exploration of dwelling as thought and as experience, an environmental ethics grounded in these gestures of
respect and hospitality. To respect someone is to hold her in regard while still letting her remain at a distance from me, giving her room to
move. Respect thrives only where this distance and difference is maintained in the very midst of my regard and concern for the other.
Likewise to offer hospitality—a notion which I have inherited from the French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas (1969)—is to open one’s
dwelling space to an other, a stranger whom I cannot grasp or comprehend but for whom I am nevertheless responsible. To be hospitable is,
like the gift of respect, to take a step back so that the other can step forth; it is to set limits on my own dwelling so that the other has room
to come and go. The genius of human being is not only that we can “be ourselves” only in relation to an other which both surpasses and
constitutes us. Rather, the genius of the human character, and the root of our ethics, is in our propensity to give space, or make room for, an
other who exceeds our grasp. An ethics of respect and hospitality has political, social, and intellectual implications. In concrete terms, it means
that we ought to set aside wilderness spaces that have no human function, not even the relatively benign function of providing recreation for
people like you and me. It means that we ought to rethink our cities in terms of density rather than sprawl, and to preserve within them spaces
of otherness and ecological diversity: parkland spaces without mowed lawns and barbeque pits. And it means that in our everyday lives, as well
as in our municipal and territorial planning, we must cultivate habits of respect for those with whom we dwell, and without whom we could not
exist. An ethics of dwelling based on hospitality and respect demands that we resist the temptation to believe, even in a spirit of generosity,
that we are the same as the other, that there is no difference between a person and a tree and a lynx across the river . For although we are by
no means indifferent to these others, it is precisely our difference from them, our not knowing who they are from the inside out, that lets us
be ethical towards them. The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben (1991) ends his book, Language and Death, with the following words, and
this is where I, too, will conclude these reflections upon the ethos of dwelling: We walk through the woods: suddenly we hear the flapping of
wings or the wind in the grass. A pheasant lifts off and then disappears instantly among the trees, a porcupine buries in the thick underbrush,
the dry leaves crackle as a snake slithers away. Not the encounter, but this flight of invisible animals is thought. No, it was not our voice. We
came as close as possible to language, we almost brushed against it, held it in suspense: but we never reached our encounter and now we turn
back, untroubled, toward home. So, language is our voice, our language. As you now speak, that is ethics. (p. 108)
A/T: May
First, Alt is a prerequisite – they’re fixated on mastery of life, means they can’t
engage in “joyous, experimenting freedom”
Second, “Genuine political engagement” can’t happen in the world of the non-
genuine politics of the aff
Third, Turn – May makes the same argument we make – The world is a terrifc
place to celebrate life – Affirming your personal desire is the best way to
celebrate life and the only way to not disengage from the world – The
internalization of fascism makes you a disconnected, non-agent in the world
Fourth, If we prove a link to the K you can’t access this evidence – The point at
which desires aren’t being enacted, you cannot access the celebration of the
world you refer to.
A/T: Schell
First, this is the biggest link to our K on the flow – Schell is the (il)logical
conclusion of security gone mad. “A fraction of infinity is still infinity!” no
matter how unlikely it is something could go wrong, we need to hunt down and
erase it. This proves that the quest for total security is impossible – there will
always be another scenario even less likely to occur, but equally demanding of
our concern. Instead we should abandon that life-denying quest. That’s the
second Kuswa piece of evidence and Koppensteiner ‘09
Second, This card does not mention value to life once, do not give them the
impact turn claim.
Third, The quest for utility based on supposed scientific truth about the world is
utterly nihilistic—we need to wrestle with why we are on such a quest: we
assume Schell’s argument.
Saurette 96 We reject the gendered language(“'I Mistrust all Systematizers and Avoid Them': Nietzsche, Arendt and the Crisis of the
Will to Order in International Relations Theory”, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, Vol. 25 i. 1, March 1996 Paul)
The very logic of the Will to Order, 'Christian morality itself, the concept of truthfulness taken more and more strictly' ,56 leads to the dawn of
its self overcoming. Science is one of the latest phases of its [Will to Truth] evolution, one of its terminal forms and inner consequences-it is the
awe-inspiring catastrophe of two thousand years of training in truthfulness that finally forbids itself the lie involved in belief in God! 57 By
challenging the truthfulness of God, the scientific Will to Truth undermines the very dichotomy between the Real World and the Apparent
World. Science, however, is not an overcoming of the Will to Truth, but merely the most complete, empty, and nihilistic ascetic ideal. It refutes
'faith' but retains an unquestioned belief in itself. Although science claims to follow no authority, its 'unconditional will to truth is faith in the
ascetic ideal itself, even if as an unconscious imperative... it is the faith in a metaphysical value, the absolute value of truth' .58 The scientific
Will to Truth is both the most advanced and the most dangerous manifestation of the Will to Order/Truth, becausein spite of its disavowal of
the Christian dichotomised world, it retains a belief in Truth without attaching any value or meaning to existence .59 With the rise of science,
then, the sole virtue of the Christian Will to Truth/Order, the' faith in the dignity and uniqueness of man, in his irreplaceability in the great chain
of being, [becomes] a thing of the past. Man has become an animal, literally and without reservation or qualification'.6O The radical scepticism
of science is the 'suicidal nihilism' of the late-modern age, 'affirming as little as it denies'." It is the process by which all such 'transcendent'
grounds are dissolved in a corrosive scepticism: the true world becomes a fable. The central value of our culture-truth-drives us towards
ceaseless unmasking. The irony, as Tracy Strong observes, is that this discovery does not liberate us from the sense that we must have truth in
order to have meaning,that meaning is somehow inextricably tied to truth or the universal. We continue to search for what we know does not
exist, confirming our growing sense of meaninglessness; worse, we come to be at home in this exhaustion of meaning.62 Ironically, then,
Nietzsche suggests that it is precisely the nihilism of scientific faith which pushes man 'onto an inclined plane-now he is slipping faster and
faster away from the centre into-what? into nothingness? into a penetrating sense of nothingness' .63 The danger of the late-modern nihilistic
Will to Truth is that this reactive 'will to negation', while yearning for a truthful foundation, can only destroy and negate. Even anthropocentric
recreations of authoritative Truth, such asfaith in progress, utilitarian happiness-for-everyone, socialist utopias, or Kant's secularisedteleologies,
cannot survive the scrutiny of this nihilistic Will to Truth. As Michael Haar notes, [a]fter having killed God-i.e. after having recognized the
nothingness of the 'true world'-and after having placed himself where God once was, Man continues to be haunted by his iconoclastic act: he
cannot venerate himself, and soon ends up by turning his impiety against himself and smashing this new idol.64 The radical and
untemperedscepticism of scientific Will to Truth undermines the foundational meanings of the modern world and thus threatens modern life
with the prospect of unconditional nihilism.
Fourth, If we win the premise of our argument- then there is no extinction

