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Capitalism Kritik TOC \o "1-9" \h \z \t "Hat,1,Block Title,2" Capitalism Kritik PAGEREF _Toc172273236 \h 1***SHELL*** PAGEREF _Toc172273237 \h 61nc (Short) PAGEREF _Toc172273238 \h 71nc (Short) PAGEREF _Toc172273239 \h 91nc (Long) PAGEREF _Toc172273240 \h 111nc (Long) PAGEREF _Toc172273241 \h 131nc (Long) PAGEREF _Toc172273242 \h 141nc (Long) PAGEREF _Toc172273243 \h 151nc (Long) PAGEREF _Toc172273244 \h 161nc (Long) PAGEREF _Toc172273245 \h 17***GENERIC LINKS*** PAGEREF _Toc172273246 \h 20Link: Fiat/Demands on State PAGEREF _Toc172273247 \h 21Link: Demands on the State PAGEREF _Toc172273248 \h 22Link: Demands on the State PAGEREF _Toc172273249 \h 24Link: Single Issues/Reforms PAGEREF _Toc172273250 \h 25Link: Particular Demands PAGEREF _Toc172273251 \h 26Link: Reforms PAGEREF _Toc172273252 \h 29Link: Reforms PAGEREF _Toc172273253 \h 30Link: Reforms PAGEREF _Toc172273254 \h 31***TOPIC LINKS*** PAGEREF _Toc172273255 \h 32Link: Space Exploration/Development PAGEREF _Toc172273256 \h 33Link: Space Exploration/Development PAGEREF _Toc172273257 \h 34Link: Space Exploration/Development- Imaginary Exodus PAGEREF _Toc172273258 \h 35Link: Space Exploration/Development PAGEREF _Toc172273259 \h 36Link: Space Exploration/Development- Tradeoff PAGEREF _Toc172273260 \h 37Link: Space Exploration/Development- Tradeoff PAGEREF _Toc172273261 \h 38Link: Space Exploration/Development- Spinoffs PAGEREF _Toc172273262 \h 39Link: Space Exploration/Development- ‘Outer Spatial Fix’ PAGEREF _Toc172273263 \h 40Link: Space Exploration/Development- ‘Outer Spatial Fix’ PAGEREF _Toc172273264 \h 41Link: Space Exploration/Development- Underconsumption PAGEREF _Toc172273265 \h 42Link: Space Exploration [AT: Our project isn’t productive/profitable] PAGEREF _Toc172273266 \h 43Link: Space Development- Resources PAGEREF _Toc172273267 \h 44Link: Space Development- Resources PAGEREF _Toc172273268 \h 45Link: Alien Threat PAGEREF _Toc172273269 \h 46Link: Astronomy, SETI, Asteroid Detection, R and D PAGEREF _Toc172273270 \h 47Link: Asteroid Defense PAGEREF _Toc172273271 \h 48Link: Asteroid Impacts/Colonization PAGEREF _Toc172273272 \h 49Link: Colonization/Terraforming/Asteroid Mining (Zubrin) PAGEREF _Toc172273273 \h 51Link: Colonization PAGEREF _Toc172273274 \h 52Link: Energy PAGEREF _Toc172273275 \h 54Link: “Frontier” PAGEREF _Toc172273276 \h 55Link: Landsats PAGEREF _Toc172273277 \h 56Link: Mars (Zubrin) PAGEREF _Toc172273278 \h 57Link: Mars-Terraforming PAGEREF _Toc172273279 \h 58Link: Mars-Terraforming PAGEREF _Toc172273280 \h 59Link: Mars PAGEREF _Toc172273281 \h 61Link: NASA PAGEREF _Toc172273282 \h 62Link: NASA PAGEREF _Toc172273283 \h 63Link: OST PAGEREF _Toc172273284 \h 64Link: Privatization PAGEREF _Toc172273285 \h 65Link: Privatization PAGEREF _Toc172273286 \h 66Link: Property Rights (OST Aff) PAGEREF _Toc172273287 \h 67Link: Property Rights PAGEREF _Toc172273288 \h 68Link: Property Rights/Libertarians in Space PAGEREF _Toc172273289 \h 69Link: Property Rights/Libertarianism PAGEREF _Toc172273290 \h 70Link: Satellites PAGEREF _Toc172273291 \h 71Link: Satellites PAGEREF _Toc172273292 \h 72Link: Satellites PAGEREF _Toc172273293 \h 73Link: Satellites PAGEREF _Toc172273294 \h 74Link: Science PAGEREF _Toc172273295 \h 75Link: Science Education PAGEREF _Toc172273296 \h 76Link: Scientific Expertism PAGEREF _Toc172273297 \h 77Link: SPS PAGEREF _Toc172273298 \h 78Link: SPS PAGEREF _Toc172273299 \h 79Link: Space Elevator PAGEREF _Toc172273300 \h 80Link: Space Leadership (Dolman) PAGEREF _Toc172273301 \h 81Link: Space Militarization PAGEREF _Toc172273302 \h 82Link: Space Militarization PAGEREF _Toc172273303 \h 83Link: Space Militarization PAGEREF _Toc172273304 \h 84Link: Space Militarization PAGEREF _Toc172273305 \h 85Link: Space Tourism PAGEREF _Toc172273306 \h 86Link: Space Weaponization/ASATs PAGEREF _Toc172273307 \h 87***ADVANTAGE/IMPACT AREA LINKS*** PAGEREF _Toc172273308 \h 88Link: Dedev PAGEREF _Toc172273309 \h 89Link: Democracy PAGEREF _Toc172273310 \h 90Link: Democracy Promotion PAGEREF _Toc172273311 \h 91Link: Economy PAGEREF _Toc172273312 \h 92Link: Energy PAGEREF _Toc172273313 \h 93Link: Environment PAGEREF _Toc172273314 \h 94Link: Hegemony PAGEREF _Toc172273315 \h 95Link: Hegemony PAGEREF _Toc172273316 \h 96Link: Hegemony PAGEREF _Toc172273317 \h 97Link: Hegemony PAGEREF _Toc172273318 \h 98Link: Human Rights PAGEREF _Toc172273319 \h 99Link: Human Rights PAGEREF _Toc172273320 \h 100Link: Nuclear War Impacts PAGEREF _Toc172273321 \h 101Link: Nuclear War Impacts PAGEREF _Toc172273322 \h 102Link: Population/Malthus PAGEREF _Toc172273323 \h 103Link: Prolif PAGEREF _Toc172273324 \h 104Link: Rights PAGEREF _Toc172273325 \h 106Link: Soft Power PAGEREF _Toc172273326 \h 107Link: Trade PAGEREF _Toc172273327 \h 108Link: WOT PAGEREF _Toc172273328 \h 109Link: WOT PAGEREF _Toc172273329 \h 110Link: WOT PAGEREF _Toc172273330 \h 112***LINKS- ID POLITICS*** PAGEREF _Toc172273331 \h 113Link: ID Politics PAGEREF _Toc172273332 \h 114Link: ID Politics PAGEREF _Toc172273333 \h 115Link: Social Movements (Race, Gender, Sex O) PAGEREF _Toc172273334 \h 116Link: Social Movements (Race, Gender, Sex O) PAGEREF _Toc172273335 \h 117Link: Gender PAGEREF _Toc172273336 \h 118Link: Experience/Standpoint Epistemology PAGEREF _Toc172273337 \h 119Link: Race PAGEREF _Toc172273338 \h 120Link: Race PAGEREF _Toc172273339 \h 121Link: Race PAGEREF _Toc172273340 \h 122Link: Race (Memmi Impact) PAGEREF _Toc172273341 \h 123Link: Race (AT: Reductionism) PAGEREF _Toc172273342 \h 124Link: bell hooks PAGEREF _Toc172273343 \h 125Cap First: Race/Gender/Sex O PAGEREF _Toc172273344 \h 126Cap First: Race/Gender PAGEREF _Toc172273345 \h 127Cap First: Race/Gender PAGEREF _Toc172273346 \h 129Cap First: Race/Gender PAGEREF _Toc172273347 \h 130Cap First: Race PAGEREF _Toc172273348 \h 131Cap First: Gender PAGEREF _Toc172273349 \h 132Cap First: Gender PAGEREF _Toc172273350 \h 133Cap First- Coalitions PAGEREF _Toc172273351 \h 134Cap First- Coalitions PAGEREF _Toc172273352 \h 136***IMPACTS*** PAGEREF _Toc172273353 \h 137Impact Turn Filter: Cap Non-Generalizable PAGEREF _Toc172273354 \h 138Impact Turn Filter: Conjunctural vs. Structural PAGEREF _Toc172273355 \h 139Impact Turn Filter: 5/6 Can’t produce Capital PAGEREF _Toc172273356 \h 141Cap Unsustainable/Collapse Now PAGEREF _Toc172273357 \h 143Cap Unsustainable/Collapse Inevitable PAGEREF _Toc172273358 \h 144Cap Unsustainable/Collapse Now PAGEREF _Toc172273359 \h 145Cap Unsustainable/Collapse Now PAGEREF _Toc172273360 \h 146Cap Unsustainable/Collapse Now PAGEREF _Toc172273361 \h 147Cap Root Cause: Laundry List PAGEREF _Toc172273362 \h 148Impact Calculus PAGEREF _Toc172273363 \h 149***SPACE IMPACTS*** PAGEREF _Toc172273364 \h 150Turns Case PAGEREF _Toc172273365 \h 151Turns Case PAGEREF _Toc172273366 \h 152Impact: Space Militarization PAGEREF _Toc172273367 \h 153Impact: Space Militarization PAGEREF _Toc172273368 \h 154Impact: Space War/Earth Tradeoff PAGEREF _Toc172273369 \h 156Impact: Space War PAGEREF _Toc172273370 \h 157Impact: US-Sino Space Conflict PAGEREF _Toc172273371 \h 158***GENERIC IMPACTS*** PAGEREF _Toc172273372 \h 159Impact: Disease PAGEREF _Toc172273373 \h 160Impact: Disease PAGEREF _Toc172273374 \h 161Impact: Disease PAGEREF _Toc172273375 \h 162Impact: Disease PAGEREF _Toc172273376 \h 163Impact: Disease PAGEREF _Toc172273377 \h 164Impact: Disease PAGEREF _Toc172273378 \h 165Impact: Disease PAGEREF _Toc172273379 \h 166Impact: Economic Crises PAGEREF _Toc172273380 \h 167Impact: Economic Crises PAGEREF _Toc172273381 \h 168Impact: Environment PAGEREF _Toc172273382 \h 169Impact: Environment PAGEREF _Toc172273383 \h 170Impact: Environment PAGEREF _Toc172273384 \h 171Impact: Environment PAGEREF _Toc172273385 \h 172Impact: Environment- Root Cause PAGEREF _Toc172273386 \h 174Impact: Environment- Root Cause PAGEREF _Toc172273387 \h 175Impact: Environment (AT: Sustainable Growth) PAGEREF _Toc172273388 \h 176Impact: Environment- Warming, Species PAGEREF _Toc172273389 \h 177Impact: Environment- Warming PAGEREF _Toc172273390 \h 178Impact: Environment- Laundry List PAGEREF _Toc172273391 \h 179Impact: Environment- Laundry List PAGEREF _Toc172273392 \h 180Impact: Ethics PAGEREF _Toc172273393 \h 182Impact: Genocide PAGEREF _Toc172273394 \h 183Impact: Genocide PAGEREF _Toc172273395 \h 184Impact: Heg/Imperialism PAGEREF _Toc172273396 \h 185Impact: Heg/Imperialism PAGEREF _Toc172273397 \h 187Impact: Heg/Imperialism PAGEREF _Toc172273398 \h 188Impact: Heg/Imperialism PAGEREF _Toc172273399 \h 189Impact: Heg/Imperialism (AT: Ferguson) PAGEREF _Toc172273400 \h 190Impact: Militarism PAGEREF _Toc172273401 \h 191Impact: Nuclear War PAGEREF _Toc172273402 \h 192Impact: Nuclear War PAGEREF _Toc172273403 \h 193Impact: Nuclear War PAGEREF _Toc172273404 \h 194Impact: Structural Poverty/Ethics PAGEREF _Toc172273405 \h 195Impact: Trade Wars PAGEREF _Toc172273406 \h 196Impact: VTL PAGEREF _Toc172273407 \h 197Impact: VTL PAGEREF _Toc172273408 \h 198Impact: War PAGEREF _Toc172273409 \h 199Impact: Warming and War PAGEREF _Toc172273410 \h 200***FRAMEWORK/ALT*** PAGEREF _Toc172273411 \h 201Herod Alt PAGEREF _Toc172273412 \h 202Meszaros Alt PAGEREF _Toc172273413 \h 204Rejection Solves PAGEREF _Toc172273414 \h 207AT: Framework PAGEREF _Toc172273415 \h 208AT: Framework PAGEREF _Toc172273416 \h 210AT: Framework/Reforms Good PAGEREF _Toc172273417 \h 211Framework is a Link PAGEREF _Toc172273418 \h 213Now Key/Revolution Possible PAGEREF _Toc172273419 \h 214Alt Solvency: Space Militarization PAGEREF _Toc172273420 \h 215***AT’s*** PAGEREF _Toc172273421 \h 216Bias / AT:Qualifications PAGEREF _Toc172273422 \h 217AT: Capitalism in Space Inevitable PAGEREF _Toc172273423 \h 219AT: Cap Inevitable PAGEREF _Toc172273424 \h 220AT: Cap Inevitable PAGEREF _Toc172273425 \h 221AT: Cap key to Democracy PAGEREF _Toc172273426 \h 222AT: Cap key to Democracy PAGEREF _Toc172273427 \h 223AT: Cap key to Tech PAGEREF _Toc172273428 \h 224AT: Cap key to Tech PAGEREF _Toc172273429 \h 225AT: Cap key to Tech PAGEREF _Toc172273430 \h 226AT: Cap key to Tech PAGEREF _Toc172273431 \h 227AT: Cap key to Tech PAGEREF _Toc172273432 \h 228AT: Cap key to Tech PAGEREF _Toc172273433 \h 229AT: Coalitions/Krishna PAGEREF _Toc172273434 \h 230AT: Gibson-Graham PAGEREF _Toc172273435 \h 231AT: Gibson Graham PAGEREF _Toc172273436 \h 232AT: Gibson-Graham PAGEREF _Toc172273437 \h 233AT: Gibson-Graham PAGEREF _Toc172273438 \h 234AT: No Alternative PAGEREF _Toc172273439 \h 235AT: No Alternative PAGEREF _Toc172273440 \h 236AT: No Alternative PAGEREF _Toc172273441 \h 237AT: No Alternative PAGEREF _Toc172273442 \h 238AT: No Alternative PAGEREF _Toc172273443 \h 239AT: Non-Falsifiable PAGEREF _Toc172273444 \h 240AT: Non-Violence PAGEREF _Toc172273445 \h 241AT: Non-Violence PAGEREF _Toc172273446 \h 242AT: Overview Effect PAGEREF _Toc172273447 \h 243AT: Perm- Holloway PAGEREF _Toc172273448 \h 244AT: Perm- Hydra PAGEREF _Toc172273449 \h 246AT: Perm- No Third Way PAGEREF _Toc172273450 \h 247AT: Perm- Do Nothing PAGEREF _Toc172273451 \h 248AT: Perm- Civility PAGEREF _Toc172273452 \h 249AT: Perm- No Partial Corrections PAGEREF _Toc172273453 \h 250AT: Perm- Interpassivity PAGEREF _Toc172273454 \h 252AT: Reductionism PAGEREF _Toc172273455 \h 253AT: Reforms Good PAGEREF _Toc172273456 \h 254AT: Space Solves Capitalism’s Problems PAGEREF _Toc172273457 \h 255AT: Space Solves Resource Scarcity PAGEREF _Toc172273458 \h 256AT: Space Solves Resources PAGEREF _Toc172273459 \h 257AT: State checks Cap PAGEREF _Toc172273460 \h 258AT: State checks Cap PAGEREF _Toc172273461 \h 259AT: State key to Solve Global Problems PAGEREF _Toc172273462 \h 260AT: Teleological PAGEREF _Toc172273463 \h 261AT: Totalitarianism PAGEREF _Toc172273464 \h 263AT: Totalitarianism/Stalin! PAGEREF _Toc172273465 \h 264AT: Transition Wars PAGEREF _Toc172273466 \h 265AT: Transition Wars PAGEREF _Toc172273467 \h 267AT: Util PAGEREF _Toc172273468 \h 268AT: Util PAGEREF _Toc172273469 \h 269***CAP VS. OTHER KRITIKS*** PAGEREF _Toc172273470 \h 2701nc Link: K Authors [Pomo, Derrida, Foucault, Baudrillard, Deleuze, Heidegger, Rorty, Adorno, Lyotard] PAGEREF _Toc172273471 \h 271Link: Postmodernism PAGEREF _Toc172273472 \h 273Link: Postmodernism PAGEREF _Toc172273473 \h 274Link: Postmodernism PAGEREF _Toc172273474 \h 275Link: Postmodernism PAGEREF _Toc172273475 \h 276Link: Badiou PAGEREF _Toc172273476 \h 277Link: Badiou PAGEREF _Toc172273477 \h 278Link: Badiou PAGEREF _Toc172273478 \h 279Link: Badiou PAGEREF _Toc172273479 \h 280Link: Badiou PAGEREF _Toc172273480 \h 281Link: Badiou PAGEREF _Toc172273481 \h 282Link: Badiou PAGEREF _Toc172273482 \h 284Link: Badiou PAGEREF _Toc172273483 \h 285Link: Bataille PAGEREF _Toc172273484 \h 286Link: Baudrillard PAGEREF _Toc172273485 \h 287Link: Baudrillard PAGEREF _Toc172273486 \h 288Link: Baudrillard PAGEREF _Toc172273487 \h 289Link: Bhabha PAGEREF _Toc172273488 \h 290Link: Chow PAGEREF _Toc172273489 \h 292Link: Deep Ecology/K of Anthropocentrism PAGEREF _Toc172273490 \h 293Link: Deleuze & Guatarri PAGEREF _Toc172273491 \h 294Link: Derrida PAGEREF _Toc172273492 \h 295Link: Derrida PAGEREF _Toc172273493 \h 296Link: Derrida PAGEREF _Toc172273494 \h 297Link: Derrida PAGEREF _Toc172273495 \h 298Link: Foucault PAGEREF _Toc172273496 \h 299Impact: Cap key to Biopower PAGEREF _Toc172273497 \h 300Alt Solves Disciplinary Power PAGEREF _Toc172273498 \h 301Link: Giroux PAGEREF _Toc172273499 \h 302Link: Hardt and Negri PAGEREF _Toc172273500 \h 304Link: Heidegger/Ontology Focus PAGEREF _Toc172273501 \h 305Link: Heidegger/Ontology Focus PAGEREF _Toc172273502 \h 306Link: Heidegger PAGEREF _Toc172273503 \h 307Link: Heidegger/K of Science PAGEREF _Toc172273504 \h 308Link: Heidegger- Cap Root Cause of Instrumental Rationality PAGEREF _Toc172273505 \h 309Alt Solves Technological Thought PAGEREF _Toc172273506 \h 310Link: Laclau and Mouffe PAGEREF _Toc172273507 \h 311Link: Virilio PAGEREF _Toc172273508 \h 312Link: ?i?ek PAGEREF _Toc172273509 \h 313Link: ?i?ek PAGEREF _Toc172273510 \h 315Link: ?i?ek PAGEREF _Toc172273511 \h 316Link: ?i?ek PAGEREF _Toc172273512 \h 318Link: ?i?ek PAGEREF _Toc172273513 \h 319Link: ?i?ek PAGEREF _Toc172273514 \h 320Alt Solvency: Historical Materialism Good PAGEREF _Toc172273515 \h 321Alt Solvency: Critical Theory > Postmodernism PAGEREF _Toc172273516 \h 323***AFF*** PAGEREF _Toc172273517 \h 324***LINK ANSWERS*** PAGEREF _Toc172273518 \h 325No Link: Space PAGEREF _Toc172273519 \h 326AT: Earth Tradeoff PAGEREF _Toc172273520 \h 327No Link: Landsats Aff PAGEREF _Toc172273521 \h 328Space Changes Everything PAGEREF _Toc172273522 \h 329Space Changes Everything PAGEREF _Toc172273523 \h 330Space Changes Everything PAGEREF _Toc172273524 \h 331Space Changes Everything PAGEREF _Toc172273525 \h 332State Checks Cap PAGEREF _Toc172273526 \h 333***ALT ANSWERS*** PAGEREF _Toc172273527 \h 334Perm Solves PAGEREF _Toc172273528 \h 335Perm Solves PAGEREF _Toc172273529 \h 337Capitalism Inevitable PAGEREF _Toc172273530 \h 338Capitalism Inevitable PAGEREF _Toc172273531 \h 339No Alt PAGEREF _Toc172273532 \h 340No Alt PAGEREF _Toc172273533 \h 341No Alt PAGEREF _Toc172273534 \h 342Alt = Toto PAGEREF _Toc172273535 \h 343Alt = Transition Wars PAGEREF _Toc172273536 \h 344Alt = Transition Wars PAGEREF _Toc172273537 \h 345Alt = Transition Wars PAGEREF _Toc172273538 \h 346Alt Decreases Growth PAGEREF _Toc172273539 \h 347Gibson-Graham PAGEREF _Toc172273540 \h 348Gibson-Graham PAGEREF _Toc172273541 \h 349Gibson-Graham PAGEREF _Toc172273542 \h 350Gibson-Graham PAGEREF _Toc172273543 \h 351AT: Dickens and Ormrod- No Alt PAGEREF _Toc172273544 \h 352AT: Dickens and Ormrod- No Alt PAGEREF _Toc172273545 \h 353AT: Dickens and Ormrod-Alt = Toto PAGEREF _Toc172273546 \h 354AT: Dickens and Ormrod- Alt = Tyranny PAGEREF _Toc172273547 \h 355AT: Dickens and Ormrod- Psychoanalysis Bad PAGEREF _Toc172273548 \h 356AT: Dickens and Ormrod-Psychoanalysis Bad PAGEREF _Toc172273549 \h 357***IMPACT ANSWERS*** PAGEREF _Toc172273550 \h 358AT: Cap Turns Case PAGEREF _Toc172273551 \h 359Cap Sustainable PAGEREF _Toc172273552 \h 360Democracy Checks Negative Impacts of Cap PAGEREF _Toc172273553 \h 361Space Cap Good: Poverty PAGEREF _Toc172273554 \h 362Space Cap Good: War PAGEREF _Toc172273555 \h 363AT: Space Resources Limited PAGEREF _Toc172273556 \h 364Cap Good: General PAGEREF _Toc172273557 \h 365Cap Good: General PAGEREF _Toc172273558 \h 366Cap Good: General PAGEREF _Toc172273559 \h 367Cap Good: General PAGEREF _Toc172273560 \h 368Cap Good: Competitiveness PAGEREF _Toc172273561 \h 369Cap Good: Competitiveness PAGEREF _Toc172273562 \h 370Cap Good: Competitiveness PAGEREF _Toc172273563 \h 371Cap Good: Democracy PAGEREF _Toc172273564 \h 372Cap Good: Democracy PAGEREF _Toc172273565 \h 373Cap Good: Democracy PAGEREF _Toc172273566 \h 374Cap Good: Democracy PAGEREF _Toc172273567 \h 375Cap Good: Disease PAGEREF _Toc172273568 \h 376Cap Good: Economy PAGEREF _Toc172273569 \h 377Cap Good: Economy PAGEREF _Toc172273570 \h 378Cap Good: Economy PAGEREF _Toc172273571 \h 379Cap Good: Environment PAGEREF _Toc172273572 \h 380Cap Good: Environment PAGEREF _Toc172273573 \h 382Cap Good: Environment PAGEREF _Toc172273574 \h 383Cap Good: Environment PAGEREF _Toc172273575 \h 384Cap Good: Environment PAGEREF _Toc172273576 \h 385Cap Good: Ethics PAGEREF _Toc172273577 \h 386Cap Good: Food Production PAGEREF _Toc172273578 \h 387Cap Good: Freedom PAGEREF _Toc172273579 \h 388Cap Good: Freedom PAGEREF _Toc172273580 \h 389Cap Good: Freedom PAGEREF _Toc172273581 \h 390Cap Good: Innovation PAGEREF _Toc172273582 \h 391Cap Good: Poverty PAGEREF _Toc172273583 \h 392Cap Good: Poverty PAGEREF _Toc172273584 \h 393Cap Good: Quality of Life PAGEREF _Toc172273585 \h 394Cap Good: Racism/Sexism PAGEREF _Toc172273586 \h 395Cap Good: Social Justice PAGEREF _Toc172273587 \h 396Cap Good: Space PAGEREF _Toc172273588 \h 397Cap Good: Space PAGEREF _Toc172273589 \h 398Cap Good: Space PAGEREF _Toc172273590 \h 399Cap Good: Space PAGEREF _Toc172273591 \h 400Cap Good: Tech PAGEREF _Toc172273592 \h 401Cap Good: War PAGEREF _Toc172273593 \h 402Cap Good: War PAGEREF _Toc172273594 \h 403Cap Good: War PAGEREF _Toc172273595 \h 404Cap Good: Water PAGEREF _Toc172273596 \h 405AT: Inequality PAGEREF _Toc172273597 \h 406AT: Globalization Bad PAGEREF _Toc172273598 \h 407AT: Value to Life PAGEREF _Toc172273599 \h 408AT: Happiness PAGEREF _Toc172273600 \h 409***SHELL***1nc (Short)A. The Link: The plan is a last ditch effort at averting crisis by making an ‘outer spatial fix’ to resolve the core contradictions of capitalismDickens 10 (Peter, Affiliated Lecturer in the Department of Sociology, Faculty of Politics, Psychology, Sociology and International Studies , University of Cambridge, "The Humanization of the Cosmos—To What End?," [] AD: 6-29-11, jam)The Cosmos: Capitalism’s New “Outside” Instead of indulging in over-optimistic and fantastic visions, we should take a longer, harder, and more critical look at what is happening and what is likely to happen. We can then begin taking a more measured view of space humanization, and start developing more progressive alternatives. At this point, we must return to the deeper, underlying processes which are at the heart of the capitalist economy and society, and which are generating this demand for expansion into outer space. Although the humanization of the cosmos is clearly a new and exotic development, the social relationships and mechanisms underlying space-humanization are very familiar. In the early twentieth century, Rosa Luxemburg argued that an “outside” to capitalism is important for two main reasons. First, it is needed as a means of creating massive numbers of new customers who would buy the goods made in the capitalist countries.7 As outlined earlier, space technology has extended and deepened this process, allowing an increasing number of people to become integral to the further expansion of global capitalism. Luxemburg’s second reason for imperial expansion is the search for cheap supplies of labor and raw materials. Clearly, space fiction fantasies about aliens aside, expansion into the cosmos offers no benefits to capital in the form of fresh sources of labor power.8 But expansion into the cosmos does offer prospects for exploiting new materials such as those in asteroids, the moon, and perhaps other cosmic entities such as Mars. Neil Smith’s characterization of capital’s relations to nature is useful at this point. The reproduction of material life is wholly dependent on the production and reproduction of surplus value. To this end, capital stalks the Earth in search of material resources; nature becomes a universal means of production in the sense that it not only provides the subjects, objects and instruments of production, but is also in its totality an appendage to the production process…no part of the Earth’s surface, the atmosphere, the oceans, the geological substratum or the biological superstratum are immune from transformation by capital.9 Capital is now also “stalking” outer space in the search for new resources and raw materials. Nature on a cosmic scale now seems likely to be incorporated into production processes, these being located mainly on earth. Since Luxemburg wrote, an increasing number of political economists have argued that the importance of a capitalist “outside” is not so much that of creating a new pool of customers or of finding new resources.10 Rather, an outside is needed as a zone into which surplus capital can be invested. Economic and social crisis stems less from the problem of finding new consumers, and more from that of finding, making, and exploiting zones of profitability for surplus capital. Developing “outsides” in this way is also a product of recurring crises, particularly those of declining economic profitability. These crises are followed by attempted “fixes” in distinct geographic regions. The word “fix” is used here both literally and figuratively. On the one hand, capital is being physically invested in new regions. On the other hand, the attempt is to fix capitalism’s crises. Regarding the latter, however, there are, of course, no absolute guarantees that such fixes will really correct an essentially unstable social and economic system. At best, they are short-term solutions. The kind of theory mentioned above also has clear implications for the humanization of the cosmos. Projects for the colonization of outer space should be seen as the attempt to make new types of “spatial fix,” again in response to economic, social, and environmental crises on earth. <CONTINUED><CONTINUED>Outer space will be “globalized,” i.e., appended to Earth, with new parts of the cosmos being invested in by competing nations and companies. Military power will inevitably be made an integral part of this process, governments protecting the zones for which they are responsible. Some influential commentators argue that the current problem for capitalism is that there is now no “outside.”11 Capitalism is everywhere. Similarly, resistance to capitalism is either everywhere or nowhere. But, as suggested above, the humanization of the cosmos seriously questions these assertions. New “spatial fixes” are due to be opened up in the cosmos, capitalism’s emergent outside. At first, these will include artificial fixes such as satellites, space stations, and space hotels. But during the next twenty years or so, existing outsides, such as the moon and Mars, will begin attracting investments. The stage would then be set for wars in outer space between nations and companies attempting to make their own cosmic “fixes.” B. Impact: The search for outer spatial fixes to capitalism causes Star Wars- whole societies will be obliteratedDickens and Ormrod 7 (Peter, Affiliated Lecturer in the Department of Sociology, Faculty of Politics, Psychology, Sociology and International Studies , U of Cambridge, and J.S., Senior Lecturer of Applied Social Science @ U of Brighton, "Cosmic society: towards a sociology of the universe," book, p. 63-64, jam)Outer spatial fixes: for war or peace? These fixes could easily become the basis for a new global war, one in which a militarized outer space would be an important part. This is because there is a potential and actual contradiction between regional ‘fixes’ such as those attempted by China, India and Japan and the demands for capital to find new sources of accumulation. A regional fix is often made ‘autarchic’: a zone that, on account of active state intervention, allows limited trade with the outside world. As Harvey (2006) suggests, this may not be a problem so long as there are sufficient resources of capital and labour in the region in question for local capital to continue accu- mulation. But, if this is not the case, capital will inevitably move elsewhere. In the process, however, it confronts other capitalist enterprises over access to labour and resources. Nationally based private enterprises therefore finish up competing for shrinking opportunities for accumulation and this indeed is a recipe for potential armed conflict. As the next chapter discusses in more detail, China, Japan and India are amongst the countries now attempting to secure military presences in outer space. If Harvey’s theory is correct, these are means of protecting regional interests by ensuring that capital in these regions will have ready access to resources and labour beyond their own limits. Regional investments in outer space could thereby form an important form of future wars over resources, hostilities which could even include confrontations with the military might of the United States. Initially these conflicts might be land-based with satellites engaged in surveillance and the guid- ing of Earth-based weapons, but later they could easily be of a ‘star wars’ type with hostilities taking place in outer space. As Harvey points out, war can be seen as the ultimate and most catastrophic form of ‘devaluation’: one in which whole societies are obliterated and the prospects for a new round of investment and accumulation may be started.1nc (Short)C. Our alternative is to vote negative to refuse to participate in activities which support capitalism. We must hollow out capitalist structures by refusing to invest our energy in reforms and rescue operationsHerod 2004(James, Getting Free, ) ? It is time to try to describe, at first abstractly and later concretely, a strategy for destroying capitalism. This strategy, at its most basic, calls for pulling time, energy, and resources out of capitalist civilization and putting them into building a new civilization. The image then is one of emptying out capitalist structures, hollowing them out, by draining wealth, power, and meaning out of them until there is nothing left but shells.? ? ? This is definitely an aggressive strategy. It requires great militancy, and constitutes an attack on the existing order. The strategy clearly recognizes that capitalism is the enemy and must be destroyed, but it is not a frontal attack aimed at overthrowing the system, but an inside attack aimed at gutting it, while simultaneously replacing it with something better, something we want.? ? ? Thus capitalist structures (corporations, governments, banks, schools, etc.) are not seized so much as simply abandoned. Capitalist relations are not fought so much as they are simply rejected. We stop participating in activities that support (finance, condone) the capitalist world and start participating in activities that build a new world while simultaneously undermining the old. We create a new pattern of social relations alongside capitalist relations and then we continually build and strengthen our new pattern while doing every thing we can to weaken capitalist relations. In this way our new democratic, non-hierarchical, non-commodified relations can eventually overwhelm the capitalist relations and force them out of existence.? ? ? This is how it has to be done. This is a plausible, realistic strategy. To think that we could create a whole new world of decent social arrangements overnight, in the midst of a crisis, during a so-called revolution, or during the collapse of capitalism, is foolhardy. Our new social world must grow within the old, and in opposition to it, until it is strong enough to dismantle and abolish capitalist relations. Such a revolution will never happen automatically, blindly, determinably, because of the inexorable, materialist laws of history. It will happen, and only happen, because we want it to, and because we know what we’re doing and know how we want to live, and know what obstacles have to be overcome before we can live that way, and know how to distinguish between our social patterns and theirs.? ? ? But we must not think that the capitalist world can simply be ignored, in a live and let live attitude, while we try to build new lives elsewhere. (There is no elsewhere.) There is at least one thing, wage-slavery, that we can’t simply stop participating in (but even here there are ways we can chip away at it). Capitalism must be explicitly refused and replaced by something else. This constitutes War, but it is not a war in the traditional sense of armies and tanks, but a war fought on a daily basis, on the level of everyday life, by millions of people. It is a war nevertheless because the accumulators of capital will use coercion, brutality, and murder, as they have always done in the past, to try to block any rejection of the system. They have always had to force compliance; they will not hesitate to continue doing so. Nevertheless, there are many concrete ways that individuals, groups, and neighborhoods can gut capitalism, which I will enumerate shortly.? ? ? We must always keep in mind how we became slaves; then we can see more clearly how we can cease being slaves. We were forced into wage-slavery because the ruling class slowly, systematically, and brutally destroyed our ability to live autonomously. By driving us off the land, changing the property laws, destroying community rights, destroying our tools, imposing taxes, destroying our local markets, and so forth, we were forced onto the labor market in order to survive, our only remaining option being to sell, for a wage, our ability to work.? ? ? It’s quite clear then how we can overthrow slavery. We must reverse this process. We must begin to reacquire the ability to live without working for a wage or buying the products made by wage-slaves (that is, we must get free from the labor market and the way of living based on it), and embed ourselves instead in cooperative labor and cooperatively produced goods.? ? ? Another clarification is needed. This strategy does not call for reforming capitalism, for changing capitalism into something else. It calls for replacing capitalism, totally, with a new civilization. This is an important distinction, because capitalism has proved impervious to reforms, as a system. We can sometimes in some places win certain concessions from it (usually only temporary ones) and win some (usually short-lived) improvements in our lives as its victims, but we cannot reform it piecemeal, as a system.<CONTINUED><CONTINUED>? ? ? Thus our strategy of gutting and eventually destroying capitalism requires at a minimum a totalizing image, an awareness that we are attacking an entire way of life and replacing it with another, and not merely reforming one way of life into something else.Many people may not be accustomed to thinking about entire systems and social orders, but everyone knows what a lifestyle is, or a way of life, and that is the way we should approach it.? ? ? The thing is this: in order for capitalism to be destroyed millions and millions of people must be dissatisfied with their way of life. They must want something else and see certain existing things as obstacles to getting what they want. It is not useful to think of this as a new ideology. It is not merely a belief-system that is needed, like a religion, or like Marxism, or Anarchism. Rather it is a new prevailing vision, a dominant desire, an overriding need. What must exist is a pressing desire to live a certain way, and not to live another way. If this pressing desire were a desire to live free, to be autonomous, to live in democratically controlled communities, to participate in the self-regulating activities of a mature people, then capitalism could be destroyed. Otherwise we are doomed to perpetual slavery and possibly even to extinction. 1nc (Long)A. Links:1. The plan is a last ditch effort at averting crisis by making an ‘outer spatial fix’ to resolve the core contradictions of capitalismDickens 10 (Peter, Affiliated Lecturer in the Department of Sociology, Faculty of Politics, Psychology, Sociology and International Studies , University of Cambridge, "The Humanization of the Cosmos—To What End?," [] AD: 6-29-11, jam)The Cosmos: Capitalism’s New “Outside” Instead of indulging in over-optimistic and fantastic visions, we should take a longer, harder, and more critical look at what is happening and what is likely to happen. We can then begin taking a more measured view of space humanization, and start developing more progressive alternatives. At this point, we must return to the deeper, underlying processes which are at the heart of the capitalist economy and society, and which are generating this demand for expansion into outer space. Although the humanization of the cosmos is clearly a new and exotic development, the social relationships and mechanisms underlying space-humanization are very familiar. In the early twentieth century, Rosa Luxemburg argued that an “outside” to capitalism is important for two main reasons. First, it is needed as a means of creating massive numbers of new customers who would buy the goods made in the capitalist countries.7 As outlined earlier, space technology has extended and deepened this process, allowing an increasing number of people to become integral to the further expansion of global capitalism. Luxemburg’s second reason for imperial expansion is the search for cheap supplies of labor and raw materials. Clearly, space fiction fantasies about aliens aside, expansion into the cosmos offers no benefits to capital in the form of fresh sources of labor power.8 But expansion into the cosmos does offer prospects for exploiting new materials such as those in asteroids, the moon, and perhaps other cosmic entities such as Mars. Neil Smith’s characterization of capital’s relations to nature is useful at this point. The reproduction of material life is wholly dependent on the production and reproduction of surplus value. To this end, capital stalks the Earth in search of material resources; nature becomes a universal means of production in the sense that it not only provides the subjects, objects and instruments of production, but is also in its totality an appendage to the production process…no part of the Earth’s surface, the atmosphere, the oceans, the geological substratum or the biological superstratum are immune from transformation by capital.9 Capital is now also “stalking” outer space in the search for new resources and raw materials. Nature on a cosmic scale now seems likely to be incorporated into production processes, these being located mainly on earth. Since Luxemburg wrote, an increasing number of political economists have argued that the importance of a capitalist “outside” is not so much that of creating a new pool of customers or of finding new resources.10 Rather, an outside is needed as a zone into which surplus capital can be invested. Economic and social crisis stems less from the problem of finding new consumers, and more from that of finding, making, and exploiting zones of profitability for surplus capital. Developing “outsides” in this way is also a product of recurring crises, particularly those of declining economic profitability. These crises are followed by attempted “fixes” in distinct geographic regions. The word “fix” is used here both literally and figuratively. On the one hand, capital is being physically invested in new regions. On the other hand, the attempt is to fix capitalism’s crises. Regarding the latter, however, there are, of course, no absolute guarantees that such fixes will really correct an essentially unstable social and economic system. At best, they are short-term solutions. The kind of theory mentioned above also has clear implications for the humanization of the cosmos. Projects for the colonization of outer space should be seen as the attempt to make new types of “spatial fix,” again in response to economic, social, and environmental crises on earth. <CONTINUED><CONTINUED>Outer space will be “globalized,” i.e., appended to Earth, with new parts of the cosmos being invested in by competing nations and companies. Military power will inevitably be made an integral part of this process, governments protecting the zones for which they are responsible. Some influential commentators argue that the current problem for capitalism is that there is now no “outside.”11 Capitalism is everywhere. Similarly, resistance to capitalism is either everywhere or nowhere. But, as suggested above, the humanization of the cosmos seriously questions these assertions. New “spatial fixes” are due to be opened up in the cosmos, capitalism’s emergent outside. At first, these will include artificial fixes such as satellites, space stations, and space hotels. But during the next twenty years or so, existing outsides, such as the moon and Mars, will begin attracting investments. The stage would then be set for wars in outer space between nations and companies attempting to make their own cosmic “fixes.” 2. [INSERT SPECIFIC LINK(s)]1nc (Long)B. Impacts: 1. Turns case: The spatial fix is inevitably unstable and temporary- the expansion of capitalism into space creates inevitable crises- examples include space junk, nuclear accidents, and environmental contaminationDickens and Ormrod 7 (Peter, Affiliated Lecturer in the Department of Sociology, Faculty of Politics, Psychology, Sociology and International Studies , U of Cambridge, and J.S., Senior Lecturer of Applied Social Science @ U of Brighton, "Cosmic society: towards a sociology of the universe," book, p. 66, jam)The neo-liberal promise and failure. It is not at all clear that the neo-liberal experiment has substantially delivered on its promises on Earth. The record is, to use Harvey’s diagnosis, ‘nothing short of dismal’ (2005: 154). Large proportions of the population have fallen into poverty, especially in Russia and the old East European societies that fully adopted the neo- liberal creed. Global indicators of health levels, life expectancy and infant mortal- ity have worsened almost universally since the 1960s. Significant exceptions to this trend are those societies such as Sweden and Poland which have managed to resist or at least tame the neo-liberal experiment. Neo-liberalization has therefore consolidated class power in the economic, political and cultural spheres. But the human and environmental costs have been very high. Furthermore, neo-liberalization has largely failed to generate economic expansion. Aggregate growth rates have fallen from 3.5 per cent in the 1960s to 1.1 per cent at the present time (Harvey 2005; Keily 2007). Only East and South-East Asia, plus most recently India, have seen substantial economic growth. Capital is still looking for more profitable opportunities. New social, economic and political ‘fixes’ will continue to be attempted. Some of these will be in outer space as the primary, secondary and tertiary circuits of capital look to make further parts of the cosmos into capital’s appendages. But over-investment in the secondary and tertiary circuits typically creates its own contradictions. Investments in outer space, for example, may well undermine the profitability of enterprises on Earth. Harvey refers to the redirection of capital into the secondary and tertiary circuits as a ‘spatial fix’. But he also points to the ambi- guity of the term. The ‘fix’ involved is almost inevitably temporary and unstable. It is of the sticking-plaster variety. Equivalent social and moral ‘fixes’ intended by dominant orders to bind nations and military projects are similarly insecure. Meanwhile, high expenditures on outer space have been accompanied by reductions in social expenditures on Earth. Military order imposed by satellite-guided bombs from above has been paralleled by, even generated, social disorder below (Fox Piven 2004). In short, if the secondary and tertiary circuits are envisaged as devices for restoring profitability and the underlying capital–labour relation, then contrary tendencies towards disintegration must also be allowed for. New outer spatial fixes, new risks. However, the outer spatial fix brings not only economic risk, but risks and unintended outcomes of other kinds. Human ‘progress’ in the cosmos is already generating a major problem in the form of space debris, as 6,791 expended rock- ets and payloads are disintegrating around Earth orbit (NASA 2005). There The outer spatial fix 67 are an estimated 110,000 man-made objects larger than 1 cm hurtling through space at up to 17,500 mph (Milne 2002). This has caused major problems for the International Space Station, and now threatens the entire space project (ibid.). One proposal for the forthcoming humanization of outer space includes the use of atom-powered rocketry. Accidents may lead to increased radioactivity on Earth and in outer space. Chemicals from rocket fuels are already being found in high concentrations in food grown near launch sites. In the much longer term, the interventions needed to change the climates of planets to make them habitable may result in much more profound unexpected and unwelcome consequences. The humanization of outer space is bringing its unique kind of risk, a cosmic equivalent to Beck’s ‘global risk’ (Beck 1999). These risks are discussed further in Chapter 6. 1nc (Long)2. The search for outer spatial fixes to capitalism causes Star Wars- whole societies will be obliteratedDickens and Ormrod 7 (Peter, Affiliated Lecturer in the Department of Sociology, Faculty of Politics, Psychology, Sociology and International Studies , U of Cambridge, and J.S., Senior Lecturer of Applied Social Science @ U of Brighton, "Cosmic society: towards a sociology of the universe," book, p. 63-64, jam)Outer spatial fixes: for war or peace? These fixes could easily become the basis for a new global war, one in which a militarized outer space would be an important part. This is because there is a potential and actual contradiction between regional ‘fixes’ such as those attempted by China, India and Japan and the demands for capital to find new sources of accumulation. A regional fix is often made ‘autarchic’: a zone that, on account of active state intervention, allows limited trade with the outside world. As Harvey (2006) suggests, this may not be a problem so long as there are sufficient resources of capital and labour in the region in question for local capital to continue accu- mulation. But, if this is not the case, capital will inevitably move elsewhere. In the process, however, it confronts other capitalist enterprises over access to labour and resources. Nationally based private enterprises therefore finish up competing for shrinking opportunities for accumulation and this indeed is a recipe for potential armed conflict. As the next chapter discusses in more detail, China, Japan and India are amongst the countries now attempting to secure military presences in outer space. If Harvey’s theory is correct, these are means of protecting regional interests by ensuring that capital in these regions will have ready access to resources and labour beyond their own limits. Regional investments in outer space could thereby form an important form of future wars over resources, hostilities which could even include confrontations with the military might of the United States. Initially these conflicts might be land-based with satellites engaged in surveillance and the guid- ing of Earth-based weapons, but later they could easily be of a ‘star wars’ type with hostilities taking place in outer space. As Harvey points out, war can be seen as the ultimate and most catastrophic form of ‘devaluation’: one in which whole societies are obliterated and the prospects for a new round of investment and accumulation may be started.1nc (Long)C. The Alternative:1. Pursuing space exploration neglects growing social injustice on Earth- we should stop the humanization of space completely and focus on growing crises down hereDickens 9 (Peter, Affiliated Lecturer in the Department of Sociology, Faculty of Politics, Psychology, Sociology and International Studies , U of Cambridge, May, The Sociological Review, Vol. 57, Iss. Supp. s1, p. 68-82, jam)If Rosa Luxemburg’s theory of imperialism is correct, space-humanisation will hasten the collapse of capitalism. The competitive struggle for the non-capitalist environment will only lead to the erosion of this ‘outside’. War and social upheaval will ensue, the alternative to capitalism being global resistance and the creation of new, socialist, society. If Harvey’s theory is correct the cosmos might at best offer a series of temporary ‘fixes’ to the central crisis of capital’s over-accumulation. But, meanwhile, growing social injustice, conflict and environmental degradation can be expected to worsen, especially under current neo-liberal regimes. In the meantime elites will make their way from Earth into the nearby cosmos to create yet another ‘outer spatial fix’ or to relax from their endeavours in one of Richard Branson’s spaceships. Over forty years ago Amitai Etzioni roundly criticised the space race as a ‘monumental misdecision’ (1964). On the one hand, he argued, resources had been switched away from pressing Earthly needs such as much-improved healthcare, education and civil rights. On the other hand, it had failed in virtually all of its promises. It had not stimulated economic growth in the United States. Productivity was not raised ‘since orbiting objects or miniature atomic warheads do not have an automatic stimulant effect on consumers’ (1964: 73-4). ‘Spin-offs’ to the economy in the form of, for example, miniaturization and new materials had been marginal and even trivial. ‘Some are safely projected into a remote and dateless future, others should never have been made; still others are exaggerated out of proportion to their real value’ (ibid.:90). Another claim was that space exploration would help humanity to understand the evolution of the cosmos. But this too turned out to be a chimera; another grand promise to attract public funds but never delivered on. Similar questions need asking now. Why is space travel happening? Who is benefiting? Whose problems is it solving? As things stand it is the already-powerful who stand to gain most. Shareholders investing in the military-industrial-space-complex remain largely content. Investors in companies extracting resources from the asteroids, the Moon and Mars will presumably be happy in the longer-term. But empire-making has always been a highly questionable process and the case for a future galactic imperialism has not been convincingly made. The arguments for stopping the humanisation of outer space completely and focusing back on the relationships and crises on Planet Earth are currently far more compelling. 1nc (Long)2. Dialectical analysis is a prior concern – our relationship to the universe and capitalism constitutes society and the possibilities for actionDickens and Ormrod 7 (Peter, Affiliated Lecturer in the Department of Sociology, Faculty of Politics, Psychology, Sociology and International Studies , U of Cambridge, and J.S., Senior Lecturer of Applied Social Science @ U of Brighton, "Cosmic society: towards a sociology of the universe," book, p. 2-4, jam)Dialectics insists on recognizing the relationships between things rather than the things themselves (Harvey 1996). Things, whether they are stars or societies, are constituted by relationships. These things both form part of these relationships and have causal effects on them. The distinction between parts and wholes is therefore meaningless. Parts are integrated into wholes, and vice versa, in a proc- ess of indefinite change. In situating cosmology within a broader system of social relationships, Best and Kellner insist: Cosmologies are constituted within a social context, and as such, often are influenced by, or are extensions of, social values and ideologies. Conversely, how human beings interpret the stars, planets, and natural world around them shapes how they understand their own societies. (Best and Kellner 2001: 136) These relationships may even be made explicit. Two of the founders of sociology, Comte (1974) and Spencer (1971), deliberately described the cosmos and society together. Comte stressed that ‘solidarity’ between elements must exist in social systems as it did in the universe revealed by astronomy. Spencer argued that both society and universe were evolving towards greater degrees of concentration and integration. Dialectics is a concept normally associated with Hegel’s philosophical theory of the progress of ideas through thesis, antithesis and finally synthesis. Marx took up the reins of dialectical thinking – emphasizing contradictory relationships and their role in change and progress – but applied it to the material conditions and struggles of society, rather than the realm of ideas. It is Engels’ (1959) concept of dialectics that is best suited to our purpose, however. Dialectics for Engels was about acknowledging the interactions, especially between humans and nature, in which, because of their intimate relationship, a change in one caused a change in the other as the two became intertwined. Linking the universe and society by asserting that both of them operate in a ‘dialectical’ fashion is therefore a useful way of starting analysis. Dialectics stresses the interactions between the observer and the observed or between the subject and the object. This is a major theme we will develop throughout this study. These dialectics operate on two levels. First, our observations and understandings of the universe create changes in the fundamental ways in which we experience, understand and manage our social universe. But, second, through this mechanism, change is affected on a much deeper level. By observ- ing the universe, people in societies have transformed themselves. In Cosmos and Psyche, Tarnas makes the point convincingly, although for ‘world view’ he might better have written ‘cosmology’: Our world view is not simply the way we look at the world. It reaches inward to constitute our innermost being, and outward to constitute the world. It mirrors but also reinforces and even forges the structures, armorings, and possibilities of our interior life. It deeply configures our psychic and somatic experience, the patterns of our sensing, knowing, and interacting with the world. (Tarnas 2006: 16) We explore the dialectic between cosmos and the self more specifically in the next two chapters (see also Dickens and Ormrod 2007). As the following chapters will suggest, by physically interacting with the universe, humans are transforming themselves once more. As societies interact with nature, human beings start changing themselves. Put in more sociological and material terms, as societies observe and modify external nature they start modifying their own, internal, nature. And this is a dialectical process. The kind of internal nature made in the process of environmental study and transformation has important effects on how external nature is in turn considered and therefore treated. In particular, for critical theorists, the domination of external nature was associated with the domination of internal nature, with the perversion of humanity’s needs and capacities. This argument about subjectivity and internal nature borrows from, amongst others, Hegel, Rousseau and Marx, and has been outlined in our earlier work (Dickens 2004). The aim of this book is to suggest ways in which this idea, central to sociology, can be usefully extended to encompass human relationships with the universe or cosmos as opposed to just external nature here on Earth. 1nc (Long)3. Regardless of alternative solvency, you have an ethical obligation to attempt to transcend capitalism-- utopian thinking is key to the value of lifeMarsh 95(James L., Professor of Philosophy at Fordham University, Critique, Action, and Liberation p. 331-336 GAL)However, such a conception of reason is highly questionable. Reason, as I have argued elsewhere and in this book, is dialectical and phenomenological. uniting within itself fact and possibility', "is" and "ought." subject and object. Reason is constitutive, not simply acquisitive or instrumental, and as such constitutes goals and values and reflectively chooses itself as an end in itself in a community' of ends. Reason is relational, communal, processive. on the move from lower viewpoints to higher viewpoints and in this sense related creatively to a world developing through a process of emergent probability According to the conception of reason, one attempting to fix human possibility' by saying "this far and no further" is inhibiting human development and is profoundly irrational. -Moreover, through a dialectical phenomenological critique made earlier in this book we have discovered late capitalism and state socialism to be profoundly irrational systemically and morally. They are irrational systemically insofar as both systems are susceptible to various kinds of crises, economic, rational, legitimating, or motivational, and both systems systematically repress democratic participation. Both systems exercise a domination, economic or political, that inhibits the free, rational unfolding of human potentiality' in all of its fullness. In both systems is a tendency to ignore or repress the subjectivity of human beings and turn them into objects; in both systems is domination of nature and a resulting ecology problem. In such a context, it would be profoundly irrational not to try to think of alternatives to the status quo. In the face of systemic domination, fidelity' to the life of reason calls on reason to become revolutionary in its approach to the world. A merely bourgeois or Stalinist rationality' is an incomplete, truncated rationality'.-Moreover, if our model of a dynamic, processive. developing world system on the move is correct, then such qualitative shifts from one epoch to another should have occurred in the past. One can imagine the Novaks or Kissingers or Friedmans of this world arguing in past centuries that political monarchy is the best human beings can do or that racism is inevitable or that a feudal relationship of lord to serf is the ultimate and best fate of human beings. Yet history has moved on. and there is no reason to think that such movement has stopped with capitalism or state socialism. The irrational, oppressive character of these structures indicates that we should move on; the processive character of human beings in the world indicates that we can move on. Recent events in eastern Europe only confirm such a judgment.Positivism and scientism in our context, then, simply become ideologies confining the human mind and imagination to certain historical forms that happen to favor certain dominating classes or bureaucratic elites. Scientism and positivism are not simply crude intellectual errors, although they are certainly that, but are economic and political expressions of domination. Capitalism and state socialism, we might say. are lived, practical positivism and scientism that express, reinforce, and legitimate domination. Because they present themselves as the only forms of reason, men and women are tempted and invited to abandon their own reflection and choosing and hand their economic, political, and social lives over to some expert or group of experts. Because science and technology are not only dominant productive forces but also ideologies, they suppress symbolic interaction in favor of purposive-rational action, constitutive reason in favor of instrumental reason, participation in favor of domination.2The 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 jacket of empirical fact. If. on the other hand, my dialectical phenomenological definition of reason is correct, then the thinking of Utopia is not only legitimate but necessary. Reflection and <CONTINUED><CONTINUED>freedom and praxis are essentially Utopian in their full, unfolding life. Denial of Utopia mutilates freedom and reason.-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.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 instances of "triangle." "justice." "beauty." respectively, are not perfect; they have cracks, blemishes, and impurities.-Further. on a 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 incarnate reason and freedom.Finally, we may affirm a threefold exteriority' to the 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 affirmation of exteriority as linked to rationality. A rationality and freedom and ethics and hermeneutics and critique 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. -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 antielitist.12<CONTINUED><CONTINUED>To think in a Utopian manner, then, about community and 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 ?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 abnormal, apparent, irrational, and absurd. We begin to suspect and see that science and 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.A rationality; however, that confines itself to understanding the facts and accepting the facts as normal cannot pierce the veil. Indeed, piercing the veil becomes irrational according to such a definition of reason. Because such a positivistic definition of reason excludes ahead of time any critical reflection on the overall social context as possibly irrational, such a definition is ideological. legitimating and preserving a repressive status quo whose interest lies in not having the veil pierced.***GENERIC LINKS***Link: Fiat/Demands on StateTheir fiat-based model for demands on the state is bad- two reasonsA. They have no actual voice in the formation of policyB. It is rooted in a nationalist identification with the USFG, which we critiqueHerod 2001 (James, “A Stake, Not a Mistake: On Not Seeing the Enemy”, October, )? ? ? Let's take another example. Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman, otherwise very sensible writers, complain that "bombing a desperately poor country under the yoke of a repressive regime is a wrongheaded response [to the "unspeakable acts of violence" committed on Sept. 11]. "The U.S. bombing of Afghanistan should cease immediately," they say. They discuss three reasons: "1. The policy of bombing increases the risk of further terrorism against the United States. 2. The bombing is intensifying a humanitarian nightmare in Afghanistan. 3. There are better ways to seek justice." All three statements are true of course, but irrelevant, because seeking justice, avoiding humanitarian nightmares, and reducing the risk of terrorism do not enter into the calculations of US policy makers. Quite the contrary, US policy makers create injustice, humanitarian nightmares, and terrorism, throughout the world, in pursuit of the imperial objective of making profit, and this has been thoroughly documented in thousands of scholarly studies. So for Mokhiber and Weissman to talk in this way, and phrase the problem in this way, exposes their failure to really comprehend the enemy we face, which in turn prevents them from looking for effective strategies to defeat that enemy, like so many other opponents of the "war". Hence all the moralizing, the bulk of which is definitely directed at the rulers, not at the ruled. That is, it is not an attempt to win over the ruled, but an attempt to win over the rulers. [4] ? ? ? It's what I call the "we should" crowd -- all those people who hope to have a voice in the formation of policy, people whose stances are basically that of consultants to the ruling class. "We" should do this, "we" shouldn't do that, as if they had anything at all to say about what our rulers do. This is the normal stance among the bootlicking intelligentsia of course. But what is it doing among progressives and radicals? Even if their stance is seen to be not exactly that of consultants, but that of citizens making demands upon their government, what makes them think that the government ever listens? I think this attitude -- the "we should" attitude -- is rooted in part at least in the fact that most progressives still believe in nations and governments. They believe that this is "our" country, and that this is "our" government, or at least should be. So Kevin Danaher says that "we should get control of the government." They identify themselves as Americans, or Germans, or Mexicans, or Swedes. So they are constantly advising and making demands that 'their' government should do this and that. If they would reject nationalism altogether, and states and governments, they could begin to see another way. Link: Demands on the StateSimply constructing a laundry list of atrocities, or morally condemning US policies misses the point— the universal “we should” assumes we actually have a voice in the formation of policy, and misidentifies the enemy.Herod 2001 (James, “A Stake, Not a Mistake: On Not Seeing the Enemy”, October, )? ? ? The widespread belief that the US government has good intentions, a belief held onto tenaciously in spite of decades of overwhelming empirical evidence refuting it, has got to be one of the greatest phenomena of mass delusion in history. It would take a twenty-first century Freud to unravel this one. Here is a government that has already bombed two other countries to smithereens just in the past ten years, first Iraq and then Yugoslavia (not to mention endless interventions abroad since its inception [7]). Now it is bombing Afghanistan to smithereens -- hospitals, fuel supplies, food depots, electrical systems, water systems, radio stations, telephone exchanges, remote villages, mosques, old folks homes, UN offices, Red Cross warehouses, clinics, schools, neighborhoods, roads, dams, airports -- and a victim of the assault escapes to plead for help from the very people who are attacking him. To have created such an illusion as this is surely one of the greatest feats of propaganda ever seen.[8] ? ? ? So although it is important to try to shatter this illusion, it is ultimately not enough, and of very limited effectiveness, simply to list all the atrocities committed by our rulers, carefully expose all their double standards, accuse them of being the real terrorists, morally condemn what they are doing, or call for peace. All these arguments are useful of course in the battle for the hearts and minds of average people, if average people ever heard them, which they do not, for the most part. And if they do hear them, it's like they (most of them) are tuning in to madness, they're so brainwashed. It takes a lot more than mere arguments to break through the mind set of a thoroughly indoctrinated people. ? ? ? Of all the dozens of comments that I read on the government's response to the attacks of September Eleven, precious few raised the key question: How do we stop them (the government, from attacking Afghanistan)? For the most part, progressive commentators don't even raise questions of strategy.[9] They are too busy analyzing ruling class ideology, in order to highlight its hypocrisies. Proving that the ruling class is hypocritical doesn't get us very far. It's useful of course. Doing this work is an important task. Noam Chomsky, for example, devotes himself almost exclusively to this task, and we should be thankful that we have his research. He usually does mention also, somewhere in almost every speech, article, or interview, that 'it doesn't have to be this way', that this situation we are in is not inevitable, and that we can change it. But when asked "How?", he replies, "Organize, agitate, educate." Well, sure. But the Christian Coalition organizes, agitates, and educates. So did the Nazis and the Klu Klux Klan. The Taliban organizes, agitates, and educates. So does the ruling class, and it does so in a massive and highly successful way, which results in overwhelming hegemony for its point of view. ? ? ? In spite of more than three decades of blistering exposés of US foreign policy, and in spite of the fact that he is an anarchist, and is thus supposedly against all government, at least in the long run, Chomsky still regularly uses the 'universal we'. Much of the time Chomsky says "The US government does this, or does that," but some of the time he says "We do this, or we do that," thus including himself, and us, as agents in the formation and execution of US foreign policy. This is an instance of what I call the 'universal we'. It presumes a democracy that does not exist. The average American has no say whatsoever in the formation and execution of US foreign policy. Nor do we even have any influence in picking the people who are making it, since we have no say over who gets to run for office or what they do after they are elected. So to say something like "we shouldn't be bombing Afghanistan", as so many progressives do, is highly misleading, and expresses a misperception and misdiagnosis of the situation we are in. ? ? ? In the question period following Chomsky's major address on "The New War Against Terror" (delivered at MIT on October 18) [10], Chomsky was challenged by a man in the audience who accused Chomsky of blaming America for the tragedy of September 11. Chomsky correctly said that the term America is an abstraction and cannot do anything. But then he said that he blamed himself, and his questioner, and others present, for this event (implying that 'we' are responsible for what 'our' government does). This is a half-truth at best. The blame for September Eleven rests squarely on those who did it. Next, to the extent that a connection can be proved between their actions and US foreign policy, the US government is to blame, and the ruling class that controls the government. Average Americans are to blame for what the US government does only in the sense that they have not managed to change or block its policies, either because they haven't tried or because they have tried but have failed. ? ? ? Of course, the category of Average American is an abstraction as well. Many average Americans vigorously support US foreign <CONTINUED><CONTINUED>policy. Others oppose it, but have failed to change it. Those of us who want a real democracy, and want to put an end to Empire, have so far failed to do so, and only in this sense are we in anyway responsible for September Eleven. But even this failure must be judged in light of the relative strengths that the parties bring to the fight. We cannot fault ourselves for being defeated by an opponent with overwhelmingly superior forces, as long as we fought as bravely and as hard as we could. Our task is to find ways to enhance our strengths and weaken theirs. To fail to make a distinction between the ruling class and the rest of us hinders this task, causes us to presume a democracy that does not exist, to misunderstand exactly what we are up against, and to misidentify the enemy. It thus prevents us from devising a successful strategy for defeating this enemy. Link: Demands on the StateMerely being reactive to US policy lets the war-mongers set the agenda—our strategy must directly fight the state and capitalism, not merely get the government to change its policy.Herod 2001 (James, “A Stake, Not a Mistake: On Not Seeing the Enemy”, October, )? ? ? The 'peace now' protesters strike a similar stance. Of course, it was heartening to see an anti-war movement blossom almost immediately. But it was also disheartening. It meant that radicals were letting the war-mongers set the agenda. Instead of continuing the fight against neoliberalism and its institutions, and against capitalism, oppositionists suddenly dropped all this to launch an anti-war campaign. The candlelight vigils, especially, seemed to me a pathetic response to a war-mongering, repressive government. This happens again and again. The government launches a war of aggression, and the peaceniks take to the streets, with their candles, crying "peace now" and "no more war". Do they ever win? Have they ever stopped even one war? Do they ever even think about how they could win? Doesn't the inefficacy of their response prove that they are not really serious about peace? Do they ever think about ways of actually stopping the murderers rather than just pleading with them not to kill? They keep saying that peace cannot be achieved by going to war. Who says the US government wants peace!? They quote A.J. Muste as saying that war is not the way to peace; peace is the way. Is this relevant? Does it make sense to quote such thoughts to a government that has always engaged, from its inception two hundred years ago, in systematic mass murder? ? ? ? Similarly with the bulk of the other progressive commentators. They are just trying to change the government's policy, not stop them and deprive them of power. Here is a typical sentence. Rahul Mahajan and Robert Jensen write: "The next step is for us to build a movement that can change our government's barbaric and self-destructive policy."[13] You see, from the government's point of view, its policy is not barbaric or self-destructive. It is intelligent, self-serving, and self-preserving. Mahajan and Jensen actually pretty much admit this in their piece, by reasoning that "This war is about the extension of U.S. power. It has little to do with bringing the terrorists to justice, or with vengeance." (Such a view is rather rare among progressives actually.) They argue that there are three other motives for the war, from the government's point of view: the desire to defend "imperial credibility", to control "oil and natural gas of Central Asia," and "to push a right-wing domestic agenda." Nevertheless, in spite of these insights, they still stop short of realizing that they therefore have to fight, stop, and neutralize the government, rather than just change its policy. Given who the government is, who it serves (capital, the rich), and what its interests and priorities are, it can't change its policies into those favored by progressives, not and survive as an imperial power that is. Link: Single Issues/ReformsSingle-issue movements and reforms of the state can’t solve capitalismHerod 7 (James, Columbia U graduate?and political activist, “Getting Free” Pg. 30 JF)We cannot destroy capitalism with single-issue campaigns, yet the great bulk of radicals’ energy is spent on these campaigns. There are dozens of them: campaigns to defend abortion rights, maintain rent control, halt whaling, prohibit toxic dumping, stop the war on drugs, stop police brutality, stop union busting, abolish the death penalty, stop the logging of redwoods, outlaw the baby seal kill, ban genetically modified foods, stop the World Bank and the World Trade Organization, stop global warming, and on and on. What we are doing is spending our lives trying to fix a system that generates evils 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 aimed 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 a new administration comes to power. These struggles all have value and are needed. Could anyone think that the campaigns against global warming, 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 gains. 