scenario to prefer over the alternative.
Fifth, Risk is inherent – their fear of life robs them of everything worth living for.
This creates a negative Will to Powerwhich rejects the “bad” parts of life.
James Der Derian ‘93 We reject the gendered language professor of political science at the U Massachusetts-Amherst and prof of IR
at Brown 93"The political subject of violence" ed. David Campbell and Michael Dillon, p 101-105
Nietzsche and Interpretive Realism In the last analysis, "love of the neighbor" is always something secondary, partly conventional and arbitrary
—illusory in relation to fear of the neigh-bor. After the structure of society is fixed on the whole and seems secure against external dangers, it is
this fear of the neighbor that again creates new perspectives of moral valuation. —Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil Nietzsche
transvalues both Hobbcss and Marx's interpretations of securi-ty through a genealogy of modes of being. His method is not to uncover some
deep meaning or value for security, but to destabilize the intolerable fiaional identities of the past which have been created out of fear, and to
affirm the creative differences which might yield new values for the future.33 Originating in the paradoxical relationship of a contingent life and
a certain death, the history of security reads for Nietzsche as an abnegation, a resentment and, finally, a transcendence of this paradox. In brief,
the history is one of individuals seeking an impossible security from the most radical "other" of life, the terror of death which, once generalized
and nationalized, triggers a futile cycle of collective identities seeking security from alien others—who are seeking similarly impossible
guarantees. It is a story of differences taking on the otherness of death, and identities calcifying into a fearful sameness. Since Nietzsche has
suffered the greatest neglect in international theory, his reinterprctation of security will receive a more extensive treatment here. One must
begin with Nietzsche's idea of the will to power, which he clearly believed to be prior to and generative of all considerations of security. In
Beyond Good and Evil, he emphatically establishes the primacy of the will to power: "Physiologists should think before putting down the
instinct of self-preservation as the cardinal instinct of an organic being. A living thing seeks above all to discharge its strength— life itself is will
to power; self-preservation is only one of the most frequent results."34 The will to power, then, should not be confused with a Hobbesian
perpetual desire for power. It can, in its negative form, produce a reactive and resentful longing for only power, leading, in Nietzsche's view, to
a triumph of nihilism. But Nietzsche refers to a positive will to power, an active and affective force of becoming, from which values and
meanings—including self-preservation—are produced which affirm life. Conventions of security act to suppress rather than confront the fears
endemic to life, for "... life itself is essentially appropriation, injury, overpowering of what is alien and weaker; suppression, hardness,
imposition of ones own forms, incorporation and at least, at its mildest, exploitation—but why should one always use those words in which
slanderous intent has been imprinted for ages."35 Elsewhere Nietzsche establishes the pervasiveness of agonism in life: "life is a consequence
of war, society itself a means to war.” But the denial of this permanent condition, the effort to disguise it with a con-sensual rationality or to
hide from it with a fictional sovereignty, are all effects of this suppression of fear. The desire for security is manifested as a collective
resentment of difference—that which is not us, not certain, not predictable. Complicit with a negative will to power is the fear-driven desire for
protection from the unknown. Unlike the positive will to power, which produces an aesthetic affirmation of difference, the search for truth
produces a truncated life which conforms to the rationally knowable, to the causally sustainable. In The Gay Science, Nietzsche asks of the
reader "Look, isn't our need for knowledge precisely this need for the familiar, the will to uncover everything strange, unusual, and
questionable, something that no longer disturbs us? Is it not the instinct of fear that bids us to know? And is the jubilation of those who obtain
knowledge not the jubilation over the restora-tion of a sense of security?**37 The fear of the unknown and the desire for certainty combine to
produce a domesticated life, in which causality and rationality become the highest sign of a sovereign self, the surest protection against
contingent forces. The fear of fate assures a belief that everything reasonable is true, and everything true, reasonable. In short, the security
imperative pro-duces, and is sustained by, the strategies of knowledge which seek to explain it. Nietzsche elucidates the nature of this
generative relationship in The Twilight of the Idols-. The causal instinct is thus conditional upon, and excited by, the feeling of fear. The "why?*1
shall, if at all possible, not give the cause for its own sake so much as for a particular kind of cause—a cause (hat is comforting, liber-ating and
relieving. . . . That which is new and strange and has not been experienced before, is excluded as a cause. Thus one not only searches for some
kind of explanation, to serve as a cause, but tor a particularly selected and preferred kind of explanation—that which most quickly and
frequently abolished the feeling of the strange, new and hitherto unexperienced: the most habitual explanations.38 A safe life requires safe
truths. The strange and the alien remain unexamined, the unknown becomes identified as evil, and evil provokes hostility—recycling the desire
for security. The "influence of timidity," as Nietzsche puts it, creates a people who are willing to subordinate affirmative values to the
"necessities" of security: "they fear change, transitoriness: this expresses a straitened soul, full of mistrust and evil experiences."39 The
unknowable which cannot be contained by force or explained by reason is relegated to the off-world. "Trust," the "good," and other common
values come to rely upon an "artificial strength": "the feeling of security such as the Christian possesses; he feels strong in being able to trust, to
be patient and composed: he owes this artificial strength to the illusion of being protected by a god."40 For Nietzsche, of course, only a false
sense of security can come from false gods: "Morality and religion belong altogether to the psychology of error, in every single case, cause and
effect are confused; or truth is confused with the effects of believing something 10 be true; or a state of consciousness is confused with its »4l
causes. Nietzsche's interpretation of the origins of religion can shed some light on this paradoxical origin and transvaluation of security. In The
Gencalogy of Morals, Nietzsche sees religion arising from a sense of fear and indebtedness to ones ancestors: The conviction reigns that it is
only through the sacrifices and accomplish-ments of the ancestors that the tribe exists—and that one has to pay them back with sacrifices and
accomplishments: one thus recognizes a debt that constantly grows greater, since these forebears never cease, in their contin-ued existence as
powerful spirits, to accord the tribe new advantages and new strength/2 Sacrifices, honors, obedience arc given but it is never enough, for The
ancestors of the most powerful tribts are bound eventually to grow to monstrous dimensions through the imagination of growing fear and to
recede into the darkness of the divinely uncanny and unimaginable: in the end the ancestor must necessarily be transfigured into a god.4i As
the ancestors debt becomes embedded in institutions, the community takes on the role of creditor. Nietzsche mocks this originary, Hobbesian
moment: One lives in a community, one enjoys the advantages of communality (oh what advantages! we sometimes underrate them today),
one dwells protected, cared for, in peace and trustfulness, without fear of certain injuries and hostile acts to which the man outside, the "man
without peace," is exposed . . . since one has bound and pledged oneself to the community precisely with a view to injury and hostile acts.44
The establishment of the community is dependent upon, indeed it feeds upon, this fear of being left outside. As the castle wall is replaced by
written treaty, however, and distant gods by temporal sovereigns, the martial skills and spiritual virtues of the noble warrior are slowly debased
and dissimulated. The subject of the individual will to power becomes the object of a collective resentment . The result? The fear of the external
other is transvalued into the "love of the neighbor" quoted in the opening of this section, and the perpetuation of community is assured
through the internalization and legitimation of a fear that lost its original source long ago. This powerful nexus of fear, of external and internal
otherness, generates the values which uphold the security imperative. Indeed, Nietzsche locates the genealogy of even individual rights, such as
freedom, in the calculus of maintaining security: - My rights - are that pan of my power which others not merely conceded me, but which they
wish me to preserve. How do these others arrive at that? First: through their prudence and fear and caution: whether in that they expect
something similar from us in return (protection of their rights); or in that they consider that a struggle with us would be perilous or to no
purpose; or in that they sec in any diminution of our force a disadvantage to themselves, since we would then be unsuited to forming an
alliance with them in opposition to a hostile third power. Then: by donation and cession.45 The point of Nietzsche's critical genealogy is to show
that the perilous conditions that created the security imperative—and the western metaphysics that perpetuate it—have diminished if not
disappeared; yet, the fear of life persists: "Our century denies this perilousncss, and docs so with a good conscience: and yet it continues to
drag along with it the old habits of Christian security. Christian enjoyment, recreation and evaluation."46 Nietzsche's worry is that the collective
reaction against older, more primal fears has created an even worse danger the tyranny of the herd, the lowering of man, the apathy of the last
man which controls through conformity and rules through passivity. The security of the sovereign, rational self and state comes at the cost of
ambiguity, uncertainty, paradox—all that makes a free life worthwhile. Nietzsche's lament for this lost life is captured at the end of Daybreak in
a series of rhetorical questions: Of future virtues—How comes it that the more comprehensible the world has grown the more solemnities of
every kind have decreased? Is it that fear was so much the basic clement of that reverence which overcame us in the presence of everything
unknown and mysterious and taught us to fall down before the incomprehensible and plead tor mercy? And has the world not lost some of its
charm for us because we have grown less fearful? With the diminution of our fearrulness has our own dignity and solemnity, our own
fiarsomeness, not also diminished?47 It is of course in Nietzsche's lament, in his deepest pessimism for the last man, that one finds the
celebration of the overman as both symptom and harbinger of a more free-spirited yet fearsome age. Dismissive of Utopian engineering,
Nietzsche never suggests how he would restructure society; he looks forward only so far as to sight the emergence of "new philosophers" (such
as himself?) who would restore a reverence for fear and reevaluate the security imperative. Nietzsche does, however, go back to a pre-
Christian, pre-Socratic era to find the exemplars for a new kind of securi iv. In The Genealogy of Morals^ he holds up Pericles as an example, for
lauding the Athenians for their "rhatbymia"—a term that incorporates the notion of "indifference to and contempt for security."48 It is perhaps
too much to expect Nietzsche's message to resonate in late modern times, to expect, at the very time when conditions seem most uncertain
and unpredictable, that people would treat fear as a stimulus for improvement rather than cause for retrenchment. Yet Nietzsche would clearly
see these as opportune times, when fear could be willfully asserted as a force for the affirmation of difference , rather than canalized into a
cautious identity constructed from the calculation of risks and benefits.
Sixth, Ultimately, these lies cause people to stop seeing themselves as subjects
but rather objects of outside influences, creating microfascism as people desire
an outside influence to shape their decisions. – That’s Ballantyne 7
A/T: Spivak
First, Spivak argues that the subject is compromised by itsrelation to
colonialism, which acts in essentialist ways. The alternative sets about trying
to"save" the subject in a typical aesthetic gesture. Thissneaking-in-the-subject-
through-the-back-door type ofactivity is precisely what she has accused Deleuze
and Guattari of doing – This turns the K
Second, Not only does her whole analysis rest on the ideas ofthe subject DnG
develops is constituted in the shifting of relations, but theygo much further than
she does in leaving the subject behind, de-centering thought from the subject
altogether, allowing a constituent flow of being to emerge – This is accessed by
Kuswa evidence – Lines of flight act as a constant point to shift our subject so
that it’s not the stagnant body she criticizes.
Third, No link and link turn – Deleuze’s subject is molecular and fragmented –
This is the opposite of what Spivak critiques and its able to be used creatively to
solve the stagnant, essentialist conceptions of subjects – Spivak’s views are as
essentialists as Deleuze’s – Turns the K – AND – She has no warrants to back up
her criticism
Robinson ’04 (Andrew, Wrote for Ceasefire, writes for several critical theory blogs and publications, political theorist, Theory and
Events writer, “SPIVAK Critique”, http://andyrobinsontheoryblog.blogspot.com/2004/11/spivak-critique.html, JCook.) Accessed 8/25/12.
Spivak evades the need to provide evidence for a string of basic