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 wholeheartedly endorse: the total and permanent eradication of capitalism. Reformism fails—we must absolutely reject capitalismHerod 7 (James, Columbia U graduate?and political activist, “Getting Free” Pg. 39-40 JF)But we must not think that the capitalist world can simply be ignored, in a live-and-let-live attitude, while we try to build new lives elsewhere. (As mentioned earlier, there is no elsewhere.) There is at least one thing, wage slavery, that we can’t simply stop participating in (but even here there are ways we can chip away at it). Capitalism must be explicitly refused and replaced by something else. This constitutes war, but it is not a war in the traditional sense of armies and tanks; it is a war fought on a daily basis, on the level of everyday life, by millions of people. It is a war nevertheless because the accumulators of capital will use coercion, brutality, and murder, as they have always done in the past, to try to block any rejection of the system. They have always had to force compliance; they will not hesitate to continue to do so. Still, there are many concrete ways that individuals, groups, and neighborhoods can gut capitalism, which I will enumerate shortly. We must always keep in mind how we became slaves; then we can see more clearly how we can cease being slaves. We were forced into wage slavery because the ruling class slowly, systematically, and brutally destroyed our ability to live autonomously. By driving us off the land, changing the property laws, dismantling community rights, destroying our tools, imposing taxes, gutting our local markets, and so forth, we were forced onto the labor market in order to survive, our only remaining option being to sell our ability to work for a wage. It’s quite clear, then, how we can overthrow slavery: we must reverse this process. We must begin to reacquire the ability to live without working for a wage or buying the products made by wage slaves (that is, we must free ourselves from the labor market and the way of living based on it), and embed ourselves instead in cooperative labor and cooperatively produced goods. Another clarification is needed. This strategy does not call for reforming capitalism, for changing capitalism into something else. It calls for totally replacing capitalism with a new civilization. This is an important distinction because capitalism has proved impervious to reforms as a system. We can sometimes, in some places, win certain concessions from it (usually only temporary ones) and some (usually short?lived) improvements in our lives as its victims, but we cannot reform it piecemeal. Hence, our strategy of gutting and eventually destroying capitalism requires at a minimum a totalizing image, an awareness that we are attacking an entire way of life and replacing it with another, and not merely reforming one way of life into something else. Many people may not be accustomed to thinking about entire systems and social orders, but everyone knows what a lifestyle is, or a way of life, and that is the way we should approach it.Link: Particular DemandsParticular demands are revolution without a revolution- single issue movements lack concrete universality, allowing them to be absorbed and made to reinforce capitalismZizek 2002(Slavoj, Revolution at the Gates, pg 296-302)So the struggle ahead has no guaranteed outcome – it will confront us with an unprecedented need to act, since it will concern not only a new mode of production, but a radical rupture in what it means to be a human being.'85 Today, we can already discern the signs of a kind of general unease – recall the series of protests usually listed under the name "Seattle". The ten-year honeymoon of triumphant global capitalism is over; the long-overdue "seven-year itch" is here – witness the panicky reactions of the mass media, which, from Time magazine to CNN, started all of a sudden to warn us about the Marxists manipulating the crowd of "honest" protesters. The problem now is the strictly Leninist one: how do we actualize the media's accusations? How do we invent the organizational structure which will confer on this unrest the form of the universal political demand? Otherwise, the momentum will be lost, and all that will remain will be marginal disturbances, perhaps organized like a new Greenpeace, with a certain efficiency, but also strictly limited goals, marketing strategy, and so on. In short, without the form of the Party, the movement remains caught in the vicious cycle of "resistance", one of the big catchwords of "postmodern" politics, which likes to oppose "good" resistance to power to a "bad" revolutionary takeover of power – the last thing we want is the domestication of anti-globalization into just another "site of resistance" against capitalism.As a result, 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 Jacobins' answer to the Girondin compromisers: "You want revolution without a revolution!" Today's dilemma is that there are two ways open for sociopolitical engagement: either play the game of the system, engage in the "long march through the institutions", or become 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 "single-issue movements" which lack the dimension of universality – that is to say, they do not relate to the social totality.Against Post-politicsIn "A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right", Marx deploys something like the logic of hegemony: at the climax of revolutionary enthusiasm, a "universal class" emerges, that is, some particular class imposes itself as universal, and thereby engenders global enthusiasm, since it stands for society as such against the ancien regime, antisocial crime as such (like the bourgeoisie in the French Revolution). What then follows is the disillusion so sarcastically described by Marx: the day after, the gap between the Universal and the Particular becomes visible again; capitalist vulgar profit emerges as the actuality of universal freedom, and so on.'86For Marx, of course, the only universal class whose singularity (exclusion from the society of property) guarantees its actual universality is the proletariat. This is what Ernesto Laclau rejects in his version of the logic of hegemony: for Laclau, the short circuit between the Universal and the Particular is always illusory, temporary, a kind of "transcendental paralogism".'87 However, is Marx's proletariat really the negative of positive full essential humanity, or "only" the gap of universality as such, irrecoverable in any positivity?188 In Alain Badiou's terms, the proletariat is not another particular class, but a singularity of the social structure and, as such, the universal class, the non-class among the classes.What is crucial here is the properly temporal-dialectical tension between the Universal and the Particular. When Marx says that in Germany, because of the compromised pettiness of the bourgeoisie, it is too late for partial bourgeois emancipation, and that for this reason, in Germany, the condition of every particular emancipation is universal emancipation, one way to read this is to see in it the assertion of the universal "normal" paradigm and its exception: in the "normal" case, partial (false) bourgeois emancipation will be followed by universal emancipation through the proletarian revolution; while in Germany, the "normal" order gets mixed up. There is, however, another, much more radical way to read it: the very German exception, the German bourgeoisie's inability to achieve partial emancipation, opens up the space for a possible universal emancipation.The dimension of universality- thus emerges (only) where the "normal" order that links the succession of particulars is disrupted. For this reason, there is no "normal" revolution; each revolutionary explosion is grounded in an exception, in a short circuit of "too late" and "too early". The French Revolution occurred because France was not able to follow the "normal" English path of capitalist development; the very "normal" English path resulted in the "unnatural" division of labour between the capitalists, who held socioeconomic power, and the aristocracy, which was left with political power. And, according to Marx, this was how Germany produced the ultimate revolution in thought (German Idealism as the philosophical counterpart of the French Revolution): precisely because it lacked a political revolution.The structural necessity of this non-contemporaneity, of this discrepancy, is what gets lost in Habermas: the basic point of his notion of "modernity as an unfinished project" is that the project of modernity contained two facets: the development of "instrumental reason" <CONTINUED><CONTINUED>(scientific-technological manipulation and domination of nature) and the emergence of intersubjective communication free of constraints; hitherto, only the first facet has been fully deployed, and our task is to bring the project of modernity to completion by actualizing the potential of the second facet. What, however, if this discrepancy is structural? What if we cannot simply supplement instrumental Reason with communicational Reason, since the primacy of instrumental Reason is constitutive of modern Reason as such? Habermas is fully consistent in applying the same logic to today's globalization – his thesis is that of "globalization as an unfinished project":The discrepancy between progressive economic integration and the political integration which lags behind can be overcome only through a politics which aims at constructing a higher-level capacity of political acting which would be able to keep pace with deregulated markets.'89In short, there is no need to fight capitalist globalization directly – we need only to supplement it with an adequate political globalization (a stronger central political body in Strasbourg; the imposition of pan-European social legislation, etc.). However, what if, again, modern capitalism, which generates economic globalization, cannot simply be supplemented by political globalization? What if such an extension of globalization to the political project forced us radically to redefine the contours of economic globalization itself?19')In short, Habermas's basic attitude is nothing less than a disavowal of the twentieth-century – he acts as if the twentieth century, in its specific dimension, did not take place: as if what happened in it were basically just contingent detours, so that the underlying conceptual narrative – that of enlightened democratic liberalism, with its indefinite progress – can be told without them.191 Along the same lines, in order to characterize the demise of the Socialist regimes in 1990, Habermas coined the term "catch-up revolution":192 the West (Western liberal democracy) has nothing to learn from the Eastern European Communist experience, since in 1990, these countries simply caught up with the social development of the Western liberal-democratic regimes. Habermas thereby writes off this experience as simply accidental, denying any fundamental structural relationship between Western democracy and the rise of "totalitarianism" – any notion that "totalitarianism" is a symptom of the inner tensions of the democratic project itself.The same goes for Habermas's treatment of Fascism: against Adorno's and Horkheimer's notion of Fascist "barbarism" as the ineluctable outcome of the "dialectic of Enlightenment", the Fascist regimes are for him a contingent detour (delay, regression) which does not affect the basic logic of modernization and Enlightenment. The task is thus simply to abolish this detour, not to rethink the Enlightenment project itself. This victory over "totalitarianism", however, is a Pyrrhic one: what Habermas needs here is a Hitchcockian lesson (remember Hitchcock's claim that a film is only as interesting as its main evil character). Dismissing the "totalitarian" deadlock as a mere contingent detour leaves us with a comfortable, but ultimately impotent, position of someone who, unperturbed by the catastrophes around him, clings to the basic rationality of the universe.The promise of the "Seattle" movement lies in the fact that it is the very opposite of its usual media designation (the "anti-globalization protest"): it is the first kernel of a new global movement, global with regard to its content (it aims at a global confrontation with today's capitalism) as well as its form (it is a global movement, a mobile international network ready to intervene anywhere from Seattle to Prague). It is more global than "global capitalism", since it brings into the game its victims – that is, those who are excluded from capitalist globalization, as well as those who are included in a way which reduces them to proletarian misery.'93 Perhaps I should take the risk here of applying Hegel's old distinction between "abstract" and "concrete" universality: capitalist globalization is "abstract", focused on the speculative movement of Capital; whereas the "Seattle" movement stands for "concrete universality", both for the totality of global capitalism and for its excluded dark side. The reality of capitalist globalization is best exemplified by the victory in June 2001 of the Russian nuclear lobby, which forced the parliament's decision that Russia would import nuclear waste from developed Western countries.Here, Lenin's reproach to liberals is crucial: they merely exploit the working classes' discontent to strengthen their position vis-a-vis the conservatives, instead of identifying with it to the end.'" Is this not also true of today's Left liberals? They like to evoke racism, ecology, workers' grievances, and so on, to score points over the conservatives – without endangering the system. Remember how, in Seattle, Bill Clinton himself deftly referred to the protesters on the streets outside, reminding the assembled leaders inside the guarded palaces that they should listen to the demonstrators' message (the message which, of course, Clinton interpreted, depriving it of its subversive sting, which he attributed to the dangerous extremists introducing chaos and violence into the majority of peaceful protesters). This Clintonesque stance later developed into an elaborate "carrot-and stick" strategy of containment: on the one hand, paranoia (the notion that there is a dark Marxist plot lurking behind it); on the other hand, in Genoa, none other than Berlusconi provided food and shelter for the anti-globalization demonstrators – on condition that they "behaved properly", and did not disturb the official event. It is the same with all New Social Movements, up to the Zapatistas in Chiapas: establishment 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 you insist on your 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 institutionalized parliamentary politics and the New Social Movements.As a sign of this emerging uneasiness and need for a true Third Way, it is interesting to see how, in a recent interview, even a conservative liberal like John le Carre had to admit that, as a consequence of the "love affair between Thatcher and Reagan" in most of the developed Western countries, and especially in the United Kingdom, "the social infrastructure has practically stopped working"; this then leads him to make a direct plea for, at least, "re-nationalizing the railways and water.”95 We are in fact approaching a state in which (selective) private affluence is accompanied by a global (ecological, infrastructural) degradation which will soon start to affect us all: the quality of water is not a problem confined to the UK – a recent survey showed that the entire reservoir from which the Los Angeles area gets its water is already so polluted by man-made toxic chemicals that it will soon be impossible to make it drinkable even through the use of the most advanced filters. Le Carre expressed his fury at Blair for accepting the basic Thatcherite co-ordinates in very <CONTINUED><CONTINUED>precise terms: "I thought last time, in 1997, that he was lying when he denied he was a socialist. The worst thing I can say about him is that he was telling the truth." "More precisely, even if, in 1997, Blair was "subjectively" lying, even if his secret agenda was to save whatever can be salvaged of the socialist agenda he was "objectively" telling the truth: his (eventual) subjective socialist conviction was a self-deception, an illusion which enabled him to fulfill his "objective" role, that of completing the Thatcherite "revolution".How, then, are we to respond to the eternal dilemma of the radical Left: should we strategically support centre-Left figures like Bill Clinton against the conservatives, or should we adopt the stance of "It doesn't matter, we shouldn't get involved in these fights – in a way, it's even better if the Right is directly in power, since, in this way, it will be easier for the people to see the truth of the situation"? The answer is a variation on Stalin's answer to the question: "Which deviation is worse, the Rightist or the Leftist one?": they are both worse. What we should do is adopt the stance of the proper dialectical paradox: in principle, of course, one should be indifferent to the struggle between the liberal and conservative poles of today's official politics – however, one can only afford to be indifferent if the liberal option is in power. Otherwise, the price may appear much too high – consider the catastrophic consequences of the German Communist Party's decision in the early 1930s not to focus on the struggle against the Nazis, with the justification that the Nazi dictatorship was the last desperate stage of capitalist domination, which would open the eyes of the working class, shattering their belief in "bourgeois" democratic institutions.Along these lines, even Claude Lefort, whom no one can accuse of Communist sympathies, recently made a crucial point in his answer to Francois Furet: today's liberal consensus is the result of a hundred and fifty years of Leftist workers' struggle and pressure upon the State; it incorporated demands which were dismissed by liberals with horror a hundred years ago – even less.'97 If we need proof, we should simply look at the list of the demands at the end of the Communist Manifesto: apart from two or three of them (which, of course, are the crucial ones), all the others are today part of the consensus (at least the disintegrating Welfare State consensus): universal franchise; free education; universal healthcare and care for the elderly; a limitation on child labour.... In short, today's "bourgeois democracy" is the result not of liberalism's intrinsic development, but of the proletarian class struggle.It is true that, today, it is the radical populist Right which usually breaks the (still) prevailing liberal-democratic consensus, gradually making acceptable hitherto excluded ideas (the partial justification of Fascism, the need to constrain abstract citizenship on grounds of ethnic identity, etc.). However, the hegemonic liberal democracy is using this fact to blackmail the Left radicals: "We shouldn't play with fire: against the new Rightist onslaught, we should insist more than ever on the democratic consensus – any criticism of it, wittingly or unwittingly, helps the New Right!" This is the key line of separation: we should reject this blackmail, taking the risk of disturbing the liberal consensus, even up to questioning the very notion of democracy.The ultimate answer to the criticism that radical Left proposals are utopian should thus be that, today, the true utopia is the belief that the present liberal-democratic capitalist consensus can go on indefinitely, with- out radical change. We are therefore back with the old '68 slogan "Soyons realistes, demandons l'impossible!": in order to be a true "realist", we must consider breaking out of the constraints of what appears "possible" (or, as we usually put it, "feasible").Link: ReformsAttempting to reform capitalism from within only serves to stabilize its contradictions – efforts at social reform only diffuse revolutionary momentum and are inevitably co-opted by the capitalist state.O'Shea 2005(Louise , , Editor of The Socialist Alternative “Understanding Marxism: Reform or Revolution?”, Socialist Alternative, Volume: 91, , Accessed: 7-9-9 )Luxemburg published a response to Bernstein in 1899 entitled Social Reform or Revolution. She mercilessly ridiculed the idea that capitalism could be reformed out of existence, likening the prospect to "chang[ing] the sea of capitalist bitterness into a sea of socialist sweetness by progressively pouring into it bottles of social-reformist lemonade". Her central argument was that to abandon the struggle for revolution in favour of reforms meant the abandonment of the struggle for socialism altogether. As Luxemburg put it, "whoever opts for the path of legal reform, in place of and in contradistinction to the conquest of political power, actually chooses not a calmer and slower road to the same aim, but a different aim altogether". Bernstein argued that trade unions and workers' cooperatives had the potential to transform capitalism into socialism. The main aim of trade unions, Luxemburg argued, was to "regulate capitalist exploitation within the market relations", by improving workers' wages and conditions, but not to overthrow the system of wage labour altogether. So a struggle limited by the unions would only result in a society characterised by more equitable distribution of wealth between workers and bosses. Revolution opens the prospect of a society without class divisions of any sort. The same logic applied to the capitalist state. As Engels outlined in 1898, the state is a product of irreconcilable class divisions, the means by which "the most powerful, economically dominant class" goes about "holding down and exploiting the oppressed class". As such, its main function is to maintain capitalist order, not challenge it. This point was brutally demonstrated in Germany during the revolution of 1918. Inspired by the Russian Revolution and enraged by the slaughter of the First World War, German workers rose up, forcing the Kaiser to flee. The remnants of the old regime turned to the SPD, by then controlled by the reformists, to form a government that could head off further revolutionary change. Luxemburg had led a split from the SPD the previous December to form an explicitly revolutionary organisation. Now her former comrades savagely crushed the revolution. SPD Minister Noske personally oversaw the hunting down and murder of Luxemburg and her collaborator, Karl Liebknecht, also a former SPD leader, in January 1919.The events in Germany clearly indicate that far from socialists being able to impose their interests on the capitalist state, the state instead forces them to conform to the needs of maintaining capitalist order and the bosses' profits - which puts them on the wrong side of the barricades in the struggle for socialism. And if reformers go too far against the interests of capital, Luxemburg was also clear about the consequences. She described how "as soon as democracy shows the tendency to negate its class character and become transformed into an instrument of the people, the democratic forms are sacrificed by the bourgeoisie and its staterepresentatives."Link: ReformsReformism is a na?ve strategy- if the reform is actually worthwhile, it will never be fully actualized- it can only serve to stabilize capitalism Herod 7 (James, Columbia U graduate?and political activist, “Getting Free” Pg. 133-134 JF)The picture here, then, is one of masses of people organized into special-purpose organizations and single-issue campaigns who network on a global scale, and thus supposedly acquire the power to impose changes on the existing ruling-class institutions. "The movement's unifying goal," the authors claim, "is to bring about sufficient democratic control over states, markets, and corporations to permit people and the planet to survive and begin to shape a viable future." They argue that "the principal strategy of the movement for globalization from below has been to identify the violation of generally held norms, demand that power actors conform to those norms, and threaten the bases of consent on which they depend if they fail to do so." It is foolish to think that the State Department, General Electric, or the World Bank can be democratized. What is not part of this picture is any thought of dismantling states, markets, or corporations and replacing them with authentically democratic social arrangements. (Thankfully, dismantling states, markets, and corporations is, however, in the picture for a significant minority of today's protesters against corporate globalization, although this doesn't seem to have been noticed by these authors.) This is a startlingly reformist book, and as with most reformism, is deeply naive. The authors do not fully perceive or understand the true nature of the enemy we face. Having failed to take into consideration the imperatives of a system based on profit taking, they fail to realize that many of the reforms they seek to impose are incompatible with that system, or that in its current phase, the system is incapable of accommodating these reforms without self?destructing, and consequently, contemporary capitalists will fanatically fight these reforms because it is a matter of survival for them. These theorists of globalization from below, however, do not perceive this. They think these reforms can be imposed, through protests and the withdrawal of consent. This is where their use of mainstream sociological categories has gotten in the way. Although they use the term global capital occasionally, they are not really aware of capitalism as a historical system, but are rather merely talking abstractly about "established institutions" and "the power of the powerful." They claim that such power "is based on the active cooperation of some people and the consent and/or acquiescence of others." They believe that this power can be challenged by the withdrawal of consent. "Social movements can be understood as the collective withdrawal of consent to established institutions." This may be true on an abstract level and in the long run (although apartheid in South Africa survived for half a century after the vast majority hated it). But in the here and now, since they lack any concrete knowledge of what the actual imperatives of contemporary capitalists are (for their continued survival as capitalists), our theorists are led to make wildly romantic demands.Link: ReformsReform inevitably occurs in a capitalist framework – that dooms solvencyLuxemburg 86 (Rosa, specialized in Staatswissenschaft (the science of forms of state) @ Zurich U, originally written in 1900, [archive/luxemburg/1900/reform-revolution/ch08.htm] AD: 7-6-11, jam)Legislative reform and revolution are not different methods of historic development that can be picked out at the pleasure from the counter of history, just as one chooses hot or cold sausages. Legislative reform and revolution are different factors in the development of class society. They condition and complement each other, and are at the same time reciprocally exclusive, as are the north and south poles, the bourgeoisie and proletariat. Every legal constitution is the product of a revolution. In the history of classes, revolution is the act of political creation, while legislation is the political expression of the life of a society that has already come into being. Work for reform does not contain its own force independent from revolution. During every historic period, work for reforms is carried on only in the direction given to it by the impetus of the last revolution and continues as long as the impulsion from the last revolution continues to make itself felt. Or, to put it more concretely, in each historic period work for reforms is carried on only in the framework of the social form created by the last revolution. Here is the kernel of the problem. It is contrary to history to represent work for reforms as a long-drawn out revolution and revolution as a condensed series of reforms. A social transformation and a legislative reform do not differ according to their duration but according to their content. The secret of historic change through the utilisation of political power resides precisely in the transformation of simple quantitative modification into a new quality, or to speak more concretely, in the passage of an historic period from one given form of society to another. That is why people who pronounce themselves in favour of the method of legislative reform in place and in contradistinction to the conquest of political power and social revolution, do not really choose a more tranquil, calmer and slower road to the same goal, but a different goal. Instead of taking a stand for the establishment of a new society they take a stand for surface modifications of the old society. If we follow the political conceptions of revisionism, we arrive at the same conclusion that is reached when we follow the economic theories of revisionism. Our program becomes not the realisation of socialism, but the reform of capitalism; not the suppression of the wage labour system but the diminution of exploitation, that is, the suppression of the abuses of capitalism instead of suppression of capitalism itself. ***TOPIC LINKS***Link: Space Exploration/DevelopmentSpace exploration is a new extension of capitalism that drives production to infinityMacDonald 7 (Fraser, U of Melbourne, Progress in Human Geography Vol. 31.592 pg. 603-604 JF)For all its clunky punnage, ‘a-whereness’ nevertheless gives a name to a set of highly contingent forms of subjectivity that are worth anticipating, even if, by Thrift’s own admission, they remain necessarily speculative. Reading this body of work can induce a certain vertigo, confronting potentially precipitous shifts in human sociality. The same sensation is also induced by engagement with Paul Virilio (2005). But, unlike Virilio, Thrift casts off any sense of foreboding (Thrift, 2005b) and instead embraces the construction of ‘new qualities’ (‘conventions, techniques, forms, genres, concepts and even … senses’), which in turn open up new ethicopolitical possibilities (Thrift, 2004a: 583). It is important not to jettison this openness lightly. Even so, I remain circumspect about the social relations that underwrite these emergent qualities, and I am puzzled by Thrift’s disregard of the (geo)political contexts within which these new technologies have come to prominence. A critical geography should, I think, be alert to the ways in which state and corporate power are immanent within these technologies, actively strategizing new possibilities for capital accumulation and military neoliberalism. To the extent that we can sensibly talk about ‘a-whereness’ it is surely a function of a new turn in capitalism, which has arguably expanded beyond the frame (but not the reach) of Marx and Engels when they wrote that: the need for a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere. (Marx and Engels, 1998: 39) The current struggle for orbital supremacy, as the next section will make clear, is an extension of these relations into space in order to consolidate them back on Earth. Indeed, outer space may become, to use David Harvey’s term, a ‘spatio-temporal ?x’ that can respond to crises of over-accumulation (Harvey, 2003: 43). While this might seem like shorthand for the sort of Marxist critique that Thrift rejects (Amin and Thrift, 2005), it is an analysis that is also shared by the advocates of American Astropolitik, who describe space as the means by which ‘capitalism will never reach wealth saturation’ (Dolman, 2002: 175). The production of (outer) space should, I think, be understood in this wider context. Space exploration is just the galactic extension of terrestrial ideological strugglesMacDonald 7 (Fraser, U of Melbourne, Progress in Human Geography Vol. 31.592 pg. 596-597 JF)My basic claim, then, is that a geographical concern with outer space is an old project, not a new one. A closely related argument is that a geography of outer space is a logical extension of earlier geographies of imperial exploration (for instance, Smith and Godlewska, 1994; Driver, 2001). Space exploration has used exactly the same discourses, the same rationales, and even the same institutional frameworks (such as the International Geophysical Year, 1957–58) as terrestrial exploration. Like its terrestrial counterpart, the move into space has its origins in older imperial enterprises. Marina Benjamin, for instance, argues that for the United States outer space was ‘always a metaphorical extension of the American West’ (Benjamin, 2003: 46). Looking at the imbricated narratives of colonialism and the Arianne space programme in French Guiana, the anthropologist Peter Red?eld makes the case that ‘outer space reflects a practical shadow of empire’ (Red?eld, 2002: 795; see also Red?eld, 2000). The historian of science Richard Sorrenson, writing about the ship as geography’s scienti?c instrument in the age of high empire, draws on the work of David DeVorkin to argue that the V-2 missile was its natural successor (Sorrenson, 1996: 228; see also DeVorkin, 1992). A version of the V-2 – the two-stage ‘Bumper WAC Corporal’ – became the ?rst earthly object to penetrate outer space, reaching an altitude of 244 miles on 24 February 1949 (Army Ballistic Missile Agency, 1961). Moreover, out of this postwar allied V-2 programme came the means by which Britain attempted to reassert its geopolitical might in the context of its own ailing empire. In 1954, when America sold Britain its ?rst nuclear missile – a re?ned version of the WAC Corporal – its possession was seen as a shortcut back to the international stage at a time when Britain’s colonial power was waning fast (Clark, 1994; MacDonald, 2006a). Even if the political geography literature has scarcely engaged with outer space, the advent of rocketry was basically Cold War (imperial) geopolitics under another name. Space exploration then, from its earliest origins to the present day, has been about familiar terrestrial and ideological struggles here on Earth. Link: Space Exploration/Development The drive to invest in space is a response to the global economic crisis – it helps sustain capitalism by allowing extraterrestrial growth and expansion.Dickens 10 (Peter, Affiliated Lecturer in the Department of Sociology, Faculty of Politics, Psychology, Sociology and International Studies , University of Cambridge, "The Humanization of the Cosmos—To What End?," [] AD: 6-29-11, jam)Crisis, Outer Space, and the Restructuring of Capital: Some Evidence What evidence is there that economic, social, and environmental crises lie behind the growing humanization of the cosmos? One indication is that, between 2004 and 2009, the global space economy (this including commercial satellites, military hardware, space tourism infrastructure costs, and launch services) increased by 40 percent.12 So, while the global economic crisis starting in 2008 has been grabbing the headlines, the sectors involved in the outer space economy have experienced very rapid growth. In 2009 space industry and government budgets involved in outer space rose by 7 percent to $261.61 billion. A 2010 survey of the global outer space economy puts this as follows: “amidst a widespread international economic crisis, the space industry proved resilient, demonstrating growth and expansion into 2010. While several other leading industries suffered dramatically, and many governments struggled to remain fiscally viable, the space industry defied the upheaval and broadened its fields of endeavour.”13 All this suggests not just that the outer space economy is doing well while other sectors are doing less well, but that growing investment in the solar system is a response to global economic crisis. Again, this growth of the private space economy underlines the significance of President Obama’s shift toward private sector “solutions” to space humanization. The private sector has long argued that, in terms of creating technological innovation and reducing costs, it is superior to NASA and other government agencies. Now—and, it should be noted, with extensive earlier financial backing from NASA—it is advancing itself as capable of taking over large parts of the space program. The aff uncritically supports the extension of the current socio-economic system and possessive individualism into space- vote neg to endorse an alternative view of our relationship with the universe.Dickens and Ormrod 7 (Peter, Affiliated Lecturer in the Department of Sociology, Faculty of Politics, Psychology, Sociology and International Studies , U of Cambridge, and J.S., Senior Lecturer of Applied Social Science @ U of Brighton, "Cosmic society: towards a sociology of the universe," book, p. 77-78, jam)Taken together, our two theoretical starting points lead us to argue first that the humanization of outer space is a product of economic and social crisis and second that such humanization is a means of reasserting hegemonic authority. Capitalism expands into outer space as a result of its inherent contradictions, capital being drawn from the primary circuit and invested in more speculative projects that extend the system in time and space through the secondary and tertiary circuits. Property rights are central to this process as capitalism attempts a series of outer spatial fixes. That this should happen is generally considered common sense. Outer spatial fixes are part of a hegemonic solution to the world’s problems. Rather than try to figure alternative social relationships, the extension of the current socio-economic system into space is supported uncritically. Space technology itself plays a central role in disseminating a hegemonic Western culture in which a possessive individualism is promoted; something that prevents those alternative social relationships from forming. There is, however, always hope for resistance, and for the moment it is to organic intellectuals within the Global Network and similar organizations that we must look for critical new visions of our relationship with the universe. Link: Space Exploration/Development- Imaginary ExodusOuter space is just a fantasy of exodus from capitalism which makes current terrestrial domination acceptableShukaitis 9 (Stevphen, U of Essex, “Space is the (non)place: Martians, Marxists, and the outer space of the radical imagination” Sociological Review Vol. 57.21 May P. 103-104 JF)This makes the role of outer space as a theme for imaginal recomposition much more complicated than it might be otherwise and also more directly politically relevant, to the degree that the provision of imaginal energies, imagery, and resources are necessary to the continued existence of capital and the state. To put it simply, they function a lot better when people have some reason and justification for their actions. Often it is the dreams of escape from the drudgery of wage labour and the banality of the everyday that creates space for fermenting these ‘new spirits of capitalism’, to borrow Boltanski and Chaipello’s argument (2005). Why then might outer space emerge more prominently as a theme for imaginal recomposition in the period of the 1960s and 1970s? Aside from the previously mentioned point of mutation of collectivist energies from working-class resistance, one could also say that there was a shift in the nature of imagined exodus. While previously it might have seemed possible that exodus could take an immediately physical form (go westward young man, or take to the high seas, or finding a promised land), this no longer seems possible as the borders of the global frontiers seem to disappear. The world seemed to have most of its territories mapped and at least somewhat known, even if not totally. Outer space provided other avenue of possible exit for those desiring an exodus from the world as we know it, or at least a route to be imagined for this purpose. In a way, while the map is not the territory, an imaginal landscape is a precondition for actually finding a northwest passage in the physical world. A shift to imaginal recomposition around outer space themes is part of the shift from a conception of exodus in physical terms to one in terms of intensive coordinates. In other words a shift towards an exodus that does not to leave while attempting to subtract itself from forms of state domination and capitalist valorization. This is perhaps seen most clearly in the development of late 1960s so-called ‘drop out culture’, even more so the case of places like Italy where it is organized in terms of the collective and the development of other forms of sociality and collectivity, rather than a sort of individualized notion of withdrawal (which became much more the case in places like the US). This is part of an overall transformation of political antagonism towards forms that inhabit a mythic territory and space of composition and are involved in forms of semiotic warfare and conflict. Link: Space Exploration/DevelopmentInvestment in space is a potential bonanza for capitalist expansion—opens up new military applications, abundant raw materials, energy production, off-earth manufacturing, and various spin-off industries.Parker 9 (Martin, Prof of Organization and Culture @ U of Leicester, The Sociological Review, May, Vol. 57, Iss. Supp. s1, p. 83-97)The relation between the military industrial complex and the war state is crucial in this regard, with space technologies including surveillance satellites, missile guidance, and the ‘weaponization’ of space being obvious gains. This much is clear from NASA onwards. However, the link between (for example) military satellites and communications and monitoring devices is clearly a very close one. Hence, access to the military high ground also means access to surveillance and media power over the entire planet, and this goes for both states and ‘defence’ companies. A further circuit is that of space tourism, clearly a domain only accessible to the hyper-rich, but further markets include the exploitation of materials from the moon, asteroids or planets; solar energy; off-earth manufacturing; colonies and terraforming projects. All of these would come with their attendant spin-off industries, such as clearing up space junk, provisioning off-planet habitats, accounting and legal services, security and so on. For Dickens and Ormrod, this is a problem, but for the space libertarians, it is an opportunity to make money and assert freedoms. Link: Space Exploration/Development- TradeoffInvestment in the space program only benefits the military-industrial complex- our priority should be addressing social inequalities here on earthDickens 10 (Peter, Affiliated Lecturer in the Department of Sociology, Faculty of Politics, Psychology, Sociology and International Studies , University of Cambridge, "The Humanization of the Cosmos—To What End?," [] AD: 6-29-11, jam)Humanizing Without Colonizing the Cosmos But humanizing outer space can be for good as well as for ill. It can either, as is now happening, be in a form primarily benefiting those who are already in positions of economic, social, and military power. Or humanization can be something much more positive and socially beneficial. What might this more progressive form of cosmic humanization look like? Most obviously, the technology allowing a human presence in the cosmos would be focused mainly on earthly society. There are many serious crises down here on Earth that have urgent priority when considering the humanization of outer space. First, there is the obvious fact of social inequalities and resources. Is $2 billion and upwards to help the private sector find new forms of space vehicles really a priority for public funding, especially at a time when relative social inequalities and environmental conditions are rapidly worsening? The military-industrial complex might well benefit, but it hardly represents society as a whole. This is not to say, however, that public spending on space should be stopped. Rather, it should be addressed toward ameliorating the many crises that face global society. Satellites, for example, have helped open up phone and Internet communications for marginalized people, especially those not yet connected by cable. Satellites, including satellites manufactured by capitalist companies, can also be useful for monitoring climate change and other forms of environmental crisis such as deforestation and imminent hurricanes. They have proved useful in coordinating humanitarian efforts after natural disasters. Satellites have even been commissioned by the United Nations to track the progress of refugees in Africa and elsewhere.Colonizing space ignores earthly problemsLee 85 (Richard B, PhD, UCBerkeley, “Models of Human Colonization,” /1807/18021/1/TSpace0161.pdf , JM)The upshot of all this is to inject a somber note in an otherwise optimistic proceeding. We need to learn a little humility and at least to become aware of our own unexamined assumptions. These scientists aspire to the stars and yet their vision is profoundly limited by the blinds of one culture at one point in history. History is messy, and the human material we are working with is messy. Let us at least try to be aware of the triumphalism that I hear again and again: "We're going to space, it's our destiny." Such sloganeering strikes a hollow note for those of us who are far from sure that technology will solve all of our problems . There are two big unknowns in this whole business of colonizing space, and we have looked at only one. The first, of course, is the extraterrestrial unknown: What is out there? But the second big unknown is the search for terrestrial intelligence: What is down here? If we are as smart as we claim to be and can go to the stars, why can't we use our considerable intelligence to solve the problems on Earth before we export them to space? Link: Space Exploration/Development- TradeoffThere are still problems on Earth – space exploration now is unethicalGoetzman 6 (Keith, Senior Editor of Utne, “Houston, We Have a Problem,” Utne November/December, JM)I am awed by the cosmos, and on those nights when I'm lucky enough to escape civilization's lights and peer into the heavens, I lie on my back on the ground and drink in the enormity of it all. The northern lights thrill me, meteor showers hypnotize me, and the answers to the great questions of our existence seem to hover in the cool, inky vastness. I let my imagination fly to the moon and beyond. But I don't want to go there. I am a bad astronaut. I am not on board with President Bush's new Vision for Space Exploration, which compels NASA to return Americans to the moon and take us to Mars. I am one of those people, and there are more of us every day, who believe that the planet Earth is in peril. We've degraded our environment so quickly, so blindly, and so greedily that it may be uninhabitable, or at least very inhospitable, within just a few generations. The right thing to do, in fact the only thing to do, is to marshal our resources and try to correct our suicidal course. Our leading scientific and engineering minds should be dedicated to seeking solutions for our earthly problems-not wasting precious time and resources on manned space exploration. Spend any time online among 'space activists' and you'll find a strain of deep-felt, long-running frustration with people like me. The let's-go-to-space folks consider themselves bold, brave, and forward thinking, while they see us earthbound types as stuck in our old ways, unable to take that great imaginative leap into the void. Here's my great leap of imagination: Let's learn how to get along with each other and live sustainably on Earth. Let's launch an era in which mutual cooperation leads us to save our precious, beautiful planet and ourselves. Let's boldly go where we've never gone before. Even if you're not with me on my mission, stop painting my fellow space skeptics and me as opponents of science. Our president is the most potent detractor of science in the country, steadfastly altering, suppressing, or flat-out ignoring well-established findings on stem cells, global warming, and other vitally important issues. This is a man who told us after the 9/11 terrorist attacks that we all ought to go shopping. Now I am supposed to believe that, as we face the prospect of environmental collapse, the best response is to go to Mars? Bush's space vision has prompted a loud outcry from scientists who, like me, are deeply critical of the retooled NASA mission, which shifts priorities away from research and toward the more glamorous, risky, and costly goal of manned space flight. Certainly, there is human value to the study of space, from simply gaining knowledge to developing spin-off technologies to providing national defense. Let's keep looking upward to learn what we can, using unmanned flights whenever possible, and let's not leave ourselves vulnerable to attack. But let's also be wary of promises that are driven more by fearmongers, desperate politicians, and aerospace industry lobbyists than by real needs. And let's not be fooled into thinking that the space people will always act ethically and in the public interest. There is a rocket fuel chemical in my wife's breast milk, and my sons have drunk it. That's one of space flight's less glorious legacies. Recently, some gung-ho proponents of space exploration have taken my main point-we are straining Earth's resources to the breaking point-and cynically tried to turn it to their advantage. We must go to space, they say, to find a new home, or new energy sources, or some friendly aliens who can show us the way. These are all long-shot propositions akin to hoping to win the lottery, whereas dramatic and cataclysmic climate change is now a near certainty. I'm going with the safer bet: Stay and fight. Link: Space Exploration/Development- SpinoffsInvestment in the space program leads to unintended spinoffs for profitable commercial applicationsDickens and Ormrod 7 (Peter, Affiliated Lecturer in the Department of Sociology, Faculty of Politics, Psychology, Sociology and International Studies , U of Cambridge, and J.S., Senior Lecturer of Applied Social Science @ U of Brighton, "Cosmic society: towards a sociology of the universe," book, p. 57, jam)Much government manipulation of the circuits of capital occurs because of the perceived value of ‘spin-offs’. Spin-offs are the unintended commercial applications that spring from technology and science developed for another goal. The list of commercial technologies that were originally developed for the space pro- gramme is long: Teflon, Velcro, Tang, temperopaedic mattresses, CAT scans, ISDN management technology, digital watches, mobile phones. They are valued because it means the initial investment in space technology drives the development of further commodities and increasingly efficient technology. These technologies generate more false needs amongst the public, and promote a further round of investment from product developers. This is one way in which the contradictions arising in the primary circuit can be forestalled. Link: Space Exploration/Development- ‘Outer Spatial Fix’The aff is a new spatial ‘fix’ for capitalism- it provide a short term resolution to the contradictions inherent in capitalism.Dickens and Ormrod 7 (Peter, Affiliated Lecturer in the Department of Sociology, Faculty of Politics, Psychology, Sociology and International Studies , U of Cambridge, and J.S., Senior Lecturer of Applied Social Science @ U of Brighton, "Cosmic society: towards a sociology of the universe," book, p. 54-55, jam)Importantly for Harvey and other Marxist geographers, these fixes commonly take on a ‘spatial’ nature. They involve the geographic expansion of the circuits of capital as new territories, raw materials, workforces and markets are drawn into the capitalist system. For purposes of exposition, Harvey (2007) initially assumes a single and closed region in which production and realization of surplus values take place. But, he argues, ‘the frontiers of the region can be rolled back or relief gained by exports of money capital, commodities or productive capacities of fresh labour powers from other regions’ (ibid.: 427). The tendency towards overaccumulation within the original region remains unchecked, but ‘devaluation is avoided by successive and ever grander ‘outer transformations’. This process can presumably continue until all external possibilities are exhausted or because other regions resist being treated as mere convenient appendages’ (ibid.: 427). But even Earthly spatial fixes may now be proving relatively ‘exhausted’, unprofitable or containing people resisting their appendage status. We therefore argue that Earthly fixes may be expanded to incorporate even more ‘outer trans- formations’. This time the fixes are in the cosmos. We therefore term them ‘outer spatial fixes’. Clearly there is no question of importing labour power from outer space to help out a failing region on Earth but, as we will discuss in Chapter 6, the raw materials of outer space are increasingly envisaged as a means of developing Earthly production processes. And, as discussed in Chapters 3 and 4, outer space is being used to manage flows of capital and information and to regulate social relations (including the social relations of production) on Earth. Once made, however, a spatial ‘fix’ is likely to be destroyed or devalued in order to make way for a new spatial fix, one offering new possibilities for capital accumulation. Spatial fixes are only ever provisional and therefore offer only short-term resolutions to the contradictions inherent in capitalism. Whether these fixes are (at least temporarily) effective depends on whether they are seen as profitable or, in the case of state and social expenditures, whether they fulfil their purpose of, for example, reproducing labour power or successfully managing social relations. We cannot overexaggerate the fact that success for Earthly or cosmic spatial fixes is by no means guaranteed. The two further circuits of capital are involved in the making of these new outer spatial fixes. The drive to explore space is part of a search for a spatial fix to crises of over-accumulationMacDonald 8 (Fraser, Faculty @ Univ. of Pennsylvania, “Anti-Astropolitik: outer space and the orbit of geography,” April 16, , JM)The current struggle for orbital supremacy, as the next section will make clear, is an extension of these relations into space in order to consolidate them back on Earth. Indeed, outer space may become, to use David Harvey’s term, a ‘spatio-temporal fix’ that can respond to crises of over-accumulation (Harvey, 2003: 43). While this might seem like shorthand for the sort of Marxist critique that Thrift rejects (Amin and Thrift, 2005), it is an analysis that is also shared by the advocates of American 604 Progress in Human Geography 31(5) Astropolitik, who describe space as the means by which ‘capitalism will never reach wealth saturation’ (Dolman, 2002: 175). The production of (outer) space should, I think, be understood in this wider context. Link: Space Exploration/Development- ‘Outer Spatial Fix’Investment in space is part of the search for a ‘outer spatial fix’ to capitalism which can temporarily resolve crises of profitabilityDickens 9 (Peter, Affiliated Lecturer in the Department of Sociology, Faculty of Politics, Psychology, Sociology and International Studies , U of Cambridge, May, The Sociological Review, Vol. 57, Iss. Supp. s1, p. 68-82, jam)Social Crises, Outer Spatial Fixes and Galactic Imperialism. Explanatory primacy is given here to economic mechanisms driving this humanization of the universe. In the same way that they have driven imperialising societies in the past to expand their economic bases into their ‘outsides’, the social relations of capitalism and the processes of capital-accumulation are driving the new kind of outer space imperialisms. Such is the starting-point of this paper (See also Dickens and Ormrod 2007). It is a position based on the work of the contemporary Marxist geographer David Harvey (2003) and his notion of ‘spatial fixes’. Capitalism continually constructs what he calls ‘outer transformations.’ In the context of the over-accumulation of capital in the primary circuit of industrial capital, fresh geographic zones are constantly sought out which have not yet been fully invested in or, in the case of outer space not yet been invested in at all. ‘Outer spatial fixes’ are investments in outer space intended to solve capitalism’s many crises. At one level they may be simply described as crises of economic profitability. But ‘economic’ can cover a wide array of issues such as crises of resource-availability and potential social and political upheavals resulting from resource-shortages. Furthermore, there is certainly no guarantee that these investments will actually ‘fix’ these underlying economic, political and social crises. The ‘fix’ may well be of a temporary, sticking-plaster, variety. The aff is part of a search for an outer spatial fix to capitalism- it creates a new cosmic elite and spreads neoliberalism throughout the galaxy.Parker 9 (Martin, Prof of Organization and Culture @ U of Leicester, The Sociological Review, May, Vol. 57, Iss. Supp. s1, p. 83-97)The rhetoric of the pioneer, and of the frontier, suggests that ordinary honest citizens will be able to stake their claims. However, as Dickens and Ormrod argue, these self-described space pioneers are not ordinary people, but members of a kind of ‘cosmic elite’ (2007: 4). Reading Kemp’s description of the sort of people who are investing in these companies, it is easy to see what they mean (2007: 5). Added to Richard Branson are the founders of , Microsoft, Pay Pal, Compusearch and a smattering of games designers and hotel magnates. The entry level costs are huge, and the risks are gigantic. Even the people who might be travelling as space tourists will have to be very wealthy indeed. Virgin Galactic are currently asking $200,000 per flight, which is an expensive five minutes. Dickens and Ormrod’s materialist analysis of the space industries concludes that off-earth capitalism is pretty much like capitalism on earth, in the sense that it runs into periodic crises that need to be fixed by the development and exploitation of new markets. These ‘fixes’ are necessarily temporary, but the promise of the ‘outer spatial fix’ is that it (potentially) opens a variety of ways in which capitalism might be extended beyond the boundaries of the earth. Adopting some ideas from the geographer David Harvey, they argue that the commodification of space allows for various circuits of capital to be re-imagined and a hegemonic model of neo-liberalism to spread skywards. Link: Space Exploration/Development- UnderconsumptionSpace exploration and development substitute for lack of consumption, sustaining the growth of the military industrial complexMarshall 95 (Alan, the Institute of Development Studies at Massey University, Feb, Space Policy, Vol. 11, Iss. 1, p. 41-52, jam)If we follow the perspectives of economic imperialism as theorized by Baran and Lenin.'1 we have the view that imperialistic expansion is the political and military manifestation of the search by nations for economic surplus. Economic surplus is defined by Baran as the difference between a nation's output and its consumption.5 Given the impossibility of a nation milking an economic surplus from the trading of extraterrestrial resources, any search for an economic surplus through the medium of space activities must lie in another direction. Allied to the Leninist and Baranesquc view of imperialism is that of other Marxist theorists, such as Bukharin, Hilferding and Luxemburg, who perceive imperialist expansion as the continual search by capitalist entities (nations, individual investors and multi-national companies, etc.) to invest surplus capital into profitable fields. This may be made increasingly difficult due to the saturation of the original market and due to diminishing marginal returns. While the cost of extracting Solar System resources may be prohibi-tively high to enable profitability, the astronautics industry itself is extremely profitable because of its link with the supply of military hardware. This may be viewed as an example of Rosa Luxemburg's model of the association of militarism with imperialism.'' According to this model of economic imperialism, military expenditure plays a part in substituting for the lack of consumption in a free market since it absorbs much surplus capital and acts to produce economic growth as registered in the national accounts. Of course, national accounting systems, such as Gross Domestic Product, fail to register the opportunity cost of state-funded investment: ic whether the same government investment could have yielded a greater return in other sectors. With the end of the Cold War, those companies that made a living from the supply of military hardware to governments have experienced a drop in demand for their military goods and an associated drop in profitability. Thus they are seeking to extend their interests in the space part of their markets in order to secure profits from building rockets and space stations rather than missiles and military aircraft. The same companies that championed the causes of national defense against the communist threat through massive military deterrence now extol the virtues of the benefits to be gained from massive investment in space activities.7 In the light of this analysis, it can be explained that the search for new fields into which surplus capital can be invested, may in fact be promoting human space expansion (despite the dubiety of it ever becoming a self-funding process). But its lack of success as a singly powerful enough motivator of Solar System development is shown by the torpidity of current human expanionist practices into space. Link: Space Exploration [AT: Our project isn’t productive/profitable]Investment in space exploration saves capitalism from self-destruction through overproduction.Marsh 95 (James L., Professor of Philosophy at Fordham University, Critique, Action, and Liberation p.266 GAL)In late capitalism the state performs all of the functions listed above but also enters into the economy itself as an active participant and as a legitimizer of the status quo. The state creates and improves conditions for the realization of capital by investing in unproductive projects (for example, armaments and space exploration), heightening productivity of human labor (education), guiding the flow of capital into sectors neglected by the autonomous market, relieving social and material costs resulting from private production (unemployment compensation, welfare), and strengthening the economy's competitive position abroad by supemational economic blocs, military presence, and imperialism. Such intervention becomes necessary in order to save the economy from self-destruction through overproduction and lack of demand and to legitimate capitalist priorities.Even if the aff’s investment in space is not immediately profitable, it is used in a Keynesian pump-priming way to regulate the economyDickens 9 (Peter, Affiliated Lecturer in the Department of Sociology, Faculty of Politics, Psychology, Sociology and International Studies , U of Cambridge, May, The Sociological Review, Vol. 57, Iss. Supp. s1, p. 68-82, jam)As regards investments connected with outer space, perhaps the most benign form of the tertiary circuit is a form of civic ‘boosterism’, whereby governments provide large outlays of capital in the hope of attracting investors to develop new primary circuits in a particular region. An example is ‘Spaceport America’, a planned $225 million development to attract Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic company. Other outer-space investments being made in the ‘tertiary circuit’ include ‘Paper NASA’, a phrase used to refer to NASA’s investments into research and the development of new technologies. State finances, siphoned off the primary circuit, are being used as a Keynesian regulator for the economy as a whole and as a means of keeping scientists in work. The somewhat vague hope is that some of their ideas will eventually bring financial returns. Similarly, much state expenditures goes (at least in the case of the USA) into the production of scientific equipment such as telescopes and computers. This, despite the fact that there may be few long-term prospects of these investments resulting into profits made in the private sector. Again, the tax-funded tertiary circuit (operated by government in a mediating role) is being used in a pump-priming way to keep the private sector profitable. Meanwhile, other elements of the ‘tertiary circuit’ (those associated with military and surveillance activities) are a good deal less benign than spaceports but will also benefit some already very powerful private sector enterprises. What President Eisenhower famously called ‘the military-industrial-complex’ (or what is now often termed ‘the military-industrial-space-complex’) has experienced a remarkable revival in recent years, one spurred on by the attacks made on the U.S. mainland on September 11th 2001. Since then an array of new enemies has been discovered. These are being used to justify yet further switches of capital by government into the tertiary circuit making military hardware of all kinds and increasingly sophisticated forms of visual and electronic surveillance (Dennis 2008). Those companies making such hardware for government are amongst the largest bloc of industry in the United States and they have exceptionally strong connections in Washington. Table l shows their position relative to others in the world, Raytheon, General Dynamics being other US-based companies and the remainder being based in Europe. Link: Space Development- ResourcesSpace development attempts to solve inevitable crises of overproduction by securing access to new raw materialsDickens 9 (Peter, Affiliated Lecturer in the Department of Sociology, Faculty of Politics, Psychology, Sociology and International Studies , U of Cambridge, May, The Sociological Review, Vol. 57, Iss. Supp. s1, p. 68-82, jam)Capital, Crises and Spatial Fixes. At the centre of the imperialising process (cosmic and Earthly) is ‘the primary circuit of capital’ in which value is made through the exploitation of labour-power. (Fig.1) Money buys labour-power and the means of production; raw materials and technology. A labour-process is then set in train and commodities are produced. These commodities are sold on the market, with some of the money-proceeds taking the form of wages paid to workers and some being recycled back to the investors of capital investing in new circuits. This primary circuit is no less than the underlying essence of capitalism. Figure 1 about here This recycling takes place (usually via banks and other financial institutions) into what Harvey calls ‘the secondary circuit’,that in which ‘fixed capital’ is created as inputs to new rounds of production (Figure 2). In this way the productivity of labour is increased. Alternatively the secondary circuit takes the form of consumers’ savings being circulated, again via banks and the capital market, into the creation of consumer durables, houses and the like. This circuit is important to Harvey as a geographer since it underlies urban and regional development, including the process of suburbanisation in previously sparsely-populated regions. And it is important for this study since we are specifically interested in the spatial implications of capital’s ‘fixes’. Figure 2 about here. Finally, Harvey identifies a ‘tertiary circuit’ in which states are mediators in the flow of capital into new investments (Figure 3). Surpluses are extracted (mainly by the device of government taxation) from the surpluses made in the primary circuit and reinvested in technology, science and administration. Similarly, they are extracted for other ‘state functions’ such as social expenditure; military expenditures, police, education and the like. Again, these flows of circuit generate new primary circuits of capital. Figure 4 about here Figure 4 shows the three types of circuit of capital combined. The diagram looks rather mechanistic but circuits of capital are unstable and crisis-ridden. Indeed, crises often underlie the switching practices outlined above. One form of crisis develops when all those consumers inclined and able to consume a particular product at a particular price will have actually done so. A crisis of over-production ensues and rates of profit fall. There are a number of possible ‘fixes’ for this crisis, one of the most relevant to outer-space imperialism being the search for cheaper (usually meaning more plentiful) supplies of raw materials. Cheaper inputs should mean that commodities start reaching more consumers and, if this happens, new rounds of accumulation are underway. Attempting to restore profitability through access to new raw materials therefore means that capitalism’s fixes often involve geographical expansion. Capital, in Neil Smith’s words ‘stalks the Earth in search of material resources’ (1984: 46). He goes on to say that ‘no part of the Earth’s surface, the atmosphere, the oceans, the geological substratum or the biological superstratum are immune from transformation by capital’ (op cit p.56). The galaxy can now be added to this list of resources being ‘stalked’ by capital.Link: Space Development- ResourcesSpace development attempts to resolve the crisis of supply, a fundamental contradiction of capitalism Dickens and Ormrod 7 (Peter, Affiliated Lecturer in the Department of Sociology, Faculty of Politics, Psychology, Sociology and International Studies , U of Cambridge, and J.S., Senior Lecturer of Applied Social Science @ U of Brighton, "Cosmic society: towards a sociology of the universe," book, p. 155-156, jam)Capitalism is necessarily an expanding and crisis-making type of society. But capital, in order to continue reproducing and expanding, necessarily encounters limits, resistances and barriers of different kinds. Indeed, it could be said that it requires limits, since these are the basis for capital’s ‘dynamism’, its constant restructuring and reorganization. As Marx himself put it, ‘The tendency to create the world market is directly given in the concept of capital itself. Every limit appears as a barrier to be overcome’ (1973: 408). As discussed in Chapter 3, today’s main power blocs (the United States, the European Union and in due course other societies such as China and India) are beginning to scramble for outer space in much the same way as the European soci- eties competed for African territory in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The establishment of property rights is central, as indeed it was when the African continent was subdivided by rival powers. As Rosa Luxemburg, one of Harvey’s antecedents, argued in developing her theory of imperialism, capital needs an ‘outside’ beyond its boundaries, off which it feeds (Luxemburg 1968; Hardt and Negri 2000). This ‘outside’ takes two main forms. First, capitalism expands by making other kinds of society in its own image; making feudal or aboriginal societies, for example, into capitalist forms. But zones outside capitalism can also be used as just a source of materials. This is where outer space is becoming significant. In the same way that gold and diamonds were taken from Peru and South Africa or sugar cane was taken from Jamaica and Java in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century forms of imperialism, so can the materials of the Arctic or of the Moon and Mars be incorporated into capitalist production processes. Assuming that the cost of reaching the Moon and the nearby planets is sufficiently low, this makes the Moon and nearby planets an attractive prospect for the further expansion of capital. But, in line with Marx, Luxemburg also went on to argue that by incorporating a non-capitalist society in either way, capital creates yet another barrier. The very commodities it needs (whether it be labour power or just materials) are now brought within its ambit. As regards materials, it will in due course use them up or make them prohibitively expensive to extract. This means that capital must find yet another source to satisfy its demand for infinite expansion. Regions such as the Arctic or outer space are good examples. So, as soon as the Moon is exhausted, capital will be seeking more resources on Mars, and so on. Outer space exploration can be seen as an attempted resolution of what some historical materialists call ‘the second contradiction of capitalism’ (O’Connor 1994, 1996). This contradiction was recognized by Marx and Engels, though given little prominence by them. Here the contradiction is between the forces and relations of production on the one hand and the conditions of production on the other. The second contradiction points to crises in supply rather than demand. ‘Conditions of production’ refers to inputs necessary to production: labour, nature, infrastructure and physical space. The last three are especially important for this discussion. Through the degradation of the environment or the failure to make or maintain sufficient physical infrastructure, a crisis in supply is produced, one in which what Marx called ‘the natural or external conditions of production’ are insufficient or have been degraded. This kind of crisis in supply is not usually, however, one in which there are absolute shortages of resources. Rather it takes the form of rising costs, which in turn threaten to undermine profits. Furthermore, social movements of different kinds can be expected to make greater demands for socialization of, and control over, the means of production. In a rather different language and with radically different political priorities, the early proponents of space travel and exploitation offered means by which the second contradiction can be resolved. For example: Shortage of resources is not a fact; it is an illusion born of ignorance. Scientifically and technically feasible improvements in launch vehicles will make departure from Earth easy and inexpensive. Once we have a foothold in space, the mass of the asteroid belt will be at our disposal, permitting us to provide for the material needs of a million times as many people as Earth can hold. Solar power can provide all the energy needs of this vast civilization (10,000,000 billion people) from now until the Sun expires. (Lewis 1996: 255) Link: Alien ThreatThe alien is us: The construction of menacing alien others is a projection of the worst aspects of our own societiesLombardo No Date (Tom, Chair of Psychology, Philosophy, and Integrated Studies, Rio Salado College “Space Exploration and Cosmic Evolution” Pg. 30-31 JF)Yet we are as fearful of aliens as we are of the vast dark emptiness of space. To a great degree, it may be the apprehension over encountering aliens that creates the fear of outer space. It is “what that goes bump in the night” and the unknown that makes outer space terrifying. Having been raised on a steady dose of science fiction movies that depict aliens as monstrous and sinister beings, we have a hard time imagining the potential positive benefits of alien contact. H.G. Wells, in The War of the Worlds, described the Martians as highly intelligent beings who wished to conquer and subdue the earth without any regard for human life. More recently, the technologically advanced aliens of Independence Day, swiftly, mercilessly, destroy countless human cities around the world. For sheer terror, perhaps the quintessential space monsters were the creatures of the Alien series, which used human bodies as hosts for their own reproduction. And there are the Borg of Star Trek, a cyborg synthesis of our fears of aliens and of machines, whose intention is to assimilate us into their depersonalized collective society, destroy our individuality, and rob us of our souls. We have been raised to believe that aliens care little about the happiness or well being of humans. Since outer space is like a blank screen on which we can project our deepest thoughts and feelings about ourselves, our different images of aliens could also reflect different aspects of how we see our own psyche and character. Why is it that aliens are so frequently warlike? Why are they often so much like the monsters of the id? Frequently they represent the worst in us. They are the devils of the modern soul. Equally, our images of aliens could reflect our underlying vision of the cosmos. Do we believe that we live in a nasty brutish universe populated by demons, akin to depictions of the seas in 16th Century maps, or do we believe we live in a universe filled with love, benevolence, wonder, and angels? Do we see the universe as a cold and impersonal reality or do we see it as magical and beautiful? Into the darkness we project our hopes and fears and structure its content in terms of our philosophical, psychological, and spiritual beliefs. The fear we have of aliens conquering and destroying us perhaps simply reflects a deep apprehension over the possibility of meeting creatures from a different world. The word for this fear is “xenophobia”. Nothing would seem so strange and unnerving as to come face to face with an intelligent mind from another planet or star system. The psychological and cultural shock of an alien encounter is what I think we fear most of all, rather than whether they will destroy us with laser guns or monstrous poisonous fangs. It is the possibility or probability of extreme difference that frightens us. The alien is the ultimate “otherness”.Link: Astronomy, SETI, Asteroid Detection, R and DGovernment investment in projects like [telescopes/SETI/Asteroid Detection] are Keynesian economic regulators to insure the future productivity of capital.Dickens and Ormrod 7 (Peter, Affiliated Lecturer in the Department of Sociology, Faculty of Politics, Psychology, Sociology and International Studies , U of Cambridge, and J.S., Senior Lecturer of Applied Social Science @ U of Brighton, "Cosmic society: towards a sociology of the universe," book, p. 57, jam)Investments are also made in what Harvey calls the ‘tertiary’ circuit. These are again long term, the intention being to generate future productivity of capital. They include switches into scientific research and development. The phrase ‘Paper NASA’ is often used to refer to NASA’s more speculative research and development department (Mean and Wilsdon 2004). Government finance is used here as a form of Keynesian regulation to keep scientists in jobs, with a vague hope that some of their ideas may ‘pay off’. Many scientific missions to the cosmos are bringing no obvious, or immediate, financial return. State interventions also include telescopes aimed at discovering how the universe evolved in its earliest years, monitoring asteroids that might potentially hit Earth, the search for extra- terrestrial intelligence and the possibilities for making other planets habitable. The telescopes, antennae, computers and other equipment used in these projects will have been made in a primary circuit and will have produced profits for their manufacturers, but their use offers no immediate way in which profits will be pro- duced. But, with governments again taking a central mediating roles (through, for example, the taxation system), profitable opportunities may be opened up in the future via this tertiary sector. Link: Asteroid DefenseAsteroid defense facilitates private capital’s commercial development of spaceSpence 94 (Martin, Marxist theorist, the assistant general secretary of the Bectu broadcasting union, Capital and Class, Spring, Vol. 18, No. 1 p. 51-83, jam)The second is hi-tech environmentalism: projects like the orbiting solar satellite power station proposed by the Sunsat Energy Council, which consists of several US military contractors. The third line of argument is more dramatic and is being advanced by scientists and corporations previously engaged on SDI. It focusses on the real but unquantifiable possibility of a comet or asteroid colliding catastrophically with the Earth. A full-scale programme to address this threat would require the design and construction of sophisticated surveillance satellites, and could involve such exotic technologies as orbiting nuclear arsenals or laser-weapons on the Moon (Matthews 1992). This is not simply the stuff of fevered science fiction: it is the subject of a public debate which is now under way in the US Congress and which has attracted considered and supportive responses from important and thoughtful representatives of capital (e.g. Economist 11/9/93). A fully-fledged anti-asteroid defence system would clearly create an enormous amount of work for the aerospace industry, which is of course the intention. But equally importantly, it could help establish a publicly-funded space infrastructure, which might then be used by private capital as a platform for a commercially-driven expansion into deep space. Link: Asteroid Impacts/ColonizationFears of asteroids are just a manifestation of ontological insecurity- the aff is an attempt to assert omnipotence in response to the vulnerabilities produced by capitalism.Ormrod 7 (James S., Senior Lecturer of Applied Social Science @ U of Brighton, Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society, Sep, Vol. 12, Iss. 3, p. 260, jam)The pro-space movement and the culture of narcissism There has been a great deal of discussion in the last few decades over the extent to which the culture of the Western world, especially the US, can be considered a culture of narcissism (e.g. Sennett, 1974; Lasch, 1979). The narcissism diagnosis has been noted especially to apply to the technocratic middle class, of which the majority of pro-space activists are members (Sennett, 1974). Quite unlike Freud's society of excess repression, this is a society in which coherent cultural ideals and social sanctions have been eroded. The traditional roles of the parents in psychosocial development have also been undermined. In conditions of social fragmentation the individual is left alone in a quest for self-actualization, without a source of socially imposed superego or "conscience". Attending to the self becomes the prerogative of the late-modern narcissist. The culture demands self-expression and self-gratification (Sennett, 1974). Indeed, that is its ideology (Craib, 1994). The libertarian values of pro-space advocates legitimate such attention to individual desires through discourses about freedom and an accumulative and aggressive human nature, among other things (see Ormrod, 2006, ch. 6). There are different ways of portraying the relationship between, on the one hand, the anxiety, insecurity, self-reflexivity and even self-hatred that result from this disruption of the normal developmental process, and on the other, the fantasies of omnipotence, self-love and over-evaluation of the self that are also witnessed in such cultures. For Lasch (1979), fantasies of omnipotence are only occasional defences for the narcissist. Likewise, for Giddens (1991, p 194), the illusory retreat to omnipotent fantasy is very easily shattered, at which point the underlying insecurity and uncertainty on which it is based become apparent. Lasch assumes that space colonization is a proposal stemming from paranoia about survival on Earth (Lasch, 1979, p 49; 1984, pp 87-90). Giddens cites Laing's (1965) observation that ontologically insecure people often face "anxiety about obliteration, of being engulfed, crushed or overwhelmed by externally impinging events" (in Giddens, 1991, p 53), which would seem to fit in particularly well with a fear of asteroid impact often associated with an escape to space. It is in this context of a fragmenting social world unable to provide resources for the construction of a stable sense of self that writers such as Giddens (1991) and Beck (1992) locate actors reflexively trying to construct the self, often through new forms of identification and lifestyle politics. What these writers underplay in their accounts generally is the extent to which elements of late-modern capitalist societies can also encourage and sustain quite unrealistic fantasies about the capacities of the self. Lasch (1979) himself recognizes that narcissistic personality types tend to be rather successful in these societies. They are certainly not crippled by their anxieties. Anxiety and identity crisis may plague those who have a sense that social constraints and resources should be in place (e.g. those with strong religious upbringings who are then exposed to an increasingly permissive culture). But in cases of extreme narcissism, self-love (accounts of which Lasch dislikes in the work of Erich Fromm and others) is a substitute for anaclitic attachment and development of an ego ideal formed from sources outside the self. Activists certainly have cause to experience the kind of ontological anxiety Giddens talks about, because they belong to a narcissistic culture. Furthermore, a number have experienced redundancy and other unsettling events that might have undermined the self. But if this anxiety is represented in the fantasy of an asteroid impact, it is instantly countered by fantasies of control over such catastrophic events, which can re-affirm one's omnipotence. One activist at a conference I attended talked about identifying asteroids on a course for Earth and then mining them empty of all their valuable materials - thus turning a threat into an opportunity for personal wealth. Smelser (1962, p 190) suggested fear of asteroid impact has resulted in mass panic, but for pro-space activists it is simply another opportunity symbolically to overcome their own vulnerability. Hoffer (1951) suggested that mass movements draw people who are frustrated, marginalized and insecure, and offer to replace this unwanted self with a new sense of omnipotence. But while some might see the pro-space movement as a reaction against a narcissistic culture, it should be noted that in many respects it is also a movement rooted firmly in that culture. <CONTINUED><CONTINUED>In one sense the movement refers us back to the certainties of a modern era of progressive confidence, yet at the same time its existence serves distinctly narcissistic ends. Its solutions exacerbate the culture of narcissism. Capitalism has a central role in creating the conditions for narcissism, promising to replace consumers' early loss. As Fromm says, "the attitude inherent in consumerism is that of swallowing the whole world. The consumer is the eternal suckling crying for the bottle" (1976, p 36). Capitalism thus serves as the adult's ever-attentive mother. This can be witnessed in the emergence of space tourism companies and other private enterprises such as those which "sell" stars to people, which offer consumers a pre-Oedipal sense of omnipotence. The entire Universe can still be brought under their power, as it is all there to be consumed (see Berger, 1972). Activists are fully supportive of political measures to promote the development of these private sector space ventures. Conclusion This paper has argued that fantasies about experiencing life in a spacefaring civilization motivate pro-space activism. In contrast to science fiction fans, who may use literature as escapism, pro-space activists are driven by phantasies about regaining the self experienced in primary narcissism, phantasies translated into symbolic spacefaring fantasies. The existence of these phantasies must be understood in the context of a late-modern culture of narcissism and its effects on people's choice of attachment and development of an ego ideal. Yet, rather than manifesting the anxiety and lack of direction associated with many late-modern individuals, pro-space activists continue to strive to obtain the kind of omnipotence first experienced in primary narcissism. Link: Colonization/Terraforming/Asteroid Mining (Zubrin)Zubrin has mommy issues – the desire for colonization is rooted in the narcissistic desire to ameliorate the traumatic infantile separation from the motherOrmrod 7 (James S., Senior Lecturer of Applied Social Science @ U of Brighton, Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society, Sep, Vol. 12, Iss. 3, p. 260, jam)Conquering planets.The most common kinds of pro-space fantasies among the groups I studied were fantasies related in some way to owning, consuming, taming or colonizing outer space. Pro-space activists are among those who have bought plots of land on the Moon as part of Dennis Hope's (legally unrecognized) scheme. They have also elaborated plans to mine asteroids and other bodies in space for precious materials. There are also more symbolic ways in which activists express their desire to tame the universe. Kevin, a young engineering graduate, talked about his desire to bounce up and down on the Moon in terms that sounded like the description of a child on a bouncy castle. Bouncing on something, or even walking on top of it, like the hunter with one foot on his kill, gives a particular power back to the individual, who can thereby imagine having conquered his object. Another very specific fantasy came from the head of one organization, ProSpace. Marc Schlather is in his 40s and has a background in Capitol Hill politics. In a statement at a ProSpace meeting he suggested that his organization would no longer be necessary when he got to play nine holes of golf on the Moon. The way the landscaping of golf courses on Earth tames the often hostile and exotic environments in which they are located suggests that playing golf can represent control over the Universe. Terraforming, or altering the climates of other planets to make them Earth-like, is another pro-space fantasy about taming the universe. Nearly all pro-space activists have a colonization fantasy in which they either live in orbiting man-made structures, in domes, or on the surface of terraformed planets. Celestial bodies are here first created in fantasy as objects distant from the individual's control. They are thus capable of representing the mother and other objects in the infant's world, which increasingly separate themselves from the infant. In pro-space fantasy this distance is crossed, the object brought back under personal control. David, an American-born entrepreneur now living in Ireland, explains his need to decrease the distance between himself and the Moon, saying straightforwardly, "I don't want to look at it up there, I want to walk on it". Pro-space pioneer Barbara Marx Hubbard uses uncannily psychoanalytic language when describing a fantasy she had during a trance she calls her "cosmic birth experience"; "the cosmic child had touched the breast of the moon" (1989, p 95). It is clear then how the objects of outer space may represent the infant's own lost objects and how bringing them under control can symbolically reinforce the phantasized power of the self. Interestingly, a common theme in pro-space writing about colonization is the idea that rather than taking building materials and fuel with us, we will live off the planet itself (see Zubrin, 1996). The object brought back under control is thus the nourishing and providing parent. This enables the fantasizers to imagine themselves as all-powerful conquerers not dependent on others, while at the same time fulfilling the desire to be nurtured by others on whom they really are dependent. Link: ColonizationInvesting capital in space colonization will only exacerbate exploitation here on earth while allowing elites to jet away from the problems capitalism produces.Dickens 10 (Peter, Affiliated Lecturer in the Department of Sociology, Faculty of Politics, Psychology, Sociology and International Studies , University of Cambridge, "The Humanization of the Cosmos—To What End?," [] AD: 6-29-11, jam)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 20th century. 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.<CONTINUED><CONTINUED> 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? Link: EnergyThe argument that advances in energy efficiency will solve environmental destruction is ahistorical-- energy savings empirically only accelerate capitalism’s ecological devastation.Foster, Clark, and York 10 (John Bellamy, prof of sociology @ U of Oregon, Brett, quals, and Richard, quals, Nov, [] AD: 7-2-11, jam)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 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. Link: “Frontier”Depicting space as the “final frontier” is an extension of US imperialist logic, renewing our sense of American identity and promoting exceptionalism.Duvall & Havercroft 6 (Raymond, Prof of Political Science @ U of Minnesota, and Jonathan, Ph.D. U Minnesota, Prof of Political Science @ Oklahoma U, October, “Taking Sovereignty Out of This World: Space Weapons and Empire of the Future,” p. 11, jam)Second, space control bears significantly on the production of political subjectivities. The original Star Trek series would begin with the voice of Captain Kirk describing space as the “final frontier”. While presenting the exploration of space as a largely peaceful enterprise, the TV show was also drawing upon its viewers’ “memories” of the “western frontier” of 19th century U.S. expansion. At least since the writings of Frederick Turner, there has been the notion that the frontier represents the well-spring of U.S. ingenuity, freedom, and creativity. According to Turner, because as they expanded westward settlers in the U.S. had to continually adapt to a new environment, they became increasingly “American”. The theme of the frontier as essential for American identity has had a significant discursive role in U.S. imperialist expansion.61 Although Turner concluded that the American frontier had closed by the late 1890s, he argued that the U.S. could extend it frontier into new countries, such as Latin America. Theodore Roosevelt, influenced by the Turner thesis, concluded that in order to maintain the exceptional American identity new frontiers had to be opened overseas. The notion of frontiers, then, has been integral to the U.S. imperialist project since its outset. The doctrine of space control, seen in this light, is simply an extension of the imperial logic. By expanding into and taking control of the “final frontier” the U.S. is continuing to renew an exceptional—an exclusive—identity by adapting itself to the harsh realities of a new nvironment. So, the doctrine of space control can be read as extending U.S. sovereignty into orbit. While a clear violation of international law, this de facto expansion of U.S. sovereignty will have two effects. First, it enables a process of primitive accumulation, whereby orbital spaces around earth are removed from the commons initially established by the Outer Space Treaty, and places them under the control of the U.S. for use and perhaps even ownership by businesses sympathetic to U.S. interests. The U.S. becomes even more than it is now the state for global capitalism, the global capitalist state. Second, this doctrine of space control is part of the ongoing re-production of American subjects as “Americans”. Embedded within space control is the notion that space is a new frontier. Following the Turner thesis and Roosevelt’s doctrine of imperialist expansion, there has long been a drive for Americans to seek out new frontiers as a way of renewing the American identity and promoting American values of individuality, innovation, and exceptionalism. Link: LandsatsLandsats are used for capitalist wars on earthMacDonald 7 (Fraser, U of Melbourne, Progress in Human Geography Vol. 31.592 pg. 597 JF)In this discussion so far, I have been drawing attention to geography’s recent failure to engage outer space as a sphere of inquiry and it is important to clarify that this indictment applies more to human than to physical geography. There are, of course, many biophysical currents of geography that directly draw on satellite technologies for remote sensing. The ability to view the Earth from space, particularly through the Landsat programme, was a singular step forward in understanding all manner of Earth surface processes and biogeographical patterns (see Mack, 1990). The fact that this new tranche of data came largely from military platforms (often under the guise of ‘dual use’) was rarely considered an obstacle to science. But, as the range of geographical applications of satellite imagery have increased to include such diverse activities as urban planning and ice cap measurements, so too has a certain re- ?exivity about the provenance of the images. It is not enough, some are realizing, to say ‘I just observe and explain desertification and I have nothing to do with the military’; rather, scientists need to acknowledge the overall context that gives them access to this data in the ?rst place (Cervino et al., 2003: 236). One thinks here of the case of Peru, whose US grant funding for agricultural use of Landsat data increased dramatically in the 1980s when the same images were found to be useful in locating insurgent activities of Maoist ‘Shining Path’ guerrillas (Schwartz, 1996). More recently, NASA’s civilian Sea-Wide Field Studies (Sea-WiFS) programme was used to identify Taliban forces during the war in Afghanistan (Caracciolo, 2004). The practice of geography, in these cases as with so many others, is bound up with military logics (Smith, 1992); the development of Geographical Information Systems (GIS) being a much-cited recent example (Pickles, 1995; 2004; Cloud, 2001; 2002; see Beck, 2003, for a case study of GIS in the service of the ‘war on terror’). Link: Mars (Zubrin)Zubrin’s vision of terraforming rests on capitalist assumptionsMarkley 97 (Robert, Jackson Distinguished Chair of British Literature @ West Virginia University, pp.779-781, MUSE, , JM)If Mars terraformed becomes the scientific "confirmation" as well as the spiritual projection of Lovelock's Gaia Hypothesis, it is also the imaginary space of a new frontier, a technologized site for an updated manifest destiny. Robert Zubrin, formerly an engineer in Martin Marietta's aerospace division and a developer of Mars Direct, a low-cost strategy to send astronauts to Mars by manufacturing fuel for the return trip from the planet's resources, forges explicit connections between the frontier thesis of Frederick Jackson Turner and the ideology of American-led terraformation (see Zubrin, The Case for Mars 1-18). "Without a frontier to grow in," Zubrin asserts, "not only American society, but the entire global civilization based upon Western enlightenment values of humanism, reason, science and progress will ultimately die" ("A New Martian Frontier"). HYPERLINK "" \l "FOOT8" 8 Only Mars "has what it takes" to continue the march of progress toward a humanist salvation: "It's far enough away to free its colonists from intellectual, legal, or cultural domination by the old world, and rich enough in resources to give birth to the new" ("A New Martian Frontier"). Zubrin's libertarian rhetoric of self-actualization thus depends on the economics of resource appropriation, even as it evokes, as fellow enthusiast Turner puts it, "a project that will allow us to pursue beauty and truth on a grand scale" (34). [End Page 779] Zubrin's romantic vision of the American frontier, however, is founded on dubious or simplified readings of American history that repress both the human and ecological consequences of conquest and colonization (see Crosby). Liberty becomes a function of an idealized "New World" open to seemingly limitless exploitation of its resources. Projected into the future, this romanticized view of the frontier describes the economic opportunities of space exploration: "If the idea is accepted that the world's resources are fixed, then each person is ultimately the enemy of every other person, and each race or nation is the enemy of every other race or nation. Only in a universe of unlimited resources can all men be brothers" ("A New Martian Frontier"). Zubrin's rhetorical movement from "the world's resources" to "a universe of unlimited resources" enacts the logic of a fantastic political economy in which terraformation--or at least the harvesting of resources from other worlds--becomes economically, socially, and politically essential to growth and freedom. In effect, "Mars beckons" because capitalist and democratic values were "born in expansion, grew in expansion, and can only exist in a dynamic expansion" ("A New Martian Frontier"). Whether one is a proponent of the Gaia Hypothesis or an investment broker, the effect of Zubrin's arguments is that the world's resources are finite, and that humanity's only hope is to repeat on Mars the cycles of spewing CFCs into the atmosphere, mining, harvesting crops and timber, and devastating wildlife that have compromised the Earth's environment. The logic of terraformation, not suprisingly, thus requires new frontiers beyond the red planet. "The universe," Zubrin declares, "is vast. Its resources, if we can access them, are truly infinite" ("A New Martian Frontier"). Terraforming Mars becomes only the initial impetus to ratchet upwards the "two key technologies of power and propulsion" so that humankind can exploit the "infinite" resources of the outer solar system and beyond. Ironically, the logic of endless terraformation dictates that without the mind-boggling investments in technology to make accessible the "infinite" resources of new frontiers humanity lapses into its default condition--the Hobbesian war of all against all. In Zubrin's mind, to terraform Mars--to render it both a biosphere and a commodity--is to reinvigorate ourselves psychically, to reverse the downward spiral of civilization. The logic of the frontier that Zubrin sketches is founded on the antiecological assumption that "natural" resources are always and [End Page 780] already marked as objects of exploitation and exchange. In this respect, he displaces onto Mars a vision of infinite resources that has led civilizations from one crisis of intensification to another until a dry, frigid, and almost oxygenless planet seems to many humanity's last best hope for survival. HYPERLINK "" \l "FOOT9" 9 Although he and Robinson share a vision of the terraformed Mars of the future, they differ significantly in their understanding of the implications of this virtual space: Zubrin projects an idealized past into the future; Robinson undoes the values and assumptions that have motivated previous imperialist enterprises. Again, it is precisely this fantasy of the Baconian mastery of nature which eco-economics seeks to counter. Link: Mars-Terraforming Terraforming is the ultimate manifestation of arrogant humanism- advocates routinely understate risks, and ignore questions of social justice in the newly terraformed environment. Dickens and Ormrod 7 (Peter, Affiliated Lecturer in the Department of Sociology, Faculty of Politics, Psychology, Sociology and International Studies , U of Cambridge, and J.S., Senior Lecturer of Applied Social Science @ U of Brighton, "Cosmic society: towards a sociology of the universe," book, p. 150-151, jam)Whatever we may think of this equation between gender and types of ‘mastering’, the potential dangers of making new Earth-like planets seem obvious. Here again, humanity’s submission of the planets is being applied on a quick-fix basis and generating potential risks. The planetary engineering project rings alarm bells as the kind of ‘deadly manifestation of bigness’ that Ehrenfeld (1981) had in mind in The Arrogance of Humanism. Indeed, it is a project he cites in that book. It relies on humans’ complete confidence in their ability to master nature for the better. Ehrenfeld says of the history of humanism as he defines it: ‘we have chosen to transform our original faith in a higher authority to faith in the power of reason and human capabilities. It has proved a misplaced trust’ (1981: viii). He points to the failure of other great human projects aimed at controlling nature, though he does not seem to be implying a reversion to a mediaeval deference to religion. As a solution for Earthly problems, planetary engineering also reverberates with Beck’s theory of late modernity (1992, 1994), according to which society is characterized by escalating projects of unprecedented scale and high-consequence risk manu- factured by an increasingly global social system. We return to Beck shortly. Despite the arrogance of the would-be planetary engineers, they do still engage with the massive risks involved in the project. However, their answers tend to be either dismissive satire (as in Haynes and McKay’s idea of bacteria returning to take over the Earth) or to advocate increasingly complex computer modelling (as in Haynes 1990). The latter returns us to our discussion of chaos and complexity theory in Chapter 1. Reality is reduced to a complex equation, which it is hoped we can understand well enough to create desired outcomes. Zubrin (Zubrin and Wagner 1996) provides many such equations, despite his continuing references to creating a ‘runaway’ greenhouse effect, which presumably becomes harder to predict and control as it progresses. However, even those modelling how planetary engineering might advance do offer words of caution. Lovelock (1989) argues, for example, that very little is known of the complexities of ecosystems even on our own planet, never mind on Mars. He therefore constructs a simple computer model for terraforming, one in which a single type of organism such as a daisy competes for survival within a naturally changing climate. Mars therefore evolves in a ‘natural’ way. It is ter- raformed in a fashion that is not aggressive, slowly developing its own natural, non-imposed ecological order. In recognizing complexity and the dangers of ter- raforming, Lovelock’s proposal is a useful corrective to proposals seemingly uncon- cerned with environmental consequences, though some might argue it still does not do enough to break with the arrogance of believing that humans can create new worlds. Yet environmental risks are not the only ones associated with planetary engi- neering. It brings another possible set of risks, this time of a social and political kind. Lovelock’s proposal for terraforming is entirely unforthcoming about the kind of society that would live and work on a terraformed planet. What social relations are involved for the making of its harmonious, slowly evolving, terraformed environment? Respect for environments and ecological systems may be an inher- ently ‘good thing’, but it is always worth recalling the kind of society transforming nature. Environmental sustainability does not always imply social justice. We may well ask who might actually dwell and work in ‘terraformed’ zones and who might actually benefit. The most likely scenario is that it will be groups of highly quali- fied and highly paid scientists who will benefit most from the project, as well as those corporations which might supply genetically engineered bacteria or orbital mirrors to heat the planet. Indeed, some are even winning research grants now to study such things. On the other hand, it could well be expendable and exploitable people who will work in zones of growing environmental risk once it is under way. Yet of course, should the environment ever prove truly stable and lush with vegetation (as utopian space art would have us believe) then one can only assume it will be the most privileged members of society who escape the chaos of Earth to achieve a new freedom in the Heavens. Link: Mars-Terraforming Terraforming is an incredibly risky proposition which represents a managerial relationship towards nature that treats the entire cosmos as mere means to human endsDickens and Ormrod 7 (Peter, Affiliated Lecturer in the Department of Sociology, Faculty of Politics, Psychology, Sociology and International Studies , U of Cambridge, and J.S., Senior Lecturer of Applied Social Science @ U of Brighton, "Cosmic society: towards a sociology of the universe," book, p. 148-150, jam)Terraforming. The central idea of terraforming is to enhance the capacity of a planetary environ- ment to support human life (literally to make it Earth-like). This would entail making the surface temperature appropriate for human beings, increasing the mass of the atmosphere, making water available in liquid form, reducing ultraviolet and cosmic rays and making an atmosphere that humans could breathe. If plants are to survive, higher levels of atmospheric oxygen would be needed to enable root respiration (Fogg 1995a,b; Zubrin and Wagner 1996). Mars is usually seen as the most obvious ‘bio-compatible’ candidate for terra- forming and eventual occupation by human beings. It appears to contain consider- able amounts of frozen water and large quantities of carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen and oxygen. These four elements are the basis of food and water and of plastics, wood, paper and clothing, and even of rocket fuel (Zubrin and Wagner 1996). It is also the right distance from the Sun to be neither too hot nor too cold to rule out life surviving (the so-called ‘Goldilocks effect’). Making a planet such as Mars into a fully terraformed and colonized setting for human beings entails doing the opposite of what many scientists, activists and political regimes are attempting on Earth. While many individuals and governments on Earth are trying to overcome the destabilization of the climate because greenhouse gases are trapping too much of the Sun’s heat, terraformers are actively attempting to make a new greenhouse effect. What are the environmental and social implications of terraforming? These are matters almost wholly missing in the optimistic accounts of scientists and pro- space advocates. There are a number of potential risks, dependent on how such planetary engineering is achieved. Perhaps most drastically and dangerously, one proposal is to terraform Mars by using war-surplus bombs. Four, 100kg fusion warheads, launched from a Mars orbiter, can throw into the air enough dust to cover Mars’ South Polar Cap, darken it, and cause it to sublime through increased solar heating. The added atmospheric pressure will set off a runaway greenhouse effect and partially terraform the planet. We have the warheads and the orbiters. We can start whenever we like. (Mole 1995: 321) There are less dramatic ways of producing gases to start a Martian greenhouse effect. Zubrin suggests three possible ways. Selected parts of the planet could be warmed ‘to release reservoirs of the native greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide’ (Zubrin and Wagner 1996: 250). Alternatively, factories could be established on Mars to make very powerful greenhouse gases known as halocarbons, or the infa- mous ‘CFCs’. A final alternative would be to release bacteria that create natural greenhouse gases. The heating necessary for the first solution could be achieved by using dyes, artificial dust clouds or pigmented organisms to change the climate. Zubrin’s favoured solution is to reflect the Sun onto the planet with huge orbiting mirrors. Another extreme strategy is to induce climate-altering meteor strikes or change the position or rotation of Mars (Birch 1993a,b). The scale of possible consequences at the level of the solar system is quite frightening. It is worth noting that some scientists believe we already have the technology to implement plan- etary engineering, if not necessarily to control it (McKay 1990). This is perhaps the ultimate reflection of a ‘cosmic risk society’. The rationale for planetary engineering Within the scientific literature itself, a number of reasons have been put forward for planetary engineering. Haynes and McKay (1992) summarize eleven argu- ments, which can be reduced to four distinct grounds for planetary engineering. 1 Planetary engineering could be the first step in colonization. Terraforming a planet for human settlement can resolve Earth’s ‘ecological crisis’ and its ‘limits to growth’. It could also provide escape in the case of nuclear war or asteroid impact. 2 In a postmodern society, which lacks any sense of unifying mission or purpose, a grand project would reunite a fragmented and disillusioned world. It will provide inspiration to young people as well as economic and scientific stimulation to other areas of society. 3 Changing the climate of another planet would lead to improved knowledge and appreciation of Earth’s ecology. It is argued that, by gaining a working knowl- edge of how to create a planetary ecology, we will be better able to understand our own. 4 The intrinsic worth of life makes spreading life to other planets desirable. Finally, it is argued that planetary engineering should be undertaken merely on the basis that spreading life has value in itself. Haynes and McKay also provide a list of arguments against planetary engi- neering, many of which point to possible unforeseeable consequences. They are clearly not really concerned, however, that the bacteria we transplant to Mars may mutate and return to Earth! The more fundamental issue is how the very idea of planetary engineering reflects on our perceived relationship with the rest of the universe. The rest of the universe according to these arguments is something to be mastered, a mere means to human ends. This is a modern reflection of the Baconian position. There are, however, some less anthropocentric positions, including some <CONTINUED><CONTINUED>that want to intro- duce life to other planets without making them fit for humans at all (ecopoiesis). But across all positions there is without doubt a faith in human ability to control nature, even if this is perceived as being for nature’s own sake. Indeed, it is even seen as being humanity’s role to do so, as Frederick Turner argues: The radical ecological thinker would have us ignore the reflexive and dynamic capacities of the human mind and act as if we were merely one species of plant or animal among many in the garden – and not the gardener or shepherd which is our true role. (Turner 1990: 37) For Plumwood, this version of ‘mastering’ would be as problematic as a straight- forward exploitative relationship. The form of reason that she attacks is distanced and objective (sometimes interpreted as ‘masculine’), the kind of attitude present in Turner and some other terraforming advocates. This stands in contrast to a relationship that is involved, emotional and ‘feminine’. We return to the more general question of ethics later. Link: MarsColonizing Mars is rooted in capitalism’s need for exploitable resourcesMarkley 97 (Robert, Jackson Distinguished Chair of British Literature @ West Virginia University, pp.775-777, MUSE, , JM)As the titles Red Mars, Green Mars, and Blue Mars suggest, Robinson's future history focuses on the nascent science of terraformation--a science that exists only as a thought experiment, as the uncertain and arbitrary simulations designed to engineer a biosphere (sufficient at least for plant life) on Mars. Imagining the terraforming of Mars gives Robinson the opportunity to rethink the complex relationships between planetary ecology, the interlocking systems that create and sustain the tenuous, seemingly miraculous conditions that allow life to flourish, and political economy, the distribution of scarce resources among competing populations and interests. At the conceptual center of this thought experiment, at "the birth of the thing rather than its [representational] death" (Shaviro), lies what Robinson calls "eco-economics," his challenge to the conventional notion that economics means the exploitation, degradation, and exhaustion of natural resources. On a world where the biosphere itself is being manufactured, notions of value make sense only to the extent that they erase distinctions between quantitative measures of labor and capital and qualitative contributions to social and ecological balance. Having established themselves on Mars, the First One Hundred, the initial party of scientists sent to colonize the planet, fragment politically, socially, and geographically. After several years, a scientific team led by Vlad Taneev and Marina Tokareva develop a process to retard the onset of senescence, then turn their attention to eco-economics as a means to integrate ecology and "its deformed offshoot economics" (Red Mars 297), to develop a system of value, in other words, that recognizes the feedback loops between the large-scale development of Martian resources and terraforming. In contrast to economics, "people arbitrarily . . . assigning numerical values to non-numerical things," as Vlad puts it, eco-economics defines "efficiency [as] the calories you put out, divided by the calories you take in" (Blue Mars 297). An ethical imperative follows: "Everyone can increase their ecological efficiency by efforts to reduce how many kilocalories they use" (298). Restricting consumption becomes a far more effective means to increase one's value to the system than accelerating production because production invariably strains scarce resources. Eco-economics, in this regard, calls into question the logic of capitalist production and, more generally, the ongoing exploitation of nature as the means to generate value. It acts as a historical simulation to suggest alternatives to ever-increasing cycles of intensification and environmental degradation. HYPERLINK "" \l "FOOT2" 2 Robinson's fragile ecology-in-the-making on Mars thus serves as a fictional projection of late-twentieth-century eco-economic crises, a virtual space in which to imagine a society struggling through and toward "some kind of universal catastrophe rescue operation, or, in other words, the first phase of the postcapitalist era" (Blue Mars 63). His trilogy works on a variety of levels to imagine the conditions under which capitalism will evolve--haltingly, violently, uncertainly--toward an eco-economic future. What distinguishes these novels from other recent "thought experiments" about humanity's future on Mars is precisely his recognition that the unending profits envisioned by late (and future) capitalism require infinitely exploitable resources to escape the diminishing returns and declining living standards of intensification. HYPERLINK "" \l "FOOT3" 3 As one of his characters, William Fort, the head of a metanational corporation that eventually metamorphoses into an umbrella of semiautonomous collectives, declares, "Capital is a quantity of input, and efficiency is a ratio of output to input. No matter how efficient capital is, it can't make something out of nothing" (Green Mars 81). In this regard, the novels can be read as simulations that paradoxically remain open to stochastic self-organization, thought experiments that engage the contingencies on which most utopian aspirations founder: social unrest, economic competition, psychic crises, national rivalries, racial hatreds, official violence, greed, stupidity, and environmental degradation. As a richly imagined geophysical and political landscape, Robinson's Mars blurs distinctions between fictional and scientific simulations of terraforming, even as it allows us to question the values on which current justifications for planetary engineering rest. Link: NASANASA is an unholy alliance between the military industrial complex, big research institutions, and politicians seeking perks for their constituents.Parker 9 (Martin, Prof of Organization and Culture @ U of Leicester, The Sociological Review, May, Vol. 57, Iss. Supp. s1, p. 83-97)Nostalgia is a problem in any framing of such a question. NASA, in its Golden Age, was not an institution that relied on saintly scientists, dedicated administrators and heroic astronauts who had been commanded on a mission by a young and idealistic president. Even in general terms, the foundation of NASA represented something of an unholy alliance between military hawks, big research institutions, ‘defence’ contractors and politicians wanting the reflected sparkle of a little space dust or jobs for their state (DeGroot, 2007). There was a lot of money involved. According to Jones and Benson (2002: 22), in the 1960s, the US spent more than four per cent of Federal expenditures on space exploration. Wachhorst (2000: 130) translates this into $24 billion for Apollo. NASA’s budget peaked in 1965 at what was 5.3 percent of the total federal budget for that year. In 1966 NASA directly employed thirty-six thousand people, and close to half a million others via roughly 500 main contractors and around 20 thousand sub-contractors (Klerkx, 2004: 165–6; Pyle, 2005: 8). Most of the money went to the big aerospace companies. Stage one was built by Boeing; stage two by North American Rockwell; stage three by McDonnell Douglas, and the rocket motors by Rocketdyne. The prime contractor for the Apollo Command and Service modules was North American Rockwell, the Lunar Module was built by Grumman, and the Lunar Roving Vehicle by Boeing. It should be clear enough that NASA, for a while, was a very effective way for a whole host of organizations to get secure contracts from the state. The politics of this were clear enough to the participants, as a speech by Werner Von Braun to a banquet for what he called ‘the leaders and captains of the main- stream of American industry and life’ the day before Apollo 11 lifted off suggests. Without your success in building the economic foundations of this nation, the resources for mounting tomorrow’s expedition to the moon would have never been committed. (in Mailer, 1971: 73) NASA outsources the majority of its work to unaccountable corporationsParker 9 (Martin, Prof of Organization and Culture @ U of Leicester, The Sociological Review, May, Vol. 57, Iss. Supp. s1, p. 83-97)It is incumbent on NASA – and upon those who have an influence on its work – to create a space market, not control it. (. . .) this market remains dominated by a handful of heavyweights who work hand in glove with NASA to block competition. (. . .) NASA has convinced lawmakers and most of the private sector that it alone has the ability to safely send humans into space (Klerkx, 2004: 212). Throughout his book Lost in Space, Greg Klerkx describes NASA as a bloated bureaucracy rife with overspending, accounting errors and inflated payments to a select list of contractors. He quotes a commentator on the close relationship between NASA and Boeing saying ‘If they fuck up, they get more money.’ (Klerkx, 2004: 214). Even the contracts that look as if they are commercial – such as the ‘United Space Alliance’ and Lockheed’s ‘Consolidated Space Operations’ contract – are actually no different in practice from the practices that preceded them. In 2000, NASA spent $12.5 billion, 83 per cent of its budget, on outsourcing to companies, universities, agencies and so on. 74 per cent went to private industry, of which 53 per cent of that (nearly $5 billion) went to Boeing and Lockheed (op. cit.: 254). To make matters worse, the demand that NASA be a vast jobs-generation machine for all US states, com- bined with the practice of ‘earmarking’ funding for a politician’s favourite project in return for a vote in Congress, means that much of the money isn’t even spent on space anyway. Link: NASANASA’s programs expand capitalist motivations to spaceCollis and Graham 9 (Christy & Graham, both are faculty @ Queensland University of Technology, Management and Organisation History 4, 3, , JM)In order to understand the politics of Martian spatiality, it is also necessary to briefly contextualize them within capitalism. The trajectory of western political economies has unquestionably been towards the monetization and commodification of everything imaginable. Behind this drive has been, first, the propertied classes of Europe and, latterly, a more universalized managerial class. What was to be owned, claimed, and commodified under capitalism was prefigured in the enclosures movement that began in the late 14th century. The shape of future capitalist commodification strategies became further evident in moves by early traders to ‘gather up’ and concentrate the efforts of Europe’s traditional craft workers in a piecework system that de‐localized the character of work (Weber 1930). Rather than being seen or experienced as an expression of accumulated history, tradition, and local knowledge, labour became oriented towards the future realization of a price, whether on the part of traders (as profits) or workers (as wages). The dominant tense of work thereby moved from past to future, from actual to potential, from a network of mutual obligations to motives of future personal gain (Graham 2001). By the late 20th century, the full expression of this movement came in the form of a massive debt bubble. Seen at its most abstract and general level, the current global financial crisis is nothing less than the commodification of future human life and energies. Thus the arc of capitalist commodification can be seen to stretch from heritage, culture, and tradition – broadly speaking, the Past – to the commodification of all future social relations (Graham 2002).We see this as an inherent and inevitable function of contemporary managerial discourse, which today begins all approaches to reality with a ‘strategic plan’: a technical device for defining, shaping, and controlling future environmental and factoral contingencies based on expectations of profit and personal gain, all of which is to be achieved through increased control and ‘efficiencies’. Here is NASA on the matter of management: On April 24, 2002, the NASA Administrator directed the Agency to support the President’s Freedom to Manage Initiative with the principal goal of removing barriers to more efficient management, with the expectations of improved accountability and performance. To support this government‐wide initiative and achieve management excellence, the Administrator established a new policy. NASA Policy Directive 1280.1, NASA Management Systems Policy, provides for management systems rigor and discipline, while accommodating and providing flexibility to, the full range of mission risk managed at HQ and Centers. (NASA 2009a) NASA has situated itself firmly within strategic management discourse. As NASA is one of the primary agencies conducting missions to the planet, Mars has also become an object of strategic planning, managerial control, and capitalist commodification processes. Mars can therefore be seen in discourse as a synecdoche of capitalist value relations – a distant and seemingly small ‘part’ of the system in which the pattern and trajectory of the whole can be seen. This becomes most clear when the politics of Martian exploration, ownership, and control are investigated. In what follows, we attend to debates around the meaning of Mars as an artifact of managerial discourses of control and exploitation; a systemic expression of colonialist capitalist commodification processes; and an exemplar of historical trends in political economy. National governments, Space agencies and societies, and private companies are investing intense energy in Mars’s exploration and future colonization. It is an important object of contemporary political economy. Our approach is grounded in cultural geography set within a postcolonial framework. It therefore focuses on Martian spatiality as a political object. ‘Political’ here does not refer solely to geopolitics, although geopolitics is included in its meaning; we use ‘political’ to describe motivated relationships between organizations, territories, species, and ideas. We concentrate on two important aspects of discourse about Mars that encapsulate the political and the economic, and in which we can see the synechdocal aspects of Martian colonization in respect of capitalism’s historical development: (1) the debate about whether Mars is legally terra nullius or terra communis (politico‐legal concerns) and (2) the debate about whether Mars should be terraformed to accommodate human occupation or preserved to respect the innate value of an alien planet (economic and environmental concerns). Like Dickens and Ormond’s (2007) exploration of capitalism’s expansion into Space, and Parker’s (2009) analysis of Space capitalism, we agree that ‘it is na?ve to imagine that Apollo and the rest have been free from such earthly entanglements’ (Parker 2009); and, with McDonald, that ‘what is at stake – politically and geopolitically – in the contemporary struggle over outer space is too serious to pass without critical comment’ (MacDonald 2007, 593). Link: OSTThe OST dictates space development will be imperialist- common heritage resource sharing is a pipe dreamMarshall 95 (Alan, the Institute of Development Studies at Massey University, Feb, Space Policy, Vol. 11, Iss. 1, p. 41-52, jam)What will be the nature of such development? Given that space expansion is only ever likely to proceed due to economic forces, space development must thereby operate by economic principles, which themselves are regulated by political regimes. Currently the political regimes in place (notably the Outer Space Treaty) dictate that solar system development will be undertaken in an imperialistic manner. Space advocates are not necessarily malevolently predisposed towards the welfare of the world's poor, but to hold to the view that extraterrestrial resource utilization is capable of positively contributing the global community with the Outer Space Treaty intact is to bask in a vat of optimism so large as to be unsupportable.Link: PrivatizationIncentives are used to privatize space exploration with the goal of increased profitabilityDickens and Ormrod 7 (Peter, Affiliated Lecturer in the Department of Sociology, Faculty of Politics, Psychology, Sociology and International Studies , U of Cambridge, and J.S., Senior Lecturer of Applied Social Science @ U of Brighton, "Cosmic society: towards a sociology of the universe," book, p. 57-58, jam)Governments will also provide large outlays of capital in the hope of attracting investors to develop new primary circuits in their region. Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic space tourism company is the primary customer for ‘Spaceport America’, a planned $225 million spaceport in New Mexico. They also include other investments in social infrastructure such as education, health and military spending. Meanwhile, having been initiated by governments as Keynesian devices for stimulating the economy, space travel and privately financed missions into outer space are already under active development. They are now being deemed profitable in the relatively near future. Correspondingly, and under pressure from libertarian pro-space organizations, the role of government in America’s space programme was being re-evaluated at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Government’s role was no longer the financer of an agency to explore and develop space, but to provide incentives for private sector investment. (President Bush’s unexpected announcement in 2004 of a new government programme to send humans to the Moon and Mars has somewhat altered this direction.) Bills were put before Congress to offer a series of tax breaks for speculative space enterprises and for a series of financial ‘prizes’ for private companies able to achieve particular technological goals in space. Some commentators such as Hickman (1999) still believe government will have to have a crucial role if enterprise is to expand beyond low-earth orbit (LEO). Link: PrivatizationIncreased private development of space just fuels the military industrial complex.Dickens 10 (Peter, Affiliated Lecturer in the Department of Sociology, Faculty of Politics, Psychology, Sociology and International Studies , University of Cambridge, "The Humanization of the Cosmos—To What End?," [] AD: 6-29-11, jam)But, at the same time, restructuring within the space industry is following some very familiar lines. Close links and mergers are taking place between large monopolistic companies and the smaller enterprises celebrated by the Space Renaissance Initiative. For example, Northrop-Grumman, one of the leading U.S. defense manufacturers, has recently bought Scaled Composites, the latter having pioneered lightweight materials used for space tourism vehicles. Northrop-Grumman has for many years designed and constructed satellite-guided drones used in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. This merger raises the prospect of skills and technologies originally designed to take wealthy people into outer space being developed to observe and eliminate warlords—and others—back on earth. Space-X is another relatively small space tourism company. It was founded in 2002 by Elon Musk, a cofounder of PayPal. But this small enterprise is now rapidly growing as a result of a number of contracts from the American Airforce. Launch services provided to the USAF by Space-X are resulting in contracts worth up to $1 billion. Other links, this time between big and small capital, are also developing. Bob Bigelow, for example, has long been an important but small-scale contender in the outer space tourism business. His proposals have included hotels on the moon and in other parts of outer space. He has already constructed 1:3-scale working models of these projects. Now, his company is in close partnership with Boeing, the exceptionally large aerospace company. Together, they will supply the space taxis outlined by President Obama. They will take astronauts and scientists to the International Space Station. Bigelow declares himself very enthusiastic as “part of the Boeing team”: “We’re very excited about this program and the Boeing partnership in general. Boeing brings with it unparalleled experience and expertise in human spaceflight systems, which will be combined with Bigelow’s Aerospace’s entrepreneurial spirit and cost conscious practices.”14 But another, more downbeat, assessment is that the individualistic, entrepreneurial spirit endorsed by the Space Renaissance Initiative is, in practice, being co-opted into the military-industrial complex. Link: Property Rights (OST Aff)Space property rights are prerequisite to capitalist expansion Dickens 10 (Peter, Affiliated Lecturer in the Department of Sociology, Faculty of Politics, Psychology, Sociology and International Studies , University of Cambridge, "The Humanization of the Cosmos—To What End?," [] AD: 6-29-11, jam)Space Law: Making the Survival of Humankind Profitable Given the increased emphasis on the commercialization of outer space, it comes as no surprise to find the question of private property in outer space opened up for debate. If capital is to undertake a space program and commodify nearby parts of the solar system, it needs reassurance that its investments will be protected by law. The issue is now being highlighted by an argument over the geostationary orbit (GEO). This is the 30 km-wide strip 35,786 km above the equator, one in which satellites can orbit at the same speed as the ground below them. With only three satellites in the GEO, a media conglomerate, a communications company, or a government surveillance agency can cover the whole world. No wonder it has been called “space’s most valuable real estate.”15 This raises the urgent question, one still not adequately resolved, of who actually owns this area of outer space. Is it owned by the equatorial countries such as Colombia, Indonesia, and Kenya under this strip? Or is it jointly owned and managed by all states? The debate over the GEO is a microcosm of that concerning outer space as a whole. The present position is one in which the moon and other celestial bodies cannot be legally owned. Under Article II of the 1967 United Nations Outer Space Treaty, the whole of outer space “is not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means.”16 It seems clear that the intention here was to prevent ownership and commodification of outer space. But this is now being challenged. Mirroring the perspective of the Space Renaissance Initiative, lawyers promoting the extension of the private sector into outer space argue that the framers of the UN Outer Space Treaty “were deliberately ambiguous about private property as opposed to nationally owned property.”17 “Besides helping to ensure the survival of mankind,” these lawyers argue, “the settling of space—including the establishment of permanent settlements on the Moon and Mars—will bring incalculable economic and social benefits to all nations.”18* Sufficient profits must be guaranteed, and this can only be done by ensuring property rights in space. Future outer space treaties should, according to one group of space lawyers, allow private ownership of a circle of land about 437 miles around an initial base. This means the reward for ensuring the future of humankind would be about six hundred thousand square miles of cosmic real estate, approximately the size of Alaska. *- 18. Wasser and Jobes, 38.Link: Property RightsSpreading private ownership to space reproduces the social and environmental crises of capitalism on a cosmic scale.Dickens 10 (Peter, Affiliated Lecturer in the Department of Sociology, Faculty of Politics, Psychology, Sociology and International Studies , University of Cambridge, "The Humanization of the Cosmos—To What End?," [] AD: 6-29-11, jam)So outer space technology can be used for tackling a number of immediate social and political issues. But these strategies do not add up to a philosophy toward outer space and the form humanization should take. Here again, the focus should be on the development of humanity as a whole, rather than sectional interests. First, outer space, its exploration and colonization, should be in the service of some general public good. Toward this end, the original intentions of the 1967 UN Outer Space Treaty should be restored. Outer space should not be owned or controlled by any economic, social, and political vested interest. The cosmos should not, in other words, be treated as an extension of the global environment, one to be owned and exploited. We have seen enough of this attitude and its outcomes to know what the result would be. Spreading private ownership to outer space would only reproduce social and environmental crises on a cosmic scale.The plan uses privates as a smokescreen to hide space imperialism where wealthy technocrats will appropriate the common heritage of humanity Marshall 99 (Alan, PhD in Science and Technology Studies @ U of Wollongong, “Gaining A Share of the Final Frontier” Technology and Participation JF) 7/6This might seem to indicate clearly that no one is allowed to claim any particular bit of the extraterrestrial solar system for themselves. However, many space lawyers and prospective space industrialists that hail from space-capable nations[7] interpret the Outer Space Treaty to mean that while areas of the solar system bodies are prohibited from being claimed, any material removed from such a body becomes the rightful property of the remover. Under such an interpretation an industrial space colony cannot own the surface upon which it settles and opens operations but as soon as it removes any material from that surface the material becomes the property of the colonial operators. If one believes that the free market will then adequately disseminate these extraterrestrial materials throughout the world via the normal pricing systems then there seems no problem with this interpretation of the Outer Space Treaty. However, since the operators can only get into the position of running an industrial colony on another world through massive state support and investment of public funds it seems incredible to class such extraterrestrial endeavours as operating according to free market principles. When discussing participation in solar system resource use the issue is not whether you believe in the efficiency of the free market versus the egalitarianism of a planned economy. The point here is that although we all know--and admit--that getting into space is a public affair, the Outer Space Treaty allows for private appropriation once humans are there. The first or 'public' phase is cast as a glorious human pursuit that transcends inter-human and international quarrels. The second or 'private' phase is cast as the incurable and ineffable operation of the free market. This 'private' phase uses the smokescreen known as the free market and the ambiguity of the Outer Space Treaty to plan for what may as well be labelled space imperialism, whereby commonly owned resources are appropriated by technocratic imperialists.[8] After helping space developers to get to the solar system bodies and construct industries there, it seems that they will be legally entitled to kick the public in the teeth and claim the resources for themselves.Link: Property Rights/Libertarians in SpacePro-space activists express their narcissistic desire for total power centered on the self via fantasies of space settlements that celebrate negative freedom and absolute individualismDickens and Ormrod 7 (Peter, Affiliated Lecturer in the Department of Sociology, Faculty of Politics, Psychology, Sociology and International Studies , U of Cambridge, and J.S., Senior Lecturer of Applied Social Science @ U of Brighton, "Cosmic society: towards a sociology of the universe," book, p. 165-166, jam)‘Freedom’ is a ubiquitous concept, one understood very differently in different social and historical contexts (Marcuse 1970). What Berlin (1969) called ‘negative’ freedom is a founding principle of neo-liberal societies. Here it is related to the emphasis on the individual as opposed to the collective or the state. It refers to freedom from interference by the state or by other individuals who might limit a person’s choices or ‘opportunity for action’. Libertarian politics reject any attempt to limit the freedom of individuals, whom they see as having sole responsibility for their own well-being. This philosophy is represented in, and draws from, free market economics. The pro-space movement has long advocated this philosophy and has made it its central focus in recent years. There are a number of ways in which expanding human society into space can be seen as representing freedom. First, it means access to increased and potentially infinite resources. Because resources on Earth such as minerals, fuel and land are understood to be becoming increasingly scarce, there is a fear of increasingly restrictive controls on individual freedoms to appropriate these resources. As Rick Tumlinson, head of the Space Frontier Foundation, has said: Ultimately, nearly everything you want to do in a sustainable world will be something someone else cannot – and that will mean limits. Limits to when and where and how you travel, how much you consume, the size of your home, the foods you eat, the job where you work, even how long you are allowed to live. If the rest of the world is to become more wealthy in such a system, consuming more, you will be forced to consume less. Equilibrium will be the goal of the state and individual freedoms will become ever more expendable. (cited in Launius 2003: 343) If outer space were opened up like the early homestead races, those with the necessary ability would have, it is believed, the freedom to appropriate as much as they possibly could. The second way in which expansion into outer space represents freedom is the liberty from state control, outer space supposedly not being subject to national appropriation. Third, advocates argue that individuals should have the choice to visit, live, work and play anywhere they want. One of our pro-space interviewees says quite simply that ‘people can stay at home if they want, but others must be allowed a different choice, we have the right to do that’. Gerard O’Neill also claimed that our ultimate right was the right to leave (Kilgore 2003). Both the National Space Society and ProSpace lobbied for the removal of government red tape and safety restrictions for private spacecraft as they represented barriers to the individual freedom to choose to go into space. The final reason is that space represents physical freedom, a release from the bonds of gravity. A bodily transcendence of the limits of the human condition is being sought. But the negative theory of freedom would not normally hold that human beings should be able to do anything and everything they wish. It is merely that the state or other individuals should not impede their choices. The narcissistic subject as represented in the pro-space movement is, however, unable to make this distinction between freedoms. The individual experiences anxiety and frustration at literally any limit to their action, and the fact that no-one is responsible for this restriction makes no difference. These arguments about freedom are ultimately intricately related to the need of pro-space activists to re-experience total power centred around the self. Again, not only does the language of freedom sustain neo-liberal capitalism, with its emphasis on the individual and delight at the survival of the fittest, but it also legitimizes the wants of its subjects.Link: Property Rights/LibertarianismProperty is theft: their argument is ignores capital’s original appropriation of others’ laborMarsh 95 (James L., Professor of Philosophy at Fordham University, Critique, Action, and Liberation p. 150-152 GAL)Nozick's conception of the individual, in my opinion, is too atomistic. To the extent that he relies on Locke's state of nature as a model, his notion of the individual is that of the bourgeois individual externally related to other individuals; the ideal social environment is one in which people are free to "do their own thing." Such a conception of the individual is false phenomenologically. ontologically. and conceptually. It is false phenomenologically because human beings are in the world and related to others through embodiment, language, tradition, and historicity. It is false ontologically because individuals are individuals in internal relation to others, not mere individuals. It is false conceptually because any bourgeois individual as bourgeois is essentially, internally related to other individuals. The capitalist, for example, could not function as capitalist without laborers producing goods to be sold for profit. Laborers could not function as laborers without capital to supply means of production and wages.—Such individuality and freedom in the capitalist and laborer are not natural, inevitable, and necessary but a historical result of specific gestalts and processes in which capital gradually accumulates means of production and money and workers are separated from the means of production. The very emergence of bourgeois freedom and individuality conceals a dependence on society and history. The apparent independence of social ties is a semblance, but it is a socially necessary semblance produced by capitalism itself.Nozick is taken in by this semblance, by the apparent equality and freedom he finds in capitalist society. Because he sees only what is on the surface, he ignores the deeper inequality' present both in original acquisition and in the ongoing process of production and exchange. Original capitalist accumulation is written in blood, replete with forcible expulsions of retainers from feudal land, legal seizure of common land by business and the state, legal compulsion exerted by the state against reluctant workers, and jailing by the state of those who were unable to pay their debts. Original capitalist accumulation and subjugation of workers to capitalist ends did not occur through some joyful social contract in which all of the population joined hands and went to work, but through violence, terror, threat, intimidation, and imprisonment. As such, original accumulation does not satisfy even Nozick's criteria for justice in acquisition, in which there is a peaceable appropriation of and putting my work into land or other property, to which others consent in a reflective manner. -Once the process of capitalist accumulation, production, and exchange gets on the track, we see a similar contradictoriness and repression. Thinker after thinker, in modern bourgeois history, justifies capitalist private property, private ownership of the means of production, by arguing that it is the fruit of one's own labor. Yet what capitalism ends up legalizing and justifying is capital's appropriation of others' labor. The capitalist as nonworker confronts the worker as merely subjective, having only her own labor power to sell. Labor with no immediate access to means of production can only link up to those who do if she goes to work on the capitalist's terms, at his beck and call, at his convenience. Private property rooted in the appropriation of the fruits of my labor, turns into its opposite in a contradictory way. the right to appropriate the fruits of other people's labor. Nozick. who defends this justification of private property and yet wishes to defend capitalism, falls into this contradiction.