In this way,
theoretical positions around which she is in dispute with others. Indeed, she tends to reproduce the
entire logic of Althusserian "symptomatic reading", which rests on the theorist
having an ontologically-privileged access to the whole Truth so as to be able to
diagnose the "ideological" character of opposing views by exposing what is
missing from them. So she claims to be able to point out what a work or tradition
can't or won't say. Also, her attack on Foucault and Deleuze for 'privileging the subject'
and 'subjective essentialism' and her criticism of 'fetishizing the concrete' implies a commitment to
an Althusserian anti-humanist methodology involving a fetishism of the
symbolic system, as if this is an external "material" structure which is
unaffected by speech-acts and which cannot be deconstructed or used
creatively. (Deleuze's "subject" is molecular and therefore fragmented, and not
at all the subject of Spivak's account. Presumably, therefore, Spivak believes that any idea
that something within human beings can exceed and challenge the status quo is
"essentialist"; though she never explains why her Lacanian view of the social system
is less "essentialist"). Belief in the subject is supposed to reproduce the social
relations of production, although Spivak does not provide any support for this
unlikely claim. (Surely capitalism is about objectifying workers, not subjectifying; and what of slavery?!). Hence, she
exaggerates the role of existing, especially formal, symbolic systems in constructing
identity and enabling or limiting speech; for instance, she claims that everything is representation. She also
exaggerates the role of theory; Foucault and Deleuze express a vague agent called an "episteme" which "operates its silent programming
function" on "the general nonspecialist, nonacademic population". ¶
Fourth, Lack Turn – The thesis of her criticism is based on a closed, all
encompassing system of lack – We solve the thesis of her criticism by providing
a system which is open – Our lines of flight specifically solves best
Where this Althusserianism is Lacanianised is on the subject of "constitutive