-Link: SatellitesSatellites are vital to preserving the economic and military dominance of the United States Dickens 10 (Peter, Affiliated Lecturer in the Department of Sociology, Faculty of Politics, Psychology, Sociology and International Studies , University of Cambridge, "The Humanization of the Cosmos—To What End?," [] AD: 6-29-11, jam)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 innovative forms of “space taxis” designed by private sector space companies.2 These plans entail new relations 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. Link: SatellitesSatellites extend the reach of capital globallyDickens and Ormrod 7 (Peter, Affiliated Lecturer in the Department of Sociology, Faculty of Politics, Psychology, Sociology and International Studies , U of Cambridge, and J.S., Senior Lecturer of Applied Social Science @ U of Brighton, "Cosmic society: towards a sociology of the universe," book, p. 61, jam)Time–space compression and the outer spatial fix. Investments are also made in new technologies permitting what Marx called ‘the annihilation of space through time’. Spatial barriers to investment are, where pos- sible, overcome by new technologies allowing the geographic spread of capitalism. Making new spatial fixes has been a core element of capitalism for at least two hundred years. Currently new ‘fixes’ are being made in Japan, Eastern Europe, the old Soviet Union and parts of Latin America such as Brazil, Mexico and Chile. China appears to be the latest target for the investment of overaccumulated capi- tal. The process of annihilating geographic space has culminated in the making of a satellite-based, so-called network society allowing ‘globalization’: information and capital to be spread to all corners of the globe. Such investment has been central in enabling companies to remain in constant and instant touch with subsidiaries and to cater for rapidly changing consumer tastes in ‘postfordist’ enterprises. These technologies also allow capital to be transferred instantaneously from one form to another, creating a more ‘liquid’ economy in which capital is no longer fixed in any geographical location or physical form but can flow freely around the globe. As will be discussed in Chapter 4, satellite technology has been central to time–space compression. The development of rocketry and advanced forms of propulsion have already brought the reaches of outer space closer to us than could once even have been imagined. Technologies of speed have also been highlighted by Virilio in his essays on dromology (1986, 1997, 1998), in which he has argued for their centrality in the spread of empire. Figure 2.6 is a reworking of a diagram Harvey uses to demonstrate time–space compression. The diagram is scaled such that the distances on the diagram represent the time taken to get between any two points, rather than the actual distances between them. It can be seen that by the end of the twentieth century the Moon was effectively much closer to us than the other side of the world was at the end of the eighteenth century. During the nineteenth century the Earth decreased enormously in size thanks to inventions like the steam locomotive and steam-powered ship, which were central to Western industrial revolutions, and to the spread of trade and Empire. By the end of the century, the Indian subcontinent was as close to England as its European neighbours had been the century before. Yet the two still remained a significant distance apart when compared with the way in which today’s global economy involves routine instantaneous financial exchanges between the two countries and numerous British firms outsource tel- ephone call centres to India. Most remarkable perhaps is the way in which outer space has shrunk into the picture. Even Earth orbit lay in an unthinkable fantasy world at the beginning of the twentieth century, yet now we find it shrink-wrapped to the surface of the Earth (being only minutes away), whilst the Moon and even the planets of the inner solar system make an appearance (the Voyager probe, which is the furthest man-made object from Earth, having left our solar system, would be several metres away from the Earth at this scale). It is because of this compression of space that it is now possible to envisage spatial fixes being made in the closer parts of the cosmos. Link: Satellites Satellites sustain monopolistic corporations Dickens and Ormrod 7 (Peter, Affiliated Lecturer in the Department of Sociology, Faculty of Politics, Psychology, Sociology and International Studies , U of Cambridge, and J.S., Senior Lecturer of Applied Social Science @ U of Brighton, "Cosmic society: towards a sociology of the universe," book, p. 2-4, jam)Capital is invested in ‘secondary’ or ‘tertiary’ circuits, or a combination of both. The secondary circuit in Harvey’s account consists of investment in physical and fixed capital that in the long term will, it is hoped, generate profits. Such investment in the secondary circuit also includes the creation of new forms of consumption. Satellites are one example of investment in the secondary circuit. After a rela- tively large initial investment (Japan Satellite Systems Inc. (JSAT) offer satellites for around 20–30 billion yen), though their profitability has fluctuated, the long- term outcome has been profits for the monopolistic media and telecommunication companies. Further investments have been made in commodified tourism, the aim of which is to appropriate and sell a range of cultural forms to consumers willing to part with their money in new and apparently exotic ways. Richard Branson has drawn capital from his other Virgin enterprises to set up the Virgin Galactic space tourism company. Some entrepreneurs have been taking idle capital derived from their primary circuit investments and investing it in secondary circuit space enterprise for some time. Having made his millions as an entrepreneur in the early computer industry, Jim Benson went on to found SpaceDev in 1997: a company investing in the design of cutting-edge space technologies. Figure 2.5 shows SpaceDev’s roadmap for the future, which stretches from satellite services already being produced and sold, to research into the technology required for asteroid mining and eventually space settlement. Investments have also been made in a number of new ‘spaceports’ in the south- ern United States, such as Burt Rutan’s Mojave Spaceport, many taking the place of small airfields, and in the design and testing of vehicles for space tourism. For Lefebvre (1976), the making of new, or rehabilitated, forms of physical space on Earth as sites for consumption and tourism has now been made the main way in which the primary circuit of capital escapes from crisis and declining profits. As Figure 2.2 showed, investments in this secondary circuit will be made by increasingly important mediating institutions such as capital markets and governments. They are able to provide, for example, ‘fictitious capital’ (paper assets or promissory notes), which is able to make investment in one type of goods suf- ficiently fluid to be transferred into another type of goods. Link: SatellitesSatellites are a means of cosmic primitive accumulationDuvall & Havercroft 6 (Raymond, Prof of Political Science @ U of Minnesota, and Jonathan, Ph.D. U Minnesota, Prof of Political Science @ Oklahoma U, October, “Taking Sovereignty Out of This World: Space Weapons and Empire of the Future,” p. 11, jam)In Volume One of Capital, Marx chided classical political economists for their inability to explain how workers became separated from the means of production. Whereas political economists such as Adam Smith argued that a previous accumulation of capital was necessary for a division of labor, Marx argued that this doctrine was an absurd doctrine. Division of labor existed in pre-capitalist societies where workers were not alienated from their labor. Instead, Marx argued that the actual historical process of primitive accumulation of capital was carried out through brute force. The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the indigenous population of that continent, the beginnings of the conquest and plunder of India, and the conversion of Africa into a preserve for the commercial hunting of blackskins, are all things which characterize the dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief moments of primitive accumulation.59 While not a perfect analogy, because of the lack of labour occurring in orbital space, the doctrine of space control is part and parcel of an ongoing process of such primitive accumulation. One of the purposes of the 1967 Outer Space Treaty was to keep outer space a commons where all states, regardless of technical ability or economic or military power, could participate in the potential benefits space has to offer. In the years since this treaty was signed, the primary economic use of space has been for commercial communications satellites. This industry has expanded dramatically in the last two decades. Total revenues for commercial space-related industries in 1980 were 2.1 billion dollars; by 2003 this figure had expanded to $91 billion and it was expected to increase at least as rapidly into the foreseeable future.60 On the economic front, space control is about determining who has access to this new economy. Positions in orbit for satellites are a new form of “real estate,” and by controlling access to outer space the U.S. would be forcibly appropriating the orbits around Earth, thereby placing the U.S. in a position to determine which governments and corporations could use space. In effect, orbital slots around earth would be turned into private property. This process of primitive accumulation is of importance to our concerns in two ways. First, the doctrine of space control represents the extension of U.S. sovereignty into outer space. In addition to being a clear violation of international law, it reinforces the constitutive effect identified in the previous section on missile defense, namely to re-inscribe the “hard shell” borders of the U.S., which are now extended to include the “territory” of outer space. This simultaneously constitutes the exclusive sovereignty of the U.S., while displacing the sovereignty of other states. Satellites solidify and accelerate global capitalismSpence 94 (Martin, Marxist theorist, the assistant general secretary of the Bectu broadcasting union, Capital and Class, Spring, Vol. 18, No. 1 p. 51-83, jam)If the space sector does develop on a capitalist basis, what will be its impact upon society? The example of satellite communication —space's commercial success story—may give a clue. Satellite communication has followed the classic route of other new communications technologies, from the telegraph onwards. Firstly, it was sponsored and funded in its infancy by the State, and specifically by the military (De la Haye 1979); and more importantly, once introduced it has tended to intensify and consolidate existing patterns of accumulation and domination (Chanan 1985). Satellite communication based itself upon pre- existing clusters of dense telecom links in the metropolitan capitalist countries and it then fed upon and intensified these links. It broadened and accelerated the pace of global business, speeding up deal-making through creating the capacity for global direct dialling by phone or fax, for computers in different continents to speak to each other, and for the multiplication and increasingly naked commercialisation of TV images. The process is now entering a new phase as space technology moves out beyond the metropolitan clusters to achieve a global reach for, and on terms dictated by. Western capital. Thtis the US Motorola corporation plans to spend $3.4 billion on 'Iridium', a system of 66 mini-satellites in low Earth orbit providing a global mobile telephone network {Financial Times 4/8/93). On another front, the US Space Marketing corporation intends to launch a space billboard into orbit, carrying advertising messages to a potential audience of billions (Mestel 1993). Link: ScienceScience is the false justification for economic expansionDickens 9 (Peter, Affiliated Lecturer in the Department of Sociology, Faculty of Politics, Psychology, Sociology and International Studies , U of Cambridge, May, The Sociological Review, Vol. 57, Iss. Supp. s1, p. 68-82, jam)First, there is considerable emphasis on the ‘pure’, universal, scientific knowledge to be supposedly gained by outer space exploration. It is argued, for example, that NASA’s $300 million Dawn Project will ‘characterize the conditions and processes of the solar system's earliest epoch by investigating in detail two of the largest protoplanets remaining intact since their formations.’(NASA 2007) (A similar rationale pervades the private space tourism industry, Space Adventurers assuring that their wealthy clients that they will be able to conduct ‘scientific experiments’, thereby benefitting others besides themselves). Science is also used by NASA as a means of capturing the public imagination. The latest dramatic pictures of asteroids, the Moon and Mars are readily available on the NASA website.Link: Science EducationScience education is biased towards capitalist profit generationBarton 1 (Angela, UT Austin, “Journal of Research In Science Teaching” Vol. 38.8 June JF)We have prepared this discussion of capitalism, critical pedagogy, and urban science education in conversation format in order to keep problematic the contextual realities of privilege, power, and knowledge in urban settings. The conversation begins with a discussion of key issues in education in general and then leads into a critique of the relationships among capitalism, science, and education. This more general beginning is important because it enables the argument that we are not looking in the right places in science to bring about meaningful reform based on social justice. Only when we see the problems in science education as problems at a societal level, which always mediates the other problems, can we aspire to any hope. Indeed, McLaren makes three key claims here: (a) that the relationship between capitalism and urban education has led to schooling practices that favor economic control by elite classes; (b) that the relationship between capitalism and science has led to a science whose purposes and goals are about profitability rather than the betterment of the global condition; and (c) that the marriages between capitalism and education and capitalism and science have created a foundation for science education that emphasises corporate values at the expense of social justice and human dignity. We conclude this conversation by describing the implications that critical pedagogy might have for productively confronting these three main issues in urban settings. McLaren: Yes. Perhaps the best way for me to expand upon these points you raise is to share with you and your readers some serious concerns I have that shape my present perspective on education in general, science in general, and then urban science education in particular. The first point that I want to make is about the relationship between education (generally) and capitalism. Our society's unfettered capitalism has become a dangerous prejudice in the U.S. and worldwide and has impacted our social, political, scientific, and education structures. Everywhere you look today, learning is being marginalized by its stress on capitalist accumulation. Scientific research, education, and capitalism serve each other so intimately that it is hard to think of one without the other. Nowhere is this more dangerous than in economically and politically oppressed communities. While capitalism, having emerged from the shadow of Marx's incubus with the fall of the former Soviet Union, continues to make good on its promises of providing considerable consumer advantages available to large numbers of people in advanced industrial nations, it also functions systematically as a form of global pillage. The neoliberal economic politics of the developed capitalist states (marked by the elimination of the public sector, the imposition of open-door free trade policies, and a draconian curtailing of state subsidies, compensations, and social protections) have created staggering disparities in wealth among populations in advanced democracies. They have also intensified and expedited the flow of surplus values from poor countries into the U.S., leaving unprecedented levels of poverty, starvation, disease, and homelessness in those very countries that the U.S. ostensibly attempts to assist (McLaren & Farahmandpur , in press; McLaren, forthcoming). McLaren: And this link is reinforced by profitability coinciding with the educational system, transforming it into a billion-dollar marketplace ripe for corporate investment and profit. An education which is subordinate to transnational capital can only be detrimental to any attempts to bring about social justice through education (McMurtry, 1998). I want to be clear here, Angie, that as a Marxist I am not advocating social justice in the sense of equalizing resources under capitalism. I am not trying to make capitalism more `compassionate' although that would certainly be a step in the right direction. I am for the abolition of capitalism both in its private property form and its state property form. In other words, I support the transformation towards a socialist alternative. A democratic socialist alternative, I might add, and what Marx referred to as the new humanism. I have labeled my position, revolutionary materialist pedagogy, multiculturalism, etc. Let us step back for a moment to sketch out how this relationship between education and capitalism has developed because how this relationship developed (and continues to develop) is just as important as its outcomes.Link: Scientific ExpertismTrust in technological and scientific expertism is an irrational leap of faith- endorsing our alternative is key to breaking the rule of elitesMarsh 95 (James L., Professor of Philosophy at Fordham University, Critique, Action, and Liberation p. 281-282 GAL)Next, since the rulers in late capitalism claiming to rule in the interests of all are either a technological and scientific elite or politicians and managers advised by such an elite, they are in principle incapable of evaluating and defending the basic goals and priorities of society, because positive science deliberately prescinds from value questions. The most that science can do is ascertain the best means for achieving goals already judged to be valid. Legitimation, however, if it is to be fully rational, applies to the goals of a society and not simply to the means of achieving them. We have the choice, therefore, of either accepting the word of elites that the goals are in fact consonant with our best interests, a claim that the elite as a scientific elite cannot justify, or disagreeing with the elite. If we take its word on this matter, then we have simply made an irrational leap of faith that whatever is is right.Democracy becomes whatever the current practice is. If we disagree with this question-begging approach and begin to think of rational alternatives to the system, then we have ceased being uncritically ruled by elites.Link: SPSSolar power satellites would be monopolized and gouged for profitDickens and Ormrod 7 (Peter, Affiliated Lecturer in the Department of Sociology, Faculty of Politics, Psychology, Sociology and International Studies , U of Cambridge, and J.S., Senior Lecturer of Applied Social Science @ U of Brighton, "Cosmic society: towards a sociology of the universe," book, p. 145-146, jam)Outer space is also being seen as an unlimited source of energy for industrial and domestic production. Solar panels are already allowing electricity to be generated in outer space. The International Space Station provides itself with around 80 kilowatts continuously from an acre of solar panels. The principle can in theory be extended to cover much larger satellites generating huge amounts of electrical power (Macauley and Davis 2002). A further suggestion is that this could be con- verted to microwaves and beamed to Earth via laser beams, providing electricity with no greenhouse gas emissions or toxic waste of any kind. A long-standing dream is for Earth’s power to be projected directly from space, ‘simultaneously providing a large profitable business and dramatically reducing pollution on Earth’ (Globus 2005). Solar panels in space are never obstructed by weather conditions and benefit from the greater intensity of the Sun outside Earth’s atmosphere. If there is a desperate demand for electricity, energy companies could stand to make substantial profits; the station receiving the laser beam would become a new Middle East! On the other hand, they would be transmitting such energy back to Earth via giant laser beams, a prospect likely to generate major risk, especially for those Earthlings near to the point of reception. The idea of using satellites for harnessing solar power was introduced by Glazer (1968), and became central to Gerard O’Neill’s space colony plans discussed below. But we need again to remain cautious. The main criticism is the expense of the electricity they would produce. There are serious questions about its profit- ability, at least in the short to medium term (Macauley 2000). Those who do not write off the idea completely believe that it will become profitable and viable and may actually happen fairly soon, though requiring some form of private–public partnership or World Bank funding (Collins 2000; Kassing 2000; Woodell 2000). But this will only be at the point when the unit cost of electricity produced by Earthly power sources rises above the unit cost of satellite solar power. According to many estimates this will not be until reserves on Earth are much more depleted. Only then will this particular outer spatial fix become profitable. If it were ever to happen, the energy produced would be extremely expensive and, because of the massive investment it would require, would very likely be monopolized. However, it can be argued that it will simply never be viable because it is cheaper to produce renewable energy on Earth than it would be in space. One commentator (Launius 2003) outlines the argument that equivalent electricity could be produced by cov- ering a section of the Sahara in solar panels, and it would be a great deal cheaper, safer and easier to maintain (Collins (2000) disagrees). To Launius, outer space collectors of solar power look like an excuse for a space programme rather than a legitimate solution to energy problems. So it is advisable to again be cautious about much of the highly optimistic pub- licity surrounding the use of solar power for Earthly needs. A study of representa- tives of the energy industry and of industry concluded that, for the next quarter of a century at least, conventional electricity generation in both developed and developing countries will be more than adequate to deal with demand (Macauley 2000). Link: SPS Solar powered satellites are an attempt to find an outer special fix to capitalism Dickens and Ormrod 7 (Peter, Affiliated Lecturer in the Department of Sociology, Faculty of Politics, Psychology, Sociology and International Studies , U of Cambridge, and J.S., Senior Lecturer of Applied Social Science @ U of Brighton, "Cosmic society: towards a sociology of the universe," book, p. 72, jam)Private corporations have always been used to make and maintain space activities funded by the US government, but there is a trend towards increasing private sector participation, especially through new competition schemes. This process is part of a much more general trend that has been experienced by almost all societies since the 1980s. Now, as we have seen, it is being extended to the military and to surveillance. Previously state-run activities are being contracted out to the private sector. But, furthermore, space activities are now being envisaged as profitable in themselves, and so space activity is now becoming increasingly commercialized as well as privatized. This is another stage of Luxemburg’s restless search for further profits or of what Harvey (2003) calls ‘accumulation by dispossession’. Using outer space as a source of raw materials is one suggestion under very active consideration. Harnessing the Sun’s rays with solar panels in space and beaming the energy to electricity grids via Earth-bound receivers is another kind of outer spatial fix under discussion, though it is not seen as profitable within the next twenty years. In the more distant future humanization will further encroach on its ‘outside’, making planets into zones appropriated for the further expansion of capitalism. Link: Space ElevatorThe space elevator is a cheaper way to expand the capitalist market into spaceBalsamello 10 (Frank, Georgetown Law, Georgetown Law Review Vol. 98:176 Pg. 1777-1778 JF)The primary reason launches have become more affordable in the last decade is because of the rise of reusable launch vehicles (RLVs), which are capable of lifting payloads at a lower cost than traditional launch options.44 In recent years, several commercial space projects using RLVs have garnered signi?cant attention for the space tourism industry. The leader, Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic, is currently taking reservations for seats aboard SpaceShipTwo, which was unveiled in December of 2009 under the new name Virgin Space Ship (VSS) Enterprise.45 Over 300 people have already put down a $20,000 deposit on the $200,000 cost of the ?ight.46 JP Aerospace (the company taking pictures of logos at 100,000 feet47) is also working on a series of projects including the V-shaped Ascender, which costs just $500,000, as well as the Tandem, which at 140,000 feet will be used to construct the Dark Sky Station, JP Aerospace’s own space station.48 Bigelow Aerospace’s orbiting Genesis I and Genesis II are experimental precursors to the Sundancer, which is scheduled for launch in 2010 as the ?rst step towards an “orbital habitat” or “space hotel.”49 Dozens of other companies are working to reduce the cost of launching payloads,50 and even non-launch options, such as the “space elevator,” are being pursued by organizations including NASA.51 Finally, several companies are promoting advances in private commercial space exploration by sponsoring competitions like the Google Lunar X PRIZE, which has over twenty teams competing for a $30 million award given to the ?rst team that lands a robot on the Moon, roams 500 meters, and transmits data back to Earth.52 According to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), “While this steady progress may not seem much like change, in fact it is the basis for revolutionary improvements in commercial space transportation: increased reliability and safety, decreased costs, and new capabilities.”5 Of course, advertisers will also need to be wary of potential backlash from those who oppose advertising in space all together. Some may ?nd it safer at ?rst simply to advertise on space tourists’ launch vehicles themselves (for example, placing logos in passenger compartments or on the sides of the vehicle). But over time, as space becomes more accessible and is used for a wider array of human activities, it may gradually become more acceptable and appealing for companies to advertise in space itself or on nearby celestial bodies (for example, billboards situated near hotels on the Moon or ?oating near space vehicles’ docking sites). Given the in?nite size of, and limitless potential uses for, outer space, it would be a novel and counterproductive approach for humanity to deem all of space closed to advertising, even while all sorts of new commercial endeavors—from tourist ships, to space hotels, to space elevators—are launched from Earth.Link: Space Leadership (Dolman)Space leadership gives capitalists free reign over EarthBormann & Sheehan 9 (Natalie & Michael, PhD in International Politics & Prof. of International Security @ Swansea, Securing Outer Space: International Relations Theory and the Politics of Space, p. 56-57, March 12, JM)In his Astropolitik Dolman calls upon U.S. defense policy-makers to weaponize orbital space so as 10 enhance U.S. hegemony over the planet. He does not address the astropolitical issues we have discussed here about what impact a space-based hegemony would have on the structure of the international system. Dolman, however, is confident that America would be responsible in using this awesome power to promote democracy and global capitalism. Setting aside the very contentious issues of whether or not America should be involved in "promoting" democracy and capitalism and whether or not current U.S. hegemony has been beneficial for the Earth's population, the moral and political implications or a space-based empire are not nearly as clear-cut as Dolman makes them out to be. One of the fundamental principles of classical geopolitics was that sea-based empires (such as Athens, Britain, and America) tended to be more democratic than land-based empires (such as Sparta, China, and Rome). The reason for this is that sea-based empires needed to disperse their forces away from the imperial center to exert control, whereas land-based empires exercised power through occupation. Military occupations made it increasingly likely that the army would seize power whenever it came into conflict with the government. Classical geopolitical theorist Otto Hintze argued that land powers tended toward dictatorships (Hintze 1975; see also Deudney 2007). Dolman builds upon these classical geopolitical insights by arguing that because space-based empires would not be able to occupy states, military coups would be less likely and democracy would be more likely (Dolman 2002a: 29). There is, however, a significant difference between space power and sea power. While neither is capable of occupying territory on its own, space power is capable of controlling territory from above through surveillance and precise projection of force — control without occupation. While space power may not result in the dictatorships normally associated with land power, it would be a useful tool is establishing a disciplinary society over all the Earth. A second obstacle to the benevolent space-based empire that Dolman imagines is the lack of counterbalancing powers. Under the two other modes of protection/security we have considered here - the real-statist and the federal-republican — there are checks that prevent even the most powerful states in the system from dominating all the other units. In real-statism, the sovereignty of states means that any potential hegemon would have to pay a significant cost in blood and treasure to conquer other states. While this cost may not be enough to dissuade a superpower from conquering one or two states, the cumulative cost of conquest and occupation makes total domination over the Earth unlikely. In the federal-republican model, the collective security regime of the entire system should act as a sufficient deterrent to prevent one state from dominating the others. Conversely, in a space-based empire the entire world is placed under direct surveillance from above. There is no point on Earth where the imperial center cannot project force on very short notice. So long as the space-based empire can deny access to space to rival powers through missile defense and anti-satellite technologies, there is no possibility that other states can directly counteract this force. As such, the space-based empire erases all boundaries and places the Earth under its control. While the possibility to resist such an empire will exist, the dynamics of" resistance will be considerably altered. Traditional insurgencies rely on physical occupation of territory by the conquering forces to provide targets of opportunity to the resistance. Because space weapons would orbit several hundred to several thousands of miles above the Earth, they would not be vulnerable to attack by anything except weapons systems possessed by the most advanced space powers, such as ballistic missiles and advanced laser systems. Even such counter-measures, however, would only raise the financial cost of space-based empire, not the cost in human lives that insurgencies rely upon to diminish domestic support for imperial occupations. Consequently a space-based empire would be freer to dominate the Earth from above than a traditional land-power occupation would be. Without obvious counter-powers or effective means of resistance, the space-based empire would be able to exercise complete bio-political control over the entire planet, turning all of Earth's inhabitants into "bare life." Under such a political arrangement the likelihood that the imperial center would be a benevolent one, uncorrupted by its total domination of the Earth, is very slim indeed. Link: Space MilitarizationSpace weaponization empowers the elites of capitalismCooper 9 (Brent, Faculty @ University of British Columbia, Lost in Space: a Realist and Marxist Analysis of US Space Militarization, March, , JM)The second theoretical argument views space weaponization as a capitalist process that maintains and promotes itself through the enrichment of the global elite class. Classical Marxism places emphasis on privatization and capital accumulation through the exploitation of resources and labour as the means for the dominant class to rule. John Lovering writes, in Military Expenditure and the Restructuring of Capitalism, that Marxists see defense expenditure as providing governments with provisional solutions to inherent problems in capitalism such as underconsumption.25 He argues that disarmament could be prosperous in the short-term, but would compromise a "significant source of stability and growth."27 The doctrine of space weaponization, therefore, in a classical Marxist sense, is an essential part of a continuing process of capital accumulation.26Space weaponization promotes the capitalist empireCooper 9 (Brent, Faculty @ University of British Columbia, Lost in Space: a Realist and Marxist Analysis of US Space Militarization, March, , JM)The problem with applying world-systems theory or dependency theory to space -weaponization is that these so-called security measures do not fundamentally affect the world-economy system. What space weaponization does is enrich the global capitalist class by profiting from the sale of the weapons and securing unimpeded commerce as well as enhancing the power of the state that sponsors the agenda. To this extent, the theory includes an element of realism in that states are considered important actors, but the relatively narrow application of space weapons still has little impact on the core-semi-periphery-periphery relationship. The agenda of space weaponization is better understood as a new form of imperialism under the Marxist theory of imperialist war. The idea, as it will be shown, is to maximize the asymmetrical military advantage of the US so as to avoid major imperialist war and promote global homogeneity indirectly through technological omnipotence.Link: Space MilitarizationSpace weaponization aims to protect capital interestsCooper 9 (Brent, Faculty @ University of British Columbia, Lost in Space: a Realist and Marxist Analysis of US Space Militarization, March, , JM)Lenin wrote about a natural congregation of capitalist forces into "cartels, syndicates and trusts" into a high stage of imperialism.37 Such a description bears semblance to the military-industrial-complex (MIC) and its functional role in international relations in terms of US interests. It is ironic that while the Marxist lens sheds light on the MIC, the constituents of the MIC serve their own interests by promoting neorealist thinking within the state because ensuring security means large defense spending. Lenin explained that capitalism tended to monopoly and that imperialism is this ultimate stage of capitalism.36 Thus, finance capital inevitably strives to extend its territory economically and geographically and conglomerate into a homogenous entity.39 From a Marxist perspective, the MIC can be seen as a means to facilitate the establishment of a transnational capitalist class insofar as the military apparatus defends the economic interests of the entire system.40 In Eisenhower's farewell address, he famously warned about the "unwarranted influence" of the MIC.41 This was because of the nature of capitalist enterprises, not so much the nature of state behavior according to neorealism. Naturally, the threat from the MIC itself is not as easily dramatized, let alone visible, than the threat of an ICBM only "33 minutes" away, which is why superficially neorealism better explains the missile defense doctrine. But when you dig deeper you see that space weaponization is not really about missile defense. In an article in the International Socialist Review, scholar Noam Chomsky describes missile defense as a "small footnote" in the broader space weaponization agenda laid out in the Vision for 2020 document. The mission statement is, of course, "to protect US interests and investment."43 Chomsky writes that since poor countries would opt for anti-satellite weapons, rather than anti-missile, and the US needs satellites to operate the missile defense system, first-strike weapons in space are a requirement to achieve what the US calls "full-spectrum dominance."43 He parallels naval armament a century ago with space weaponization today by how the British Navy was charged with protecting British commercial interests in the 19t,h century.44 Also, US military expenditure laid the foundations for subsequent industries that the US would come to dominate for many years such as steel and automobile manufacturing.45Thus, it is clear that space weaponization represents the perpetuation of the US imperative to remain at the forefront of technological innovation, in addition to protecting its current assets in space. Furthermore, a report called GlobalTrends 2015 predicts the widening economic division between "haves" and "have-nots."45 The perseverance of this space militarization agenda is coincidental with globalization. Space weaponization is being sold in terms of physical security but it is really about an insurance policy for a global economic dominance of haves over have-nots. As Chomsky summarizes, globalization will increase in the "preferred sense - meaning investor rights."47Link: Space MilitarizationThe US economy is dependent on high levels of military spending- plan is fuel for the warfare stateDickens and Ormrod 7 (Peter, Affiliated Lecturer in the Department of Sociology, Faculty of Politics, Psychology, Sociology and International Studies , U of Cambridge, and J.S., Senior Lecturer of Applied Social Science @ U of Brighton, "Cosmic society: towards a sociology of the universe," book, p. 57-58, jam)Military expenditures, originally siphoned off from the primary circuit, have now been made highly profitable, especially for the industries of ‘developed’ coun- tries. Indeed, the American economy now deeply depends on military spending, leading some to use the term ‘warfare state’ (Edgerton 2005). The close working relations between the economy and the military are sometimes known as ‘the military industrial complex’. The military clearly requires the materials made by private defence contractors whereas the contractors are highly dependent on military spending as a steady revenue stream. Indeed, the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space has displayed posters campaigning to ‘end aerospace corporation welfare’: contracts given to major weapons and space manufacturers to keep them in business. Governments are again making investments siphoned off from the primary circuit in the form of taxes and ploughed into further primary circuits which, it is hoped, will become profitable. Space weaponization empowers capital beyond restrictionBormann & Sheehan 9 (Natalie & Michael, PhD in International Politics & Prof. of International Security @ Swansea, Securing Outer Space: International Relations Theory and the Politics of Space, p. 55-56, March 12, JM)On the individual axis, space weapons represent a powerful disciplinary capacity in the ability to target individuals with great precision. Many of the proposed weapons systems - most notably space-based lasers - are designed to project lethal force at very precise targets, even individuals. Presumably then a primary use of such weapons would be to destroy specific enemies of the imperial center. This ability to project force precisely to any point on Earth would have two political effects. First, it will strip all states that do Earth at a moment's notice, there would be no need for it to control territory. As such, this new form or imperial sovereignty would have three features nor encountered in previous political forms. First, it would have a centralized locus of authority, while being de-territorialized in terms of what it governed. Second, it would asymmetrically bind all individuals and institutions, including nominal states, into a hierarchical relationship with the imperial center at the top. Finally it would possess a monopoly on the external violence between (then non-sovereign) states as well as the capacity to target any specific individual within a state at any point in time. Effectively, this space-based empire would possess sovereignty over the entire globe (Duvall and Havercroft 2008). Link: Space MilitarizationSpace militarization is a boon to corporations – also causes unemployment and class tensionSpence 94 (Martin, Marxist theorist, the assistant general secretary of the Bectu broadcasting union, Capital and Class, Spring, Vol. 18, No. 1 p. 51-83, jam)SDI was a Utopian project to build a space-based anti-missile 'shield' using various exotic technologies. Despite the fact that many scientists regarded it as fantasy and that key tests were feked in order to maintain its credibility [Independent on Sunday 29/8/93), over the 1980s $30 billion was spent on SDI {Financial Times 30/7/93), generating enormous profits for aerospace companies. Corporations such as General Dynamics, Lockheed, McDonnell-Douglas and Rockwell were reported to have closed down whole civilian production lines to make room for the new boom in military contracts (Davis 1986, 243). The unfocussed and Utopian nature of SDI and the vast resources allocated to it, meant that it effectively acted as a massive State subsidy to US high-technology industrial research. It generated breakthroughs in medicine, computer software design, and laser technology, which US private capital then sought to exploit commercially (Financial Times 30/7195). At the same time, it acted as a slush fund for projects which failed to win support elsewhere, such as McDonnell-Douglas' futur- istic 'Delta Clipper' spaceplane (Blase 1993) and conventional scientific projects such as a NASA lunar mapping mission (Salmon 1993). SDI and the arms boom also had a profound effect on the USA's regional and class structure. Davis has argued that arms spending was the cement in Reagan's political base, forging an 'over- consumptionist' alliance between big capital and layers of the middle class (Davis 1986, 211 ff.). It also acted as a warped proxy for Reagan's non-existent social and regional policies, subsidising housing, health, education and wages in those areas where contracts were placed. The sunbelt became a 'gunbelt' (O'Connor 1991, 15), as a new arc of pathological prosperity swung down the Pacific coast, across the South, and (selectively) up the Eastern seaboard to the allegedly post-Fordist hi-tech clusters of companies around Boston. Link: Space TourismTechnology and expertise developed by the space tourism industry is used to engage in surveillance and elimination of undesirable populations Dickens 9 (Peter, Affiliated Lecturer in the Department of Sociology, Faculty of Politics, Psychology, Sociology and International Studies , U of Cambridge, May, The Sociological Review, Vol. 57, Iss. Supp. s1, p. 68-82, jam)Perhaps the most obvious current switches of capital into outer space projects are those associated with the burgeoning space tourism industry. This is one of the most wasteful forms of conspicuous consumption imaginable though it does indicate how outer space might in due course be made the site of new production-processes. The idea of putting hotels in space was first mentioned by Barron Hilton, president of Hilton Hotels, as long ago as 1967 (Spencer and Rugg 2004: 160). In addressing the American Astronautical Society, he assured them that ‘when space scientists make it physically feasible to establish hotels in space, the hotel industry will meet the challenge’ (Billings 2006: 162). Designs for hotels incorporate large viewing windows and, in an extended weightless stay, the space tourism visionaries can imagine even more fantastic leisure pursuits and games to be enjoyed in zero gravity. Ashford (2002) elaborates two of these ideas as he describes how orbital hotels will allow tourists to fly with wings and play in cylindrical zero-gravity swimming pools. In similar vein, Collins et al. (2000) have produced a design for an orbital sports stadium. These fantastic orbital hotels sound like something of the distant future, but again research and design work is already well under way. Bob Bigelow, the leading con-tender, is spending $500 million on a space hotel and has already built working 1:3 scale models. He is now planning a cruise ship designed to ferry tourists the moon. Some of these visions are now coming to pass as a result of switches in Harvey’s ‘secondary circuit.’ Richard Branson is currently switching capital from his other Virgin enterprises to set up the Virgin Galactic space tourism company. PayPal founder Elon Musk and entrepreneur Jeff Bezos have also drawn surplus capital from their other investments and ploughed it into developing the infrastructure and vehicles for space tourism. Meanwhile, after a number of abortive attempts by American and Russian conglomer?ates, American company Space Adventures sold flights on board a Russian Soyuz rocket to three multimillionaire businessmen. Each flight cost $20 million, the first being that of Dennis Tito. Space Adventures have announced that by 2010 they expect to be offering tourist trips to the International Space Station (ISS) for $20 million and around the moon for $100 million. One thousand clients are said to be interested. It now seems possible, however, that the ambitions of these potential space travellers will be thwarted. The Russian Federal Space Agency has announced that the increasing number of nations involved in ISS, combined with popular criticism in Russia of this use of the ISS, mean that from 2010 this asset will only be used by trained crew-members (China Post 2008). Projections for the future of privately-financed space tourism nevertheless remain ambitious. Spencer and Rugg (2004 op.cit.) make the analogy between the growth of luxury cruising on the oceans and that in space. They argue that Tito’s flight was a ‘pioneering phase’. In ten years or so the International Space Station will have been converted into the first ‘private orbital yacht’ and around one thousand private citizens will have travelled ‘off world’. In the next ‘exclusive’ phase, wealthy individuals and corporations will, it is projected, be engaging in orbital yacht racing and celebrities will be making outer space their preferred venue for weddings. The ‘mature phase’ will be one in which cruise ships seating one hundred persons and offering a range of recreational facilities will be available. By 2050, one million people will be touring off-world and ‘the year 2075 could see 3000 to 5000 tourists and sports fans going every day’ (Spencer and Rugg 2004 op.cit.: 52). Yet there are also now signs that the technology and expertise gained in the relatively benign space tourism industry are possibly being adopted for more sinister purposes. Northrop-Grumman, a leader US defence manufacturer, has recently bought outright Scaled Composites. The latter company has pioneered the use of lightweight materials for outer space vehicles, materials eventually used in the manufacture of Richard Branson’s space vehicles. The reasons for this purchase are not clear at the time of writing. But Northrop Grumman has for years made huge profits by the construction of satellite-guided Unmanned Air Vehicles. These are used by the USAF for surveillance and what their website terms ‘precision strike missions.’ This switch of capital into a company which has pioneered lightweight materials for space vehicles is creating another example of a familiar phenomenon. In a similar way to surveillance satellites being simultaneously used for military and civil purposes, the technologies used for helping wealthy people to take vacations to increasingly; exotic zones in space are also being used for observing, regulating and even eliminating warlords and other supposedly ‘undesirable’ populations scattered over the earth. Link: Space Weaponization/ASATsThe true purpose of space weaponization is to protect business interestsDuvall & Havercroft 6 (Raymond, Prof of Political Science @ U of Minnesota, and Jonathan, Ph.D. U Minnesota, Prof of Political Science @ Oklahoma U, October, “Taking Sovereignty Out of This World: Space Weapons and Empire of the Future,” p. 11, jam)The doctrine of space control has emerged in the U.S. military out of the belief that assets in space represent a potential target for enemies of the U.S.56 There are two kinds of vulnerable U.S. assets: private-commercial; and military. One concern is that rivals may attack commercial satellites, thereby disrupting the flow of information and potentially inflicting significant harm on global markets. Militarily, a second concern is that, through its increasing reliance on satellites for its Earth-based military operations, the U.S. has created an “asymmetrical vulnerability”. An adversary (including a non-state, “terrorist” organization) could effectively immobilize U.S. forces by disabling the military satellites that provide communication, command, and control capabilities. As noted above, U.S. military planners are already warning about a possible “Space Pearl Harbor”. Consequently, the doctrine of space control is designed to protect commercial and military satellites from potential attacks, and ultimately to prevent rivals from having access to space.57 As of the year 2000 there were over 500 satellites in orbit owned by 46 countries, worth in excess of $250 billion. With the rise of the information economy, satellites are playing an increasing role in international trade and finance. As such, U.S. military planners are concerned about commercial satellites. One rationalization for the weaponization of space is that these commercial assets represent a vulnerability to economic sabotage and terrorism. As Lambeth has argued, The most compelling reason for moving forward for dispatch toward acquiring at least the serious elements of space control capability is that the United States is now unprecedentedly invested and dependent upon on-orbit capabilities, both military and commercial. Since these equities can only be expected to grow in sunk cost, it is fair to presume that they will eventually be challenged by potential opponents.58 Notice how this description of space control discusses space in terms of a set of capital assets that should be protected from external threats. While scholars have for a long time debated whether one, if not the, primary objective of U.S. military endeavors is to protect the interests of business, when it comes to questions of space control it is one of only two things in space to protect. There are no human populations in space—with the exception of the two or three occupants on the International Space Station—that could be killed by conflict in space, so the thing that is being secured through the project of space control is technology—either commercial satellites or military assets. ***ADVANTAGE/IMPACT AREA LINKS***Link: DedevDe-development theory is chronically unresponsive to the class differences and imperialism behind capitalist inequalityFoster 11 (John Bellamy, prof of sociology @ U of Oregon, “ Capitalism De-Growth: An Impossibility Theorem” Monthly Review Vol. 62.8 January JF)An underlying premise of this movement is that, in the face of a planetary ecological emergency, the promise of green technology has proven false. This can be attributed to the Jevons Paradox, according to which greater efficiency in the use of energy and resources leads not to conservation but to greater economic growth, and hence more pressure on the environment.5 The unavoidable conclusion—associated with a wide variety of political-economic and environmental thinkers, not just those connected directly to the European degrowth project—is that there needs to be a drastic alteration in the economic trends operative since the Industrial Revolution. As Marxist economist Paul Sweezy put it more than two decades ago: “Since there is no way to increase the capacity of the environment to bear the [economic and population] burdens placed on it, it follows that the adjustment must come entirely from the other side of the equation. And since the disequilibrium has already reached dangerous proportions, it also follows that what is essential for success is a reversal, not merely a slowing down, of the underlying trends of the last few centuries.”6 The notion that degrowth as a concept can be applied in essentially the same way both to the wealthy countries of the center and the poor countries of the periphery represents a category mistake resulting from the crude imposition of an abstraction (degrowth) on a context in which it is essentially meaningless, e.g., Haiti, Mali, or even, in many ways, India. The real problem in the global periphery is overcoming imperial linkages, transforming the existing mode of production, and creating sustainable-egalitarian productive possibilities. It is clear that many countries in the South with very low per capita incomes cannot afford degrowth but could use a kind of sustainable development, directed at real needs such as access to water, food, health care, education, etc. This requires a radical shift in social structure away from the relations of production of capitalism/imperialism. It is telling that in Latouche’s widely circulated articles there is virtually no mention of those countries, such as Cuba, Venezuela, and Bolivia, where concrete struggles are being waged to shift social priorities from profit to social needs. Cuba, as the Living Planet Report has indicated, is the only country on Earth with high human development and a sustainable ecological footprint.20 It is undeniable today that economic growth is the main driver of planetary ecological degradation. But to pin one’s whole analysis on overturning an abstract “growth society” is to lose all historical perspective and discard centuries of social science. As valuable as the degrowth concept is in an ecological sense, it can only take on genuine meaning as part of a critique of capital accumulation and part of the transition to a sustainable, egalitarian, communal order; one in which the associated producers govern the metabolic relation between nature and society in the interest of successive generations and the earth itself (socialism/communism as Marx defined it).21 What is needed is a “co-revolutionary movement,” to adopt David Harvey’s pregnant term, that will bring together the traditional working-class critique of capital, the critique of imperialism, the critiques of patriarchy and racism, and the critique of ecologically destructive growth (along with their respective mass movements).22Link: DemocracyTrue democracy is impossible under capitalism- it just results in plutocracyFoster & McChesney 10 (John Bellamy, Prof of Sociology @ U of Oregon, and Robert, Research Professor @ U of Illinois, “Capitalism, The Absurd System: A View From the United States” Monthly Review Vol. 62.2 June JF)Boiled down, U.S. politics under today’s mature capitalism are not about the welfare of the demos (i.e., the people) as envisioned in classical notions of democracy, but rather about which party can best deliver profitability to investors and corporations. There are continuing debates between those who simply want to slash labor costs, taxes, and regulations for the rich, and those who want to do some of that but also use some regulation and government spending to encourage higher wages and demand-driven growth. Both sides, however, accept that making the economy profitable for the owning class is the sine qua non of successful administration. Within these constraints, there are occasional important political fights and periodic bones to throw to the electorate. But, in times of economic stagnation, the bones get smaller and even disappear. What passes for genuine political debate often tends to be irrelevant gibberish and blatant manipulation on side issues, or inconsequential nitpicking on minutiae. The big stuff is off the table. The system is democratic in theory, plutocratic (rule by the rich) in content. The hollowness of democracy in today’s capitalism is evident in the blatant corruption of governance at all levels in the United States, and the non-accountability of all the major players. The corruption we are discussing is not about politicians getting inordinately great seats at the World Series, but the degeneration of the system and the dominance of a culture of greed that is now pervasive and institutionalized, contaminating all aspects of life. The manner in which, during the current Great Recession, the dominant institutions and investors were able to coalesce and demand hundreds of billions, even trillions, of dollars in public money as a blank check to the largest banks—and then shamelessly disperse multimillion-dollar bonuses to individuals at the apex of those very same corporations now on the public dole—was a striking reminder of the limits of self-government in our political economy. When the Masters of the Universe, as those atop the economic system have been called, need money, when they need bail-outs, when they need the full power of the state, there is no time for debate or inquiry or deliberation. There is no time for the setting of conditions. There is only time to give them exactly what they want. Or else! Egged on by the news media, all responsible people fall in line or face ostracism. As for education and the social services that mark the good society, well, they have to wait in line and hope something is left after the capitalist master is fed. In stagnant times, it is a long wait. Marx’s work provides searing insights on how to understand a society that, at the surface, appears to be one thing but, at its deeper productive foundations, is something else. Marx argued that a core contradiction built into capitalism was between its ever-increasing socialization and enhancement of productivity, and its ongoing system of private appropriation of profit. In other words, one of the great virtues of capitalism, in comparison to the relatively stagnant societies that preceded it, is that it is constantly revolutionizing society’s productive capacity and the social interconnections between people within production. But, at a certain point, private control over the economy comes into stark conflict with the vast productive capacities of social labor that have developed. These means of private control, the dominant class/property relations, become “so many fetters” on the further development of society, of human potential, of even the sustainability of human society. The fetters must therefore be “burst asunder,” to allow for new stages of human development.11Link: Democracy PromotionDemocracy promotion is an excuse to prop up dictators who support the neoliberal agenda Herod 7 (James, Columbia U graduate?and political activist, “Getting Free” Pg. JF)Radicals have always scoffed at the claim by the U.S. government that it is devoted to promoting democracy abroad. The United States is perfectly willing to work with the most brutal dictators, provided that they are in the U.S. camp. As for democracies, the United States supports only those that are procapitalist and endorse the corporate neoliberal agenda. Otherwise, the U.S. government seeks to overthrow any parliamentary democracy if it opposes these policies. It tried to overthrow Hugo Chavez in Venezuela (even though he has handily won seven elections), but failed, in a rare defeat (at least so far; efforts are ongoing). It succeeded in overthrowing Aristide, although he was a legitimately elected leader, because he wasn’t playing ball, just as it overthrew Allende thirty years ago, another legitimately elected leader in Latin America’s oldest parliamentary democracy. In 1953, the U.S. government overthrew the democratically elected Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran in order to install Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlevi. The United States is also quite skilled at subverting elections, rather than simply deposing already-elected leaders it doesn’t like. There are numerous examples, like the U.S. intervention in the Greek elections immediately after World War II to prevent the communists from coming to power an election the communists otherwise would have won easily. It has also honed the skill of fomenting popular uprisings in order to install leaders it prefers. It does this by pouring millions of dollars into the country to support particular groups, bribe officials, finance publications, pay demonstrators, train insurrectionists, pay for media coverage, weapons, opinion polls, and so forth. Recently, it has used this skill to great advantage in three countries in rapid succession: Yugoslavia, Georgia, and the Ukraine. In each case, the result was that a procapitalist, pro-Western, neoliberal leader came to power.Link: EconomyCapitalism causes inevitable crashes and conflict—economic meltdown would result in new controls on international capital, which is good.Mead ’97 (Walter Russell, Henry Kissinger Senior Fellow for U.S. Foreign Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations, “Roller-Coaster Capitalism: Creative Destruction at Work”, Foreign Affairs, January/February, )The more creative capitalism becomes -- the faster productivity rises, the more new technology transforms the way we work -- the more destructive it becomes. The firms and factories that do not adapt will die; the skills of workers and existing plant and equipment rapidly become obsolete; whole nations and regions based on the industries and technologies of past decades lose their competitive edge and sink into decline.Observers more conventional than Greider acknowledge this, claiming only that the winners will outnumber the losers in the end. Greider agrees in principle, but he says that the happy ending may be more delayed, and the road to resolution of the dilemma may require more destructive detours, than the conventionally optimistic view can foresee.Again, he draws a comparison with the earlier history of the twentieth century. The productivity increases and technological advances of the 1920s did eventually lead to the great economic expansion and unprecedented mass affluence of the quarter-century from 1950 to 1975, but the road from the 1920s led through the Great Depression of the 1930s and the war of the 1940s before the crowds of winners were able to cash in their chips.It is, of course, impossible to tell if Greider is right. Perhaps the world is in a new financial bubble and today's upward redistribution of income is the harbinger of a vast financial and ultimately political meltdown. If so, many of the oracles of contemporary economic and political wisdom will be metaphorically if not literally hung from the lampposts as popular opinion turns ruthlessly against the ideas, institutions, and leaders of the preceding period. Herbert Hoover was not a popular man during the depression, and Richard Whitney, president of the New York Stock Exchange in 1929, ended up in jail for embezzlement. The best- selling books of the 1930s were, at least figuratively, bound in the skins of the optimists of the 1920s "new era."If anything remotely like this happens, some of the solutions that Greider proposes will be tried. New forms of regulation will attempt to control international capital movements and reduce the risks inherent in today's relatively open trade and investment regimes. Vast public investment projects will attempt to replace the tapped-out power of individual consumers to buy, reviving markets and growth and reducing unemployment by the creation of new demand through public spending.Link: EnergyAdvances in energy efficiency only fuel the growth of capitalism and accelerate environmental destructionFoster 2k (John B., PhD, York University, “Capitalism’s Environmental Crisis: Is Technology the Answer?” December 1, , JM)The standard solution offered to the environmental problem in advanced capitalist economies is to shift technology in a more benign direction: more energy-efficient production, cars that get better mileage, replacement of fossil fuels with solar power, and recycling of resources. Other environmental reforms, such as reductions in population growth and even cuts in consumption, are often advocated as well. The magic bullet of technology, however, is by far the favorite, seeming to hold out the possibility of environmental improvement with the least effect on the smooth working of the capitalist machine. The 1997 International Kyoto Protocol on global warming, designed to limit the greenhouse-gas emissions of nations, has only reinforced this attitude, encouraging many environmental advocates in the United States (including Al Gore in his presidential campaign) to advocate technological improvement in energy efficiency as the main escape from the environmental mess. There are two ways in which technological change can lower environmental impact. First, it can reduce the materials and energy used per unit of output and, second, it can substitute less harmful technology. Much of the improvement in air quality since the nineteenth century, including its aesthetics, resulted from the reduction in the smoke and sulfur dioxide emissions for which coal-burning is notorious. Solar energy, in contrast to other present and prospective sources of energy, is not only available in inexhaustible supply (though limited at any given time and place), but is also ecologically benign. Environmentalists in general therefore prefer a shift to solar energy. Such considerations have encouraged the view that all stops should be pulled out on promoting technologies that increase efficiency, particularly of energy, and use more benign productive processes that get rid of the worst pollutants. I want to concentrate here on the energy efficiency part of this. The issue of the materials used and the production technology are much more intractable problems under the current regime of accumulation. One of the reasons for this is that current productive processes often involve toxins of the worst imaginable kind. For example, we know that the proliferation of synthetic chemicals, many of which are extraordinarily harmful—carcinogenic and teratogenic—is associated with the growth of the petrochemical industry and agribusiness, producing products such as plastics and pesticides. (This was the central message of Barry Commoner’s Closing Circle.) Yet attempts to overcome this dependence on toxic production create a degree of resistance from the vested interests of the capitalist order that only a revolutionary movement could surmount. In contrast, straightforward improvements in energy efficiency have always been emphasized by capital itself, and fall theoretically within the domain of what the system is said to be able to accomplish—even what it prides itself in. In the past, it was common for environmentalists to compare the problems of the “three worlds” using the well-known environmental impact or “PAT” formula (Population x Affluence x Technology=Environmental Impact). The third world’s environmental problems, according to this dominant perspective, could be seen as arising first and foremost from population growth rather than technology or affluence (given the low level of industrialization). The environmental problems of the Soviet bloc were attributed to its inferior technology, which was less efficient in terms of materials and energy consumed per unit of out-put, and more toxic in its immediate, localized environmental effects, than in the West. The West’s chief environmental problem, in contrast, was attributed neither to its population growth nor its technology (areas in which it had comparative environmental advantages), but to its affluence and the growing burden that this imposed on the environment. The ace in the hole for the wealthy capitalist countries was always seen to be their technological prowess—which would allow them to promote environmental improvements while also expanding their affluence (that is, growth of capital and consumption). What likelihood then is there that new or newly applied technology will be able to prevent environmental degradation from expanding along with the economy? Link: EnvironmentPresenting nature as “fixable” presumes a relationship with it that necessitates its degradationSwyngedouw 6 (Erik, Department of Geography @ Manchester, Urban and Landscape Perspectives 9, 2, p.185-205, September, JM)The popular response to Katrina, the barrage of apocalyptic warnings of the pending catastrophes wrecked by climate change and the need to take urgent remedial action to engineer a retro-fitted ‘balanced’ climate are perfect examples of the tactics and configurations associated with the present post-political condition, primarily in the US and Europe. Indeed, a politics of sustainability, predicated upon a radically conservative and reactionary view of a singular – and ontologically stable and harmonious – Nature is necessarily one that eradicates or evacuates the ‘political’ from debates over what to do with natures. The key political question is one that centres on the question of what kind of natures we wish to inhabit, what kinds of natures we which to preserve, to make, or, if need be, to wipe off the surface of the planet (like the HIV virus, for example), and on how to get there. The fantasy of ‘sustainability’ imagines the possibility of an originally fundamentally harmonious Nature, one that is now out-of-synch but, which, if ‘properly’ managed, we can and have to return to by means of a series of technological, managerial, and organisational fixes. As suggested above, many, from different social, cultural, and philosophical positionalities, agree with this dictum. Disagreement is allowed, but only with respect to the choice of technologies, the mix of organisational fixes, the detail of the managerial adjustments, and the urgency of their timing and implementation. Nature’s apocalyptic future, if unheeded, symbolises and nurtures the solidification of the post-political condition. And the excavation and critical assessment of this post-political condition nurtured and embodied by most of current Western socio-environmental politics is what we shall turn to next. Focusing on the zero point of the ecological crisis precludes preventing itSwyngedouw 6 (Erik, Department of Geography @ Manchester, Urban and Landscape Perspectives 9, 2, p.185-205, September, JM)The inability to take ‘natures’ seriously is dramatically illustrated by the controversy over the degree to which disturbing environmental change is actually taking place and the risks or dangers associated with it. Lomborg’s The Sceptical Environmentalist captures one side of this controversy in all its phantasmagorical perversity (Lomborg, 1998), while climate change doomsday pundits represent the other. Both sides of the debate argue from an imaginary position of the presumed existence of a dynamic balance and equilibrium, the point of ‘good’ nature, but one side claims that the world is veering off the correct path, while the other side (Lomborg and other sceptics) argues that we are still pretty much on nature’s course. With our gaze firmly fixed on capturing an imaginary ‘idealised’ Nature, the controversy further solidifies our conviction of the possibility of a harmonious, balanced, and fundamentally benign ONE Nature if we would just get our interaction with it right, an argument blindly (and stubbornly) fixed on the question of where Nature’s rightful point of benign existence resides. This futile debate, circling around an assumedly centred, known, and singular Nature, certainly permits -- in fact invites -- imagining ecological catastrophe at some distant point (global burning (or freezing) through climate change, resource depletion, death by overpopulation). Indeed, imagining catastrophe and fantasising about the final ecological Armageddon seems considerably easier for most environmentalists than envisaging relatively small changes in the socio-political and cultural-economic organisation of local and global life here and now. Or put differently, the world’s premature ending in a climatic Armageddon seems easier to imagine (and sell to the public) than a transformation of (or end to) the neo-liberal capitalist order that keeps on practicing expanding energy use and widening and deepening its ecological footprint. Link: HegemonyHegemony maintains a system of capital that privileges the few at risk of extinctionFoster 6 (John Bellamy, Prof of Sociology @ U of Oregon, “The New Geopolitics of Empire” Monthly Review Vol. 57.8 January JF)U.S. imperial geopolitics is ultimately aimed at creating a global space for capitalist development. It is about forming a world dedicated to capital accumulation on behalf of the U.S. ruling class—and to a lesser extent the interlinked ruling classes of the triad powers as a whole (North America, Europe, and Japan). Despite “the end of colonialism” and the rise of “anti-capitalist new countries,” Business Week pronounced in April 1975, there has always been “the umbrella of American power to contain it….[T]he U.S. was able to fashion increasing prosperity among Western countries, using the tools of more liberal trade, investment, and political power. The rise of the multinational corporation was the economic expression of this political framework.”36 There is no doubt that the U.S. imperium has benefited those at the top of the center-capitalist nations and not just the power elite of the United States. Yet, the drive for global hegemony on the part of particular capitalist nations and their ruling classes, like capital accumulation itself, recognizes no insurmountable barriers. Writing before September 11, 2001, István Mészáros argued in his Socialism or Barbarism that due to unbridled U.S. imperial ambitions the world was entering what was potentially “the most dangerous phase of imperialism in all history”: For what is at stake today is not the control of a particular part of the planet—no matter how large—putting at a disadvantage but still tolerating the independent actions of some rivals, but the control of its totality by one hegemonic economic and military superpower….This is what the ultimate rationality of globally developed capital requires, in its vain attempt to bring under control its irreconcilable antagonisms. The trouble is, though, that such rationality…is at the same time the most extreme form of irrationality in history, including the Nazi conception of world domination, as far as the conditions required for the survival of humanity are concerned.37 In the present era of naked imperialism, initiated by the sole superpower, the nature of the threat to the entire planet and its people is there for all to see. According to G. John Ikenberry, Professor of Geopolitics and Global Justice at Georgetown University, in his 2002 Foreign Affairs article “America’s Imperial Ambition”: the U.S. “neoimperial vision” is one in which “the United States arrogates to itself the global role of setting standards, determining threats, using force, and meting out justice.” At present the United States currently enjoys both economic (though declining) and military primacy. “The new goal,” he states, “is to make these advantages permanent—a fait accompli that will prompt other states to not even try to catch up. Some thinkers have described the strategy as ‘breakout.’” Yet, such a “hard-line imperial grand strategy,” according to Ikenberry—himself no opponent of imperialism—could backfire.38 The foregoing suggests that interimperialist rivalry did not end as is often thought with the rise of U.S. hegemony. Rather it has persisted in Washington’s drive to unlimited hegemony, which can be traced to the underlying logic of capital in a world divided into competing nation states. The United States as the remaining superpower is today seeking final world dominion. The “Project for the New American Century” stands for an attempt to create a U.S.-led global imperium geared to extracting as much surplus as possible from the countries of the periphery, while achieving a “breakout” strategy with respect to the main rivals (or potential rivals) to U.S. global supremacy. The fact that such a goal is irrational and impossible to sustain constitutes the inevitable failure of geopolitics.Link: HegemonyHegemonic competition is rooted in the capitalist desire to destroy competitors that lead to extinctionMeszaros 3 (Istvan, Prof Emeritus of Philosophy @ U of Sussex, “Militarism and the Coming Wars” talk given at the Critique Confernce, London January Pg. 4-7JF)To be sure, the new phase of global hegemonic imperialism is preponderantly under the rule of the U.S., while the other would-be imperialist powers on the whole seem to accept the role of hanging on to the American coat-tails, though of course by no means for eternity. One can indeed unhesitatingly envisage, on the basis of the already visible instabilities, the explosion of weighty antagonisms among the major powers in the future. But would that by itself offer any answer to the systemic contradictions at stake, without addressing the causal determinations at the roots of imperialistic developments? It would be very na?ve to believe that it could. Here I only wish to underline a central concern, namely that the logic of capital is absolutely inseparable from the imperative of the domination of the weaker by the stronger. Even when one thinks of what is generally considered the most positive constituent of the system, competition resulting in expansion and advancement, its necessary companion is the drive to monopoly and the subjugation or extermination of the competitors who stand in the way of self-asserting monopoly. Imperialism, in turn, is the necessary result of capital’s relentless drive to monopoly. The changing phases of imperialism both embody and more or less directly affect the changes of ongoing historical development. With regard to the present phase of imperialism, two closely connected aspects are of paramount importance. The first is that the ultimate material/economic tendency of capital is for global integration which, however, it cannot secure at the political level. This is due to a large extent to the fact that the global capital system unfolded in the course of history in the form of a multiplicity of divided and indeed antagonistically opposed national states. Not even the most violent imperialist collisions of the past could produce a lasting result in this respect. They could not impose the will of the most powerful national state on a permanent basis on its rivals. The second aspect of our problem, which is the other side of the same coin, is that despite all efforts capital failed to produce the state of the capital system as such. This remains the gravest of complications for the future, notwithstanding all talk about “globalization”. U.S.-dominated global hegemonic imperialism is an ultimately doomed attempt to superimpose itself on all of the other, sooner or later recalcitrant, national states as the “international” state of the capital system as such. Here, too, we are confronted by a massive contradiction. For even the recent, most aggressive and openly threatening U.S. strategic documents try to justify their advocated “universally valid“ policies in the name of the “American national interests” while denying such considerations to the others. We are, thus, concerned with a set of interdeterminations which must be viewed as parts of an organic system. If we want to fight war as a mechanism of global government, as we must, in order to safeguard our very existence, we have to situate the historical changes that have taken place in the last few decades in their proper causal framework. The design of one overpowering national state controlling all of the others, following the imperatives emanating from capital’s logic, can only lead to humanity’s suicide. At the same time it must be also recognized that the seemingly insoluble contradiction between national aspirations – exploding from time to time in devastating antagonisms – and internationalism can only be 7 resolved if regulated on a fully equitable basis, which is totally inconceivable in capital’s hierarchically structured order.Link: HegemonyUS hegemony is designed to uphold the capitalist world order Xing and Hersh 6 (Li and Jacques, Aabourg U, American Review of Political Economy Vol. 4.1/2 December Pg. 42-43 JF)Based on the marriage of economic liberalism and political realism, the theory of hegemonic stability is premised on the creation and distribution of the public goods. Perceiving states as interest maximizers, realists argue that under normal circumstances, an individual state does not have the incentives to contribute to the public goods because the gains from free-riding outweigh the rewards of cooperation, and the costs of being ridden upon are greater than the benefits from autonomy. Only a hegemonic superpower with sufficient political and economic resources assisted by a military capability is able to provide or induce others to contribute their share to the international common goods, such as “free trade, peace and security, or at least a balance of powers and a sound system of international payments” (Balaam & Veseth, 1996, p. 51). In this context, the most important function of the hegemon is to set forth and enforce the institutionalization of rules for international political and economic relations with a built-in bias in favor of the hegemon as well as securing the continuous functioning of the capitalist world system. The realist interpretations accept the importance of political and military dominance for the maintenance of a liberal world economy while the liberal (or neo-liberal institutionalist position) considers the possibility of reaching a degree of interdependence through the promotion of the self-interest of the trading states. In other words, applying the “invisible hand” of the market to the international political economy. The post-war world order, designed and maintained by the United States, was capable of imposing discipline on the capitalist system as a whole in the name of “common interest” for all parties. Such “imposition” of hegemonic stability, however, cannot simply be regarded as a by-product of manipulation or coercion. It must also comply with a genuine ability of the leadership to transform economic dominance under a general unification of the camp of capital into political and ideological hegemony. The Bretton Wood institutions can be seen as the result of US initiatives to negotiate and establish international rules so as to prevent redistributive crises and neutralize various “anti-systemic forces”14 The incorporated mechanisms of these institutions were also devised to supervise the application of the system’s norms (Cox, 1981, p. 145). It is commonly recognized that following World War II, the United States fulfilled the role of the benevolent hegemon for the core countries by assuming most of the costs for maintaining the capitalist world system, but also by reaping most of the immediate benefits for the US economy and its business elite. This is an important aspect behind the concept of passive revolution. Understanding that its own prosperity was tightly bound to the operation of the global system and the success of allies and former enemies, the United States was willing to maintain the security and prosperity of partner/competitor nations. Benevolence toward a broad alliance was projected as the principal motivation behind the American role in the establishment of the Bretton Woods system, the Marshall Plan, the Korean War, the NATO, the Vietnam War, etc., while the self-serving motives were underplayed in the US hegemony stability discourse.Link: HegemonyU.S. hegemony exists to secure the expansion of world capitalism- this guarantees warFoster 6 (John Bellamy, Prof of Sociology @ U of Oregon, “A Warning to Africa: The New U.S. Grand Strategy” Monthly Review Vol. 58.2 June JF)U.S. imperial grand strategy is less a product of policies generated in Washington by this or that wing of the ruling class, than an inevitable result of the power position that U.S. capitalism finds itself in at the commencement of the twenty-first century. U.S. economic strength (along with that of its closest allies) has been ebbing fairly steadily. The great powers are not likely to stand in the same relation to each other economically two decades hence. At the same time U.S. world military power has increased relatively with the demise of the Soviet Union. The United States now accounts for about half of all of the world’s military spending—a proportion two or more times its share of world output. The goal of the new U.S. imperial grand strategy is to use this unprecedented military strength to preempt emerging historical forces by creating a sphere of full-spectrum dominance so vast, now encompassing every continent, that no potential rivals will be able to challenge the United States decades down the line. This is a war against the peoples of the periphery of the capitalist world and for the expansion of world capitalism, particularly U.S. capitalism. But it is also a war to secure a “New American Century” in which third world nations are viewed as “strategic assets” within a larger global geopolitical struggle. The lessons of history are clear: attempts to gain world dominance by military means, though inevitable under capitalism, are destined to fail and can only lead to new and greater wars. It is the responsibility of those committed to world peace to resist the new U.S. imperial grand strategy by calling into question imperialism and its economic taproot: capitalism itself.Link: Human RightsHuman rights leave capitalist social relations intact, it is irrelevant to the power of the ruling classThompson 0 (Denise, Research Associate @ U of New South Wales, “What Can Rights Discourse Cover Up?” presented at the Australasian Political Science Association conference October 3-6 JF)The notion of human rights is one of those ideas which at first sight appear to be wholly positive. As Carol Smart has remarked: 'It is almost as hard to be against rights as it is to be against virtue' (Smart, 1989: 143). Everybody is in favour of rights, and no one is against them. Even the tyrants who habitually violate and trample over people's rights agree that rights are a good thing—they simply deny they are doing any trampling. So the idea of human rights is one which seems to meet with general approval. So why bother with it? What does this eighteenth-century criticism of 'natural rights' have to do the 'human rights' of the second half of the 20th century? The answer is that the criticism of doctrines of rights as referring to non-existent entities somehow 'outside society' has re-emerged as a charge of 'essentialism'. You'll all be familiar with the term 'essentialism' used in a feminist context, where it functions to deny the existence of women's oppression by prohibiting any usage of the term 'women'. The reason for this, or so it is said, is that the category 'women' is so diverse and contains so many differences that using it covers up important distinctions between and among women. In my view, this objection against using the term 'women' is incoherent. It forbids the use of the term while continuing to use it to refer to differences among women. Indeed, it's not possible to talk about the differences unless we also talk about women. So 'women' remains a meaningful category as long as it's confined to talk about differences among women. It's only prohibited if we want to identify what all women have in common, that is, an interest in struggling against those male supremacist conditions which deny women a human status of our own. Of course, this is an attempt to avoid the kind of Hobbesian assumptions made by Bentham and Burke. It's saying that there's no point in speculating what 'Man' (and it's still men) might be outside society, since he never is. Now, this is true enough (as long as women are included, too). But leaving it there, simply with the abstract 'social constitution of the human subject', does not avoid a substantive view of what it is to be human. On the contrary, it says that to be human is to be nothing but a creature of the social environment. It has the same conservative implications as the arguments of Bentham and Burke, because it provides no grounds from which to challenge aspects of one's social environment. This is an ironic conclusion, given that the anti-essentialist position emanates from what is self-identified as the political Left. The problem is that that position has divorced itself from its Marxist roots. Marx was as scathingly dismissive of 'the Rights of Man' as were Bentham and Burke. Marx, too, thought they were meaningless—he referred to them as 'ideological nonsense about rights and other trash so common among the democrats and French socialists' (Marx, 1875: 161). He, too, regarded them as individualistic—the subject whose rights were enshrined in the doctrine was 'egoistic man', the atomised, competitive individual 'intent on business' (Marx, 1867: 280), whose sole concern with other men was to fend off encroachments on his freedom to own property and accumulate wealth, and whose only god was money (Marx, 1843). And he also saw the doctrine as tyrannical. However, the source of the tyranny was different in Marx's account from what it was in the naccounts of Bentham and Burke. The violence stemmed not from the anarchy of the unsocialised individual, but from the power of the rising ruling class, the bourgeoisie, in its challenge to the waning power of feudalism: 'in its enjoyment of [its own liberties, the bourgeoisie] finds itself unhindered by the equal rights of the other classes' (Marx, 1852: 30). Far from being 'outside society', Marx's 'egoistic man' was thoroughly embedded in the social relations of capitalism. He was 'man just as he is, man as he has been corrupted, lost to himself, sold, and exposed to the rule of inhuman conditions and elements by the whole organization of our society' (Marx, 1843: 226).Link: Human RightsHuman rights discourse reinforces inequalities of capitalismDiSalvo 11 (Lazri, U of Connecticut, “Reproducing Rights: Rebellious Appropriation of Global Rights Discourse by Social Movements” JF)The left criticizes the human rights framework as the foundation of exploitative liberal structures. Marx argues rights construct false politics of individual equality and liberty while naturalizing the conditions which maintained the antithetical hierarchical structures of domination. These structures and citizen dependence on the liberal state to grant rights produce the modern propertied subject (Marx,1978). Leftist theorists argue that human rights regulate individuals and legitimate and support existing forms of power, whether the state or capitalism (Brown 1995; Gledhill 1997; Goodale 2005). Modern human rights discourse is produced through and reinforces global neoliberal power structures and the logics of late capitalism. All social relations are structured through a global hegemonic discourse based on the neoliberal ideals of 'rational actors' and 'markets of power', particularly global human rights discourse (Hardt and Negri, 2000). Foucault (1978) describes this ordering of society through the internalization of rule and discipline as “governmentality” where power is expressed through a pervasive network of social relations rather than direct dominance. Global governance is thus theorized as global governmentality (Neumann and Sending, 2010) or the neoliberal imperium (Agathangelou and Ling, 2009) where all state and citizen behaviors are structured and produced through institutionalized neoliberal ideals.Link: Nuclear War ImpactsNuclear war impacts are hyperbolic and demobilize struggles against material conditions Martin 82 (Brian, Prof of Social Sciences at the U of Wollongong, Australia, Journal of Peace Research, Vol. 19, No. 4, pp. 287-300, jam)(a) Exaggeration to justify inaction. For many people, nuclear war is seen as such a terrible event, and as something that people can do so little about, that they can see no point in taking action on peace issues and do not even think about the danger. For those who have never been concerned or taken action on the issue, accepting an extreme account of the effects of nuclear war can provide conscious or unconscious justification for this inaction. In short, one removes from one's awareness the upsetting topic of nuclear war, and justifies this psychological denial by believing the worst. This suggests two things. First, it may be more effective in mobilising people against nuclear war to describe the dangers in milder terms. Some experiments have shown that strong accounts of danger - for example, of smoking[17] - can be less effective than weaker accounts in changing behaviour. Second, the peace movement should devote less attention to the dangers of nuclear war and more attention to what people can do to oppose it in their day-to-day lives. Nuclear war is solely a bourgeoisie concern Martin 82 (Brian, Prof of Social Sciences at the U of Wollongong, Australia, Journal of Peace Research, Vol. 19, No. 4, pp. 287-300, jam) (g) White, western orientation. Most of the continuing large-scale suffering in the world - caused by poverty, starvation, disease and torture - is borne by the poor, non-white peoples of the third world. A global nuclear war might well kill fewer people than have died of starvation and hunger-related disease in the past 50 or 100 years.[22] Smaller nuclear wars would make this sort of contrast greater.[23] Nuclear war is the one source of possible deaths of millions of people that would affect mainly white, rich, western societies (China and Japan are the prime possible exceptions). By comparison, the direct effect of global nuclear war on nonwhite, poor, third world populations would be relatively small. White westerners may tend to identify their own plight with that of the rest of the world, and hence exaggerate the threat of destruction wreaked on their own societies into one for all of humanity. White westerners may also tend to see the rest of the world as vitally dependent on themselves for survival, and hence see catastrophe for all as a result of a nuclear war which destroys 'civilisation'. In practice, poor non-white populations arguably would be better off without the attentions of white, western 'civilisation' - although nuclear war is hardly the way to achieve this. These considerations suggest the importance of strengthening links between peace struggles and struggles for justice, equality and freedom from exploitation in poor countries. Link: Nuclear War ImpactsNuclear war impacts justify piece-meal reformismMartin 82 (Brian, Prof of Social Sciences at the U of Wollongong, Australia, Journal of Peace Research, Vol. 19, No. 4, pp. 287-300, jam) (j) Reformist political analysis. Closely linked with exaggeration of the efforts of nuclear war and emphasis on worst cases is a political strategy that provides little fundamental challenge to prevailing social institutions. The bulk of efforts for peace are based on the assumed power of knowledge and logic to convince decision-makers to change policies. This includes many of the efforts to influence directly the opinions of decision-makers (e.g. negotiation, lobbying), to influence their opinions through public pressure (e.g. generated through education campaigns) and even through direct action (e.g. mass demonstrations, civil disobedience). The solution promoted by many such efforts is essentially disarmament within the framework of present social, political and economic structures. The institutional structures in which corporate managers, party bureaucrats and political leaders are dominant would still be intact: only the bombs would be gone. It can be argued[25] that efforts based on the assumed power of knowledge and logic are insufficient, since the actions of decision-makers are mainly determined not by opinions but by interests rooted in current institutional arrangements. Furthermore, disarmament is an inadequate goal in as much as it leaves intact the structural forms which are linked with the use of organised violence, including hierarchical organisational forms, large differences in power, prestige and wealth, and the nation-state system. If these structures are the source of the nuclear threat, then it might be asked, why should disarmament be pursued in a way which leaves them intact? The apparent answer is the very magnitude of the nuclear threat itself. One false step by one's own leaders, so the conventional wisdom decrees, and the holocaust may be upon us - initiated by the enemy, of course. In these circumstances, any destabilising challenges to the power structures on either side are dangerous, and to be avoided. This becomes a prescription for reformism, rather than promotion of more fundamental changes, as the road to peace. The greater the magnitude of disaster that nuclear war poses, the greater the injunction to avoid dangerous destabilising tactics and strategies. It may be for this reason that governments have not made greater attempts to disabuse people of the notion that nuclear war is the end of civilisation or life on earth. The more extreme the disaster, the more apathetic people become and the less likely they are to challenge the powers that be. Military and political planners do not think in these terms, naturally, and so on occasion publicly promote measures for civil defence or for fighting limited nuclear wars, so stimulating a hornet's nest of citizen concern and opposition. Doomsdayism has often been linked with conservative or reformist politics, as in the case of claims of environmental doom.[26] A more realistic assessment of the consequences of nuclear war needs to be accompanied by a non-reformist political strategy for challenging the war system. Such a strategy might for example be built around campaigns for social defence, for peace conversion, for freedom, justice and equality, and for creating nonhierarchical political and economic institutions.[27] At the same time, present campaigns based on the power of knowledge and logic would remain important: although insufficient, they are still necessary. Link: Population/MalthusMalthusian population arguments are an ideological justification for capitalism- they blame poverty, structural unemployment and inequitable distribution on fertility rather than class divisionsRaghavan 2k (Chakravarthi, Chief Editor of the South-North Development Monitor, [.sg/title/malthus.htm] AD: 7-3-11, jam)“As such, no other ideological framework has so effectively legitimised Western interests, development theories and strategies, especially the Green Revolution and, now, genetic engineering in agriculture. This argument has consistently overwhelmed other explanations of poverty. Malthusian famine scenarios have systematically distracted attention from the fact that it is not people’s reproductive habits that are the principal source of most of the misuse or waste of the world’s resources, but the contradictions and motives of capitalist development.”In his first Essay on the Principles of Population, population pressure is treated as a ‘law of nature’ making poverty natural and inevitable, and the ‘positive checks’ of disease and starvation regarded as chief routes through which population pressure can (and should be) alleviated. By suggesting that the fertility of the poor - rather than chronic or periodic unemployment, the fencing of common lands, or high food prices—was the main source of their poverty and implying that the poor’s fertility cannot be significantly influenced by human intervention, Malthus acquitted the property-owning class and the political economic system of accountability for poverty. Malthus insisted that anything that humans might do through their own social and political efforts to redress inequalities or to mitigate suffering would be counter-productive since it would only increase population and place more pressure on productive resources. A system of common ownership capable of supporting greater populations was, moreover, an affront to the ‘natural’ order of things. Capitalism was the only admissible system. Population is only a problem in class societies- Malthus assumed class and inequality were naturalZavarzadeh 2002 (Mas’ud, “The Labor Theory of (Anti)Abortion” , Red Critique, September/October, )Population, contrary to Malthus, is not the problem. It becomes a problem in class societies. Malthus's theory claims that since population increases at a geometrical rate while food supply increases only at arithmetical rate, the imbalance between the two causes poverty and unemployment and, therefore, prevents the formation of an egalitarian society. Engels points out that "[I]t is precisely this theory which is the cornerstone of the liberal system of free trade". Both he and Marx demonstrate that Malthus's theory is more propaganda than a serious inquiry into political economy. The ideology of Malthus's theory becomes clear in his claim that in every civilized society? "a class of propertied and a class of labourers must necessarily exist." Class, according to Malthus, is natural; and, therefore, hunger is to be accepted as an effect of the law of nature, and nothing should be done about it. But hunger is an effect of the social relations of production not nature because it is not lack of food that creates hunger. It is lack of access. To put it differently, the relation of the population to the food supply does not explain poverty and hunger. The relation of the population to employment does. Population, in other words, does not cause the scarcity of resources or lack of access to them. The problem is the systemic class differences produced by wage-labor. Population is used to maintain the wage-labor system that produces immense poverty and wealth.Link: ProlifNonproliferation is just an attempt to maintain unequal power- only a commitment to dismantle capitalism and abolish nuclear weaponsJensen 10 (Robert, Professor in the School of Journalism at the University of Texas, “No Nukes, No Empire: The Abolition of Nuclear Weapons Requires the End of the U.S. Empire” delivered to the “Think outside the Bomb” event 6/14 JF)If we are serious about the abolition of nuclear weapons, we have to place the abolition of the U.S. empire at the center of our politics. That means working toward a world free of nuclear weapons demands we not only critique the reactionary wing of the U.S. power structure, the Bushes and Cheneys and Rumsfelds -- call them the reckless hawks. A serious commitment to a future free of nuclear weapons demands critique of moderate wing, the Obamas and Bidens and Clintons -- call them the reasonable hawks. The former group is psychotic, while the latter is merely cynical. After eight years of reckless reactionary psychotics, it's easy to be lulled into a false sense of security by reasonable moderate cynics. But we should remember that a hawk is a hawk. The next step is asking whose interests are advanced by the hawks. Even though in the post-World War II era the hawks have sometimes differed on strategy and tactics, they have defended the same economic system: a predatory corporate capitalism. Let's call those folks the vultures. Different groupings of hawks might be associated with different groupings of vultures, giving the appearance of serious political conflict within the elite, but what they have in common is much more important than their differences. The political empire of the contemporary United States serves the corporate empires that dominate not only the domestic but the global economy, and it all depends on U.S. military power, of which the nuclear arsenal is one component. George W. Bush was the smirking frat-boy face of the U.S. empire. Barack Obama is the smiling smart-guy face of the U.S. empire. Whoever is at the helm, the U.S. political/economic/military empire remains in place, shaky at the moment, but still the single greatest threat to justice and peace on the planet. Any serious project to rid the world of the particular threat of nuclear weapons has to come to terms with the more general threat of the empire. Even though it was clear that after WWII the United States could have lived relatively secure in the world with its considerable wealth and extensive resources, the greed that drives empire demanded that U.S. policy-makers pursue a policy not of peace but of domination, as seen in this conclusion of the State Department's Policy Planning Staff in 1947: "To seek less than preponderant power would be to opt for defeat. Preponderant power must be the object of U.S. policy."1 Preponderant power means: We run the world. We dictate the terms of the global economy. Others find a place in that structure or they risk annihilation. No challenge from another system or another state is acceptable. In service of this quest, elites created the mythology of the Cold War -- that we were defending ourselves against a Soviet empire bent on destroying us -- which was grafted easily onto the deeper U.S. mythology about a shining city upon the hill and Manifest Destiny, about the divine right of the United States to dominate. As a result, much of the U.S. public is easily convinced of the righteousness of the U.S. imperial project and persuaded to believe the lie that we maintain nuclear weapons only as a deterrent. The reality should blunt the self-congratulatory instinct: U.S. nuclear weapons were created to project power, not protect people. That's why most U.S. elites are interested in non-proliferation, not abolition. The goal of abolition will remain safely out of reach, on the horizon, just beyond our ability to accomplish in the near future -- while the United States continues to imagine a future in which the rest of the world accepts U.S. domination. Since countries threatened by the empire won't accept non-proliferation unless there is a meaningful commitment to abolition and a scaling back of imperial designs, the U.S. policy will fail. That's because it's designed to fail. U.S. policy is designed to keep a hold on power and wealth, and the people running the country believe nuclear weapons are useful in that quest. Our task is to make sure we aren't conned by politicians, either those who push the fear button or pull on our hope strings. When we take up questions of military strategy and weapons, our task is to understand the underlying political and economic systems, name the pathologies of those systems, identify the key institutions in those systems, withhold our support from those institutions when possible, create alternative institutions when possible, and tell the truth. We may support cynical politicians and inadequate policy initiatives at times, but in offering such support we should continue to tell the truth. I want to end by taking the argument one step further: Such critiques ring hollow if we don't engage in critical self-reflection about how many of us in the <CONTINUED><CONTINUED>United States have grown comfortable in these systems. We decry injustice but spend little time talking about how our own material comfort is made possible by that injustice. A serious commitment to the end of nuclear weapons, the end of empire, the end of a predatory corporate capitalist system demands that we also commit to changing the way we live.Link: RightsRights are a means for mediating the contradictions of capitalism— they maintain actual social inequality while promoting abstract equality.San Juan Jr. 2005 (E., Red Critique, Winter/Spring, “Freedom and Human Rights under Imperialist Hegemony”, )Such an occurrence is of course what we conceive of as a socialist revolution. In the absence of conditions favorable to such an event, we continue to endure the imperatives of a regime of competitive, possessive individualism. Here civil society and individual proprietary rights occupy center stage. The right of writers and artists to pursue their own interests—whether pleasure, fantasy-fulfillment, prestige, or group emancipation—becomes fundamental. But this is also, as Marx points out in "On the Jewish Question" and other works, the realm of "the rights of egoistic man, of man separated from other men and from the community" (Lukes 63). Historically, rights in the context of the exploitation of labor and the expropriation of surplus value tend to promote the interests of the class of property-owners. Bourgeois rights are integral to the contradictions of capitalist society, contradictions that can be mediated through standards of procedural justice enforced by the liberal state. Such a form of justice inheres in the application of an equal standard on unequal individuals, hence the paradoxical maintenance of social inequality among citizens enjoying abstract equality. This paradox seems to vitiate many eloquent defenses of the rights of individual writers to express themselves without any constraint, especially when such rights are used to reinforce the power of the bourgeois state against its political enemies, progressives and socialist forces organizing against capital or "third world" peoples resisting imperialist aggression.Link: Soft Power“Soft power” is just a benevolent gloss on imperialism.Foster 2002 (John Bellamy, Monthly Review, November, “The Rediscovery of Imperialism”, ) “Younger Marxists,” Patnaik wrote, “look bemused when the term is mentioned. Burning issues of the day…are discussed but without any reference to imperialism…. The topic has virtually disappeared from the pages of Marxist journals, especially those of a later vintage.” The history and theory of imperialism, he noted, is no longer discussed.The historical significance of this can be seen in an ideological split that occurred in response to the struggle over globalization and the new Balkan Wars, and later in relation to the September 11 attacks on the New York World Trade Center and the Pentagon and the subsequent War on Terrorism. On the one hand, mainstream intellectuals, particularly in the face of the widening military operations of the United States and NATO but also in response to such issues as U.S. support of the World Trade Organization (WTO), became more willing to reappropriate the concept of imperialism as a way of putting a larger gloss on what was presented as the beneficial hegemony or “soft imperialism” of the world’s only superpower. On the other hand, post-Marxist and erstwhile radical thinkers often took on the role of criticizing any use of the concept of imperialism in its classical Marxist sense, detaching it from capitalism, global exploitation, and economic imperialism, and arguing that since the term was unacceptable in polite discourse it should be discarded.Link: Trade“Free trade” is spread though the imperialism and the threat of force – it is an ideological justification for removing barriers to exploitationTabb 7 (William, Dep. of Econ @ Queens College, Monthly Review Vol. 58.10 March JF)What drives capitalism is not some imaginary free market with its consumer sovereign but rather capital’s drive to accumulate. Imperialists seeking to exploit peoples and resources wherever they find vulnerable social formations make their calculation exclusive of the cost to their own nation’s treasury, except to the extent they themselves bear any burden of expenditure. The saturation of domestic markets and the drives to lower cost, find new sources of profit, and employ technological revolutions for accumulation purposes combine to drive capitalism outward. Trade was rarely initiated, as the economists’ model would have it, out of free consent for mutual advantage between core and periphery. In the early stages of imperialism—of plunder and piracy—this was self-evident and overseas expansion required a very different rationale. From a marxist view successful capitalism needs the national state to overcome internal barriers to the creation and smooth operation of its home market and to protect its traders’ and investors’ interests abroad in a world of rival states. So if the drive to expand and to encompass the world market is given in the nature of capitalism as Marx suggested, then imperialism is not an accident but integral to its operation and logic. The drive to compete does not presume, as the mainstream economists would have it, an ideal of perfect competition as the tendential norm and starting point of analysis, but the use of state power on the part of the strongest elements to intervene on behalf of their power to exploit and extort rules favorable to the greatest appropriation of surplus. As innovations in transportation and communication develop so does the capacity to more deeply penetrate other social formations. Those who take imperialism seriously think that the models mainstream economists construct underspecify and misspecify the way trade and growth are connected and incorporate assumptions (such as full employment of all resources in a competitive marketplace) that do not model actual capitalism’s character. As Patrick O’Brien writes “In order to measure the costs and benefits that might have arisen from a disembodied imperialism they have resorted to an analysis based upon an altogether unrealistic counterfactual; namely, an international economic order, operating between 1688 and 1815 under competitive conditions, virtually free from governmental interference with trade and untroubled by warfare.”8 Such counterfactual economic theory that presents “free trade” as the dominant reality even in the colonial era itself has then been used to argue that the burdens of colonies and the imperial military apparatus outweigh their benefits since free trade is more efficient and more beneficial to both parties. Counterfactual history is a difficult, if not in most instances an impossible, business. But it is not without interest that in 1820, according to Angus Maddison’s calculations, Asia generated 59 percent of global GDP (by purchasing power parity measure); in 1950 just 18 percent of world GDP.13 It is difficult to think that foreign intervention and conquest had nothing to do with this huge relative decline. When a post-Maoist government sought an opening to the West on its own terms, these disgraces were a vivid memory. Thus they desired a carefully calibrated economic policy that would allow them to control this process. Developmental states have found industrial policy can be used effectively as in Japan and Korea. The activities of the IMF and the WTO as directed by the countries of the core can be read as acting to prevent the possibility of state-led development, once practiced by the now developed economies. There continues to be a need for active interventionist policies to establish and maintain what has been called “free trade,” and military intervention and the threat of use of overwhelming force remain central tools of the imperialist project. Imperialism is a capacious category and its usage has stretched from control and rivalry over foreign markets to the face of conquest and regime change. The role of corporate and financial interests in removing obstacles to trade and investment is of course hardly absent in the current imperialist adventure in Iraq. An administration deeply entangled in oil and defense contracting has thus lied its way into what is proving a painful quagmire. The application of the Bush Doctrine has pushed to the background the framework which has guided the polices of his father’s administration and the Clinton White House—the expansion of U.S. power through the creation and modification of trade and investment relations on a global terrain. We are reminded by today’s events that imperialism is above all about defending and expanding global control. This involves two tactical avenues: military force and political governance. The two go together although not always in overt ways. Twenty-first-century imperialism is about neoliberal globalization. The regimes for trade, finance, and investment of the global economic governance institutions—the IMF, the WTO, and others—are nonetheless supplemented when imperialism believes it necessary by the old standby of military conquest and horrific violence. Washington’s arrogance of invasion and regime change, of naked imperialist ambition, is in our time a failure—in all but its ability to inflict horrendous cost on its victims. It has given rise to a vibrant antiwar movement and the dissatisfaction of tens of millions of Americans who have recently become more aware of the arrogance of imperialist power.Link: WOTThe war on terror is a new form of the inside/outside binary of capitalist inequality that justifies imperialist conflictGraham 6 (Steven, Department of Geography, U of Durham International Journal of Urban and Regional Research Vol. 30.2 June P. 256-257 JF)Binaried portrayals suggesting an absolute separateness between ‘homeland’ cities and the Arab cities of the target Other are powerfully reinforced by neoconservative geopolitical ideologies (Roberts et al., 2003). These stress the supposed disconnection of countries deemed to be hotbeds of threats to US interests from normalized processes of neoliberal globalization. Normatively, they emphasize the imperative of integrating such territories into processes of neoliberal globalization, if necessary through the use of ‘pre-emptive’ acts of US military aggression such as the 2003 invasion of Iraq (Roberts et al., 2003). Thomas Barnett’s in?uential The Pentagon’s New Map (2004) is one example of a range of neoliberal imaginary geopolitical renderings of the world seized upon by the Bush administration as supporting the ‘war on terror’. Barnett’s global, binary schema stresses the putative ‘disconnection’ of the US military’s target zones in the Middle East, Africa and Central America — or what he calls the ‘nonintegrating gap’ — from the rest of the world, a zone which is seen to be integrating benignly through processes of neoliberal capitalism to constitute what Barnett calls a ‘functioning core’. In a world of intensifying transnational migration, transport, capital and media ?ows, however, such attempts at constructing a mutually exclusive binary — a securitized inside’ enclosing the urban places of the US Empire’s ‘homeland’, and an urbanizing ‘outside’, where US military power can pre-emptively attack places deemed sources of ‘terrorist’ threats — are inevitably both ambivalent and ridden with contradictions. They rest alongside the ratcheting-up of state surveillance and repression against Others targeted within US cities and society. They are paralleled, as we shall see later in this article, by military strategies which increasingly treat the ‘inside’ spaces within the US and the ‘foreign’ ones in the rest of the world as a single, integrated, ‘battlespace’ prone to the rapid movements of ‘terrorist’ threats into the geographical and urban heartlands of US power at any instant. And they obscure the complex geographies and political economies of ‘primitive accumulation’ which closely tie predatory post-war ‘reconstruction’ and oil contracts in Iraq, and homeland security contracts in US cities, to the same cartel of Bush-friendly oil companies, defence and security contractors and ‘private military corporations’ (Harvey, 2003; Chatterjee, 2004; Boal et al., 2005). Whilst dramatic, the imaginative geographies underpinning the ‘war on terror’ are far from original (see Driver, 2001). In fact, they revivify long-established colonial and Orientalist tropes to represent Middle Eastern culture as intrinsically barbaric, infantile, backward or threatening from the point of view of Western colonial powers (Gregory, 2004a). Arab cities, moreover, have long been represented by Western powers as dark, exotic, labyrinthine and structureless places that need to be ‘unveiled’ for the production of ‘order’ through the ostensibly superior scienti?c, planning and military technologies of the occupying West. By burying ‘disturbing similarities between “us” and “them” in a discourse that systematically produces the Third World as Other’, such Orientalism deploys considerable ‘symbolic violence’ (Gusterson, 1999: 116). This is done, crucially, in order to produce both ‘ “the Third World” and “the West” ’ (ibid.: 116).Link: WOTThe way capitalist states conduct war is terrorism based on a distinction between the civilized Western capitalist self and the terrorist other that justifies limitless violenceGrosscup 11 (Beau, Prof of poli sci @ CSU Chico, “Cluster Munitions and State Terrorism” Monthly Review Vol. 62.11 April JF)As a “privilege of power,” the bombing nations have dominated the global discourse on terrorism so that at home and abroad the terrorist tag applies exclusively to their designated “enemies.” Yet, since they insist on using cluster munitions, evading the terrorism label has become increasingly important. Central to their “dodging” effort is the “intent” argument. Cluster munitions, they assert, though dangerous to civilian life, do not intentionally target civilians or noncombatants. Thus, their strategic scheme does not match the core definitional criteria of terrorism. Theoretically, this position relies heavily on the supposition that there is a meaningful distinction between bombing intending to kill civilians (terrorism) and bombing with the knowledge that you may kill civilians (war).17 In practice, this argument rests on the assumption that intent (especially that of the terrorist) is always known, and that legally, intentions matter. The moral, social, and political universe of global powers is shaped by “self/other” analysis, which then structures the bombing nations’ intention to use violence. Briefly put, Western liberal capitalist nations are seen as a product of superiority (civilized), while the rest of the world (the inferior, uncivilized other) presents a threat to the superior-self. Historically, the European powers labeled this race-based dichotomy “the West and the Rest.” This self/other distinction vital to “the culture of imperialism” justifies (1) the violence required for the establishment of the liberal political community; (2) the violence for its self-defense; and (3) the violence required to civilize the “other.” The intent under which liberalism operates, as political theorist Margaret Canovan writes: “is not a matter of clearing away a few accidental obstacles and allowing humanity to unfold its natural essence. It is more like making a garden in a jungle that is continually encroaching.”18 In the creation and defense of the superior “self,” the continuous use of violence is justified as necessary. Or as Talal Asad asserts, “The absolute right to defend oneself by force becomes, in the context of industrial capitalism, the freedom to use violence globally: when social difference is seen as backwardness and backwardness is a source of danger to civilized society, self-defense calls for a project of reordering the world in which the rules of civilized warfare cannot be allowed to stand in the way.”19 Within this context, the bombing nations’ intent, often expressed under the moral umbrella of “just war theory,” is to preserve the civilized order via “a project of universal redemption” in which “some humans have to be treated violently in order that humanity can be redeemed.”20 Central to their current “redemption project” (the war on terror) is the bombing nations’ intention to produce, sell, and use cluster munitions. It is clearly nonsense to claim that the intentional targeting of civilians is consistent with a policy that distinguishes war from terrorism. As cluster munitions defenders acknowledge, these weapons are used with the awareness that they will cause civilian casualties—but such defenders still assert that the use of such weapons is legitimate as long as there is no intent to inflict such harm. Yet the use of such weapons, knowing full well that they will harm civilians (and indeed mostly civilians), is by any rational standard intent to harm civilians—even if civilians are not the specified target. This is particularly true of cluster munitions. They are intentionally designed, as antipersonnel weapons, to explode in air, causing death and destruction beyond the immediate target. Anti-landmine and cluster munitions activist/researcher Rae McGrath makes this point: Defenders of cluster munitions, that is, principally, the strategic military planners of the big weapons states, claim that, because “war is hell,” civilian casualties are bound to occur. They assert that terrorists intentionally make the hell of war more terrible, indeed morally repugnant, for civilians, since, in the confrontation with the “civilized” world, they are operating at a technological disadvantage—operating outside of the normal, “civilized” confines of war and employing asymmetric warfare. Therefore, terrorism is a weapon of the weak, and “uncivilized.” Hence, there is a “strategic imperative” for terrorists to invent (or get possession of) technology with greater, more indiscriminate killing power: to exploit or even overcome their asymmetries. The bombing nations operate under a similar strategic imperative, often stated as needing to “out invent” the terrorists (as well as current or potential state enemies) by developing better antipersonnel <CONTINUED><CONTINUED>weapons to be directed against terrorists. As a result, cluster munitions are seen as part of military advancement to enhance the position of the “civilized.” Despite their rhetorical protestations to the contrary, military strategists favor cluster munitions because they are weapons of state terror. They are a “strategic fit” in fighting and winning modern wars, while cowing the civilian “other” in postwar peace. Thus, until and unless it suits their strategic and ideological purposes, the bombing nations will either reject the Oslo convention outright or effectively mitigate its effects. Meanwhile, they go on conducting their war of terror, firmly convinced of their military and moral superiority. But, as Calab Carr documents in The Lessons of Terror, they do so at great peril to themselves and to the rest of us.30Link: WOTThe War on Terror is an extraeconomic means to prop up faltering hegemony in the face of growing economic stagnationFoster & Clark 4 (John Bellamy, Prof of Sociology @ U of Oregon, Brett, assist. prof of sociology @ NCSUMonthly Review Vol. 56.7 December JF)A new age of barbarism is upon us.” These were the opening words of an editorial in the September 20, 2004, issue of Business Week clearly designed to stoke the flames of anti-terrorist hysteria. Pointing to the murder of schoolchildren in Russia, women and children killed on buses in Israel, the beheading of American, Turkish, and Nepalese workers in Iraq, and the killing of hundreds on a Spanish commuter train and hundreds more in Bali, Business Week declared: “America, Europe, Israel, Egypt, Pakistan, and governments everywhere are under attack by Islamic extremists. These terrorists have but one demand—the destruction of modern secular society.” Western civilization was portrayed as standing in opposition to the barbarians, who desire to destroy what is assumed to be the pinnacle of social evolution. Altogether absent from this establishment view is the predatory role played by U.S. and European imperialism. It is true that we are living in a “new age of barbarism.” However this has its roots not in religious fundamentalism but in what Marx saw as the barbarism accompanying bourgeois civilization and what Rosa Luxemburg once called “the ruins of imperialistic barbarism.” We need to look at global capitalism and beyond that at what the United States and Britain are doing in Iraq, the principal zone of imperialist conflict at present, if we are to plumb the full depths of the barbarism that characterizes our time. The more global way in which Marx and Engels utilized the concept of barbarism, however, was in the treatment of the relation between center and periphery of the capitalist world economy. In their panegyric to the bourgeoisie that comprised much of part 1 of The Communist Manifesto they remarked how the bourgeoisie “has made barbarian and semi-barbarian countries dependent on the civilized ones, nations of peasants on nations of bourgeois, the East on the West.” Likewise they referred to the fact that “the cheap prices of its [the bourgeoisie’s] commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate.” Marx viewed Tsarist Russia, on the semi-periphery of Europe, as a bastion of barbarism threatening revolutionary movements in the West. Today the world is facing what de Silva feared—a barbarism emanating from a single powerful country, the United States, which has adopted a doctrine of preemptive (or preventative) war, and is threatening to destabilize the entire globe. In the late twentieth century the further growth of monopoly capital (as explained most cogently in Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy’s Monopoly Capital and Harry Magdoff’s Age of Imperialism) led to a heavy reliance, particularly for the United States as the hegemonic state of the world system, on military spending and imperialist intervention. With the waning of the Cold War this dependence of the imperial superpower on the most barbaric means of advancing its interests and controlling the system has only increased. The continuing decline of U.S. economic hegemony, occurring alongside deepening economic stagnation in capitalism as a whole, has led the United States to turn increasingly to extraeconomic means of maintaining its position: putting its huge war machine in motion in order to prop up its faltering hegemony over the world economy. The “Global War on Terror” is a manifestation of this latest lethal phase of U.S. imperialism, which began with the 1991 Gulf War made possible by the breaking up of the Soviet bloc and the emergence of the United States as the sole superpower.***LINKS- ID POLITICS***Link: ID PoliticsIdentity politics uniquely prevent successful alternatives to capitalismHerod 7 (James, Columbia U graduate?and political activist, “Getting Free” Pg. 33 JF)The so-called new social movements, based on gender, racial, sexual, or ethnic identities, cannot destroy capitalism. In general, they haven’t even tried. Except for a tiny fringe of radicals in each of them, they have been attempting to get into the system, not overthrow it. This is true for women, blacks, homosexuals, and ethnic (including Anative) groups, as well as many other identities old people, people with disabilities, mothers on welfare, and so forth. Nothing has derailed the anticapitalist struggle during the past quarter century so thoroughly as have these movements. Sometimes it seems that identity politics is all that remains of the left. Identity politics has simply swamped class politics. The mainstream versions of these movements (the ones fighting to get into the system rather than overthrow it) have given capitalists a chance to do a little fine-tuning by eliminating tensions here and there, and by including token representatives of the excluded groups. Many of the demands of these movements can be easily accommodated. Capitalists can live with boards of directors exhibiting ethnic, gender, and racial diversity as long as all the board members are procapitalist. Capitalists can easily accept a rainbow cabinet as long as the cabinet is pushing the corporate agenda. So mainstream identity politics has not threatened capitalism at all. The radical wings of the new social movements, however, are rather more subversive. These militants realized that it was necessary to attack the whole social order in order to uproot racism and sexism problems that could not be overcome under capitalism since they are an integral part of it. There is no denying the evils of racism, sexism, and nationalism, which are major structural supports to ruling-class control. These militants have done whatever they could to highlight, analyze, and ameliorate these evils. Unfortunately, for the most part, their voices have been lost in all the clamor for admittance to the system by the majorities in their own movements.Link: ID PoliticsFighting for the rights of individual minority groups mystifies capitalist social relationsZizek 99 (Slavoj, Ph.D., Senior researcher @ Institute of Sociology, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, October 28, , JM)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 participating in tea ceremonies or obeying the bushido code—or for the inverse case of the Western journalist in search of the particular secret of the Japanese success: this very reference to a particular cultural formula is a screen for the universal anonymity of Capital. The true horror does not reside 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 effectively no particular Secret Agent who animates 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 universal world system: it bears witness to the unprecedented homogenization of the contemporary world. It is effectively 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 silently 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 life-styles, and so on, while capitalism pursues its triumphant march—and today’s critical theory, in the guise of ‘cultural studies’, is doing the ultimate service to the unrestrained development of capitalism by actively participating in the ideological effort to render its massive presence invisible: in a typical postmodern ‘cultural criticism’, the very mention of capitalism as world system tends to give rise to the accusation of ‘essentialism’, ‘fundamentalism’ and other crimes. Link: Social Movements (Race, Gender, Sex O)Social movements revolving around specific local sites within the structure of capital, like race, gender or sexuality only attempt to create more space within capitalism—they signal abandonment of the totalizing goal of transforming capitalism.Young 2006 (Robert, Red Critique, Winter/Spring, “Putting Materialism back into Race Theory”, )Gilroy endorses the new social movements precisely because "the new movements are not primarily oriented towards instrumental objectives, such as the conquest of political power or state apparatuses" (226). Instead, the new social movements desire autonomy within the existing system (226) and therefore foreground the "sphere of autonomous self-realization" (233). In other words, they do not want to change an exploitative system, they merely want a little more (discursive) freedom within it, and this (reformist) project signals agency for Gilroy. For Gilroy, the new social movements represent agency, and in this regard, they replace the proletariat—the historic vehicle for social transformation—but their agency, to repeat, is directed toward reforming specific local sites, such as race or gender, within the existing system. In short, they have abandoned the goal of transforming existing capitalism—a totalizing system which connects seemingly disparate elements of the social through the logic of exploitation—for a new goal: creating more humane spaces for new movements within capitalism.So, then, what is so new in the new social movements? It is certainly very "old" in the way it rehabilitates liberal notions of the autonomous subject. Its newness is a sign of the contemporary crisis-ridden conjuncture in capitalist social relations. This crisis of capital and the ensuing rupture in its ideological narrative provides the historical condition for articulating resistance along the axes of race, class, gender, ecology, etc. Even though resistance may take place in very specific domains, such as race, gender, ecological, or sexuality, among others, this does not mean that the crisis is local. It simply indexes how capitalist exploitation brings every social sphere under its totalizing logic. However, rather then point up the systematicity of the crisis, the theorists of the new social movements turn to the local, as if it is unrelated to questions of globality.With Gilroy and the new social movements, we are returned, once again, to the local and the experiential sets the limits of understanding. Gilroy asserts that people "unable to control the social relations in which they find themselves…have shrunk the world to the size of their communities and begun to act politically on that basis" (245). If this is true, then Gilroy, at the level of theory, mirrors this as he "shrinks" his theory to the dictates of crude empiricism. Rather than opening the possibility of collective control over social relations, which points in an emancipatory direction, Gilroy brackets the question of "social relation" and consequently, he limits politics to the cultural (re)negotiations of identity.Link: Social Movements (Race, Gender, Sex O)New social movements precipitate rightwing takeover by abandoning totalizing class politics.Red Critique 2005 (Winter/Spring, “Left Populisms”,)The (not so new) Left has laid the groundwork for a radical shift to the right by abandoning systemic class politics for the idol of fragmented "new social movements". Having rendered all issues separate issues, the new social movements "cover" the issues—the differences of racism, sexism, homophobia, etc.—by adding together, or "articulating", all the different pieces. In other words, not only is the left obsessed with differences of race, gender, sexuality, ability. . .within the working class, but it has no coherent theory of differences. What do racism, sexism, homophobia have to do with each other? What do they have to do with exploitation? Nothing, as far as the Left is concerned. This is because it sees class as status—a surface (market) difference like all others rather than the structure of?exploitation underlying all differences. Not surprisingly, the Left's "new social movements" have served capital more than anyone else, since having rendered workers a series of status groups with no underlying connection, capital can readily recruit the different groups to its "cause" as it needs them.?It can also just as easily dissolve the differences when it requires national "unity" to support its wars. Class as status is the logic behind the workers in imperialist nations aligning—more or less consciously—with the bourgeoisie of their country, riding the coattails of whatever is the latest attack on the least powerful workers of the world, and remaining desperate for the crumbs the owners throw them.Link: GenderThe oppression of women is inevitable without the alt- we shouldn’t settle for the crumbs the system throws our wayProletarian Revolution 2004 (No. 72, September, )For working-class women, their oppression as women cannot so easily be separated from their exploitation. The two are tied together as one predicament. The fact that women workers remain largely in unskilled job ghettoes, the lack of day care facilities, the high infant mortality rates suffered among Blacks and Latinos, enforced “workfare” job slavery -- all these are women’s “issues.” Anti-gay attacks, anti-immigrant and racist attacks, attacks on unions, economic hardship -- these likewise are key “women’s issues.”The notion that “women’s struggles,” “Black struggles,” “union struggles” and the “anti-war struggles” are fundamentally separate is just a surface appearance. None of the miseries imposed by imperialist capitalism can be tackled head-on without the development of revolutionary working-class consciousness and working-class unity. Yet this year we had the spectacle of a “March for Women’s Lives” whose message was that we must vote for a party and candidate that stand for the continuation of all these attacks, including an imperialist war that has massacred Iraqi men, women and children by the thousands.Authentic revolutionary socialism means an end to racism and sexism and imperialist war. The working class is the only social force that can create its own leadership, a revolutionary party, to unite workers and all the oppressed, to end all oppression and exploitation. Then we can talk about real “choice,” not the pathetic crumbs of promises thrown to some women today. Unless imperialism and its political parties are overthrown, the sufferings of the masses of oppressed women in the U.S. and across the globe will only escalate.A revolutionary workers’ state will provide jobs for all with a shorter work day and universal wage hikes. The new society will provide extensive child care as well as kitchen, laundry and other collective facilities to release women from the drudgery of individuated household labor and caretaking burdens. It will mean free transport, health care, education and housing. The essential ingredient right now is that more and more working-class women join in the struggle for revolutionary socialism.Link: Experience/Standpoint EpistemologyEmbracing “experience” or “standpoint” as the basis for epistemology ignores the mediated nature of experience—Experience is just another site for articulating the dominant ideology because it ignores the historical continuity of class domination in favor of a ‘local’ understanding of oppression.Young 2006 (Robert, Red Critique, Winter/Spring, “Putting Materialism back into Race Theory”, )Bourgeois philosophical assumptions haunt the Afrocentric project and, in the domain of black feminist theory, Patricia Hill Collins provides an instructive example of this intersection. In Black Feminist Thought, Collins posits the "special angle of vision" that black women bring to knowledge production process (21), and this "unique angle" (22) provides the "standpoint" for Afrocentric feminism, a feminism that she equates with humanism (37). Similar to the experiential metaphysics of Black women's standpoint theory, Collins also situates Afrocentric feminist epistemology "in the everyday experiences of African-American women" (207). Consequently, Collins suggests that "concrete experience" constitutes a criterion of meaning (208).However, the experiential, the "real", does not adequate the "truth", as Collins implies. Collins rejects the "Eurocentric Masculinist Knowlege Validation Process" for its positivism but, in turn, she offers empiricism as the grounds for validating experience. Hence, the validity of experiential claims is adjudicated by reference to the experience. Not only is her argument circular, but it also undermines one of her key claims. If race, class, gender, and the accompanying ideological apparatuses are interlocking systems of oppression, as Collins suggest, then the experiential is not the site for the "true" but rather the site for the articulation of dominant ideology. On what basis then, could the experiential provide grounds for an historical understanding of the structures that make experience itself possible as experience?Asante and Collins assume that experience is self-intelligible and in their discourse it functions as the limit text of the real. However, I believe experience is a highly mediated frame of understanding. Though it is true that a person of color experiences oppression, this experience is not self-explanatory and, therefore, it needs to be situated in relation to other social practices. Experience seems local but it is, like all cultural and political practices, interrelated to other practices and experiences. Thus its explanation come from its "outside". Theory, specifically Marxist theory, provides an explanation of this outside by reading the meaning of all experiences as determined by the economic realities of class. While Asante's and Collins' humanism reads the experience of race as a site of "self-presence", the history of race in the United States—from slavery to Jim Crow to Katrina—is written in the fundamental difference of class. In other words, experience does not speak the real, but rather it is the site of contradictions and, hence, in need of conceptual elaboration to break from cultural common sense, a conduit for dominant ideology. It is this outside that has come under attack by black (humanist) scholars through the invocation of the black (transcendental) subject.Link: RaceRace oppression is used by capital to ideologically justify economic exploitation—the eradication of racism requires a totalizing critique of capitalism. Young 2006 (Robert, Red Critique, Winter/Spring, “Putting Materialism back into Race Theory”, )This essay advances a materialist theory of race. In my view, race oppression dialectically intersects with the exploitative logic of advanced capitalism, a regime which deploys race in the interest of surplus accumulation. Thus, race operates at the (economic) base and therefore produces cultural and ideological effects at the superstructure; in turn, these effects—in very historically specific way—interact with and ideologically justify the operations at the economic base [1]. In a sense then, race encodes the totality of contemporary capitalist social relations, which is why race cuts across a range of seemingly disparate social sites in contemporary US society. For instance, one can mark race difference and its discriminatory effects in such diverse sites as health care, housing/real estate, education, law, job market, and many other social sites. However, unlike many commentators who engage race matters, I do not isolate these social sites and view race as a local problem, which would lead to reformist measures along the lines of either legal reform or a cultural-ideological battle to win the hearts and minds of people and thus keep the existing socio-economic arrangements intact; instead, I foreground the relationality of these sites within the exchange mechanism of multinational capitalism.Consequently, I believe, the eradication of race oppression also requires a totalizing political project: the transformation of existing capitalism—a system which produces difference (the racial/gender division of labor) and accompanying ideological narratives that justify the resulting social inequality. Hence, my project articulates a transformative theory of race—a theory that reclaims revolutionary class politics in the interests of contributing toward a post-racist society. In other words, the transformation from actually existing capitalism into socialism constitutes the condition of possibility for a post-racist society—a society free from racial and all other forms of oppression. By freedom, I do not simply mean a legal or cultural articulation of individual rights as proposed by bourgeois race theorists. Instead, I theorize freedom as a material effect of emancipated economic forms.?I foreground my (materialist) understanding of race as a way to contest contemporary accounts of race, which erase any determinate connection to economics. For instance, humanism and poststructuralism represent two dominant views on race in the contemporary academy. Even though they articulate very different theoretical positions, they produce similar ideological effects: the suppression of economics. They collude in redirecting attention away from the logic of capitalist exploitation and point us to the cultural questions of sameness (humanism) or difference (poststructuralism). In developing my project, I critique the ideological assumptions of some exemplary instances of humanist and poststructuralist accounts of race, especially those accounts that also attempt to displace Marxism, and, in doing so, I foreground the historically determinate link between race and exploitation. It is this link that forms the core of what I am calling a transformative theory of race. The transformation of race from a sign of exploitation to one of democratic multiculturalism, ultimately, requires the transformation of capitalism. Link: RaceRacism marks people for exploitation and capitalism accordingly generates an ideological defense to normalize that exploitation. Eliminating race oppression requires an attack on capital.Young 2006 (Robert, Red Critique, Winter/Spring, “Putting Materialism back into Race Theory”, )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.Link: RaceRace is inherently related to existing property relationships—they reduce racial oppression to discourse, without connecting it to the larger social structure of capitalism.Young 2006 (Robert, Red Critique, Winter/Spring, “Putting Materialism back into Race Theory”, )In Goldberg, the obsession with autonomy engenders a reification of discourse and the political implications of this are quite revealing. For Goldberg, discourse—not class struggle—becomes the motor of history: "it is in virtue of racist discourse and not merely rationalized by it that such forced manipulations of individual subjects and whole populations could have been affected" (95). He continues: "[i]nstruments of exclusion—legal, cultural, political, or economic—are forged by subjects as they mould criteria for establishing racial otherness" (95). Racial alterity makes sense not on its own terms but in relation to "instruments of exclusion". However, to move beyond Goldberg, I suggest that these instruments, in turn, must be related to existing property relationships. In short, the logic of alterity justifies and hence assists in the maintenance of class generated social inequality. The preoccupation with "autonomy" and "racial discourse formation" makes it seem as if social life is a matter of "contingency". This view blocks our understanding of the one constant feature of daily life under capitalism: exploitation. Under capitalism, exploitation is a not a discursive contingency but a structural articulation, and this structure of exploitation underpins (post)modern social life.At the moment then, the discourse of autonomy displaces the structure of exploitation and, in this regard, I believe one can map out the ideological collusion taking place in race theory. As I pointed out earlier, the humanists posit the "uniqueness" of black subjectivity and now we can see the postmodern corollary which posits the "uniqueness" of racial discourse. I refer to these positions as the "pedagogy of autonomy" because both instruct subjects to value the local. In both instances, the discourse of autonomy provides an ideological framework for protecting the "unique" against its conceptual other—knowledge of the social totality. The pedagogues of autonomy assume that the "unique", in its immediacy to the concrete, provides access to the real and therefore grounds knowledge. These (anti-reductionist) pedagogues reduce knowledge to the concrete and, consequently, mystify our understanding of race because they disconnect it from larger social structures like class and ideology.Link: Race (Memmi Impact)Memmi is talking about racism as a means to justify class privilegeSan Juan Jr. 2003 (E., Cultural Logic, “Marxism and the Race/Class Problematic: A Re-Articulation)?????34. A recent translation of Albert Memmi's magisterial book entitled Racism reminds us that any understanding of the complex network of ideas and practices classified by that term will always lead us to the foundational bedrock of class relations. Memmi defines racism as "the generalized and final assigning of values to real or imaginary differences, to the accuser's benefit and at his victim's expense, in order to justify the former's own privileges or aggression" (2000, 169). The underlying frame of intelligibility for this process of assigning values cannot be anything else but the existence of class-divided societies and nation-states with unequal allocations of power and resources. Both motivation and consequences can be adequately explained by the logic of class oppression and its entailments. In our epoch of globalization, inequality between propertied nation-states (where transnational corporate powers are based) and the rest of the world has become universalized and threatens the welfare of humanity and the planet.Link: Race (AT: Reductionism)A). They are equally reductionist, and B). They aren’t really opposed to reductionism, they are just rejecting a class understanding of race, which is a link.Young 2006 (Robert, Red Critique, Winter/Spring, “Putting Materialism back into Race Theory”, )The linguistic turn in social theory enables the recent anti-reductionist views on race. Concepts like Winant's "racial formation" ("Racial Formation Theory" 130), Paul Gilroy's "multi-modal" (There Ain't 28) and David Theo Goldberg's "grammatical" reading of race ("Racist Discourse" 95) reflect the current anti-reductionist logic that currently dominates contemporary theorizing on race. All three theorists vigorously oppose reducing race to class, but apparently, it is acceptable to "reduce" race to a "hybridity" of factors (Goldberg 93), which once again establishes liberal pluralism as the limit of politics. Indeed, at the moment, it is fairly commonplace to "reduce" race to culture, or politics, or desire. Hence, these theorists are not so much opposed to reductionist theories, they simply are opposed to class understandings of race and, in this way, they articulate a conceptual displacement of materialism (in the name of epistemological skepticism) and, consequently, they reclaim the autonomy of race (in the name of liberalism).Link: bell hooksbell hooks politics only put a human face on capitalism—it amounts to bearing witness to the crimes of capitalism but doing nothing to struggle for its replacement.Young 2006 (Robert, Red Critique, Winter/Spring, “Putting Materialism back into Race Theory”, )Here, then, is one of the primary effects of the postmodern knowledge practices: class is deconstructed as a metaphysical dinosaur. In this regard, postmodernists collude with the humanists in legitimating the sanctity of the local. Both participate in narrowing cultural intelligibility to questions of (racial) discourse or the (black) subject and, in doing so, they provide ideological immunity for capitalism. It is now very difficult to even raise the issue of class, particularly if you raise the issue outside of the logic of supplementarity—today's ruling intellectual logic which provides a theoretical analog to contemporary neo-liberal political structures.In one of the few recent texts to explore the centrality of class, bell hooks' Where We Stand, we are, once again, still left with a reaffirmation of capitalism. For instance, hooks argues for changes within capitalism: "I identify with democratic socialism, with a vision of participatory economics within capitalism that aims to challenge and change class hierarchy" (156). Capitalism produces class hierarchy and, therefore, as long as capitalism remains, class hierarchy and antagonism will remain. Hence, the solution requires a transformation of class society. However, hooks mystifies capitalism as a transhistorical system and thus she can assert that the "poor may be with us always" (129). Under this view, politics becomes a matter of "bearing witness" to the crimes of capitalism, but rather than struggle for its replacement, hooks call for strategies of "self-actualization" and redistributing resources to the poor. She calls for the very same thing—collectivity—that capitalism cannot provide because social resources are privatized under capitalism. Consequently, Hooks' program for "self-esteem" is an attempt to put a human face on capitalism.Whether one considers the recent work by African-American humanists, or discourse theorists, or even left-liberal intellectuals, these various groups—despite their intellectual differences—form a ruling coalition and one thing is clear: capitalism set the limit for political change, as there is no alternative to the rule of capital. In contrast to much of contemporary race theory, a transformative theory of race highlights the political economy of race in the interests of an emancipatory political project. Wahneema Lubiano once wrote that "the idea of race and the operation of racism are the best friends that the economic and political elite have in the United States" (vii). Race mystifies the structure of exploitation and masks the severe inequalities within global capitalism. I am afraid that, at this point, many contemporary race theorists, in their systematic erasure of materialism, have become close (ideological) allies with the economic and political elites, who deny even the existence of classes. A transformative race theory pulls back into focus the struggle against exploitation and sets a new social priority "in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all" (Marx 31).Cap First: Race/Gender/Sex ODestroying the capitalist state solves all identity based oppressionHerod 7 (James, Columbia U graduate?and political activist, “Getting Free” Pg. 101-102 JF)But on the neighborhood level, in self-governing free communities, the question of identity takes on an entirely different cast because of the already-achieved equality of power and wealth. Much of the struggle of blacks has been to get the same civil rights everyone else had. Women have sought equal rights under the law as well as equity in pay and workloads. Old people have wanted to live with dignity and independence, and not be shoved off to die in some holding pen. In autonomous neighborhoods based on democratic decision making, cooperative labor, and shared wealth, all these things would be theirs as a matter of course. It's hard to see how identity politics as we have known it this past quarter century could even exist under anarchy. Identities in the neighborhood that would exist that would surely exist would devolve into the standard difficulty of majority/minority relations. There will be minorities on just about every issue. But will these minorities be based on race, gender, age, or language? I doubt it. They will be political or philosophical minorities. One reason I'm so committed to deliberative assemblies is that they seem to offer us the best chance of overcoming distinctions that might be inappropriate to particular cooperative decisions. Through a process of discussion, we can discover whether a distinction really matters on any given issue. If gender is relevant to a particular issue, it can be factored in; if it is not, it can be factored out. Existing gender prejudices will undoubtedly influence the discussion. But perhaps open discussion in small assemblies will enable us to expose and defuse these prejudices. Thus, we can come to see whether race, gender, ethnicity, age, intelligence, beauty, articulateness, or what have you, is actually relevant to or has a bearing on any given issue in dispute that is up for discussion and decision. In this way, reasoning can be brought to bear on our collective lives. Our divisions will come to be based more on different takes (political, philosophical, and theoretical) on the issues than on identities such as race, gender, or ethnicity. Our identities will come to be based more on what we believe rather than on the color of our skin, the language we speak, our sexuality, the nation we reside in, or our age in the long run, that is. The alt eliminates patriarchy, racism, and heterosexismHerod 7 (James, Columbia U graduate?and political activist, “Getting Free” Pg. 13-14 JF)Please note what this arrangement of social relations does not have: hierarchy, representation, wage slavery, profit, commodities, money, classes, private ownership of the means of production, taxes, nation-states, patriarchy, alienation, exploitation, elite professional control of any activity, or formal divisions by race, gender, age, ethnicity, looks, beliefs, intelligence, or sexual preference. This neighborhood, so organized, is the basic unit of a new social order. Those familiar with radical traditions will recognize in this sketch a melding of the anarcho-communist focus on community, the anarcho-syndicalist emphasis on workers’ control, and the feminist stress on abolishing the distinction between the public and private spheres of social life. It is my belief that each of these cannot be achieved without the other. The achievement of workers’ control alone would leave no way for the community as a whole to allocate its resources (e.g., to decide whether to phase out a project or start up a new one), whereas the achievement of community control alone, without simultaneously controlling the means of production, is meaningless, empty. And the failure to democratize and socialize households, including them (and hence reproduction) as an explicit and integral part of the social arrangements, would leave a gender-based division of labor intact, thus perpetuating the public/private dichotomy. The actual task we face, then, is to transform existing structures (buildings and factories) and social relations (property, family, work, and play relations) into the desired ones. We need to try to imagine how our model neighborhood would look after having been converted from a typical urban neighborhood. Let’s see first if we can convert the existing physical plant into something more useful for democratic, cooperative living, keeping in mind that this is the easy part; the hard part is transforming social relations. I will deal with this more below in discussing how to get there. Cap First: Race/GenderClass domination must be tackled first- it is the most universal form of oppression and it exacerbates other antagonisms. Movements against racism and sexism will fail unless they also fundamentally transform the economyMarsh 95 (James L., Professor of Philosophy at Fordham University, Critique, Action, and Liberation p. 282-283 GAL)Next, we must consider the question concerning the relationship among racism, sexism, and classism. A tendency now exists in leftist circles to talk about racism, sexism, and class domination as distinct, coequal forms of domination. Such a tendency is understandable in the light of the economism and reductionism of much of the Marxist left, but is finally not justified.Three different models are possible here, a vulgar Marxist model that denies any autonomy at all to the sexual or racial domains, the three-sector model mentioned above, and a sophisticated Marxist model that asserts the dominance of class exploitation but allows relative autonomy on lived and ideological levels to the other two spheres. The sophisticated Marxist approach, in my opinion, is the best account. It allows some diversity, specificity, and autonomy between and among spheres. The sophisticated Marxist model thus retains the strengths of the other two while avoiding and overcoming their onesidedness. Why is class domination ultimately more fundamental and important and overriding? It is more universal, extending not only over the United States and Western Europe but also over the Third World in Africa. Asia, and South America; not only over women and African-Americans but also most men and whites. Class struggle is the most antagonistic of conflicts—fundamental cooperation is emerging between the sexes and races but not between labor and capital. Racism and sexism in the West and North we are approaching rejecting in principle but not capital. The reign of capitalism up to this point has been nonnegotiable in the West.Capitalism defines the modern in a way that sexism and racism do not. Indeed, sexism and racism are holdovers from prior epochs and. as such, subordinate moments in the capitalistic mode of production. Also, an asymmetry exists between racism and sexism, on the one hand, and capitalism on the other. Progress in overcoming racism and sexism occurs up to the point where that overcoming infringes upon fundamental capitalistic social relations. The fate of Martin Luther King's civil rights movement when it came North and began to be more openly economic in its orientation is one example; the fate of women professionals asking for salaries equal to men in a context of economic retrenchment is another. Capitalism will transform sexual and racial relations to achieve its goals, but the reverse is generally not true.Capital twists racism and sexism to its own ends, using the former to fragment the working class and the latter, of which American foreign policy in Vietnam and Nixon's machismo on the Watergate tapes is a dramatic example, to legitimize a tough-minded, quantitative, technocratic, one-dimensional domination. Also, if Habermas is correct, late capitalism has more or less immunized the monopoly sphere of the economy from serious conflict. The result is that conflict has been displaced to other spheres more or less peripheral to this central monopoly sphere. Racism and sexism, then, to an extent are indirectly displaced forms of class domination and colonization, like the contradiction between symbolic interaction and purposive rational action. As such displaced forms, and in their own right as well, they are important and must be fought, but they are not equal in importance to class domination. Racism and sexism serve capital as ideology. If this fact is not recognized, then at a certain point the revolutionary elan of the civil rights and feminist movements is negated. We make the mistake of thinking that an African-American person is fully liberated if he becomes an NFL quarterback and a woman if she becomes an executive on Wall Street<CONTINUED><CONTINUED>. Both movements at that point have simply degenerated into demands for equal participation in the rat race.Another way of putting the same point is to say that capitalism is a process of self-expanding value oriented to the production of surplus value. As such, capitalism, to the extent that it fully comes into its own. will relate racism and sexism to itself and incorporate them in various ways. Racism and sexism are like other holdovers from precapitalist epochs, like rent or interest, which come in fairly late in Marx's analysis in volume 3 of Capital. Capital, because of its thirst for surplus value, has an infinity to it and tends to overcome limits and incorporate them into itself, twisting them to its own ends. In this respect, racism and sexism, without downplaying their tremendous moral evil and the enormous suffering they inflict in their contemporary manifestations, are no different from rent and interest. One does not get at what is specific and essential in capitalist modernity by talking about rent or interest or racism or sexism as such, but by understanding these phenomena as related to and incorporated into this process of capitalist valorization. As a glance at and reflection on the streets of Los Angeles after the 1992 riots shows (see below), capitalized racism is not the same as precapitalist racism. As reflection on the use of women in advertisements to sell products indicates, capitalized sexism is not the same as precapitalist sexism. Cap First: Race/GenderEfforts to solve racism and sexism will fail unless they confront class domination firstMarsh 95 (James L., Professor of Philosophy at Fordham University, Critique, Action, and Liberation p. 286-287 GAL)Racism and sexism, then, with their own separate dialectics function as a pregiven basis for capital to create three fractions of labor, the independent primary, dependent primary, and secondary sectors. These in mm enhance and reinforce racism and sexism, giving rise to a fragmented culture and politics in the United States that fail to unite against a common class enemy. Labor unions in the United States have contributed to this process by engaging over the last 100 years in their own practices of racism and sexism. All of this is not to deny the real inequities of a systematic, institutionalized racism or sexism, but only to argue that these also operate ideologically and functionally to reinforce, express, legitimize, and disguise class domination: nor do I mean to imply that on the most concrete level of praxis or social movements, a politics or economics organized around the working class is more significant or even as significant as a politics organized around issues relating to quality of life, including not only militarism and ecological devastation but also racism and sexism. Indeed, because of the role of the welfare state discussed in this chapter and in the next, working-class organization and movements can be in certain contexts less important and significant than civil rights or woman's rights movements. All such movements, however, to the extent that they try to address and change our socioeconomic system in the deepest and most comprehensive manner, must confront the issue of class domination, tyranny, and colonization. If full economic, social, and political democracy, democratic socialism, is the way to go. then economic domination, tyranny, and colonization must be confronted and overcome. Otherwise, the very legitimate ends of all social movements will be compromised, limited, and frustrated. I will deal with this issue of social movements and their relationship to class domination more fully in the last chapter.Cap First: Race/GenderClass is the most fundamental form of oppression, and is of paramount importance because everyone’s economic survival are determined by them.Belkhir 1 (Jean, director of the sociology program at Southern U @ New Orleans, [colorado.edu/Sociology/gimenez/work/cgr.html] AD: 7-6-11, jam)Nevertheless, I want to argue against the notion that class should be considered equivalent to gender and race. I find the grounds for my argument not only on the crucial role class struggles play in processes of epochal change but also in the very assumptions of RGC studies and the ethnomethodological insights put forth by West and Fenstermaker (1994). The assumption of the simultaneity of experience (i.e., all interactions are raced, classed, gendered) together with the ambiguity inherent in the interactions themselves, so that while one person might think he or she is "doing gender," another might interpret those "doings" in terms of "doing class," highlight the basic issue that Collins accurately identifies when she argues that ethnomethodology ignores power relations. Power relations underlie all processes of social interaction and this is why social facts are constraining upon people. But the pervasiveness of power ought not to obfuscate the fact that some power relations are more important and consequential than others. For example, the power that physical attractiveness might confer a woman in her interactions with her less attractive female supervisor or employer does not match the economic power of the latter over the former. In my view, the flattening or erasure of the qualitative difference between class, race and gender in the RGC perspective is the foundation for the recognition that it is important to deal with "basic relations of domination and subordination" which now appear disembodied, outside class relations. In the effort to reject "class reductionism," by postulating the equivalence between class and other forms of oppression, the RGC perspective both negates the fundamental importance of class but it is forced to acknowledge its importance by postulating some other "basic" structures of domination. Class relations -- whether we are referring to the relations between capitalist and wage workers, or to the relations between workers (salaried and waged) and their managers and supervisors, those who are placed in "contradictory class locations," (Wright, 1978) -- are of paramount importance, for most people's economic survival is determined by them. Those in dominant class positions do exert power over their employees and subordinates and a crucial way in which that power is used is through their choosing the identity they impute their workers. Whatever identity workers might claim or "do," employers can, in turn, disregard their claims and "read" their "doings" differently as "raced" or "gendered" or both, rather than as "classed," thus downplaying their class location and the class nature of their grievances. To argue, then, that class is fundamental is not to "reduce" gender or racial oppression to class, but to acknowledge that the underlying basic and "nameless" power at the root of what happens in social interactions grounded in "intersectionality" is class power.Cap First: RaceCapitalism uses racism to justify its exploitation- attacking class domination is key to solving racismTaylor 11 (Keeanga-Yamahtta, doctoral candidate in the department of African American Studies at Northwestern U, Jan 4, [w2011/01/04/race-class-and-marxism] AD: 7-6-11, jam)Marxists argue that capitalism is a system that is based on the exploitation of the many by the few. Because it is a system based on gross inequality, it requires various tools to divide the majority--racism and all oppressions under capitalism serve this purpose. Moreover, oppression is used to justify and "explain" unequal relationships in society that enrich the minority that live off the majority's labor. Thus, racism developed initially to explain and justify the enslavement of Africans--because they were less than human and undeserving of liberty and freedom. Everyone accepts the idea that the oppression of slaves was rooted in the class relations of exploitation under that system. Fewer recognize that under capitalism, wage slavery is the pivot around which all other inequalities and oppressions turn. Capitalism used racism to justify plunder, conquest and slavery, but as Karl Marx pointed out, it also used racism to divide and rule--to pit one section of the working class against another and thereby blunt class consciousness. To claim, as Marxists do, that racism is a product of capitalism is not to deny or diminish its importance or impact in American society. It is simply to explain its origins and the reasons for its perpetuation. Many on the left today talk about class as if it is one of many oppressions, often describing it as "classism." What people are really referring to as "classism" is elitism or snobbery, and not the fundamental organization of society under capitalism. Moreover, it is popular today to talk about various oppressions, including class, as intersecting. While it is true that oppressions can reinforce and compound each other, they are born out of the material relations shaped by capitalism and the economic exploitation that is at the heart of capitalist society. In other words, it is the material and economic structure of society that gave rise to a range of ideas and ideologies to justify, explain and help perpetuate that order. In the United States, racism is the most important of those ideologies. Cap First: GenderWe have to address class domination to break down patriarchySmith 83 (Dorothy, professor of sociology @ Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, “Women, Class, And Family” P. 2-4 JF)The tack I have taken is somewhat different. I cannot see a mode of production as excluding the organisation of gender relation. In pre-capitalist societies, gender is basic to the 'economic' division of labour and how labour resources are controlled. In other than capitalist forms, we take for granted that gender relations are included. In peasant societies for example, the full cycle of production and subsistence is organised by the household and family and presupposes gender relations. Indeed, we must look to capitalism as a mode of production to find how the notion of the separation of gender relations from economic relations could arise. It is only in capitalism that we find an economic process constituted independently of the daily and generational production of the lives of particular individuals and in which therefore we can think economy apart from gender. In treating patriarchy and capitalism as distinct systems, we are reading back into history and into other kinds of societies a state of affairs peculiar to our own. We have come slowly to the discovery that gender permeates all aspects of social, political and economic organisation; that what has been seen as not gendered is in fact largely an exclusively male arena of action and that from that viewpoint, gender relations are only present when women are. But from the standpoint of women, we are coming to recognise the pervasive effect or presence of gender.5 To posit a distinct sex/gender systems is to inhibit analysis and understanding of the gender-saturated character of social relations by sectioning off those involving women. I have taken the view that we must begin by including women from the outset in our attempt to make out the historical processes in which we are implicated and which launch us towards the future we try to grasp and make. In so doing the concepts we are familiar with and which have been built upon an assumption of a universe which has excluded gender by excluding women must be pulled, stretched and if necessary remade. For we are addressing the reality of a world which is put together as it is in the actual activities of actual individuals and in that world women are really present. They are as much in class, part of class and class struggle as men. Gender relations are, I shall try to show, an integral constituent of the social organisation of class7 Looked at in this way, the problem of patriarchy versus class takes on a different cast. The interpersonal relations of direct dominance, between women and men, are implicated in a larger organisation of the society. Even if we see the patriarchal principle at work in each new setting, in government, business, professions, labour unions, yet that personal relation of dominance and inequality is articulated to the larger social, political and economic organisation of the society. It cannot be separated from it. The direct and personal character of men's domination over women takes on its actual character within determinate social relations specific to capitalism and to its development over the past 150 or so years. The relation between the actual forms of men's dominance over women, and women's general inequality in the society, are specific to this kind of society, to this historical epoch. These are the forms in which we experience oppression. They are the only forms of oppression we know. Whether there is something beyond or beneath which is general is not our first question. Our first question is to understand the relation between what we find at the level of experience and the larger social, economic and political process, viewing the latter as historical processes. For of course, this place, this time, these material conditions, these social relations, are where we do our work. This is what we must understand. Cap First: GenderOnly the alt can create the material change necessary to eliminate the conditions which cause their harmsCotter 2 (Jennifer, U of Pittsburgh, “Feminism Now” Red Critique March-April accessed 7/2/11 JF)The significance of private ownership of the means of production and command over the labor-power of others as well as its normalization in contemporary feminism, matters because it determines what material resources and conditions are at the disposal of all members of society (and what material interests they can advance) and therefore determines whether the social arrangements will be able to free all persons from necessity or whether they will need to be transformed to do so. Freedom of sexuality, love, desire cannot be produced unless emotional relations are, as Alexandra 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. Transnational feminism, with its focus on "ethical resistance" to the material conditions of inequality for women, actually works in the interest of subordinating the needs of women for material equality and freedom from necessity to the reproductive requirements of transnational capitalism. What is necessary in feminism is not the individualized "responsibility" of "transnational" feminism but the collective solidarity of revolutionary internationalism for a feminism that will participate in the class struggle to abolish capitalism's regime of profit and wage-labor and therefore put the material conditions in place to emancipate all people from exploitation and economic necessity.Capitalism reinforces patriarchyKovel 7 (Joel, Graduate, Psychoanalytic Institute, Downstate Medical Center, Brooklyn, The Enemy of Nature: The End of Capitalism or the End of the World? December 9, p. 56-57, JM)A similar process is played out in the sphere of gender. As ecosystems are broken up and rearranged under capitalism, a fraction of women in metropolitan regions attain considerable autonomy and opportunity, while conditions for the world's majority sharply deteriorate. This is evident in the high percentage of women in sweatshops around the world (where fine motor skills and patriarchally imposed docility are valued); the burgeoning sex trade industries, where numberless women have now, in the era of free trade, become actual slaves (as have innumerable others in the sweatshops); as well as the general rise of rape and spousal abuse as concomitants of a disintegrating social order, so far gone that a recent UNICEF report indicates that nearly half the world's women come under attack by those closest to them.7 This was not at all the case in precapitalist societies. Cap First- CoalitionsClass domination is the dominant form of injustice- it twists all other antagonisms to its own needs, and presents a common enemy that can link coalitions of diverse social movementMarsh 95(James L., Professor of Philosophy at Fordham University, Critique, Action, and Liberation p.343-344 GAL)Because capitalism is a system with interrelated social, economic, and political components, the containment of crisis in one area, the economic and especially monopoly capital as a sector of the economic, causes crisis to break out elsewhere. Citizens become aware that their life-world is being "colonized" by a capitalist system whose imperatives are alien to the structure of that lifeworld. In many, though not all. cases, the conflicts are not fueled immediately by issues of economic production or consumption but by issues related to quality of life, what Habermas call "the grammar of forms of life." Why are we not safe on the streets of our city? Why is the environment ugly? Why are women treated as second-class citizens? Why is my government engaged in an illegal, unjust foreign war or intervention?^The motivation for such social movements is not or does not have to be capitalist class domination; we have to avoid a simplistic reductionism here. However, it would be equally simplistic to deny any relationship whatsoever to such domination. In late capitalism, class structure and domination are often rendered latent but are nonetheless real, and other conflicts and crises are in some way displaced effects of this domination and have their own kind of relationship to it. Militarism, as we have already indicated, is a great source of profit for many industries and contributes to empire as a way of life. The environment is being depleted of raw materials because of the imperatives of capitalist growth—if profit is the goal, then more profit is better than less—and the environment is being rendered unhealthy and ugly because of the tendency within capitalism to value profit over human beings, wealth over human welfare, quantity of money over quality of life. Male chauvinism operates both as a supporting ideology for capitalism and for justifying the role of women in the home as unpaid managers of consumption and child-rearing. Such social movements, then, if not immediately related to capitalist class domination and even if they have their own relative autonomy and distinctiveness, are ultimately related. Moreover, because capitalism twists other forms of injustice such as sexism or racism to its own ends, capitalist class domination still is the dominant form of injustice in capitalist society.— What has changed from early capitalism is that this domination is concealed rather than overt, mediated positively by the state and other cultural media rather than immediate. What has also changed is the introduction of new kinds of crisis and the importance of new kinds of groups other than, although not necessarily ex-eluding, the working class for instigating social change.Indeed we can go further and say that not only is capitalist domination linked to other forms of domination, but. in keeping with my argument in Chapter 13. is the main obstacle to social change in these areas. The principal, although not the only adversary of women and African-Americans and homosexuals, has been and is business. In the struggle for equal pay for equal work, an end to racial and sexual stereotyping of jobs, elimination of discriminatory'hiring, promotion, and retention policies, and affirmative action and restitution for past discrimination, women and African-Americans and homosexuals have struggled to limit the power of capital. Some political economists have argued that the next phase of struggle against discrimination is likely to be the development of standards of comparative worth, by which to judge whether employers are illegally discriminating in the money awarded for unequal or dissimilar jobs; here disadvantaged groups will directly challenge the employer's right to set wage rates. Moreover in the 1980s and 1990s the increasingly desperate plight of unemployed African-Americans. Hispanics. and women, the increasing number of <CONTINUED><CONTINUED>patients with AIDS, and the situation of the homeless is linked to and rooted in capitalist priorities and policies, which in the United States take the form of attacks on labor and welfare and capital flight toward regions with fewer environmental restrictions, weaker unions, and more raw materials.I do not wish to overstate this point. There is a distinctiveness to racial or sexual or heterosexist injustice that cannot be reduced to the structure of class domination; racial epithets directed against an African-American baseball player or women's struggle for abortion rights or gay bashing in the streets of New York illustrate the point. Nonetheless in this social system racism, sexism, and heterosexism. as we have seen in Chapter 13. are twisted and used by capital to achieve its own ends. The more potent, deeper adversary of the struggles against racism, sexism, and heterosexism is capital. Here is one reason that a merely pluralist liberal or postmodern politics partially misses the mark. I will pursue this point later on in this chapter. The adversary is a unity in difference, not simply capital nor simply racist, sexist, and heterosexist practice and structures of domination, but a racist, sexist, heterosexist capitalism. The opposition, therefore, should not be a simple unity, the working class, nor a simple diversity' composed of social movements, but a unity' in difference, many social movements linked positively by common aspirations, norms, and ideals and a common enemy. Cap First- CoalitionsClass focus is the key to building coalitions that include all gendered and racial strugglesBelkhir 1 (Jean, director of the sociology program at Southern U @ New Orleans, [colorado.edu/Sociology/gimenez/work/cgr.html] AD: 7-6-11, jam)From the standpoint of Marxist theory, however, class is qualitatively different from gender and race and cannot be considered just another system of oppression. As Eagleton points out, whereas racism and sexism are unremittingly bad, class is not entirely a "bad thing" even though socialists would like to abolish it. The bourgeoisie in its revolutionary stage was instrumental in ushering a new era in historical development, one which liberated the average person from the oppressions of feudalism and put forth the ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity. Today, however, it has an unquestionably negative role to play as it expands and deepens the rule of capital over the entire globe. The working class, on the other hand, is pivotally located to wage the final struggle against capital and, consequently, it is "an excellent thing" (Eagleton, 1996: 57). While racism and sexism have no redeeming feature, class relations are, dialectically, a unity of opposites; both a site of exploitation and, objectively, a site where the potential agents of social change are forged. To argue that the working class is the fundamental agent of change does not entail the notion that it is the only agent of change. The working class is of course composed of women and men who belong to different races, ethnicities, national origins, cultures, and so forth, so that gender and racial/ethnic struggles have the potential of fueling class struggles because, given the patterns of wealth ownership and income distribution in this and all capitalist countries, those who raise the banners of gender and racial struggles are overwhelmingly propertyless workers, technically members of the working class, people who need to work for economic survival whether it is for a wage or a salary, for whom racism, sexism and class exploitation matter. But this vision of a mobilized working class where gender and racial struggles are not subsumed but are nevertheless related requires a class conscious effort to link RGC studies to the Marxist analysis of historical change. In so far as the "class" in RGC remains a neutral concept, open to any and all theoretical meanings, just one oppression among others, intersectionality will not realize its revolutionary potential. ***IMPACTS***Impact Turn Filter: Cap Non-GeneralizableCapitalism is a non-generalizable condition- if everyone consumed at the rate of advanced capitalist states, the system would instantly collapse. Their accusations of no alternative and demand for action in the “real world” divorce their impacts from their systemic causesMeszaros 95 (Istvan, prof emeritus @ U of Sussex, “Beyond Capital” Pg. xv-xvi)If it is true, as they, that ‘there is no alternative’ to the structural determinations of the capital system in the ‘real world’, in that case the very idea of causal interventions — no matter how little or large — must be condemned as an absurdity. The only change admissible within such a vision of the world belongs to the type which concerns itself with some strictly limited negative effects but leaves their causal foundation — the given system of metabolic control — completely unaffected. Yet, if there is an approach that truly deserves to be called a total absurdity in the realm of social reform, it is not the advocacy of major structural change but precisely the kind of apologetic wishful thinking which divorces the effects from their causes. This is why the ‘war on poverty’, announced with reforming zeal so many times, especially in the twentieth century, is always lost, given the causal framework — the poverty-producing exploitative structural imperatives — of the capital system. The attempt at divorcing effects from their causes goes hand in hand with the equally fallacious practice of claiming the status of a rule for the exception. This is how it can be pretended that the misery and chronic underdevelopment that necessarily arise from the neo-colonial domination and exploitation of the overwhelming majority of humankind by a mere handful of capitalistically developed countries — hardly more than the G7 — do not matter at all. For, as the self-serving legend goes, thanks to the (never realized) ‘modernization’ of the rest of the world, the population of every country will one fine day enjoy the great benefits of the ‘free enterprise system’. The fact that the rapacious exploitation of the human and material resources of our planet for the benefit of a few capitalist countries happens to be a non-generalizable condition is wantonly disregarded. Instead, the universal viability of emulating the development of the ‘advanced capitalist’ countries is predicated, ignoring that neither the advantages of the imperialist past, nor the immense profits derived on a continuing basis from keeping the “Third World’ in structural dependency can be ‘universally diffused’, so as to produce the anticipated happy results through ‘modernization’ and ‘free-marketization’. Not to mention the fact that even if the history of imperialism could be re-written in a sense of diametrically opposed to the way it actually unfolded, coupled with the fictitious reversal of the existing power relations of domination and dependency in favour of the underdeveloped countries, the general adoption of the rapacious utilization of our planet’s limited resources — enormously damaging already, although at present practiced only by the privileged tiny minority — would make the whole system instantly collapse. It is enough to thinking this respect of the wild discrepancy between the size of the U.S. population — less than 5 percent of the world population-- and its 25 percent consumption of total available energy resources. It takes no great imagination to figure out what would happen if the 95 percent adopted the same consumption pattern, trying to squeeze nineteen times 25 percent out of the remaining 75 percent. To hide the vacuity of the promised corrective solutions is the convenient ideological function of turning the strictly exceptional conditions of the privileged into the universal rule. Only in an utterly fictitious world in which effects can be divorced from, and even diametrically opposed to, their causes can such an approach be considered feasible and sound. This is why these two fallacies — the first that stipulates the possibility of manipulating effects in and by themselves as divorced from their causes, and the second the universalization of ungeneralizable exceptions — are so closely tied together in the ruling ‘pragmatic’ ideology. An ideology which finds its ultimate self-justification and satisfaction in its claim to depict the order of the ‘real world’ to which ‘there can be no alternative’. Impact Turn Filter: Conjunctural vs. StructuralThe aff is concerned with solving fleeting, conjunctural crises, which are inevitably recurring features of the fundamental structural crisis of capital. Error replication is inevitable, and our impacts outweighMeszaros 2006 (Istvan, Monthly Review, September, “The Structural Crisis of Politics”)2. The Nature of Capital’s Structural Crisis In this respect it is necessary to clarify the relevant differences between types or modalities of crisis. It is not a matter of indifference whether a crisis in the social sphere can be considered a periodic/con-junctural crisis, or something much more fundamental than that. For, obviously, the way of dealing with a fundamental crisis cannot be con-ceptualized in terms of the the categories of periodic or conjunctural crises. To anticipate a main point of this lecture, as far as politics is con-cerned the crucial difference between the two sharply contrasting types of crises in question is that the periodic or conjunctural crises unfold and are more or less successfully resolved within a given framework of politics, whereas the fundamental crisis affects that framework itself in its entirety. In other words, in relation to a given socioeconomic and political system we are talking about the vital difference between the more or less frequent crises in politics, as against the crisis of the estab-lished modality of politics itself, with qualitatively different require-ments for its possible solution. It is the latter that we are concerned with today. In general terms, this distinction is not simply a question of the apparent severity of the contrasting types of crises. For a periodic or conjunctural crisis can be dramatically severe—as the “Great World Economic Crisis of 1929–1933” happened to be—yet capable of a solution within the parameters of the given system. Misinterpreting the severity of a given conjunctural crisis as if it was a fundamental systemic crisis, as Stalin and his advisers did in the midst of the “Great World Economic Crisis of 1929–1933,” is bound to lead to mistaken and indeed volun-taristic strategies, like declaring social democracy to be the “main enemy” in the early 1930s, which could only strengthen, as in fact it trag-ically did strengthen, Hitler’s forces. And in the same way, but in the opposite sense, the “non-explosive” character of a prolonged structural crisis, in contrast to the “thunderstorms” (Marx) through which periodic conjunctural crises can discharge and resolve themselves, may also lead to fundamentally misconceived strategies, as a result of the misin-terpretation of the absence of “thunderstorms” as if their absence was the overwhelming evidence for the indefinite stability of “organized capitalism” and of the “integration of the working class.” This kind of misinterpretation, to be sure heavily promoted by the ruling ideological interests under the pretenses of “scientific objectivity,” tends to rein-force the position of those who represent the self-justifying acceptance of the reformist accommodationist approaches in institutionalized—for-merly genuinely oppositional—working–class parties and trade unions (now, however, “Her Majesty’s Official Opposition,” as the saying goes). But even among the deeply committed critics of the capital system, the same misconception regarding the indefinitely crisis-free perspective of the established order can result in the adoption of a self-paralyzing defensive posture, as we witnessed in the socialist movement in the last few decades. It cannot be stressed enough, the crisis of politics in our time is not intelligible without being referred to the broad overall social framework of which politics is an integral part. This means that in order to clarify the nature of the persistent and deepening crisis of politics all over the world today we must focus attention on the crisis of the capital system itself. For the crisis of capital we are experiencing—at least since the very beginning of the 1970s—is an all-embracing structural crisis.18 Let us see, summed up as briefly as possible, the defining characteristics of the structural crisis we are concerned with. The historical novelty of today’s crisis is manifest under four main aspects: ? (1) its character is universal, rather than restricted to one particular sphere (e.g., financial, or commercial, or affecting this or that <CONTINUED><CONTINUED>particu-lar branch of production, or applying to this rather than that type of labour, with its specific range of skills and degrees of productivity, etc.); ? (2) its scope is truly global (in the most threateningly literal sense of the term), rather than confined to a particular set of countries (as all major crises have been in the past); ? (3) its time scale is extended, continuous—if you like: permanent— rather than limited and cyclic, as all former crises of capital happened to be. ? (4) its mode of unfolding might be called creeping—in contrast to the more spectacular and dramatic eruptions and collapses of the past— while adding the proviso that even the most vehement or violent con-vulsions cannot be excluded as far as the future is concerned: i.e, when the complex machinery now actively engaged in “crisis-management” and in the more or less temporary “displacement” of the growing con-tradictions runs out of steam.... [Here] it is necessary to make some general points about the criteria of a structural crisis, as well as about the forms in which its solution may be envisaged. To put it in the simplest and most general terms, a structural crisis affects the totality of a social complex, in all its relations with its con-stituent parts or sub-complexes, as well as with other complexes to which it is linked. By contrast, a non-structural crisis affects only some parts of the complex in question, and thus no matter how severe it might be with regard to the affected parts, it cannot endanger the continued survival of the overall structure. Accordingly, the displacement of contradictions is feasible only while the crisis is partial, relative and internally manageable by the system, requiring no more than shifts—even if major ones—within the relatively autonomous system itself. By the same token, a structural crisis calls into question the very existence of the overall complex concerned, postulat-ing its transcendence and replacement by some alternative complex. The same contrast may be expressed in terms of the limits any particular social complex happens to have in its immediacy, at any given time, as compared to those beyond which it cannot conceivably go. Thus, a structural crisis is not concerned with the immediate limits but with the ultimate limits of a global structure....19 Thus, in a fairly obvious sense nothing could be more serious than the structural crisis of capital’s mode of social metabolic reproduction which defines the ultimate limits of the established order. But even though profoundly serious in its all-important general parameters, on the face of it the structural crisis may not appear to be of such a decid-ing importance when compared to the dramatic vicissitudes of a major conjunctural crisis. For the “thunderstorms” through which the con-junctural crises discharge themselves are rather paradoxical in the sense that in their mode of unfolding they not only discharge (and impose) but also resolve themselves, to the degree to which that is feasible under the circumstances. This they can do precisely because of their partial char-acter which does not call into question the ultimate limits of the estab-lished global structure. At the same time, however, and for the same reason, they can only “resolve” the underlying deep-seated structural problems—which necessarily assert themselves again and again in the form of the specific conjunctural crises—in a strictly partial and tempo-rally also most limited way. Until, that is, the next conjunctural crisis appears on society’s horizon. By contrast, in view of the inescapably complex and prolonged nature of the structural crisis, unfolding in historical time in an epochal and not episodic/instantaneous sense, it is the cumulative interrelationship of the whole that decides the issue, even under the false appearance of “normality.” This is because in the structural crisis everything is at stake, involving the all-embracing ultimate limits of the given order of which there cannot possibly be a “symbolic/paradigmatic” particular instance. Without understanding the overall systemic connections and implications of the particular events and developments we lose sight of the really significant changes and of the corresponding levers of poten-tial strategic intervention positively to affect them, in the interest of the necessary systemic transformation. Our social responsibility therefore calls for an uncompromising critical awareness of the emerging cumulative interrelationship, instead of looking for comforting reassurances in the world of illusory normality until the house collapses over our head. Impact Turn Filter: 5/6 Can’t produce CapitalEven if they win that cap is good for some, 5/6ths of humanity can’t benefit from itDeSoto 0 (Hernando, president of the institute for liberty and democracy, “The Mystery of Capital: why capitalism triumphs in the West and fails everywhere else” Pg. 5-8 JF)In this book I intend to demonstrate that the major stumbling block that keeps the rest of the world from benefitting from capitalism is its inability to produce capital. Capital is the force that raises the productivity of labor and creates the wealth of nations. It is the lifeblood of the capitalist system, the foundation of progress, and the one thing that the poor countries of the world cannot seem to produce for themselves, no matter how eagerly their people engage in all the other activities that characterize a capitalist economy. I will also show, with the help of facts and figures that my research team and I have collected, block by block and farm by farm in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America, that most of the poor already possess the assets they need to make a success of capitalism. Even in the poorest countries, the poor save. The value of savings among the poor is, in fact, immense—forty times all the foreign aid received throughout the world since 1945. In Egypt, for instance, the wealth that the poor have accumulated is worth fifty-five times as much as the sum of all direct foreign investment ever recorded there, including the Suez Canal and the Aswan Dam. In Haiti, the poorest nation in Latin America, the total assets of the poor are more than one hundred fifty times greater than all foreign investment received since Haiti’s independence from France in 1804. If the United States were to hike its foreign-aid budget to the level recommended by the United Nations—0.7 percent of national income—it would take the richest country on earth more than 150 years to transfer the world’s poor resources equal to those they already possess. But they hold these resources in defective forms: houses built on whose ownership rights are not adequately recorded, unincorporated business with undefined liability, industries located where financiers and investors cannot see them. Because the rights to these possessions are not adequately documented, these assets cannot readily be turned into capital, cannot be traded outside of narrow local circles where people know and trust each other, cannot be used as collateral for a loan, and cannot be used as a share against an investment. In the West, by contrast, every parcel of land, every building, every piece of equipment, or store of inventories is represented in a property document that is the visible sign of a vast hidden process that connects all these assets to the rest of the economy. Thanks to this representational process, assets can lead an invisible, parallel life alongside their material existence. They can be used as collateral for credit. The single most important source of funds for new businesses in the United States is a mortgage on the entrepreneur’s house. These assets can also provide a link to the owner’s credit history, an accountable address for the collection of debt and taxes, the basis for the creation of reliable and universal public utilities, and a foundation for the creation of securities (like mortgage-backed bonds) that can then be rediscounted and sod in secondary markets. By this process the West injects life into assets and makes them generate capital. Third world and former communist nations do not have this representational process. As a result, most of them are undercapitalized, in the same way that a firm is undercapitalized when it issues fewer securities than its income and assets would justify. The enterprises of the poor are very much like corporations that cannot issue shares or bonds to obtain new investment and finance. Without representations, their assets are dead capital. The poor inhabitants of these nations—five-sixths of humanity—do have things, but they lack the process to represent their property and create capital. They have houses but not titles; crops but not deeds; business but not statutes of incorporation. It is the unavailability of these essential representations that explains why people who have adapted every other Western invention, from the paper clip to the nuclear reactor, have not been able to produce sufficient capital to make their domestic capitalism work. This is the mystery of capital. Solving it requires an understanding of why Westerners, by representing assets with titles, are able to see and draw out capital from them. One of the greatest challenges to the human mind is to comprehend and to gain access to those things we know exist but cannot see. Not everything that is real and useful is tangible and visible. Time, for example, is real, but it can only be efficiently managed when it is represented by a clock or a calendar. Throughout history, human beings have invented <CONTINUED><CONTINUED>representational systems—writing, musical notation, double-entry bookkeeping—to grasp with the mind what human hands could never touch. In the same way, the great practitioners of capitalism, from the creators of integrated title systems and corporate stock to Michael Milken, were able to reveal and extract capital where others saw only junk by devising new ways to represent the invisible potential that is locked up in the assets we accumulate. The absence of this process in the poorer regions of the world—where two-thirds of humanity lives—is not the consequence of some Western monopolistic conspiracy. It is rather that Westerners take the mechanism so completely for granted that they have lost all awareness of its existence. Although it is huge, nobody sees it, including the Americans, Europeans, and Japanese who owe all their wealth to their ability to use it. It is an implicit legal infrastructure hidden deep within their property systems—of which ownership is but the tip of the iceberg. The rest of the iceberg is an intricate man-made process that can transform assets and labor into capital. This process was not created from a blue-print and is not described in a glossy brochure. Its origins are obscure and its significance buried in the economic subconscious of Western capitalist nations. Cap Unsustainable/Collapse Now Capitalism’s contradictions make its collapse inevitableDickens 9 (Peter, Affiliated Lecturer in the Department of Sociology, Faculty of Politics, Psychology, Sociology and International Studies , U of Cambridge, May, The Sociological Review, Vol. 57, Iss. Supp. s1, p. 68-82, jam)Can capitalism go on expanding forever? It is a question many people have asked for many years. It is also a relevant question when considering the prospect of capitalism’s potentially infinite expansion into the cosmos. In the early decades of the 20th century Rosa Luxemburg suggested that capitalism always needs an ‘outside’, a zone of non-capitalism in which people would buy goods made in capitalist societies (Luxemburg 2004). To continue expanding, capitalism needs to continue placing a large part of its surplus into the means of production, machines and technology. Imperialism, according to Luxemburg, is the competitive struggle between capitalist nations for what remains of the non-capitalist ‘outside’. And yet, Luxemburg also argued, there is a fundamental contradiction, one ultimately leading to capitalism’s collapse. As it increasingly draws its ‘outside’ into itself capitalism also destroys the very demand it needs for its products. The surplus value produced by capitalism simply cannot be absorbed. This is not the place to assess in detail Luxemburg’s arguments or the debates she has generated. Suffice to note that many Marxists now argue that, while crises of underconsumption are important, crises stemming from over-accumulation of capital and the need for ‘outside’ regions in which to invest are even more significant as regards the further expansion of capitalism (Brewer 1990, Harvey 2003). Luxemburg was nevertheless the first attempt to explicitly raise the question of how capitalism relates to a non-capitalist ‘outside’ and whether capitalism can, in principle, last forever as it colonises its outside. The question of capitalism’s ‘outside’ is now being asked again, albeit in a rather different form. Hardt and Negri, in their influential text Empire, tell us that ‘there is no more outside.’ They state that ‘in the passage from modern to postmodern, from Imperialism to Empire, there is progressively less distinction between inside and outside’ (2000:187). They make this case in relation to the economy, politics and militarism in today’s form of globalisation. As regards economics, Hardt and Negri admit that the capitalist market has always run counter to any division between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’. It has been constantly expanded globally and yet encountered barriers. But at the same time it has also thrived on overcoming such barriers, reorganising itself to overcome these limits. But now the global market is so dominant that it is even more difficult to envisage a distinction between an ‘inside’ and an ‘outside’ market waiting to be subjugated, made part of the capitalist market and in due course reorganised as a site of capitalist production. There is no ‘outside’ left and capital is reduced to re-engaging in a form of ‘primitive accumulation’; privatising publicly-owned assets, making them into commodities to be bought and sold Cap Unsustainable/Collapse InevitableCapitalism will eventually die, like all things, crisis indicates the approaching end of its lifeWallerstein 11 (Immanuel, sociologist and historical social scientist, “Structural Crisis In The World System” Monthly Review Vol. 62.10 March JF)Premise No. 1 is that all systems—from the astronomical universe to the smallest physical phenomena, and including of course historical social systems—have lives. They come into existence at some point, which needs to be explained. They have “normal” lives, the rules of which need to be explicated. The functioning of their normal lives tends, over time, to move them far from equilibrium, at which point they enter a structural crisis, and in due course cease to exist. The functioning of their normal lives has to be analyzed in terms of cyclical rhythms and secular trends. The cyclical rhythms are sets of systemic fluctuations (upturns and downturns), in which the system regularly returns to equilibrium. However, it is a moving equilibrium since, at the end of a downturn, the system never returns to exactly where it was at the beginning of the upturn. This is because secular trends (slow, long-term increases in some systemic characteristic) push the curve slowly upward, as measured by some percentage of that characteristic in the system. Eventually, the secular trends move the system too near its asymptotes, and the system is unable to continue its normal, regular, slow upward push. Thereupon, it begins to fluctuate wildly and repeatedly, leading to a bifurcation—that is, to a chaotic situation in which a stable equilibrium cannot be maintained. In such a chaotic situation, there are two quite divergent possibilities of recreating order out of chaos, or a new stable system. This period we may call the structural crisis of the system, and there is a system-wide battle—for historical social systems, a political battle—over which of two alternative possible outcomes will be collectively “chosen.” All in all, it is not a pretty picture, and brings us to the political question, What can we do in this kind of situation? But first, who are the actors in the political battle? In a structural crisis, the only certainty is that the existing system—the capitalist world-economy—cannot survive. What is impossible to know is what the successor system will be. One can envisage the battle as one between two groups that I have labeled “the spirit of Davos” and “the spirit of Porto Alegre.”Cap Unsustainable/Collapse NowCollapse now: economic growth is stagnating and structural inequality is increasingFoster & McChesney 10 (John Bellamy, Prof of Sociology @ U of Oregon, and Robert, Research Professor @ U of Illinois, “Capitalism, The Absurd System: A View From the United States” Monthly Review Vol. 62.2 June JF)Capitalism’s main economic claim to being an indispensable system is that it promotes economic growth, the benefits of which ostensibly trickle down to the vast majority. Today, however, in the mature capitalist economies, economic growth has slowed to a crawl (though sufficient to threaten the environment). The gains of labor productivity flow upwards by myriad pumps, after which they are seldom allowed to trickle down. The result is a deeply unequal society and generalized economic stagnation, associated with a dearth of effective demand—countered only in part by financial bubbles, which eventually burst with disastrous effects. In the past five decades, the U.S. economy has grown, but at slower and slower rates. The stagnation of the last ten years resembles nothing so much as the stagnation of the 1930s (i.e., the Great Depression years). (See Chart One). The same is true to varying extents for all the other rich, mature, capitalist economies. This long-term slowdown is associated with growing structural inequality. The economic surplus generated by society is amassed more and more at the top. Worker productivity is much greater than it was back in 1975, but very little of this increased wealth actually goes to workers themselves. As Chart Two demonstrates, the wages of U.S. manufacturing workers have fallen rapidly during the last three and a half decades as a share of value added in U.S. manufacturing. The median wage of all nonagricultural workers has stagnated over the same period. Cap Unsustainable/Collapse NowStatus quo is unsustainable – peak oil, renewable energy failsTrainer 10 (Ted, Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the School of Social Work, U of New South Wales, Aug 15, [.au/node/45108] AD: 7-3-11, jam)Today the case is much stronger on all accounts. We’ve got clear evidence now about the coming of peak oil. In 1985, we had no idea of the peak oil thesis. Now, it’s pretty widely agreed that peak oil is upon us and that we may have gone through the peak. My main concern about this is that people don’t grasp the significance of the figures that they know. Take the peak oil thing: almost everyone knows of it, but the enormous significance of it doesn’t seem to sink in. What the hell are we going to do if oil gets very scarce? You just cannot run our sort of society [without oil]. So that’s one thing that strengthens the “limits to growth” claim. Another, similar issue is the greenhouse effect. It is only very recently the case that people have grasped that we have an astronomical problem here. In 1985, I could foresee this possibility [of dangerous climate change], but with nothing like the clarity and confidence we’ve now got. It seems pretty clear that this is a problem we cannot solve in a capitalist, consumerist society [but] people just don’t seem to grasp that. Another problem is that there is a feeling that we can run everything on renewables. But there is a very strong case that we can’t. A final thing [that is new] is the whole footprint analysis. We’ve got this pretty clear analysis that the productive land we use in Australia is about eight hectares per person. If you look at the productive land of the planet, which is about 8 billion hectares, then Australians are using productive land at a rate of about 10 times of what will ever be possible for most of the world’s people. So, we’re not just a little bit unsustainable. Those figures indicate we’re miles past any sort of level [of consumption that] could be extended to everybody. A big reason why these things are not so transparent is, of course, because the rich countries are hogging all the resources. We don’t feel the scarcity, but that’s because we are getting far more than our fair share of resources. Our critique now has to have two main aspects. One is sustainability and the other is global justice. On one count we’ve got a society that is just outrageously unequal and unacceptable. On the second count, we’ve got a way of life that is plundering the planet to supply the corporations and the supermarket shoppers in rich countries with comfort and goods. This comes at the direct cost of most of the world’s people who work in the sweatshops and the mines and the plantations. But it astounds me that the average person in rich countries either doesn’t know about this or couldn’t care less. Cap Unsustainable/Collapse NowCapitalism is socially and materially unsustainable- tech can’t keep pace with the rated of resource depletionIkerd 6 (John, Prof Emeritus of Agricultural Economics @ U of Missouri Columbia, “Is Capitalism Sustainable?” JF)Throughout human history, capitalist economies have been driven by the relentless pursuit of economic growth. The underlying assumption has been that individual human wants are insatiable; we can never get enough but more is always better. Capitalists have been able to exploit the willingness of workers to work more, earn more, and consume more because they never felt they had enough. Capitalism has two potentially fatal flaws. First, unrestrained capitalism inevitably leads to a widening gap between the rich and the poor, as wealth becomes concentrated in the hands of the few at the expense of the many. Even when the “rising tide raises all boats,” it raises the investors’ boats more than the workers’. Growing social disparity eventually destroys the stability and productivity of the society within which the economy functions. Capitalist economies have degenerated into economic chaos, if not revolution, any time they have been allowed to function without adequate government regulations to protect society. Karl Marx was right: unbridled capitalism is not socially sustainable. Second, unrestrained capitalism inevitably degrades and depletes the natural and human resources it relies on for its productivity. Everything of economic value is derived from either nature or society. Both are finite and limited in their ability to produce things of economic value. A common economic fallacy is that technology is capable of offsetting the continuing loss of basic resources. As natural and human resources become scarce, rising prices will provide economic incentives for technologies that will allow resources to be used more efficiently. Thus, human ingenuity will reduce and eventually remove all limits to economic growth. Capitalism was conceived during a time when the resources of nature seemed inexhaustible and human society seemed invincible. We know now that a sustainable economy must renew and regenerate as least as much as it extracts and exploits. We also know that an unbridled capitalist economy will not do so, and thus, is not sustainable. Cap Root Cause: Laundry ListCapitalism is the root cause of militarism, environmental destruction, and poverty. Overcoming it is an ethical and practical imperative.Marsh 95(James L., Professor of Philosophy at Fordham University, Critique, Action, and Liberation p.313 GAL)To some extent, the statement of the problem implies in broad outline its solution. If the main problem in the West and East is a class and group domination contradicting the imperatives of the ideal speech situation. PGC. FSD. and the principles of justice, then the solution, negatively stated, is to negate or overcome such domination. Positively stated, the solution is full economic, social, and political democracy, in a word, democratic socialism. Such a socialism incarnates in its institutions the values of freedom, equality, reciprocity', and democracy.We have seen in Part One that such socialism is an ethical imperative, and now. in Part Two. that it is a systematic requirement. Because in the West the problems of poverty', unemployment, homelessness. environmental pollution and ugliness, militarism, and imperialism are primarily rooted in capitalism, such capitalism has become a luxury we can no longer afford. The overcoming of capitalism and movement to democratic socialism is both an ethical and existential imperative. Not only duty' and fight but also survival and well-being depend on the overcoming of capitalism. Once again duty' and happiness go together or not at all.Capitalism is the root cause of all impactsHerod 7 (James, Columbia U graduate?and political activist, “Getting Free” Pg. 8-9 JF)Beyond these two basic awarenesses, there is the recognition of the linkages between our many miseries and the wage slave system. This knowledge is more difficult to acquire, mainly because capitalists, and their public relations people, take such pains to blame the sufferings of the world on anything and everything other than their own practices. If there is starvation in Bangladesh, it’s because there are too many people and not because agricultural self-sufficiency has been destroyed by capitalist world markets. If the oceans are dying from oil tanker flushes, this is a shame, but it’s really no one’s fault; it’s just the price we must pay for progress and civilization. If millions are living in abject poverty in the shantytowns of third world cities, there is nothing unusual about this; it’s just part of the worldwide process of urbanization they never mention that governments and corporations have seized the peasants’ lands, forcing them to leave their homes. If cities are filling up with the homeless, it’s because these people are lazy and won’t look for work, and not because there aren't enough jobs for everyone and rents are sky-high. The list of such subterfuges is endless. The truth is that most of the suffering in the world now is directly attributable to capitalists. If it were not for capitalists, most of the illness in the world could be eliminated, as well as most of the hunger, ignorance, homelessness, environmental destruction, congestion, warfare, crime, insecurity, waste, boredom, loneliness, and so