lack". "These philosophers will not entertain the thought of constitutive contradiction - that is where they admittedly part company with
the Left" (274). Contrary to Spivak's assertion here, this is not a left idea (Marxian contradiction is Hegelian, not constitutive) but a
Lacanian one. Indeed, she mystifies this mystified formula still further by suggesting it
operates, not only in individual psyches, but collectively, through "our archaic past". She links this to
the concept of "interest", i.e. "interest" marks the point where lack is inscribed in the subject.
It is unclear what relationship this libidinal concept of "interest" has to the more usual economic meaning which occurs elsewhere in Spivak's
essay. Perhaps she has picked up the bad habit, again common among Lacanians, of treating different senses of the same word as if they
express some kind of unconscious unity. She specifically supports "a politically interested refusal to
push to the limit the founding presuppositions of my desires", i.e. conceives politics as ideology
(in the Situationist sense of the term). Also, the confusion of external others with "the interior
voice that is the voice of the other in us" as a single "desiring subject as Other" -
as if people are nothing but little bits of each other's psyches - is Lacanian. Most crucially, she seems to oppose the
openness of theories such as those of Deleuze and Foucault, who leave space for
resistance and "lines of flight", insisting instead that the system is a total trap
which can actually go as far as to foreclose the possibility of subaltern
collectivities emerging.
Fifth, No link – Spivak’s criticism of Deleuze is only about one small text – We
don’t read anything from this text, nor do we gain theory from it – AND – Link
turn – The subaltern speaks in Deleuze’s work
Spivak's reading of Deleuze and Foucault is selective, reading sweeping problems into
their work on the basis of one short article. She ignores other relevant material,
such as Deleuze's discussion of shamanism in Anti-Oedipus. She also does not consider whether
Foucault's method could in principle be applied to colonial systems. Her argument seems to be that Foucault and
Deleuze write mainly about the west, therefore they must be ignorant (or in denial)
about the "Other of Europe", therefore they must implicitly express a "Subject
of the West". (This argument could be repeated in relation to any particular