forth. Even much of the suffering caused by hurricanes, floods, droughts, and earthquakes can be laid at the feet of capitalists because capitalists prevent us from preparing for and responding to these disasters as a community, in an intelligent way. And recently, capitalists are to blame for the increased severity of some of these events due to global warming, which capitalists have caused. Unless you’re already convinced, I know you’re not going to believe these bald claims. But others have documented the linkages between these various evils and the profit system, if you wish to study their works. Impact CalculusCapitalism causes incalculable deaths—nothing can outweighHerod 7 (James, Columbia U graduate?and political activist, “Getting Free” Pg. 22-23 JF)We must never forget that we are at war, however, and that we have been for five hundred years. We are involved in class warfare. This defines our situation historically and sets limits to what we can do. It would be nice to think of peace, for example, but this is out of the question. It is excluded as an option by historical conditions. Peace can be achieved only by destroying capitalism. The casualties from this war, on our side, long ago reached astronomical sums. It is estimated that thirty million people perished during the first century of the capitalist invasion of the Americas, including millions of Africans who were worked to death as slaves. Thousands of peasants died in the great revolts in France and Germany in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. During the enclosures movement in England and the first wave of industrialization, hundreds of thousands of people died needlessly. African slaves died by the millions (an estimated fifteen million) during the Atlantic crossing. Hundreds of poor people were hanged in London in the early nineteenth century to enforce the new property laws. During the Paris uprising of 1871, thirty thousand communards were slaughtered. Twenty million were lost in Joseph Stalin’s gulag, and millions more perished during the 1930s when the Soviet state expropriated the land and forced the collectivization of agriculture an event historically comparable to the enclosures in England (and thus the Bolsheviks destroyed one of the greatest peasant revolutions of all time). Thousands of militants were murdered by the German police during the near revolution in Germany and Austria in 1919. Thousands of workers and peasants were killed during the Spanish Civil War. Adolf Hitler killed ten million people in concentration camps (including six million Jews in the gas chambers). An estimated two hundred thousand labor leaders, activists, and citizens have been murdered in Guatemala since the coup engineered by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in 1954. Thousands were lost in the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. Half a million communists were massacred in Indonesia in 1975. Millions of Vietnamese were killed by French and U.S. capitalists during decades of colonialism and war. And how many were killed during British capital’s subjugation of India, and during capitalist Europe’s colonization of Asia and Africa? A major weapon of capitalists has always been to simply murder those who are threatening their rule. Thousands were killed by the contras and death squads in Nicaragua and El Salvador. Thousands were murdered in Chile by Augusto Pinochet during his counterrevolution, after the assassination of Salvador Allende. Speaking of assassinations, there is a long list: Patrice Lumumba, Rosa Luxemburg, Antonio Gramsci (died in prison), Ricardo Flores Magon (died in prison), Che Guevara, Gustav Landauer, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., Fred Hampton, George Jackson, the Haymarket anarchists, Amilcar Cabral, Steve Biko, Karl Liebnicht, Nat Turner, and thousands more. Thousands are being murdered every year now in Colombia. Thousands die every year in the workplace in the United States alone. Eighty thousand die needlessly in hospitals annually in the United States due to malpractice and negligence. Fifty thousand die each year in automobile accidents in the United States, deaths directly due to intentional capitalist decisions to scuttle mass transit in favor of an economy based on oil, roads, and cars (and unsafe cars to boot). Thousands have died in mines since capitalism began. Millions of people are dying right now, every year, from famines directly attributable to capitalists and from diseases easily prevented but for capitalists. Nearly all poverty-related deaths are because of capitalists. We cannot begin to estimate the stunted, wasted, and shortened lives caused by capitalists, not to mention the millions who have died fighting their stupid little world wars and equally stupid colonial wars. (This enumeration is very far from complete.) Capitalists (generically speaking) are not merely thieves; they are murderers. Their theft and murder is on a scale never seen before in history a scale so vast it boggles the mind. Capitalists make Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Genghis Khan, and Attila the Hun look like boy scouts. This is a terrible enemy we face. ***SPACE IMPACTS***Turns CaseCapitalism inevitably manufactures crisis in space – takes out solvency and turns caseDickens 10 (Peter, Affiliated Lecturer in the Department of Sociology, Faculty of Politics, Psychology, Sociology and International Studies , University of Cambridge, "The Humanization of the Cosmos—To What End?," [] AD: 6-29-11, jam)Galactic Colonialism, Risk, and War But even if it were desirable, the success of a galactic colonialism is by no means guaranteed. This is because the very venture of space colonization brings new risks. The fifteenth-century Renaissance and the Enlightenment placed great faith in science as a means of bringing “progress.” Now such progress is regularly challenged. Furthermore, much scientific intervention today stems from the crises stemming from earlier intervention, or what some social scientists have called “manufactured risk.”19 This kind of risk, for which no one agency or individual is usually culpable, is readily recognizable in space-humanization progress. Note, for example, that there are now around fourteen thousand tracked objects circling around the earth, known as “space debris” or “space junk.” Improved tracking systems will increase the number of smaller, observable tracked objects to around thirty thousand, many of these causing potential damage. Even whole satellites may collide. Such collisions are estimated at millions or even billions to one. But on February 10, 2009, such a collision actually happened. A defunct Russian satellite crashed into an American commercial satellite, generating thousands of pieces of orbiting debris.20 Space junk poses a serious threat to the whole enterprise of space colonization, and plans are now afoot to launch even more satellites, designed to drag older satellites out of orbit in order to avoid collisions.21 Space colonization brings a number of other manufactured risks. The farther space vehicles penetrate the solar system, the more likely it is that they will be powered by nuclear, rather than solar, energy. It is not widely appreciated, for example, that the 1997 Cassini Mission to Saturn’s moons (via Jupiter and Venus) was powered by plutonium. One estimate is that if something had gone wrong while Cassini was still circling the earth, some thirty to forty million deaths could have occurred.22 No plans were in place for such an eventuality. Yet, as early as 1964, a plutonium-powered generator fell to earth, having failed to achieve orbit. Dr. John Gofman, professor of medical physics at the University of California, Berkeley, then argued that there was probably a direct link between that crash and an increase of lung cancer on Earth. Both President Obama and the Russian authorities are now arguing for generating electricity with plutonium in space, and building nuclear-propelled rockets for missions to Mars.23 Some of the wilder plans for space colonization also entail major risk. These include proposals for “planetary engineering,” whereby the climates of other planets would be changed in such a way as to support life. Dyes, artificial dust clouds, genetically engineered bacteria, and the redirecting of sunlight by satellite mirrors are all being advanced as means of “terraforming,” or making parts of the cosmos more like earth. This and the Cassini example further demonstrate the nature of “manufactured risk.” Science and technology, far from creating Renaissance or Enlightenment-style optimism and certainty, are creating new problems that are unforeseen and extremely difficult to cope with. Turns CaseCapitalism trivializes space travel and causes space junkLobel 6 (Hannah, Editor-in-chief, Texas International Law Journal, Utne November/December, p. 44, JM)Elon Musk of PayPal fame is working on sending spacecraft into orbit through his company Space Exploration Technologies (called SpaceX). He's framed his ambitions as a first step toward ensuring a spacefaring civilization that could survive Earth's demise. Another siliconaire, CEO Jeff Bezos, has built buzz for his Blue Origin venture-which aims to launch tourists into suborbital bliss from the company's West Texas spaceport-mainly by being secretive about it. Several states are gearing up to cash in on the new industry by allocating tax dollars to build their own spaceports. And Budget Suites of America CEO Robert Bigelow is working on lodging. He successfully launched a one-third-scale model of his inflatable hotel, Genesis 1, in July. (Ironically, the project was initiated at NASA, which abandoned it in 2000 and then sold Bigelow development rights.) The possibilities to capitalize don't end there. There's lunar and asteroid mining, advertising, solar power collection, and more. After Las Vegas played host this summer to the first of two conferences highlighting space's commercial prospects, a city newspaper's editorial page crooned: "When flexibility and innovation are called for, nothing has ever succeeded like the profit-seeking free market." Despite all the dreams the free market seems set to fulfill, however, the reliance on a capitalist mentality carries familiar pitfalls. In Space: The Fragile Frontier (American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, 2006), author and space technology consultant Mark Williamson warns that our commercial endeavors are already wreaking environmental havoc. Littered with human-made space junk, Earth's orbit could prove dangerous not only to government endeavors, such as the space shuttle and International Space Station, but also to commercial satellites. With more and more entities laying claims to space, Williamson warns that development and exploration guidelines must be laid down "before the 'final frontier' becomes a lawless, selfish, and untamed frontier." What's more, while rocketeers like Branson and Musk promise the moon, a little skepticism would go a long way toward determining whether the time has really come to trade the starts and spurts of science for the swashbuckling mentality of the marketplace. "There has been a lot of hype," says Roger Launius, chairman of the Space History Division at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum and former NASA chief historian. Though he tips his hat to Rutan's SpaceShipOne (which hangs in his museum), he notes that NASA was flying similar Mach 3 aircraft at higher speeds more than 40 years ago. On suborbital flights like those being sold by Branson, passengers can float weightless for a few minutes and quickly snap a shot of the curve of Earth before heading for safe ground. Breaking through to what most of us consider space-the dark expanse John Glenn reached in 1962-is far more demanding and risky. That so much attention has been lavished on an industry whose accomplishments lag decades behind NASA's is testament to the savvy marketing of outfits courting capital and public opinion. Commercialization has been framed as populism, as the answer to an innovation-stifling bureaucracy, and several millionaires stand to profit. These outfits have not had to face the tough scrutiny that comes with inevitable failure, however, or the soul searching triggered by the loss of human resources-traumas that have left NASA averse to risk. The public mourned the astronauts lost in the Challenger and Columbia accidents as people who died for their country and for science. How will we regard the deaths of adventurers risking life and limb for a $200,000 view? The space program was never a pure pursuit of knowledge, of course: Apollo was largely a warning shot in the Cold War. But the impact of the feat managed to transcend politics. It inspired wonder and, as it evoked the promise of worlds beyond our own, encouraged people to envision new possibilities. Those intangibles, unlikely to fit into a business plan, are at risk if exploration is put at the mercy of pure profit. Impact: Space MilitarizationCapitalism causes space militarization Cooper 9 (Brent, U of British Columbia, “Lost In Space: A Realist and Marxist Analysis of US Space Militarization” Pg. 13-14 JF) 7/6In an article in the International Socialist Review, scholar Noam Chomsky describes missile defense as a “small footnote” in the broader space weaponization agenda laid out in the Vision for 2020 document. The mission statement is, of course, “to protect US interests and investment.” Chomsky writes that since poor countries would opt for anti-satellite weapons, rather than anti-missile, and the US needs satellites to operate the missile defense system, first-strike weapons in space are a requirement to achieve what the US calls “full-spectrum dominance.” He parallels naval armament a century ago with space weaponization today by how the British Navy was charged with protecting British commercial interests in the 19th century. Also, US military expenditure laid the foundations for subsequent industries that the US would come to dominate for many years such as steel and automobile manufacturing. Thus, it is clear that space weaponization represents the perpetuation of the US imperative to remain at the forefront of technological innovation, in addition to protecting its current assets in space. Furthermore, a report called Global Trends 2015 predicts the widening economic division between “haves” and “have-nots.” The perseverance of this space militarization agenda is coincidental with globalization. Space weaponization is being sold in terms of physical security but is really about an insurance policy for a global economic dominance of haves over have-nots. As Chomsky summarizes, globalization will increase in the “preferred sense – meaning investor rights.” Space militarization triggers a US-Russia nuclear warRozoff 9 (Rick, anti-war writer, “Militarization of Space: Threat of Nuclear War on Earth” 6/18 JF) 7/6To confirm the seriousness and urgency of Hu's and Medvedev's concerns over the expansion of the arms race and potential armed conflict into space, on the same day as their statement was released Russian Deputy Defence Minister Vladimir Popovkin addressed a press conference in Moscow and issued comments that were summarized by the local media as "Russia warns that technology failure with weapons in space may accidentally invite a massive response amounting to nuclear war." He warned that his nation's "response to American weapons in orbit would be asymmetric but adequate." [3] “The Kremlin has criticized U.S. plans for space-based weapons, saying they could trigger a new arms race. Russia and China have pushed for an international agreement banning space weapons, but their proposals have been rejected by the United States. “The United States action can only be described as unilateral and undermining international and strategic stability, actions that could eventually result in another stage of the arms race. “Ballistic missile defence systems, whether ground-based, airborne or space-based, can also potentially target satellites. That is, the militarization of space can result in a nuclear conflagration on earth not only by accident or the law of unintended consequences but fully by design. If the US plan is, by a combination of ground, sea and air delivery systems, to destroy any ability to retaliate after a devastating first blow, the Russian general warned of what in fact would ensue: “The Americans will never manage to implement this scenario because Russian strategic nuclear forces, including the Russian Strategic Missile Forces, will be capable of delivering a retaliatory strike given any course of developments.Impact: Space MilitarizationCapitalism causes inevitable extinction [and is more probable than asteroids] – ecological destruction, and space militarization causes miscalc – escalates to full-blown U.S/Russia warIndependent Media Center 3 (IMC, grassroots network committed to using media production and distribution as tools for promoting social and economic justice, May 14, [web.web/20050220092917/] AD: 7-4-11, jam)Bertrand Russell throughout his long career as a public intellectual and political activist had reason to reflect on the follies of humanity and the real threats to human survival, threats which are self induced. Much speculation and movie making is devoted toward such survival threatening events as asteroid strikes and mantle head plumes. What is totally ignored is the threat to human survival posed by our own institutions. We can notch another one for the propaganda model; it is to be expected that our pathological institutions would not dwell on their inherent pathology. We can expect nothing less of the corporate media. I shall argue that we face what I refer to as "Russell's problem": “are Homo sapiens an intelligent maladaptive organism doomed to self extinction”? There exists good reason to suppose that a maladaptive, intelligent, organism would indeed cause its own extinction simply because of the destructive potential of intelligence. This is one of the farces of many science fiction stories, such as Star Trek, which posit the existence of hideous innately war like but highly intelligent species. This is not a productive mix; surely any advanced species, in order to reach such heights as inter-galactic travel, would need to be a species that places a premium on cooperation and solidarity. An avaricious intelligent species would only over time succeed in destroying itself and much of the ecological basis for the support of life long before it would be able to traverse wormholes. There exist three threats to survival namely nuclear war, ecological change and north-south conflict. All three I would argue can be traced to a single source that being the pathological nature of state capitalism. What is frightening is that eventual self induced extinction is a rational consequence of our system of world order much like the destruction of the system of world order prior to 1914 was a rational consequence of its internal nature. I shall focus in this essay on nuclear war, the most immediate threat. In doing so we will come to appreciate the nexus between this threat, globalisation and north-south conflict. Currently we are witnessing a major expansion in the US global military system. One facet of this expansion is the globalisation of US nuclear war planning known as "adaptive planning". The idea here is that the US would be able to execute a nuclear strike against any target on Earth at very short notice. For strategic planners the world's population is what they refer to as a "target rich environment". The Clinton era commander of US nuclear forces, Admiral Mies, stated that nuclear ballistic missile submarines would be able to "move undetected to any launch point" threatening "any spot on Earth". What lies at the heart of such a policy is the desire to maintain global strategic superiority what is known as "full spectrum dominance" previously referred to as "escalation dominance". Full spectrum dominance means that the US would be able to wage and win any type of war ranging from a small scale contingency to general nuclear war. Strategic nuclear superiority is to be used to threaten other states so that they toe the party line. The Bush administration's Nuclear Posture Review stipulated that nuclear weapons are needed in case of "surprising military developments" not necessarily limited to chemical or biological weapons. The Clinton administration was more explicit stating in its 2001 Pentagon report to Congress that US nuclear forces are to "hedge against defeat of conventional forces in defense of vital interests". The passage makes clear that this statement is not limited to chemical or biological weapons. We have just seen in Iraq what is meant by the phrase "defense of vital interests". Washington is asserting that if any nation were to have the temerity to successfully defend itself against US invasion, armed with conventional weapons only, then instant annihilation awaits. "What we say goes" or you go is the message being conveyed. Hitler no doubt would have had a similar conception of "deterrence". It should be stressed that this is a message offered to the whole world after all it is now a target rich environment. During the cold war the US twice contemplated using nuclear weapons in such a fashion both in Vietnam, the first at Dien Bien Phu and during Nixon administration planning for "operation duck hook". In both cases the main impediments to US action were the notion that nuclear weapons were not politically "useable" in such a context and because of the Soviet deterrent. The Soviet deterrent is no more and the US currently is hotly pursuing the development of nuclear weapons that its designers believe will be "useable" what the Clinton administration referred to as low yield earth penetrating nuclear <CONTINUED><CONTINUED>weapons and what the Bush administration refers to as the Rapid Nuclear Earth Penetrator. Such strategic reforms are meant to make nuclear war a more viable policy option, on the basis that lower yields will not immediately kill as many innocent people as higher yield weapons. This is known as the lowering of the threshold of nuclear war. The development of the RNEP draws us closer to the prospect of nuclear war, including accidental nuclear war, because lower yields will lower the barrier between conventional and nuclear war. There will exist no real escalatory firewall between these two forms of warfare which means that in any conventional crisis involving nuclear powers, there will exist a strong incentive to strike first. A relationship very similar to the interaction between the mobilisation schedules of the great powers prior to 1914. There exist strong parallels between US nuclear planning and the German Imperial Staff’s Schlieffen plan. Lowering the threshold of nuclear war will also enhance pressures for global nuclear proliferation. If the US is making its arsenal more useable by working towards achieving a first strike capability, then others such as Russia and China must react in order to ensure the viability of their deterrents. Moreover, the potential third world targets of US attack would also have greater incentive to ensure that they also have a nuclear deterrent. It is also understood that the development of these nuclear weapons may require the resumption of nuclear testing, a key reason for the Administration's lack of readiness to abide by the CTBT treaty, which is meant to ban nuclear testing. The CTBT is a key feature of contemporary global nuclear non proliferation regimes for the US signed the CTBT in order to extend the nuclear non proliferation treaty (NPT) indefinitely. Abandoning the CTBT treaty, in order to develop a new generation of more "useable" nuclear weapons that will lower the threshold of nuclear war, will place the NPT regime under further strain and greatly increase the chances of further nuclear proliferation. There exists a "deadly connection" between global weapons of mass destruction proliferation and US foreign policy. One may well ask what has all this to do with state capitalism? Consider the thinking behind the militarisation of space, outlined for us by Space Command; “historically military forces have evolved to protect national interests and investments – both military and economic. During the rise of sea commerce, nations built navies to protect and enhance their commercial interests. During the westward expansion of the continental United States, military outposts and the cavalry emerged to protect our wagon trains, settlements and roads”. The document goes on, “the emergence of space power follows both of these models”. Moreover, “the globalization of the world economy will continue, with a widening between ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’. The demands of unilateral strategic superiority, long standing US policy known as "escalation" or "full spectrum" dominance, compel Washington to pursue “space control". This means that, according to a report written under the chairmanship of Donald Rumsfeld, "in the coming period the US will conduct operations to, from, in and through space" which includes "power projection in, from and through space". Toward this end, Washington has resisted efforts in the UN to create an arms control regime for space. As a result there will inevitably arise an arms race in space. The importance of this simply cannot be over-emphasised. Throughout the nuclear age there have been a number of close calls, due to both human and technical error, that almost lead to a full scale nuclear exchange between Washington and Moscow. These glitches in command and control systems were ultimately benign because both sides had early warning satellites placed in specialised orbits which could be relied upon to provide real time imagery of nuclear missile launch sites. However the militarisation of space now means that these satellites will become open game; the benign environment in space will disappear if the militarisation of space continues. Thus if the US were to "conduct operations to, from in and through space" it will do see remotely. Technical failure may result in the system attacking Russian early warning satellites. Without question this would be perceived by the Russian's as the first shot in a US nuclear first strike. Consider for instance a curious event that occurred in 1995. A NASA research rocket, part of a study of the northern lights, was fired over Norway. The rocket was perceived by the Russian early warning system as the spear of a US first strike. The Russian system then began a countdown to full scale nuclear response; it takes only a single rocket to achieve this effect because it was no doubt perceived by Russian planners that this single rocket was meant to disable their command and control system as a result of electromagnetic pulse effects. To prevent the loss of all nuclear forces in a subsequent follow on strike the Russian's would need to launch a full scale response as soon as possible. Because the US itself has a hair trigger launch on warning posture a Russian attack would be followed by a full scale US attack; the US has a number of "reserve options" in its war plans, thus such an accidental launch could trigger a global chain of nuclear release around the globe. Calamity was averted in 1995 because Russia's early warning satellites would have demonstrated that there was no launch of US nuclear forces. If these satellites were to be taken out then this ultimate guarantee disappears; the Russian ground based radar system has a number of key holes that prevent it from warning of an attack through two key corridors, one from the Atlantic the other from the Pacific. In the future if an event such as 1995 were to occur in space the Russians no longer would have the level of comfort provided by its space based assets. The militarisation of space greatly increases the chances of a full scale accidental nuclear war. Impact: Space War/Earth Tradeoff The plan trades off with addressing inequality and various crises on Earth and causes galactic resource warsDickens 9 (Peter, Affiliated Lecturer in the Department of Sociology, Faculty of Politics, Psychology, Sociology and International Studies , U of Cambridge, May, The Sociological Review, Vol. 57, Iss. Supp. s1, p. 68-82, jam)The Cosmos as Capitalism’s Outside.The imminent conquest of outer space raises the question of ‘outside’ and ‘inside’ yet again. Capitalism now has the cosmos in its sights, an outside which can be privately or publicly owned, made into a commodity, an entity for which nations and private companies can compete. As such they are a possible site of armed hostilities. This means, contra Hardt and Negri, that there is an outside after all, one into which the competitive market can now expand indefinitely. A new kind of imperialism is therefore underway, albeit not one attempting to conquer and exploit people ‘outside’ since there are no consumers or labour power to exploit in other parts of the solar system. Ferrying wealthy tourists into the cosmos is a first and perhaps most spectacular part of this process of capital’s cosmic expansion. Especially important in the longer term is making outer space into a source of resources and materials. These will in due course be incorporated into production-processes, most of which will be still firmly lodged on earth. Access to outer space is, potentially at least, access to an infinite outside array of resources. These apparently have the distinct advantage of not being owned or used by any pre-existing society and not requiring military force by an imperialising power gaining access to these resources. Bringing this outside zone into capitalism may at first seem beneficial to everyone. But this scenario is almost certainly not so trouble-free as may at first seem. On the one hand, the investment of capital into outer space would be a huge diversion from the investments needed to address many urgent inequalities and crises on Earth. On the other hand, this same access is in practice likely to be conducted by a range of competing imperial powers. Hardt and Negri tell us that the history of imperialising wars is over. This may or may not be the case as regards imperialism on earth. But old-style imperialist, more particularly inter-imperialist, wars seem more likely than ever as growing and competing power-blocs (the USA and China are currently amongst the most likely protagonists) compete for resources on earth and outer space. Such, in rather general terms, is the prospect for a future, galactic, imperialism between competing powers. But what are the relations, processes and mechanisms underlying this new phenomenon? How should we understand the regional rivalries and ideologies involved and the likely implications of competing empires attempting to incorporate not only their share of resources on earth but on global society’s ‘outside’? Impact: Space War Capitalism causes space resource warsDickens 9 (Peter, Affiliated Lecturer in the Department of Sociology, Faculty of Politics, Psychology, Sociology and International Studies , U of Cambridge, May, The Sociological Review, Vol. 57, Iss. Supp. s1, p. 68-82, jam)Imperialism on earth and outer space should be seen within the above context of an ever-expanding capitalism, economic-cum-social-cum-resource crises and new wars. Space tourism and the search for new materials are indicators of how capitalism and imperialism are now developing in outer space. But imperialism involves more than the expansion of an economic structure. It entails a competitive struggle between capitalist states. This involves the constant upgrading of technologies and social relations and continuing conflict over ownership of territory and resources. These processes necessarily involve the political power of competing nation states. If we are to adequately understand the tensions and conflicts arising from imperialisms on Earth and in outer space, the notion of ‘spatial fixes’ therefore needs combining with an understanding of capitalist states (or in some cases, such as the European Union, a fusion of states) and their relationships with different social interests. This is one way in which Harvey’s analysis can be taken forward. Impact: US-Sino Space ConflictInter-imperialist rivalry between the US and China in space is inevitable under capitalismDickens 9 (Peter, Affiliated Lecturer in the Department of Sociology, Faculty of Politics, Psychology, Sociology and International Studies , U of Cambridge, May, The Sociological Review, Vol. 57, Iss. Supp. s1, p. 68-82, jam)The imperialising tendencies of the United States and Russia were originally the chief generators of the state-driven Chinese space program in the 1950s. Nuclear armed ballistic missiles were seen by the Chinese authorities as the way to counter both the American threat in Taiwan and the supposed threat from the Soviet Union (Dellios 2005). The form of the military industrial complex now appears to be changing, largely as a result of broader attempts to marketise the Chinese economy, including its space and military sectors. On the one hand China possesses what one commentator calls ‘one of the oldest, largest, and most diversified military industrial complexes in the world’, consisting of some 300,000 engineers and technicians working in about 1,000 enterprises employing a total of three million workers (Bitzinger 2005) . These supply a complete range of weaponry from small arms to intercontinental ballistic missiles (Simons et al 2007). Yet these enterprises are widely seen by the Chinese authorities as inefficient, technologically-backward and too big a drain on public resources (Canadian Security 2003). As an indication of ongoing reforms, ten new ‘defense industry enterprise groups’ have recently been made, these arguably being the first signs of a state-led ‘tertiary circuit’. The eventual form of the Chinese military-industrial-space-complex is unclear but the fact that China recently destroyed one of its old weather satellites with a ground-based missile means it certainly cannot be dismissed as ‘backward’ from a purely military perspective. Such are the key imperialist rivals, each seeking to make spatial fixes either on earth or in outer space. These rivalries are essential to the system as outlined by Harvey, each coalition responding in competitive military and economic fashion to the perceived challenges of others. Galactic colonialism causes U.S/China war Dickens 10 (Peter, Affiliated Lecturer in the Department of Sociology, Faculty of Politics, Psychology, Sociology and International Studies , University of Cambridge, "The Humanization of the Cosmos—To What End?," [] AD: 6-29-11, jam)But even manufactured risks may be minimal in scope, compared with another risk stemming from cosmic colonization. This is outright war. Armed conflict has long been a common feature of past colonialisms; between colonizing nations as well as between the colonizers and aboriginal peoples. Satellites are already a means by which territories and investments on Earth are monitored and protected by governments operating on behalf of their economic interests. But the prospect of galactic colonialisms raises the distinct possibility of hostilities in space. Galactic wars may therefore be the product of galactic colonialism. Such a scenario was prefigured by the Star Trek science fiction television series in which the main role of “The Federation” is the protection of capitalist mining colonies.24 It is a discomforting fact that both China and the United States are now actively developing their own versions of “full spectrum dominance.” China demonstrated its capabilities in January 2007 by shooting down one of its own defunct satellites. In February 2008, the U.S. Navy demonstrated a similar capability, destroying a faulty U.S. satellite with a sea-based missile. An arms race in outer space has already started. ***GENERIC IMPACTS***Impact: DiseaseCapitalism prevents innovation for life-saving medicinePalecek 9 (Mike, Iowa author, former federal prisoner for peace, and newspaper reporter, Aug 12, [capitalism-versus-science.htm] AD: 7-1-11, jam)The pharmaceutical industry is well known for price gouging and refusing to distribute medicines to those who can’t afford it. The lack of drugs to combat the AIDS pandemic, particularly in Africa, is enough to prove capitalism’s inability to distribute medicine to those in need. But what role does the profit motive play in developing new drugs? The big pharmaceuticals have an equally damning record in the research and development side of their industry. AIDS patients can pay tens of thousands of dollars per year for the medication they need to keep them alive. In 2003, when a new drug called Fuzeon was introduced, there was an outcry over the cost, which would hit patients with a bill of over $20,000 per year. Roche's chairman and chief executive, Franz Humer tried to justify the price tag, “We need to make a decent rate of return on our innovations. This is a major breakthrough therapy… I can't imagine a society that doesn't want that innovation to continue.” But the innovation that Mr. Humer speaks of is only half-hearted. Drug companies are not motivated by compassion; they are motivated by cash. To a drug company, a person with AIDS is not a patient, but a customer. The pharmaceutical industry has a financial incentive to make sure that these people are repeat-customers, consequently there is very little research being done to find a cure. Most research done by the private sector is centered on finding new anti-retroviral drugs - drugs that patients will have to continue taking for a lifetime. There has been a push to fund research for an AIDS vaccine and, more recently, an effective microbicide. However, the vast majority of this funding comes from government and non-profit groups. The pharmaceutical industry simply isn’t funding the research to tackle this pandemic. And why would they? No company on earth would fund research that is specifically designed to put them out of business. Similar problems arise in other areas of medical research. In the cancer field an extremely promising drug was discovered in early 2007. Researchers at the University of Alberta discovered that a simple molecule DCA can reactivate mitochondria in cancer cells, allowing them to die like normal cells. DCA was found to be extremely effective against many forms of cancer in the laboratory and shows promise for being an actual cure for cancer. DCA has been used for decades to treat people with mitochondria disorders. Its effects on the human body are therefore well known, making the development process much simpler. But clinical trials of DCA have been slowed by funding issues. DCA is not patented or patentable. Drug companies will not have the ability to make massive profits off the production of this drug, so they are not interested. Researchers have been forced to raise money themselves to fund their important work. Initial trials, on a small scale, are now under way and the preliminary results are very encouraging. But it has been two years since this breakthrough was made and serious study is only just getting underway. The U of A’s faculty of medicine has been forced to beg for money from government and non-profit organizations. To date, they have not received a single cent from a for-profit medical organization. Impact: DiseaseCapitalism co-opts disease preventionHaynes 9 (Mike, Staff, International Socialism 123, June 25, JM)We need to take any argument about the role of medicine in health in two stages. The first is to stress the absolute importance of what is called primary prevention and not to fall into the trap of thinking that we can leave the causes of illness alone and focus on better treatment. Primary prevention saves lives but primary prevention may not involve medical measures in the narrow sense at all. Only three out of the 39 proposals made by the 1997 Acheson Report of the Inquiry into Inequalities in Health related directly to health service provision.24 If the problem is a choice between a worse treatment and a better one, we should obviously demand the better one. But the issue should not be about whether we can afford treatments but whether we can afford people to be ill. It is often said that medical costs will always rise. This is an absurd argument in itself because it ignores the way in which the drive for profit is behind the cost rises that exist. But even if it were true, reducing the numbers of ill people in the first place would reduce the cost problems. The less people that you have to treat, the more you can afford to spend on making those who have the genuine misfortune (and not the socially determined one) to fall ill. The real problem then is to alter the fundamentals of the generation of illness caused by class society. Primary prevention is therefore politically challenging. There has always been a minority tendency in the medical establishment that links health improvement to real social reform, and within this group a smaller one still who continue to insist that so long as capitalism and class society exist we will remain trapped in unequal lives and unequal deaths.25 But many health professionals also see the immediate attraction of the medical fix. And so do we as patients once we get trapped in ill health. Even the members of the team that produced the original Black Report were split on this issue. According to Sir Douglas Black: We were all agreed that education and preventative measures, specifically directed towards the socially deprived, were necessary. But the sociological members of the group…considered that the consequent expenditure should be obtained by diversion from acute services. On the other hand the medical members…felt that the acute services played a vital role in the prevention of chronic disability and could not be further cut back without serious effects on emergency care, on the training of doctors for both hospital work and for family practice and on the length of waiting lists. We spent a long time, without real success trying to resolve this matter.26 This fudge is not enough. Consider the problem of mental ill health. Its burden continues to rise in the advanced world. There is a big question over whether the medical fix actually works. But suppose the evidence was clearer that it did. It would still not be enough for three reasons. First, “it is inconceivable that enough professionals could be trained and employed to treat the many millions of causalities of our psychologically toxic social environment one at a time”. Second, if the problem is the toxic environment then once people are returned to it their symptoms are likely to recur. Third, this approach does nothing to stop new cases appearing.27 But the same logic applies to other areas. Britain, for example, is acknowledged to have one of the poorest records in the advanced world for longer-term survival after major incidents like cancer and heart attacks. You can now guess that there may be two explanations for this. One is medical—the weaknesses of early identification, treatment and follow up. The other is inequality. If inequality increases your chances of getting a life threatening disease, then however good the medical fix the pressure will be on again once you return to the environment that helped to cause the illness in the first place. At this point, however, many take fright. It seems easier to imagine that the way forward is to work on medical solutions to ill health and demand more resources for these. But this takes us to the second issue of whether a health system run for profit can ever rationally answer human need. The answer is an unequivocal no. The first simple rule of healthcare is Tudor Hart’s “inverse care law”, which says that “the availability of good medical care tends to vary inversely with the need for the population served [and this] operates more completely where medical care is most exposed to market forces”.28 A national health system has to be based on principles of comprehensiveness, universality and equitability. “Supply and demand”, internal and external markets, subvert these principles and undermine the capacity of rational health planning. They even undermine the very sources of information which would make such planning possible. The result is variation in the coverage of basic services. With this comes a huge loss in real efficiency. A second simple rule of healthcare then emerges: the more the logic of capitalism determines the supply of healthcare, the higher the costs, the larger the management layer, and the greater the diversion of resources away from treatment and care and into private hands. With this level of irrationality in the system we can then move to a third simple rule of healthcare: the more the logic of capitalism determines the supply of healthcare, the more the healthcare system itself may become a threat to social health. Impact: DiseaseCapitalism causes poverty and diseaseHaynes 9 (Mike, Staff, International Socialism 123, June 25, JM)Stand outside any doctor’s surgery and you will see people carried there by inequalities. Their illnesses, major and minor, physical and mental, are markers of where they stand in society. When it comes to ill health, less is always more—the less your situation, the more likely you are to have a health problem. It is a short step from here to pointing to the use of class as an explanatory category: your class position causes you to be more or less sick, to live more or less long. And from here it is only another short step, though one more establishment researchers are understandably loath to take, to argue that, since capitalism is at the root of class society, it is capitalism that makes you more or less ill. If health problems are the product of social organisation, and if we want to really address them, we have to focus on the social conditions and social organisation that give rise to them. As Sir Michael Marmot, the leading epidemiologist in the UK puts it, “Inequalities in health between and within countries are avoidable”. HYPERLINK "" \l "123haynes_1" 1 Premature death arises from three sources: infectious or communicable diseases such as typhus, typhoid, smallpox, cholera, Aids, etc; non-communicable diseases such as heart disease, cancer, nutritional diseases; and violence. In the past infectious diseases played a much larger part than they do today. It is not that non-communicable diseases did not exist but that infectious diseases carried people off first. The shift towards a predominance of death from non-communicable diseases (and violence) is called the “epidemiological transition”. Infectious diseases have not gone away. In poorer parts of the world such diseases continue to play a crucial role—Aids is one example, alongside diseases of poverty that flow from dirty water, inadequate sanitation and the like. But only in Africa is infectious disease still the major cause of premature death: “Of the 45 million deaths among adults age 15 years and older in 2002, 32 million were due to non-communicable disease and a further 4.5 million to violent causes”. HYPERLINK "" \l "123haynes_2" 2 Not every disease and cause of death shows a clear socio-economic pattern but the most common diseases and causes of death do. Death does not strike randomly. There has always been a general understanding of this. What is different now is the focus on the systematic process of causation and the need to connect up different elements of an explanation of health and ill health, to seek out what has been called “the cause of the cause”. It is this that takes us to the problem of social class and health, and to a view of capitalism as a toxic form of human society. Impact: DiseaseThe inequalities inherent in capitalism engender diseaseHaynes 9 (Mike, Staff, International Socialism 123, June 25, JM)The way that health is closely moulded by inequality and unequal power and control was set out in 1980 in the UK in The Black Report. Originally sponsored by the 1970s Labour government it was politically sidelined by the first Thatcher government.3 The opponents of the social approach to health then tried to explain away the evidence of the link between health and inequality. They attacked the reliability of the data, focusing on what is called the “health selection effect”. Causation might run not from society to health but from health to society. For example, as unemployment rises we know that the unemployed will register more illness than the employed. So does unemployment make you sick or does being sick mean that you are more likely to be unemployed? The attempts to focus on health selection, however, have failed. In most instances the causation does flow from society to health: “There is no evidence to support health selection as an explanation of broader social inequalities in health,” wrote Marmot in 1994 and the evidence against the health selection hypothesis has grown.4 In 2003 the World Health Organisation published the second edition of a document edited by Marmot and Richard Wilkinson called, The Solid Facts.5 This attempted to quash such arguments and finally establish that there is a strong “social gradient” of health and ill health. Social conditions mold people’s early lives, their work and leisure, their patterns of consumption, friendship groups, etc, and this can then explain, at the group level, patterns of disease and death to quite an astonishing degree. Wilkinson and Kate Pickett reiterate this same argument in a recent book, The Spirit Level. In rich societies, as the level of inequality rises, so average life expectancy falls and the rates of physical and mental illness rise. Inequality can also help predict levels of obesity, teenage pregnancy, illiteracy, crime, murder, people in prison, happiness—the connections seem almost endless.6 Greater inequality produces a situation where the same health risks produce different outcomes depending on who you are. Take a group of senior civil servants who smoke and compare them with a lower grade group who also smoke. Which will have the higher death rate? This is the type of question asked in the “Whitehall Studies”, led by Marmot, which tracked ill health among civil servants in the UK for many years and whose results have inspired countless other studies. Here is the answer in Marmot’s words: An administrator who smokes 20 cigarettes a day has a lower risk of dying from lung cancer than does a lower grade civil servant who smokes the same amount even after pack years (packs per years times the number of years the person has smoked), tar content and the gradient in mortality from coronary heart diseases among non-smokers are taken into account.7 Impact: DiseaseClass distinction causes diseaseHaynes 9 (Mike, Staff, International Socialism 123, June 25, JM)What is more important from our point of view is that, once settled human societies begin to emerge from 10,000 BC to 6,000 BC, class organisation also developed with them. The ruling groups seized control of the social surplus, consuming more of it and also organising society to perpetuate their rule and their control. The paradox of the development of class society is that, although in the long run it develops the material wealth of society, it does so in such a way that the benefits go disproportionately to the few. This led to inequality being marked not only in differing life expectancies but in the degree to which lives are marked by disease. To make sense of this we need some basic demographic concepts. Infant mortality refers to deaths under the age of one, child mortality to deaths under the age of five and adult mortality to deaths over the age of 15. The fourth crucial concept is life expectancy. This is usually measured from birth. It is an average of the length of time those born live, so if life expectancy is low this does not necessarily mean that there are no old people. Rather life expectancy will be pulled down if large numbers die in the first years of life. With the development of class society new social forces emerged which moulded the patterns of life and death. Access to material resources now became unequal, along the lines of the class nature of society. This was true of normal times but it was even more true in years of famine. The regularity of famine reflected the interaction between nature and the economic and social systems, and the way that these determined the nature of agricultural production. Malnourishment was extensive. You could often determine a person’s place in society by how they looked physically. As Wilkinson puts it, “The rich were fat and the poor were thin”.8 The concentration of population in urban centres, albeit on a scale incomparably smaller than today, created a new vulnerability to infectious disease agents. In the towns not only were social conditions often bad, but also the water supply was polluted, sanitation systems were primitive and the air foul. The result was epidemic diseases such as typhus, typhoid, smallpox and endemic diseases (there all the time) such as tuberculosis. And every so often there was a good chance of pandemic diseases such as plague. In these settled societies violence now became more organised, whether it was the violence within societies or the violence between societies. War became a regular feature of social development and in its wake came not only death and destruction on the battlefield but social immiseration in the areas through which armies marched and fought.9 With low productivity and diseases rife, population grew slowly for thousands of years, as is apparent in table 1. Impact: DiseaseCapitalism creates cycles of health inequalityHaynes 9 (Mike, Staff, International Socialism 123, June 25, JM)There is good reason to think that per capita income (in today’s values) of around $10,000 is sufficient to solve the material problems underpinning health inequality. At this level there is enough go around and enough to provide the resources for adequate public health. What separates societies, therefore, is less the per capita income over this level (in the UK/US case we are looking at roughly three times this) than the degree to which it is unequally distributed, and the scale of relative deprivation between different social groups. The greater the degree of inequality, the greater the health gaps. As Wilkinson has put it, “People in a country can be twice as well off on average as those in another country without benefit to their mortality rates” if the distribution of income and wealth is unequal.14 This is explained by a third element, which is the way that capitalism not only generates material inequality, but also social mechanisms, that lead to ill health. The problem is both the material pressures on human beings—our basic work security, the environment, pollution, etc—and the uneven social and psychological means we have for dealing with the unequal outcomes that follow. This leads to a fourth element, which is that when these patterns are revealed the system can also encourage perverse responses. If society makes you ill, the obvious solution is to deal with the diseases of ill health at the societal level. But the temptation is often to push resources into dealing with the consequences. If the procedures to deal with consequences are themselves a source of profit, then the temptation will be to bend further discussion away from causes and social solutions towards a self-perpetuating pattern focused on medical technologies, drugs, therapies and the like. Fortunately capitalism also creates a fifth element: the knowledge base to understand the real relationship along with groups of people, those at the bottom and “professionals”, who should better understand the situation and can join together to demand change. However, the extent to which this will happen is a political issue. For a century now the medical profession has been divided between what have been called mercenaries, seeking to exploit ill health for gain, and missionaries, who are concerned to remove its social causes.15 But the mercenaries have now been supplemented by the managers who have benefited from the commercialisation and privatisation of health and who tell us that the way forward is health markets that they can run jointly with the mercenaries. Impact: DiseaseCapitalism is the root cause of diseaseHaynes 9 (Mike, Staff, International Socialism 123, June 25, JM)Why should this be? Material need cannot be ignored. Income poverty is not the basis for a good life, and societies with the greatest levels of inequality will also have the largest numbers of poor people. But it is relative poverty and position that matter most. So what is going on? The biomedical answer seems to be that vulnerability and susceptibility to illness and death are related to the degree of adversity in our lives. Some exercise is good for you but relentless physical demands in circumstances over which you have no control drain the body. Similarly, some stress is good for you but relentless worrying about job, home, family, etc not only drains you emotionally but feeds back into physical and mental ill health: The relationship among the nervous system, the endocrine system, and the immune system is emerging as the pathway that can help our understanding of the changes in health which are associated with changing social and economic conditions.17 In other words, although illness arises from bodily processes it is really a product of social organisation. And—this is crucial—because health follows the social gradient it is not just about improving the conditions of the poorest. In health terms it is in our collective and individual interest to tackle the problem more systematically. As Marmot puts it: Much of the discussion about social inequities in heath has focused on the health disadvantage of the lower class. This is analogous to seeing social problems as particular to a disadvantaged minority, rather than a problem for society as a whole.18 Marmot’s argument here is partly a reformulation of RH Tawney’s famous comment that “what thoughtful rich people call the problem of poverty, thoughtful poor people call with equal justice the problem of riches” but it is more. The steeper the social gradient, not only the bigger the health gap between those at the top and those at the bottom, but also the lower the average position of all. “The countries with the longest life expectancy are not the wealthiest but those with the smallest spread of income and the smallest proportion of the population in relative poverty.” There is therefore a problem with thinking that because I am near the top in UK terms (and the level of inequality in the UK is one of the highest) I will live longer than someone at the bottom or in the middle. This is true. But it is also true that you would live longer still if society were more equal. It was realised in the 1990s that “the mortality rate for the lowest social class in Sweden [with less inequality] is less than that for the top social class in the United Kingdom”.19Impact: Economic CrisesThe inherent contradictions of capitalism will continually produce economic crises 8 (Marxist website with a focus in the actions and perspectives of the masses, “An Introductory Explanation of Capitalist Economic Crises” 08/06 JF) 7/6The most fundamental dialectical contradiction in capitalist society is that between the social character of production and private appropriation. This same contradiction is the most fundamental explanation for the existence of crises in a capitalist economy. In capitalist society this general contradiction between production and consumption (or, spelling it out further, between limited production and desired higher consumption) still exists, but its nature is transformed. The new social character of production, together with improved technology (which also creates many of the necessary preconditions for social production), has qualitatively transformed the capability of people to produce goods; there has been a massive qualitative leap in the productive capability of society. The basic problem is no longer that a primitive social technique prevents the forces of production from easily being expanded to meet all the reasonable needs and wants of the people. Instead, the problem is that capitalism has an inherent internal flaw which prevents society from using its new productive capability to the fullest. This inherent internal flaw is the result of the first contradiction I mentioned, the fundamental contradiction of capitalist society, the contradiction between social production and private appropriation. Each time production really begins to soar this internal contradiction in capitalism results in a crisis, and production has to be drastically cut back again—even though the needs of the people are still unsatisfied. The necessary social form of production is in place (at least in rough approximation), but can’t be thoroughly employed. Sufficient technology has long been in place (and continues rapidly to improve), but again it cannot be thoroughly employed. It is the contradiction between social production and private appropriation, or in other words, the capitalist relations of production, which stand in the way of the full employment of this social production and technology to satisfy the needs of all the people. So the end result is the same as before capitalism arose: even though the social and technical productive capability now exists, not enough goods are actually produced and actually put into the hands of all those who need them. (Once again, the problem is aggravated by the capitalists ripping off a grossly disproportionate share of what is produced, but this is still a very secondary factor. The basic problem lies in the contradictions of the economic system itself, not in how greedy the capitalists may or may not be in this country or that, or in this period or that.) Even though capitalist production, like all earlier forms of production, cannot in practice produce enough to satisfy the needs and wants of everyone, it does regularly get into situations (crises) in which it produces much more than it knows what to do with within the framework of its social relations. These are the crises of overproduction, but overproduction in relation to what can be profitably sold, not overproduction in relation to what people need and want. The bulk of the theory of capitalist economic crises is the detailed exploration of this question—how can production be kept going when the capitalists only pay the workers a portion of the value that they produce? There are indeed ways to do this—for a while! The problem is that all these ways eventually lead to other serious problems, so serious in fact that they must inevitably result in major interruptions in the production process, i.e., economic crises.Impact: Economic CrisesEconomic crises are historically proven symptoms of capitalism’s systemic crisisKotz 8 (David, Dep of Econ @ U Massachusetts Amherst, “The Financial and Economic Crisis of 2008: A Systematic Crisis of Neoliberal Capitalism” pg. 2 December JF) 7/6History shows that capitalism periodically undergoes a systemic crisis. The particular institutional form of capitalism has varied in different periods. However effectively a particular institutional form of capitalism, or social structure of accumulation (SSA), may for a time promote high profits and economic expansion, eventually the contradictions of that form of capitalism undermine its continuing operation, leading to a systemic crisis.4 To refer to a situation as a systemic crisis means that the crisis can be resolved only through a major restructuring of the system. If the current situation were not a systemic crisis, then it should be possible resolve the financial crisis with appropriate state bailouts of financial institutions and the imposition of some new regulations on the financial system, while mitigating the developing recession with a large economic stimulus program. Following such crisis interventions, neoliberal capitalism would resume more-or-less normal operation. However, if the current financial and economic crisis is an indication of a systemic crisis of neoliberal capitalism, that suggests that neoliberal capitalism cannot be sustained by such limited interventions, and we should expect to see the replacement of neoliberal capitalism by something else.Impact: EnvironmentCapitalism will cause extinction through environmental destructionFoster, Clark, and York 10 (John Bellamy, Prof of Sociology @ U of Oregon, Brett, assist. prof of sociology @ NCSU, and Richard, assoc. prof of sociology @ U of Oregon, Monthly Review Vol. 62.6 November JF)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 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.Impact: EnvironmentCapitalism destroys the environment – can’t prioritize sustainability over short term profitAltvater 7 (Elmar, Former Prof. of Political Science @ University of Berlin, “The Social and Natural Environment of Fossil Capitalism,” (rev.).doc, JM)The reason for capitalism’s high economic impact on the environment is to be found in its double character. It has a value dimension (the monetary value of the gross national product, of world trade, of FDI, of financial flows, etc.) but is also a system of material and energy flows in production and consumption, transportation and distribution. Economic decisions concerning production first consider values and prices, profit margins and monetary returns, on capital invested. In this sphere the ruling principle is only the economic rationality of profit-maximizing decision-makers. But the decisions they take have important impacts on nature, due to the material and energy dimension of economic processes. Under capitalist conditions the environment is more and more transformed into a contested object of human greed. The exploitation of natural resources, and their degradation by a growing quantity of pollutants, results in a man-made scarcity, leading to conflicts over access to them. Access to nature (to resources and sinks) is uneven and unequal and the societal relation of man to nature therefore is conflict-prone. The “ecological footprints” of people in different countries and regions of the world are of very different sizes, reflecting severe inequalities of incomes and wealth. Ecological injustices therefore can only usefully be discussed if social class contradictions and the production of inequality in the course of capital accumulation are taken into account.Impact: EnvironmentCapitalism will destroy the biosphere- tech can’t solve, just delay the inevitableCairns 2 (John, Dep of Bio @ Virginia State U, Environmental Health Perspectives Vol. 110 2 February P. A 66-67 JF) 7/6Human society has only one planet, so prudence requires that human society take precautions to prevent damage to Earth, even if uncertainty exists about how much damage will occur, or even if damage will occur, and if the damage is likely to be catastrophic. Nature follows universal laws that were in existence long before the laws of human society were developed. Most societies that have ignored these natural laws have paid severely for this transgression. Human laws may be a guide in respecting natural laws, but human laws that are not compatible with natural laws will not free human society from the consequences of breaking natural laws. Intelligence could be used to develop a more harmonious relationship with natural systems and to avoid exploiting Earth’s resources without restraint. On a finite planet, exponential growth, or any growth beyond certain limits, must eventually exhaust natural capital. A society practicing a perpetual growth paradigm will probably collapse (13,14). As McNeill (15) noted, it is possible that China has shifted, over thousands of years, from one unsustainable set of practices to another. In mathematical terms, Bartlett (16) has shown that each increase of 1 billion barrels of oil in the size of the estimated ultimate (oil) recovery beyond the value of 2.0 × 1,012 barrels can be expected to result in a delay of approximately 5.5 days in the date of maximum production. As was evident during the gas shortages of the 1970s, scarcity can quickly change patterns of behavior. Technology can postpone the ecologically damaging effects of scarcity, but with billions already impoverished, the effects cannot be indefinitely postponed. Even within human society, the perpetual growth paradigm seems incompatible with the Golden Rule. Human society cannot exist without the biospheric life support system. As Berry (17) noted, human society is forsaking the natural world for growth. Berry remarked with regret that the process of exponential growth has eroded all those experiences that make life satisfying: the sense of community, and intimacy with the natural world, wonder, and beauty. Impact: EnvironmentThere is no turning back for capitalism—environmental destruction will kill us all unless we change the system of productionMagdoff & Foster 10 (Fred, Prof Emeritus of plant and soil sci @ U of Vermont, and John Bellamy, prof of sociology @ U of Oregon, “What Every Environmentalist Needs to Know About Capitalism” Monthly Review Vol. 61.10 March JF)It is beyond debate that the ecology of the earth—and the very life support systems on which humans as well as other species depend—is under sustained and severe attack by human activities. It is also clear that the effects of continuing down the same path will be devastating. As James Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and the world’s most famous climatologist, has stated: “Planet Earth, creation, the world in which civilization developed, the world with climate patterns that we know and stable shorelines, is in imminent peril….The startling conclusion is that continued exploitation of all fossil fuels on Earth threatens not only the other millions of species on the planet but also the survival of humanity itself—and the timetable is shorter than we thought.”17 Moreover, the problem does not begin and end with fossil fuels but extends to the entire human-economic interaction with the environment. It is our contention that most of the critical environmental problems we have are either caused, or made much worse, by the workings of our economic system. Even such issues as population growth and technology are best viewed in terms of their relation to the socioeconomic organization of society. Environmental problems are not a result of human ignorance or innate greed. They do not arise because managers of individual large corporations or developers are morally deficient. Instead, we must look to the fundamental workings of the economic (and political/social) system for explanations. It is precisely the fact that ecological destruction is built into the inner nature and logic of our present system of production that makes it so difficult to solve. The economic system that dominates nearly all corners of the world is capitalism, which, for most humans, is as “invisible” as the air we breathe. We are, in fact, largely oblivious to this worldwide system, much as fish are oblivious to the water in which they swim. It is capitalism’s ethic, outlook, and frame of mind that we assimilate and acculturate to as we grow up. Unconsciously, we learn that greed, exploitation of laborers, and competition (among people, businesses, countries) are not only acceptable but are actually good for society because they help to make our economy function “efficiently.” No-growth capitalism is an oxymoron: when growth ceases, the system is in a state of crisis with considerable suffering among the unemployed. Capitalism’s basic driving force and its whole reason for existence is the amassing of profits and wealth through the accumulation (savings and investment) process. It recognizes no limits to its own self-expansion—not in the economy as a whole; not in the profits desired by the wealthy; and not in the increasing consumption that people are cajoled into desiring in order to generate greater profits for corporations. The environment exists, not as a place with inherent boundaries within which human beings must live together with earth’s other species, but as a realm to be exploited in a process of growing economic expansion. There is, however, one slight problem with this “capitalist no-growth utopia”: it violates the basic motive force of capitalism. What capital strives for and is the purpose of its existence is its own expansion. Why would capitalists, who in every fiber of their beings believe that they have a personal right to business profits, and who are driven to accumulate wealth, simply spend the economic surplus at their disposal on their own consumption or (less likely still) give it to workers to spend on theirs—rather than seek to expand wealth? If profits are not generated, how could economic crises be avoided under capitalism? To the contrary, it is clear that owners of capital will, as long as such ownership relations remain, do whatever they can within their power to maximize the amount of profits they accrue. A stationary state, or steady-state, economy as a stable solution is only conceivable if separated from the social relations of capital itself. The irreversible exhaustion of finite natural resources will leave future generations without the possibility of having use of these resources. Natural resources are used in the process of production—oil, gas, and coal (fuel), water (in industry and agriculture), trees (for lumber and paper), a variety of mineral deposits (such as iron ore, copper, and bauxite), and so on. Some resources, such as forests and fisheries, are of a finite size, but can be renewed by natural processes if used in a planned system that is flexible enough to change as conditions warrant. Future use of other resources—oil and gas, minerals, aquifers in some desert or dryland areas (prehistorically deposited water)—are limited forever to the supply that currently exists. The water, air, and soil of the biosphere can continue to function well for the living creatures on the planet only if pollution doesn’t exceed their limited capacity to assimilate and render the pollutants harmless. <CONTINUED><CONTINUED>The length of time before nonrenewable deposits are exhausted depends on the size of the deposit and the rate of extraction of the resource. While depletion of some resources may be hundreds of years away (assuming that the rate of growth of extraction remains the same), limits for some important ones—oil and some minerals—are not that far off. For example, while predictions regarding peak oil vary among energy analysts—going by the conservative estimates of oil companies themselves, at the rate at which oil is currently being used, known reserves will be exhausted within the next fifty years. The prospect of peak oil is projected in numerous corporate, government, and scientific reports. The question today is not whether peak oil is likely to arrive soon, but simply how soon.27 The earth system can be seen as consisting of a number of critical biogeochemical processes that, for hundreds of millions of years, have served to reproduce life. In the last 12 thousand or so years the world climate has taken the relatively benign form associated with the geological epoch known as the Holocene, during which civilization arose. Now, however, the socioeconomic system of capitalism has grown to such a scale that it overshoots fundamental planetary boundaries—the carbon cycle, the nitrogen cycle, the soil, the forests, the oceans. More and more of the terrestrial (land-based) photosynthetic product, upwards of 40 percent, is now directly accounted for by human production. All ecosystems on earth are in visible decline. With the increasing scale of the world economy, the human-generated rifts in the earth’s metabolism inevitably become more severe and more multifarious. Yet, the demand for more and greater economic growth and accumulation, even in the wealthier countries, is built into the capitalist system. As a result, the world economy is one massive bubble. There is nothing in the nature of the current system, moreover, that will allow it to pull back before it is too late. To do that, other forces from the bottom of society will be required.Impact: Environment- Root CauseThe root causes of ecological problems are social problems- class, racial, and gender domination give rise to the idea of dominating the Earth. Their misidentification of the causes of the ecological crisis means their alternative can never solve.Bookchin 93 (Murray, “What is Social Ecology?”, orig. published in Environmental Philosophy: From Animal Rights to Radical Ecology, ed. Michael Zimmerman, )What defines social ecology as social is its recognition of the often-overlooked fact that nearly all our present ecological problems arise from deep-seated social problems. Conversely, our present ecological problems cannot be clearly understood, much less resolved, without resolutely dealing with problems within society. To make this point more concrete; economic, ethnic, cultural, and gender conflicts, among many others, lie at the core of the most serious ecological dislocations we face today — apart, to be sure, from those that are produced by natural catastrophes.If this approach seems a bit too sociological for those environmentalists who identify the primary ecological problem as being the preservation of wildlife or wilderness, or more broadly as attending to “Gaia” to achieve planetary “oneness,” they might wish to consider certain recent developments. The massive oil spill by an Exxon tanker at Prince William Sound, the extensive deforestation of redwood trees by the Maxxam Corporation, and the proposed James Bay hydroelectric project that would flood vast forested areas of northern Quebec, to cite only a few problems, are sobering reminders that the real battleground on which the ecological future of the planet will be decided is clearly a social one.Indeed, to separate ecological problems from social problems — or even to play down or give only token recognition to their crucial relationship — would be to grossly misconstrue the sources of the growing environmental crisis. In effect, the way human beings deal with each other as social beings is crucial to addressing the ecological crisis. Unless we clearly recognize this, we will surely fail to see that the hierarchical mentality and class relationships that so thoroughly permeate society are what has given rise to the very idea of dominating the natural world.Unless we realize that the present market society, structured around the brutally competitive imperative of “grow or die,” is a thoroughly impersonal, self-operating mechanism, we will falsely tend to blame other phenomena — technology as such or population growth as such — for environmental problems. We will ignore their root causes, such as trade for profit, industrial expansion, and the identification of progress with corporate self-interest. In short, we will tend to focus on the symptoms of a grim social pathology rather than on the pathology itself, and our efforts will be directed toward limited goals whose attainment is more cosmetic than curative.Impact: Environment- Root CauseAt the root of the present devastation of the environment is capitalismKovel 7 (Joel, Graduate, Psychoanalytic Institute, Downstate Medical Center, Brooklyn, The Enemy of Nature: The End of Capitalism or the End of the World? December 9, p. 1-4, JM)In 1970, growing fears for the integrity of the planet gave rise to a new awareness and a new politics. On April 22, the first “Earth Day” was announced, since to become an annual event of re-dedication to the preservation and enhancement of the environment. The movement affected ordinary people and, remarkably, certain members of the elites, who, organized into a group called the Club of Rome, even dared to announce a theme never before entertained by persons of power. This appeared as the title of their 1972 manifesto, The Limits to Growth.1 Thirty years later, Earth Day 2000 featured a colloquy between Leonardo de Caprio and President Bill Clinton, with much fine talk about saving nature. The anniversary also provided a convenient vantage point for surveying the results of three decades of “limiting growth.” At the dawn of a new millennium, one could observe the following: The human population had increased from 3.7 billion to 6 billion (62 percent). ? Oil consumption had increased from 46 million barrels a day to 73 million. ? Natural gas extraction had increased from 34 trillion cubic feet per year to 95 trillion. ? Coal extraction had gone from 2.2 billion metric tonnes to 3.8 billion. ? The global motor vehicle population had almost tripled, from 246 million to 730 million. ? Air traffic had increased by a factor of six. ? The rate at which trees are consumed to make paper had doubled, to 200 million metric tons per year. ? Human carbon emissions had increased from 3.9 million metric tons annually to an estimated 6.4 million – this despite the additional impetus to cut back caused by an awareness of global warming, which was not perceived to be a factor in 1970. ? As for this warming, average temperature increased by 1°f – a disarmingly small number that, being unevenly distributed, translates into chaotic weather events (seven of the ten most destructive storms in recorded history having occurred in the last decade), and an unpredictable and uncontrollable cascade of ecological trauma – including now the melting of the North Pole during the summer of 2000, for the first time in 50 million years, and signs of the disappearance of the “snows of Kilimanjaro” the year following; since then this melting has become a fixture. ? Species were vanishing at a rate that has not occurred in 65 million years. ? Fish were being taken at twice the rate as in 1970. ? Forty percent of agricultural soils had been degraded. ? Half of the forests had disappeared. ? Half of the wetlands had been filled or drained. ? One-half of US coastal waters were unfit for fishing or swimming. ? Despite concerted effort to bring to bay the emissions of ozone-depleting substances, the Antarctic ozone hole was the largest ever in 2000, some three times the size of the continental United States; meanwhile, 2,000 tons of such substances as cause it continue to be emitted every day. 2 ? 