group which is not explicitly mentioned in a particular article). This is then backed by various
appeals to her own views, usually with no supporting evidence or arguments. For instance: she simply asserts that it is
surreptitiously oppressive to allow others to speak. Similarly, Foucault is supposed to have "helped
positivist empiricism" and is "uncritical about the historical role of the intellectual". She does not mention his detailed critiques of the "human
sciences". (Perhaps it is the fact that Foucault does not extend his critique of particular intellectual discourses to a critique of "the intellectual"
treated as a mythical and ahistorical abstraction which is Spivak's problem here?).
Sixth, Your reading of this criticism proves uniqueness – We control the

direction of the link – Obviously the subaltern can speak
Spivak asks, "can the subaltern speak?" and her answer is "no". However, unlike
Guha she doesn't really seem interested in how "the subaltern" tries to speak.
Instead, she analyses dominant discourses and shows how they construct
subaltern people as voiceless. This leads her away from evidence and into a
discourse analysis focussed solely on dominant groups. For example: "The question is not of female
participation in insurgency, or the ground rules of the sexual division of labour, for both of which there is 'evidence'. It is, rather, that, both as
object of colonialist historiography and as subject of insurgency, the ideological construction of gender keeps the male dominant". "The
institutional evilsattendant upon this law are well known; I am considering its asymmetrical effect on the ideological formation of the sexed
subject". Regarding feminism: "One never encounters the testimony of the women's voice-consciousness" (a paradoxical criticism since she
criticises the idea of authentic voice when attacking Foucault). . Interpreting such phrases is difficult because Spivak does not define key
concepts in her work (is "ideology" merely symbolic or also practical?) and her over-reliance on passive voice, but she seems to think that,
This ignores the difficulty involved in
because male linguistic texts define women as voiceless, therefore they are.
imposing any particular dominant text: it is subject both to refusal and to

deconstructive readings by "subaltern" people themselves. The Israelis
construct the Palestinians as subordinate but this does not prevent Palestinian
resistance. People do not necessarily become what dominant legal and symbolic systems say they are. Dominant social systems are
often reduced to apparatuses hovering above everyday life, and their actuality when it exists is mostly a result of physical violence. It is not
possible to draw conclusions about the identity of "the subaltern" from a discussion of the discourse of colonisers and elites. The position of her
. She claims to be "a postcolonial woman" and also claims
own discourse in her theory is unclear
that postcolonial women cannot speak due to being interpellated as voiceless

by male and colonial power. However, here she is "speaking" (or rather,
writing).
Pre-Prepped 1NCs for Affirmatives

DNG Capitalism K

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Deleuze & Guattari Capitalism K

accumulation process attempts a qualitative transformation of nature,

surface in which space is abstracted from geophysical reality. As

celebrated by Foucault has become a neoliberal dystopia. The

a romantic space of resistance; it has been tamed. Sekula and Burch’s

of the sea that is frequently found in narratives of globalization,

First, There is no bare canvas. All art has underlying thoughts,

This Tourist map with its suggestion of perspective is reminiscent of

enticing, clear, manageable ensemble. This ensemble negates the

First, Questions of class always fail for it operates as a molar

capitalism inside socialism itself, any more than it prevented classical

knowing whether or not class consciousness, embodied in a party or

spontaneity: whence the necessity for distinguishing "groups-in-

The problem is in a prior valuation about life, about

We have to know and feel for something

The death that the 1AC fetishizes is a negation of life. Their

The affirmative’s concept of death holds no relation to actual death; it

as much as reflection on the when and

where of an actual death can induce paralysis and despair when

This adventure is “ceaseless”

because the potential is not extinguished when a particular actual

Mirroring this ceaselessness and multiplicity, questions

persist because each time they are answered in a particular death as

First, Democracy is a guise for despotism. It is cold and calculated

State, the despotic agency of overcoding and transcendence.A single example

realized...only as an abstraction. It assumes its immanent concrete

other axioms, notably those concerning the security of property,

century social -welfare biopolitics 1 that derived wealth from laboring

digitalized representations enabling wealth accumulation. In concluding, this

The flow of wealth is infused with speed and becomes a centrifuge

wealth has moved centripetally toward elite centers within and

across nations as a result of de-regulation, corporate and government

First, Gay desire has been commodified by capitalism and the

, the focus is placed on the micro-politics of desire . Critical of the

Second, Identity does not exist, it is a violent attempt at centering a

professor of philology, who suddenly loses his mind and supposedly

various historical personages, but rather identifying the names of

involved in history as the schizo, or dealt with it in this way. He

First, Heidegger is wrong about enframing. We have to understand it

The highway is the embodiment of capitalism, codifying and

Narratives of progress and utopian futures surrounding contruction

The imagined future represented in such

ephemera suggests a longing for a perfect, utopian future

of America's reluctance to be involved in the rapidly escalating war in

Infrastructure networks play a crucial role in the construction of the

procedures. The change in the nature of connections due to technological

undoubtedly perform an important role in such a shift by activating

The activation of a multiplicity

of institutional and non-institutional actors (agencies, enterprises, etc.) responsible

The infrastructure builds the territory by

enabling communication, transport and relationships to take place. It

motorways and information and communications technologies,

the construction of new infrastructure

lines implies environmental degradation , because they affect delicate

do not necessarily suffer directly from the drawbacks of a specific

networks create interdependencies among places, and ‘these places

that places, regardless of their reciprocal distance, form a territory on

become relative because connections depend on the nature of the

Traditional networks tend to be made obsolete by the introduction of

any case difficult to forecast, owing to the complexity of the cause–

First, Democracy by its essence conflicts with minoritarian politics.

compromised by, dictatorial States, that the defense of human rights

rigid,andthey obstruct or repel “the becoming [which] is by its nature