7.3 billion tons of pollutants were released in the United States during 1999.3 We can add some other, more immediately human costs: ? Third World debt increased by a factor of eight between 1970 and 2000. ? The gap between rich and poor nations, according to the United Nations, went from a factor of 3:1 in 1820, to 35:1 in 1950; 44:1 in 1973 – at the beginning of the environmentally sensitive era – to 72:1 in 1990, roughly two-thirds of the way through it. ? By 2000 1.2 million women under the age of eighteen were entering the global sex trade each year. ? 100 million children were homeless and slept on the streets. These figures were mostly gathered around the year 2000, and served to frame the first edition of The Enemy of Nature by calling attention to a remarkable yet greatly underappreciated fact: that the era of environmental awareness, beginning roughly in 1970, has also been the era of greatest environmental breakdown. No sooner, then, did the awareness of a profound threat to humanity’s relationship to nature surface than it became overwhelmed by a greater force outside this awareness. Each of the above observations has had its specific causes – the production of a certain gas, the dynamics of the auto market or of the habitat of a threatened species, etc. – but there must also be a larger issue to account for the rapid acceleration of the set of all such perturbations – and, necessarily tied to this, the appearance of increasingly chaotic interactions between the members of this set. There is, therefore, some greater force at work, setting the numberless manifestations of the crisis into motion and whirling them about like broken twigs in the winds of a hurricane. It is this larger force that the present work investigates, under an obligation imposed by the colossal failure of the reigning environmental awareness. I say “obligation,” because of the gravity of the present crisis. If we take this crisis seriously enough – and what, in the whole history of the human race, has had more momentous and dire implications? – then we are obliged to radically rethink our entire approach. Happily, many more people, including experts of one kind or another, are now recognizing the scope of the crisis and what is at stake. Unhappily, they mostly remain blind to the essential dynamics; thus, the great range of recommendations are puerile rehashes of what has already failed: exhortations to live more frugally, to recognize and respect our embeddedness in nature, to recycle, to find and approve better technologies, to vote into power environmentally responsible politicians, and so forth. None of these recommendations is without merit; they all need to find their place in a comprehensive approach. But what makes that approach comprehensive needs to begin with recognition of the “greater force” whose impulse drives the crisis onward. Now the reader already knows the name of this force from The Enemy of Nature’s subtitle: that we face a choice between “the end of capitalism” or “the end of the world.” So there seems to be no suspense: as a mystery story, The Enemy breaks the basic rule by giving away the killer’s name on the dustjacket. But the crime remains unspecified and the revelation superficial, chosen, I must confess, to catch the reader’s attention and tug at that rising yet indefinite awareness that, yes, this damned capitalist system is wrecking nature. The real work lies ahead – to make that awareness definite, to clarify what capital is and what nature is, to understand capital’s enmity to nature, to understand it as not just an economic system but in relation to the entire human project, to see its antecedents and consequences, and, most importantly, to fathom what can be done about it. Impact: Environment (AT: Sustainable Growth)Economic growth destroys the environment- the market imperative of “grow or die” makes attempts at ‘sustainable’ or ‘limited’ growth meaningless. Only the alternative solves.Bookchin, Director Emeritus of the Institute for Social Ecology at Plainfield, 89(Murray, “Death of a Small Planet”, The Progressive, pp. 19-23, , Accessed: 7/2008)It has been dawning on the First World, which is rapidly using up many of its resources, that growth is eating away the biosphere at a pace unprecedented in human history. Deforestation from acid rain, itself a product of fossil fuel combustion, is matched or even exceeded by the systematic burning that is cleaning vast rain forests. The destruction of the ozone layer, we are beginning to learn, is occurring almost everywhere, not just in Antarctica. We now sense that unlimited growth is literally recycling the complex organic products of natural evolution into the simple mineral constituents of the Earth at the dawn of life billions of years ago. Soil that was in the making for millennia is being tunned into sand; richly forested regions filled with complex life-forms are being reduced to barren moonscapes; rivers, lakes, and even vast oceanic regions are becoming noxious and lethal sewers, radio nuclides, together with an endless and ever-increasing array of toxicants, are invading the air we breathe, the water we drink, and almost every food item on the dinner table. Not even sealed, air-conditioned, and sanitized offices are immune to this poisonous deluge.Growth is only the most immediate cause of this pushing back of the evolutionary clock to a more primordial and mineralized world. And calling for "limits to growth" is merely the first step toward bringing the magnitude of our environmental problems under public purview. Unless growth is traced to its basic source-competition in a grow-or-die market society-the demand for controlling growth is meaningless as well as unattainable. We can no more arrest growth while leaving the market intact than we can arrest egoism while leaving rivalry intact.Impact: Environment- Warming, SpeciesCapitalism is a parasite on the global environment, causing species extinction and catastrophic warmingFoster 2005 (John Bellamy, Monthly Review, March, Vol. 56, Iss. 10, “The End of Rational Capitalism”)These same decades of economic stagnation and financial explosion have also been decades in which capital has become more and more parasitic on the global environment. The system of accumulation under globalized monopoly capitalism is undermining the basic biogeochemical processes of the planet in the process of promoting conspicuous waste and growing inequality. Not only has global warming emerged since the 1980s as the greatest threat yet to the biosphere as we know it, but the problem has gotten rapidly worse. The prospect of only a very limited rise in average world temperature-one that society might easily adapt to-now appears highly unlikely. An increase in average global temperatures of 2° C (3.6° F) above preindustrial levels-an amount of increase thought to separate non-catastrophic from catastrophic levels of global warming-will soon become unstoppable. Further, there is a growing fear among scientists of runaway global warming due to cumulative effects associated with a lessening of the carbon-absorbing capacities of the oceans and forests-a probable consequence of global warming itself. In Antarctica glaciers are melting and ice shelves thinning, pointing to a rise in world sea levels. All ecosystems on earth are now in decline. Species are facing extinction at levels not seen for 65 million years. Global shortages of fresh water are looming. The toxicity of the earth is increasing. All this and more is to be expected now that the rational regulation of the environment under capitalism has been shown to be a dangerous fantasy. Moreover, rather than any direct attempt to stop these trends we are now told in the age of neoliberal globalization that all such attempts are useless-witness the U.S. refusal to sign the Kyoto Protocol. Instead we are asked to rely on the magic of the market to save the environment. Yet, there is nothing in the nature of a capitalist society, which has no logic other than that of accumulation, that could possibly produce such a result.Impact: Environment- WarmingCapitalism causes catastrophic warming- scientific consensus that it’s inevitable at current emissions levelsFoster and Clark 2004 (John Bellamy and Brett, Monthly Review, December, Vol. 56, Iss. 7, “Empire of Barbarism”)The gates of hell are open in another respect. We live in a material world, where land, water, and air support life. The human economy and natural processes are inseparably interconnected. Today all of the ecosystems on the earth are in jeopardy. Of particular concern is global warming, which is literally pointing the earth toward an inferno of our own making. The scientific consensus on global warming suggests that at least a 60-80 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions below the 1990 levels is necessary in the next few decades in order to avoid catastrophic environmental effects (rising sea levels leading to loss of islands and coastal areas, increasing droughts and desertification, extreme weather events, accelerated species extinction, loss of food crops, etc.) over the coming century. Yet, the United States has steadily increased its carbon dioxide emissions since 1990. It leads the world in overall emissions, with per capita emissions at over five times the world average, and shows no signs of reversing this trend, regardless of the devastating consequences this may have for other countries particularly in the tropics or for future generations. The war in Iraq, which is about the control of oil as a means to world domination, is itself a manifestation of the U.S. refusal to change direction regardless of the consequences for the planet. This "Après moi le déluge!" philosophy, as Marx intimated at one point, constitutes the very essence of barbarism.6Impact: Environment- Laundry ListCapitalism destroys the environment – greenhouse gas, acid rain, forests, desertification, and loss of biodiversityTrainer 96 (Ted, University of New South Wales, “Towards a Sustainable Economy”, Jon Carpenter Oxford Publishing, pages 42-43)Our way of life is ecologically unsustainable Our resource-affluent way of life also causes many serious environmental problems. We are destroying vital ecological systems. Consider, for example, the greenhouse problem, acid rain, the destruction of forests, the spread of deserts and the loss of plant and animal species. At the present rate, more than a million species will disappear in the next 25 years, because the expansion of human economic activity is destroying habitats. We farm in ways that lose 5 tonnes of topsoil for each person on earth every year (that is 15 times the amount of food we eat), we are destroying the protective ozone layer in the atmosphere, and we are polluting the ground waters and seas. One ofthe most unsustainable aspects of our society is the way we continually take large quantities of nutrients from the soil, eat them and then throw them away. We are depleting our soils at a rapid rate. In Chapter 12 it will be argued that we can only have a sustainable agriculture if we change to highly localised economic systems in which most of our food is produced close to where we live and all food wastes can be recycled. Most of these ecological problems are direct consequences of the sheer amount of producing and consuming going on. There is, for example, no way of solving the greenhouse problem without drastically reducing the amount of fuel being burnt, and therefore the volume of production taking place. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has concluded that in order to keep the carbon content ofthe atmosphere from increasing, let alone reduce it (as we should be doing) we will have to cut carbon input to the atmosphere by 60-80 per cent. If by 2060 we achieve a 60 per cent reduction and share the energy among 11 billion people then world average fossil fuel use would be about one-eighteenth the present Australian average. How can we do anything like this unless we drastically reduce energy use and therefore fossil fuel use? One of the most disturbing recent observations is the fact that in the last decade a number ofcrucial biological and ecological indices seem to be approaching or to have passed their peaks. This is true of world cropland area, irrigated area, fertiliser use, and meat, timber, wool and grain production. Some key yields such as rice and wheat seem to be tapering towards upper limits. World fish catch has clearly fallen from levels that will not be attained again. Yet we are only providing well for one billion people, and we might soon have 11 billion on the planet. Now add to this analysis the implications of continued economic growth. Fig 6.la represents the present volume of world economic output, distributed across its 5.4 billion people. Figure 6.lb represents output assuming that all the people living in the Third World in 2060 have risen to the living standards the rich countries have now, and incomes in rich countries rise by 3 per cent p.a. until then. World output would be about 19 times as great as it is now. Anyone assuming that all the world's people can be as rich as the rich world's people would be by 2060, given only 3 per cent annual growth until then, must believe that the world's resources and ecosystems can sustain 88 times present annual volumes ofoutput. And 3 per cent growth rate is not sufficient to make our economy healthy! In the 1980s Australia averaged 3.2 per cent annual growth and just about all its economic and social problems became worse. Unemployment at least doubled and the foreign debt multiplied by 10. Prime Minister Keating has emphasised that we need 4.5 per cent growth to start bringing unemployment down. Let us assume we were to average 4 per cent annual growth until 2060, and that by then all the world's people had risen to the 'living standards' we would have then. Total world economic output would be 220 times what it is today. There is no chance whatsoever of reaching even a 19-fold increase in present output. Yet conventional economists proceed as if we can rise to and beyond these levels; they never acknowledge any need to worry about there being any limits to the growth of production and consumption. The environmental problem is basically due to overproduction and overconsumption, yet we have an economy in which there must be constant and limitless increase in production and consumption. Again, the problem is due to our economy and cannot be solved until we develop a quite different economy.Impact: Environment- Laundry ListCapitalism is driving climate change and ecological destruction—glacier melts, habitat and species loss, pollution, floods, droughts, famine, disease, and ocean acidificationFoster 10 (John Bellamy, prof of sociology @ U of Oregon, “ Why Ecological Revolution?” Monthly Review Vol. 61.8 January JF)It is now universally recognized within science that humanity is confronting the prospect—if we do not soon change course—of a planetary ecological collapse. Not only is the global ecological crisis becoming more and more severe, with the time in which to address it fast running out, but the dominant environmental strategies are also forms of denial, demonstrably doomed to fail, judging by their own limited objectives. This tragic failure, I will argue, can be attributed to the refusal of the powers that be to address the roots of the ecological problem in capitalist production and the resulting necessity of ecological and social revolution. The term “crisis,” attached to the global ecological problem, although unavoidable, is somewhat misleading, given its dominant economic associations. Since 2008, we have been living through a world economic crisis—the worst economic downturn since the 1930s. This has been a source of untold suffering for hundreds of millions, indeed billions, of people. But insofar as it is related to the business cycle and not to long-term factors, expectations are that it is temporary and will end, to be followed by a period of economic recovery and growth—until the advent of the next crisis. Capitalism is, in this sense, a crisis-ridden, cyclical economic system. Even if we were to go further, to conclude that the present crisis of accumulation is part of a long-term economic stagnation of the system—that is, a slowdown of the trend-rate of growth beyond the mere business cycle—we would still see this as a partial, historically limited calamity, raising, at most, the question of the future of the present system of production.1 When we speak today of the world ecological crisis, however, we are referring to something that could turn out to be final, i.e., there is a high probability, if we do not quickly change course, of a terminal crisis—a death of the whole anthropocene, the period of human dominance of the planet. Human actions are generating environmental changes that threaten the extermination of most species on the planet, along with civilization, and conceivably our own species as well. What makes the current ecological situation so serious is that climate change, arising from human-generated increases in greenhouse gas emissions, is not occurring gradually and in a linear process, but is undergoing a dangerous acceleration, pointing to sudden shifts in the state of the earth system. We can therefore speak, to quote James Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and the world’s most famous climate scientist, of “tipping points…fed by amplifying feedbacks.”2 Four amplifying feedbacks are significant at present: (1) rapid melting of arctic sea ice, with the resulting reduction of the earth’s albedo (reflection of solar radiation) due to the replacement of bright, reflective ice with darker blue sea water, leading to greater absorption of solar energy and increasing global average temperatures; (2) melting of the frozen tundra in northern regions, releasing methane (a much more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide) trapped beneath the surface, causing accelerated warming; (3) recent indications that there has been a drop in the efficiency of the carbon absorption of the world’s oceans since the 1980s, and particularly since 2000, due to growing ocean acidification (from past carbon absorption), resulting in faster carbon build-up in the atmosphere and enhanced warming; (4) extinction of species due to changing climate zones, leading to the collapse of ecosystems dependent on these species, and the death of still more species.3 Due to this acceleration of climate change, the time line in which to act before calamities hit, and before climate change increasingly escapes our control, is extremely short. In October 2009, Luc Gnacadja, executive secretary of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification, reported that, based on current trends, close to 70 percent of the land surface of the earth could be drought-affected by 2025, compared to nearly 40 percent today.4 The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has warned that glaciers are melting throughout the world and could recede substantially this century. Rivers fed by the Himalyan glaciers currently supply water to countries with around 3 billion people. Their melting will give rise to enormous floods, followed by acute water shortages.5 Many of the planetary dangers associated with current global warming trends are by now well-known: rising sea levels engulfing islands and low-lying coastal regions throughout the globe; loss of tropical forests; destruction of coral reefs; a “sixth extinction” rivaling the great die-downs in the history of the planet; massive crop losses; extreme weather events; spreading hunger and disease<CONTINUED><CONTINUED>. But these dangers are heightened by the fact that climate change is not the entirety of the world ecological crisis. For example, independently of climate change, tropical forests are being cleared as a direct result of the search for profits. Soil destruction is occurring, due to current agribusiness practices. Toxic wastes are being diffused throughout the environment. Nitrogen run-off from the overuse of fertilizer is affecting lakes, rivers, and ocean regions, contributing to oxygen-poor “dead zones.” Since the whole earth is affected by the vast scale of human impact on the environment in complex and unpredictable ways, even more serious catastrophes could conceivably be set in motion. One growing area of concern is ocean acidification due to rising carbon dioxide emissions. As carbon dioxide dissolves, it turns into carbonic acid, making the oceans more acidic. Because carbon dioxide dissolves more readily in cold than in warm water, the cold waters of the arctic are becoming acidic at an unprecedented rate. Within a decade, the waters near the North Pole could become so corrosive as to dissolve the living shells of shellfish, affecting the entire ocean food chain. At the same time, ocean acidification appears to be reducing the carbon uptake of the oceans, speeding up global warming.6Impact: EthicsIt is an ethical obligation to break down capitalism’s universal control of every aspect of our realityZizek & Daly 4 (Slavoj, University of?Northampton, prof of sociology @ U of Ljubljana, and Glyn, Conversations with Zizek page 14-16) For Zizek it is imperative that we cut through this Gordian knot of postmodern protocol and recognize that our ethico-political responsibility is to confront the constitutive violence of today’s global capitalism and its obscene naturalization / anonymization of the millions who are subjugated by it throughout the world. Against the standardized positions of postmodern culture – with all its pieties concerning ‘multiculturalist’ etiquette – Zizek is arguing for a politics that might be called ‘radically incorrect’ in the sense that it break with these types of positions 7 and focuses instead on the very organizing principles of today’s social reality: the principles of global liberal capitalism. This requires some care and subtlety. For far too long, Marxism has been bedeviled by an almost fetishistic economism that has tended towards political morbidity. With the likes of Hilferding and Gramsci, and more recently Laclau and Mouffee, crucial theoretical advances have been made that enable the transcendence of all forms of economism. In this new context, however, Zizek argues that the problem that now presents itself is almost that of the opposite fetish. That is to say, the prohibitive anxieties surrounding the taboo of economism can function as a way of not engaging with economic reality and as a way of implicitly accepting the latter as a basic horizon of existence. In an ironic Freudian-Lacanian twist, the fear of economism can end up reinforcing a de facto economic necessity in respect of contemporary capitalism (i.e. the initial prohibition conjures up the very thing it fears). This is not to endorse any kind of retrograde return to economism. Zizek’s point is rather that in rejecting economism we should not lose sight of the systemic power of capital in shaping the lives and destinies of humanity and our very sense of the possible. In particular we should not overlook Marx’s central insight that in order to create a universal global system the forces of capitalism seek to conceal the politico-discursive violence of its construction through a kind of gentrification of that system. What is persistently denied by neo-liberals such as Rorty (1989) and Fukuyama (1992) is that the gentrification of global liberal capitalism is one whose ‘universalism’ fundamentally reproduces and depends upon a disavowed violence that excludes vast sectors of the world’s populations. In this way, neo-liberal ideology attempts to naturalize capitalism by presenting its outcomes of winning and losing as if they were simply a matter of chance and sound judgment in a neutral market place. Capitalism does indeed create a space for a certain diversity, at least for the central capitalist regions, but it is neither neutral nor ideal and its price in terms of social exclusion is exorbitant. That is to say, the human cost in terms of inherent global poverty and degraded ‘life-chances’ cannot be calculated within the existing economic rationale and, in consequence, social exclusion remains mystified and nameless (viz. the patronizing reference to the ‘developing world’). And Zizek’s point is that this mystification is magnified through capitalism’s profound capacity to ingest its own excesses and negativity: to redirect (or misdirect) social antagonisms and to absorb them within a culture of differential affirmation. Instead of Bolshevism, the tendency today is towards a kind of political boutiquism that is readily sustained by postmodern forms of consumerism and lifestyle. Against this Zizek argues for a new universalism whose primary ethical directive is to confront the fact that our forms of social existence are founded on exclusion on a global scale. While it is perfectly true that universalism can never become Universal (it will always require a hegemonic-particular embodiment in order to have any meaning), what is novel about Zizek’s universalism is that it would not attempt to conceal this fact or reduce the status of the abject Other to that of a ‘glitch’ in an otherwise sound matrix.Impact: GenocideCapitalism’s mode of rationality allows genocideTraverso 99 (Enzo, Prof. of Political Science @ Jules Verne University, Understanding the Nazi Genocide: Marxism after Auschwitz, July 1, p. 55, JM)The Final Solution thus seemed to Mandel to confirm one of the major traits of contemporary Western economies - a hybrid of organisation with anarchy, of extremely detailed planning of each segment with an overall chaos completely out of control. He had analysed this paradox in his most ambitious theoretical work, Late Capitalism, by developing a concept of rationality which he acknowledged as the brainchild of Max Weber and Georg Lukdcs. Seen from this angle, Auschwitz was a deadly example of the combination of 'partial rationality' (Teilrationalitat) and 'global irrationality' (Gesamtirrationalitiit) typical of advanced capitalism.39 Here Mandel's analysis paralleled that of Herbert Marcuse, who had earlier described the 'one-dimensional' society of neo-capitalism as one whose 'sweeping rationality ... is itself irrational'.40 This perception of the Jewish genocide as a synthesis of partial rationality (the administrative and industrial system of the death camps) and 'global irrationality pushed to its logical conclusion' (the murderous madness of destroying a people) also resembled Adorno's and Horkheimer's approach, in which the 'self-destruction of reason' completed by Nazism was made possible by an extreme radicalisation of the instrumental rationality of the modern world.Capitalism causes genocide and nuclear warInternationalist Perspective 2000“Capitalism and Genocide,” Mass death, and genocide, the deliberate and systematic extermination of whole groups of human beings, have become an integral part of the social landscape of capitalism in its phase of decadence. Auschwitz, Kolyma, and Hiroshima are not merely the names of discrete sites where human beings have been subjected to forms of industrialized mass death, but synecdoches for the death-world that is a component of the capitalist mode of production in this epoch. In that sense, I want to argue that the Holocaust, for example, was not a Jewish catastrophe, nor an atavistic reversion to the barbarism of a past epoch, but rather an event produced by the unfolding of the logic of capitalism itself. Moreover, Auschwitz, Kolyma, and Hiroshima are not "past", but rather futural events, objective-real possibilities on the Front of history, to use concepts first articulated by the Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch. The ethnic cleansing which has been unleashed in Bosnia and Kosovo, the genocide of the Tutsis in Rwanda, the mass death to which Chechnya has been subjected, the prospect for a nuclear war on the Indian sub-continent, are so many examples of the future which awaits the human species as the capitalist mode of production enters a new millenium. Indeed, it is just such a death-world that constitutes the meaning of one pole of the historic alternative which Rosa Luxemburg first posed in the midst of the slaughter inflicted on masses of conscripts during World War I: socialism or barbarism!Impact: GenocideCapitalism causes inevitable crises which culminate in genocide and a war against alterityInternationalist Perspective 2000“Capitalism and Genocide,” The basis upon which such a pure community is constituted, race, nationality, religion, even a categorization by "class" in the Stalinist world, necessarily means the exclusion of those categories of the population which do not conform to the criteria for inclusion, the embodiments of alterity, even while they inhabit the same geographical space as the members of the pure community. Those excluded, the "races" on the other side of the biological continuum, to use Foucauldian terminology, the Other, become alien elements within an otherwise homogeneous world of the pure community. As a threat to its very existence, the role of this Other is to become the scapegoat for the inability of the pure community to provide authentic communal bonds between people, for its abject failure to overcome the alienation that is a hallmark of a reified world. The Jew in Nazi Germany, the Kulak in Stalinist Russia, the Tutsi in Rwanda, Muslims in Bosnia, blacks in the US, the Albanian or the Serb in Kosovo, the Arab in France, the Turk in contemporary Germany, the Bahai in Iran, for example, become the embodiment of alterity, and the target against which the hatred of the members of the pure community is directed. The more crisis ridden a society becomes, the greater the need to find an appropriate scapegoat; the more urgent the need for mass mobilization behind the integral state, the more imperious the need to focus rage against the Other. In an extreme situation of social crisis and political turmoil, the demonization and victimization of the Other can lead to his (mass) murder. In the absence of a working class conscious of its historic task and possibilities, this hatred of alterity which permits capital to mobilize the population in defense of the pure community, can become its own impetus to genocide. The immanent tendencies of the capitalist mode of production which propel it towards a catastrophic economic crisis, also drive it towards mass murder and genocide. In that sense, the death-world, and the prospect of an Endzeit cannot be separated from the continued existence of humanity's subordination to the law of value. Reification, the overmanned world, bio-politics, state racism, the constitution of a pure community directed against alterity, each of them features of the economic and ideological topography of the real domination of capital, create the possibility and the need for genocide. We should have no doubt that the survival of capitalism into this new millenium will entail more and more frequent recourse to mass murder.Impact: Heg/ImperialismCapitalism causes extinction via hegemonic imperialismFoster 5 (John, Monthly Review, September, vol 57, Iss 4 “Naked Imerialism”)From the longer view offered by a historical-materialist critique of capitalism, the direction that would be taken by U.S. imperialism following the fall of the Soviet Union was never in doubt. Capitalism by its very logic is a globally expansive system. The contradiction between its transnational economic aspirations and the fact that politically it remains rooted in particular nation states is insurmountable for the system. Yet, ill-fated attempts by individual states to overcome this contradiction are just as much a part of its fundamental logic. In present world circumstances, when one capitalist state has a virtual monopoly of the means of destruction, the temptation for that state to attempt to seize full-spectrum dominance and to transform itself into the de facto global state governing the world economy is irresistible. As the noted Marxian philosopher István Mészáros observed in Socialism or Barbarism? (2001)—written, significantly, before George W. Bush became president: “[W]hat is at stake today is not the control of a particular part of the planet—no matter how large—putting at a disadvantage but still tolerating the independent actions of some rivals, but the control of its totality by one hegemonic economic and military superpower, with all means—even the most extreme authoritarian and, if needed, violent military ones—at its disposal.”The unprecedented dangers of this new global disorder are revealed in the twin cataclysms to which the world is heading at present: nuclear proliferation and hence increased chances of the outbreak of nuclear war, and planetary ecological destruction. These are symbolized by the Bush administration’s refusal to sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty to limit nuclear weapons development and by its failure to sign the Kyoto Protocol as a first step in controlling global warming. As former U.S. Secretary of Defense (in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations) Robert McNamara stated in an article entitled “Apocalypse Soon” in the May–June 2005 issue of Foreign Policy: “The United States has never endorsed the policy of ‘no first use,’ not during my seven years as secretary or since. We have been and remain prepared to initiate the use of nuclear weapons—by the decision of one person, the president—against either a nuclear or nonnuclear enemy whenever we believe it is in our interest to do so.” The nation with the greatest conventional military force and the willingness to use it unilaterally to enlarge its global power is also the nation with the greatest nuclear force and the readiness to use it whenever it sees fit—setting the whole world on edge. The nation that contributes more to carbon dioxide emissions leading to global warming than any other (representing approximately a quarter of the world’s total) has become the greatest obstacle to addressing global warming and the world’s growing environmental problems—raising the possibility of the collapse of civilization itself if present trends continue.The United States is seeking to exercise sovereign authority over the planet during a time of widening global crisis: economic stagnation, increasing polarization between the global rich and the global poor, weakening U.S. economic hegemony, growing nuclear threats, and deepening ecological decline. The result is a heightening of international instability. Other potential forces are emerging in the world, such as the European Community and China, that could eventually challenge U.S. power, regionally and even globally. Third world revolutions, far from ceasing, are beginning to gain momentum again, symbolized by Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution under Hugo Chávez. U.S. attempts to tighten its imperial grip on the Middle East and its oil have had to cope with a fierce, seemingly unstoppable, Iraqi resistance, generating conditions of imperial overstretch. With the United States brandishing its nuclear arsenal and refusing to support international agreements on the control of such weapons, nuclear proliferation is continuing. New nations, such as North Korea, are entering or can be expected soon to enter the “nuclear club.” Terrorist blowback from imperialist wars in the third world is now a well-recognized reality,<CONTINUED><CONTINUED> generating rising fear of further terrorist attacks in New York, London, and elsewhere. Such vast and overlapping historical contradictions, rooted in the combined and uneven development of the global capitalist economy along with the U.S. drive for planetary domination, foreshadow what is potentially the most dangerous period in the history of imperialism.The course on which U.S and world capitalism is now headed points to global barbarism-or worse. Yet it is important to remember that nothing in the development of human history is inevitable. There still remains an alternative path-the global struggle for a humane, egalitarian, democratic, and sustainable society. The classic name for such a society is "socialism." Such a renewed struggle for a world of substantive human equality must begin by addressing the system's weakest link and at the same time the world's most pressing needsby organizing a global resistance movement against the new naked imperialism.Impact: Heg/ImperialismCapitalism necessitates ruthless imperialism, threatening our survival as a speciesMeszaros 1 (Istvan, prof. emeritus @ Univ. of Sussex, Socialism or Barbarism, p 37-39, JM)The military dimension of all this must be taken very seriously. It is no exaggeration to say-in view of the formerly quite unimaginable destructive power of armaments accumulated in the second half of the twentieth century-that we have entered the most dangerous phase of imperialism in all history. For what is at stake today is not the control of a particular part of the planet-no matter how large-putting at a disadvantage but still tolerating the independent actions of some rivals, but the control of its totality by one hegemonic economic and military superpower, with all means--even the most extreme authoritarian and, if needed, violent military ones-at its disposal. This is what the ultimate rationality of globally developed capital requires, in its vain attempt to bring under control its irreconcilable antagonisms. The trouble is, though, that such rationality-which can be written without inverted commas, since it genuinely corresponds to the logic of capital at the present historical stage of global development-is at the same time the most extreme form of irrationality in history, including the Nazi conception of world domination, as far as the conditions required for the survival of humanity are concerned, When Jonas Salk refused to patent his discovery, the polio vaccine, insisting that it would be like wanting "to patent the sun," he could not imagine that the time would come when capital would attempt to do just that, trying to patent not only the sun but also the air, even if that had to be coupled with dismissing any concern about the mortal dangers which such aspirations and actions carried with them for human survival. For the ultimate logic of capital in its processes of decision-making can only be of a categorically authoritarian "top-down" variety, from the microcosms of small economic enterprises to the highest levels of political and military decision-rnaking. But how can one enforce the patents taken out on the sun and the air? There are two prohibitive obstacles in this regard, even if capital-in its drive to demolish its own untranscendable limits must refuse to acknowledge them. The first is that the plurality of capitals cannot be eliminated, no matter how inexorable and brutal the monopolistic trend of development manifest in the system. And the second, that the corresponding plurality of social labor cannot be eliminated, so as to turn the total labor force of humankind, with all its national and sectional varieties and divisions, into the mindless "obedient servant" of the hegemonically dominant section of capital. For labor in its insurmountable plurality can never abdicate its right of access to the air and the sun; and even less can it survive for capital's continued benefit-an absolute must for this mode of controlling social metabolic reproduction-without the sun and the air. Those who say that today imperialism does not involve the military occupation of territory not only underrate the dangers we face but also accept the most superficial and misleading appearances as the substantive defining characteristics of imperialism in our time, ignoring both history and the contemporary trends of development. For one thing, the US militarily occupies territory in no less than sixty-nine countries through its military bases: a number that continues to expand with the enlargement of NATO. Those bases are not there for the benefit of the people-the grotesque ideological justification-but for the benefit of the occupying power, so as to be able to dictate policies as it pleases. Impact: Heg/ImperialismCapitalism necessitates imperial geopolitics, threatening extinctionFoster 2006 (John Bellamy, Monthly Review, January, Vol. 57, Iss. 8, “The New Geopolitics of Empire”)The unpopularity of geopolitical analysis after 1943 is usually attributed to its association with the Nazi strategy of world conquest. Yet the popular rejection of geopolitics in that period may have also arisen from the deeper recognition that classical geopolitics in all of its forms was an inherently imperialist and war-related doctrine. As the critical geopolitical analyst Robert Strausz-Hupé argued in 1942, "In Geopolitik there is no distinction between war and peace. All states have the urge to expand, and the process of expansion is viewed as a perpetual warfare-no matter whether military power is actually applied or is used to implement 'peaceful' diplomacy as a suspended threat."35U.S. imperial geopolitics is ultimately aimed at creating a global space for capitalist development. It is about forming a world dedicated to capital accumulation on behalf of the U.S. ruling class-and to a lesser extent the interlinked ruling classes of the triad powers as a whole (North America, Europe, and Japan). Despite "the end of colonialism" and the rise of "anti-capitalist new countries," Business Week pronounced in April 1975, there has always been "the umbrella of American power to contain it.... [T]he U.S. was able to fashion increasing prosperity among Western countries, using the tools of more liberal trade, investment, and political power. The rise of the multinational corporation was the economic expression of this political framework."36There is no doubt that the U.S. imperium has benefited those at the top of the center-capitalist nations and not just the power elite of the United States. Yet, the drive for global hegemony on the part of particular capitalist nations and their ruling classes, like capital accumulation itself, recognizes no insurmountable barriers. Writing before September 11, 2001, István Mészáros argued in his Socialism or Barbarism that due to unbridled U.S. imperial ambitions the world was entering what was potentially "the most dangerous phase of imperialism in all history":For what is at stake today is not the control of a particular part of the planet-no matter how large-putting at a disadvantage but still tolerating the independent actions of some rivals, but the control of its totality by one hegemonic economic and military superpower... .This is what the ultimate rationality of globally developed capital requires, in its vain attempt to bring under control its irreconcilable antagonisms. The trouble is, though, that such rationality...is at the same time the most extreme form of irrationality in history, including the Nazi conception of world domination, as far as the conditions required for the survival of humanity are concerned.37Impact: Heg/ImperialismThe nature of capitalism ensures U.S. imperialism and dominance of countries on the periphery Foster 5 (John Bellamy, Prof of Sociology @ U of Oregon, “Naked Imperialism” Monthly Review Vol. 57.4 September JF)The argument advanced here points to a different conclusion. U.S. militarism and imperialism have deep roots in U.S. history and the political-economic logic of capitalism. As even supporters of U.S. imperialism are now willing to admit, the United States has been an empire from its inception. “The United States,” Boot writes in “American Imperialism?,” “has been an empire since at least 1803, when Thomas Jefferson purchased the Louisiana Territory. Throughout the 19th century, what Jefferson called the ‘empire of liberty’ expanded across the continent.” Later the United States conquered and colonized lands overseas in the Spanish-American War of 1898 and the brutal Philippine-American War that immediately followed—justified as an attempt to exercise the “white man’s burden.” After the Second World War the United States and other major imperialist states relinquished their formal political empires, but retained informal economic empires backed up by the threat and not infrequently the reality of military intervention. The Cold War obscured this neocolonial reality but never entirely hid it. The growth of empire is neither peculiar to the United States nor a mere outgrowth of the policies of particular states. It is the systematic result of the entire history and logic of capitalism. Since its birth in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries capitalism has been a globally expansive system—one that is hierarchically divided between metropole and satellite, center and periphery. The objective of the imperialist system of today as in the past is to open up peripheral economies to investment from the core capitalist countries, thus ensuring both a continual supply of raw materials at low prices, and a net outflow of economic surplus from periphery to center of the world system. In addition, the third world is viewed as a source of cheap labor, constituting a global reserve army of labor. Economies of the periphery are structured to meet the external needs of the United States and the other core capitalist countries rather than their own internal needs. This has resulted (with a few notable exceptions) in conditions of unending dependency and debt peonage in the poorer regions of the world. If the “new militarism” and the “new imperialism” are not so new after all, but in line with the entire history of U.S. and world capitalism, the crucial question then becomes: Why has U.S. imperialism become more naked in recent years to the point that it has suddenly been rediscovered by proponents and opponents alike? Only a few years ago some theorists of globalization with roots in the left, such as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in their book Empire (2000), were arguing that the age of imperialism was over, that the Vietnam War was the last imperialist war. Yet, today, imperialism is more openly embraced by the U.S. power structure than at any time since the 1890s. This shift can only be understood by examining the historical changes that have occurred in the last three decades since the end of the Vietnam War. Already by the close of the twentieth century the power elite in the United States had therefore moved toward a policy of naked imperialism to a degree not seen since the opening years of the century—with the U.S. empire now conceived as planetary in scope. Even as a massive antiglobalization movement was emerging, notably with the protests in Seattle in November 1999, the U.S. establishment was moving energetically toward an imperialism for the twenty-first century; one that would promote neoliberal globalization, while resting on U.S. world dominance. “The hidden hand of the market,” Thomas Friedman, the Pulitzer-prize-winning foreign policy columnist for the New York Times, opined, “will never work without a hidden fist—McDonald’s cannot flourish without a McDonnell Douglas, the builder of the F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies is called the United States Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps” (New York Times Magazine, March 28, 1999). The “hidden fist,” however, was only partly hidden, and was to become even less so in the ensuing years. From the longer view offered by a historical-materialist critique of capitalism, the direction that would be taken by U.S. imperialism following the fall of the Soviet Union was never in doubt. Capitalism by its very logic is a globally expansive system. The contradiction between its transnational economic aspirations and the fact that politically it remains rooted in particular nation states is insurmountable for the system. Yet, ill-fated attempts by individual states to overcome this contradiction are just as much a part of its fundamental logic. In present world circumstances, when one capitalist state has a virtual monopoly of the means of destruction, the temptation for that state to attempt to seize full-spectrum dominance and to transform itself into the de facto global state governing the world economy is irresistible. As the noted Marxian philosopher István Mészáros observed in Socialism or Barbarism? (2001)—written, significantly, before George W. Bush became president: “[W]hat is at stake today is not the control of a particular part of the planet—no matter how large—putting at a disadvantage but still tolerating the independent actions of some rivals, but the control of its totality by one hegemonic economic and military superpower, with all means—even the most extreme authoritarian and, if needed, violent military ones—at its disposal.”Impact: Heg/Imperialism (AT: Ferguson)Ferguson whitewashes the bloody history of imperialism- the US pursuit of hegemony threatens the world with violent destructionFoster and Clark 2004 (John Bellamy and Brett, Monthly Review, December, Vol. 56, Iss. 7, “Empire of Barbarism”)Today the world is facing what de Suva feared-a barbarism emanating from a single powerful country, the United States, which has adopted a doctrine of preemptive (or preventative) war, and is threatening to destabilize the entire globe. In the late twentieth century the further growth of monopoly capital (as explained most cogently in Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy's Monopoly Capital and Harry Magdoff's Age of Imperialism) led to a heavy reliance, particularly for the United States as the hegemonic state of the world system, on military spending and imperialist intervention. With the waning of the Cold War this dependence of the imperial superpower on the most barbaric means of advancing its interests and controlling the system has only increased. The continuing decline of U.S. economic hegemony, occurring alongside deepening economic stagnation in capitalism as a whole, has led the United States to turn increasingly to extraeconomic means of maintaining its position: putting its huge war machine in motion in order to prop up its faltering hegemony over the world economy. The "Global War on Terror" is a manifestation of this latest lethal phase of U.S. imperialism, which began with the 1991 Gulf War made possible by the breaking up of the Soviet bloc and the emergence of the United States as the sole superpower.After the terrorist attack on September 11, 2001, the empire could present itself as at war with barbarism and in defense of civilization. "The barbarians have already knocked at the gates," declares Niall Ferguson, Herzog Professor of History at the Stern School of Business, New York University and a principal advocate of U.S. and British imperialism. But today's barbarians, he charges, are Islamic fundamentalists, and liberal imperialism becomes a way of inoculating the world against such Islamic terrorism. While the knock on the gates represents a clear danger to the U.S.-dominated imperial order, these external terrorist groups, Ferguson contends, will not bring about the decline of the American imperium directly. Instead, the principal threat to the position of the United States in the global economy is internal. It is rooted in an unwillingness on the part of the U.S. state to make a full claim to its position at the head of the global empire.Ferguson, who believes that the British Empire of old should be emulated-albeit in a form worthy of the twenty-first century-argues in his latest book Colossus and his earlier Empire that the world needs an empire.Many nations would be better off dominated by the United States than having full independence. The United States, he claims, "is a guns and butter empire"-one that represents not just the rule of force but the advance of the principles of liberal empire and liberal bounty, thus yielding a more democratic and prosperous world order. It is no mere coincidence that Ferguson, one of the most influential establishment historians today, explicitly calls for an updating of the old "White Man's Burden" (to be replaced by a new ideology of "functional" empire) while whitewashing one of the most barbaric wars of modern imperialism: the Philippine-American War at the beginning of the twentieth century-the very same imperial war that Kipling had urged on the United States in his poem "The White Man's Burden" (Colossus, pp. 48-52, 267, 301-02; Empire, pp. 369-70).Ferguson's "guns and butter empire" is now a transparent objective of U.S. policy. With the fall of the Soviet Union, as István Mészáros explained in Socialism or Barbarism, the United States began to assume "the role of the state of the capital system as such, subsuming under itself by all means at its disposal all rival powers" (p. 29). With its immense military power and its willingness to use force, the United States is now leading the world into what Mészáros has called "the potentially deadliest phase of imperialism." In attempting to prevent revolution (or indeed any way out for populations in the periphery), the United States is seeking to transcend the only certain law of the universe: change. In the process, it has given birth to dictators, supported terrorists, and threatened the world with violent destruction. In the Middle East the United States has nurtured a regressive, fundamentalist political Islam (useful in the CIA-directed war against the Soviets in Afghanistan and in closing off all progressive options in the Middle East) that insofar as it turns back and bites the hand that fed it-the United States and its allies-is branded as a "new barbarism."Impact: Militarism Capitalist militarism guarantees extinctionMeszaros 3 (Istvan, Prof Emeritus of Philosophy @ U of Sussex, “Militarism and the Coming Wars” talk given at the Critique Confernce, London January Pg. 2-3 JF)Today the situation is qualitatively different. For two principal reasons. First, the objective of the feasible war at the present phase of historical development, in accordance with the objective requirements of imperialism – world domination by capital’s most powerful state, in tune with its own political design of ruthless authoritarian “globalization”(dressed up as “free exchange” in a U.S.-ruled global market) – is ultimately unwinnable, foreshadowing, instead, the destruction of humankind. This objective by no stretch of imagination could be considered a rational objective in accord with the stipulated rational requirement of the “continuation of politics by other means” conducted by one nation, or by one group of nations against another. Aggressively imposing the will of one powerful national state over all of the others, even if for cynical tactical reasons the advocated war is absurdly camouflaged as a “purely limited war” leading to other “open ended limited wars”, can therefore be qualified only as total irrationality. The second reason greatly reinforces the first. For the weapons already available for waging the war or wars of the twenty first century are capable of exterminating not only the adversary but the whole of humanity, the first time ever in history. Nor should we have the illusion that the existing weaponry marks the very end of the road. Others, even more instantly lethal ones, might appear tomorrow or the day after tomorrow. Moreover, threatening the use of such weapons is by now considered an acceptable state strategic device. Thus, put reasons one and two together, and the conclusion is inescapable: envisaging war as the mechanism of global government in today’s world underlines that we find ourselves at the precipice of absolute irrationality from which there can be no return if we accept the ongoing course of development. What was missing from von Clausewitz’s classic definition of war as the “continuation of politics by other means” was the investigation of the deeper underlying causes of war and the possibility of their avoidance. The challenge to face up to such causes is more urgent today than ever before. For the war of the twenty first century looming ahead of us is not only “not winnable in principle”. Worse than that, it is in principle unwinnable. Consequently, envisaging the pursuit of war, as the American administration’s September 17, 2002 strategic document does, make Hitler’s irrationality look like the model of rationality. Impact: Nuclear WarCapitalist powers’ loose and unjust attitude towards the use of nuclear weapons risks extinctionMeszaros 6 (Istvan, Prof Emeritus of Philosophy @ U of Sussex, “The Structural Crisis of Politics” The Monthly Review Vol. 58.4 September JF)Are the legitimate political institutions of our societies in a position to redress even the most perilous situations by democratic intervention in the process of actual decision making, as traditional political discourse keeps reassuring us, despite all evidence to the contrary? Only the most optimistic—and rather na?ve—could assert and sincerely believe that such a happy state of affairs happens to be the case. For the principal Western powers have, quite unimpeded, embarked in the last few years on devastating wars using authoritarian devices—like the “executive prerogative” and the “Royal Prerogative”—without consulting their peoples on such grave matters, and ruthlessly brushing aside the framework of international law and the appropriate decision making organs of the United Nations.4 The United States arrogates to itself as its moral right to act as it pleases, whenever it pleases, even to the point of using nuclear weapons—not only preemptively but even preventively—against whichever country it pleases, whenever its claimed “strategic interests” so decree. And all this is done by the United States as the pretended champion and guardian of “democracy and liberty,” slavishly followed and supported in its unlawful actions by our “great democracies.” Once upon a time the acronym MAD—mutually assured destruction—was used to describe the existing state of nuclear confrontation. Now that the “neoconservatives” can no longer pretend that the United States (and the West in general) are threatened by nuclear annihilation, the acronym has been turned into literal madness, as the “legitimate policy orientation” of institutionalized military/political insanity. This is in part the consequence of neoconservative disappointments about the Iraq war. For “American neo-cons had hoped the invasion of Iraq would set in train a domino effect across the region, with the people of Iran and other oil-rich states rising up to demand western-style freedoms and democracy. Unfortunately the reverse has been true, in Iran at least.”5 But it is much worse than that, because a whole system of institutionally entrenched and secured “strategic thinking,” centered on the Pentagon itself, lurks behind it. This is what makes the new MADNESS so dangerous for the entire world, including the United States whose worst enemies are precisely such “strategic thinkers.” Unfortunately, the United States is by no means the only country which should be characterized in such terms. There are many others as well in which the political decision making functions are monopolized by very similar self-legitimating consensual institutional arrangements, with negligibly little (if any) difference between them, notwithstanding the occasional change in personnel at the top level. I will confine myself in this regard to the discussion of one prominent case, the United Kingdom (or Great Britain). This particular country—traditionally promoting itself as the “mother country of democracy” on account of the historic Magna Carta—under the premiership of Tony Blair eminently qualifies for the same dubious distinction of “one-party system with two right wings,” just like the powerful North American state. The Iraq war was rubber stamped in the British Parliament by both the Conservative Party and “New Labor,” with the help of more or less obvious legal manipulations and violations. Thus we can now read that “Transcripts of evidence given in private by the attorney general, Lord Goldsmith, to an official inquiry suggest that the crucial advice on the legality of war, presented to parliament in his name, was written for him by two of Tony Blair’s closest allies….The former foreign secretary Robin Cook said last night that having resigned the day before the war started, he had never heard Lord Goldsmith make the legal case in cabinet. ‘I now think he never formally wrote a second opinion,’ he told The Guardian.”10 Naturally, the subsequent public exposure and condemnation of such practices by prominent legal experts, concerning “Bush and Blair’s illegal war,” makes no difference whatsoever.11 For the vested interests of global hegemonic imperialism—unhesitatingly and humiliatingly served by the political consensual system of a former major imperialist power—must prevail at all cost.Impact: Nuclear WarThe pressures of capitalism’s decline will cause catastrophic imperialist wars and nuclear holocaustFoster 9 (John Bellamy, Prof of Sociology @ U of Oregon, Monthly Review Vol. 60.10 March JF)Such global ambitions of a single state, however, inevitably transmute from a source of hegemonic stability into a source of hegemonic instability for the world system. Despite its globalizing tendencies capitalism is unable to integrate politically to form a truly global governance. Instead the attempts of Washington to restore and expand its global hegemony, using its military power to enhance its economic position, are creating what is potentially the deadliest period in the history of imperialism. The United States has recently expanded its bases around the world to as many as seventy countries and territories, while U.S. troops are operating on an even wider field. U.S. military spending in 2007, according to acknowledged figures, is $552 billion, approximately equal to the estimated military spending of all the other nations in the world put together, while actual U.S. military spending in 2007 was $1 trillion.49 Amiya Kumar Bagchi, one of India’s most distinguished economists, has called this a “third axial age,” in which “the United States has emerged as the superimperialist, and its government has claimed that no international law or organization can deter it from any material action it considers to be in the national interest (meaning, of course, the interest of big U.S. capital). At the same time that big capital, backed by the military might of the superimperialist, pursues its murderous course, the bargaining power of workers all over the world is pushed down to low levels through a combination of measures—totally deregulating finance, enfeebling the state, and depriving workers of all rights vis-à-vis capital through legislation.50 There is no doubt that the national security apparatus in the United States, in this period, sees China, as the great Marxist philosopher István Mészáros has said, as its “ultimate target.”51 This has been most evident in the last few years in: (1) report after report by the U.S. national security establishment warning of China’s growing influence in Africa and access to African petroleum reserves, control of which are seen as vital to U.S. “national security” (2) continual fears within the U.S. intelligence community of a Chinese-Iranian or Chinese-Russian-Iranian alliance; (3) U.S. efforts to form a military pact with India; (4) concerns raised about Chinese advances in space; and (5) conflict regarding Tibet, Taiwan, North Korea, and the China Sea. Although the United States is economically bound to China at present through the production of multinational corporations and intensive trade and currency exchanges—so much so that the two economies appear to be in a kind of symbiotic embrace—increased geopolitical rivalry associated with declining U.S. hegemony and the rise of China as a world power create the possibility of a more explosive relationship arising. At present there are very palpable fears in Washington’s higher circles regarding the continuing—and from their perspective necessary and non-negotiable—role of the dollar as trade settlement and reserve currency, even in the face of current Chinese support for the dollar system. Washington understands that China’s blind support for the dollar is problematic, especially in the event of a rapid devaluation of all existing dollar obligations resulting from Federal Reserve policy. China holds $652 billion in U.S. Treasury debt (an increase from $459 billion at the end of 2007). Altogether it owns 10 percent of the U.S. public debt. A rapid devaluation of the dollar would only be seen in China as an expropriation. An ensuing movement of China away from the dollar, however limited—and none but limited moves are immediately possible—could drastically destabilize the entire U.S. dominated world economic order.52 At the same time as Washington is concerned about the increased potential threat to its hegemony posed by the rise of China, it is also striving to contain or weaken other states as well, such as Russia, Iran, and Venezuela. There is no doubt that the economic and ecological crises, to the extent that they worsen, will tend to destabilize the system, intensifying these and other imperial tensions. Classic geopolitical theory suggests that only by containing the rimlands of Eurasia can a single power control the globe. U.S. strategy at present centers on the Middle East, as the strategic petroleum underbelly of Eurasia. But its primary goal is to defend and even expand its own weakening global ascendancy vis-á-vis potential economic and military rivals. With the spread of weapons of mass destruction—which U.S. attempts at consolidating global military and economic dominance actually encourage—it is not difficult to imagine a situation in which matters will get out of control. The terror of a global holocaust emerging from such economic, ecological, and geopolitical instability—threatened in the first instance by the refusal of the United States and its Israeli ally to accept the failure of their policies in the Middle East and the related mismanagement of world energy resources—is a danger that cannot be ignored. This grim reality marks the failed peace—Pox Americana rather than Pax Americana—of a failed system.53As the foregoing indicates, the world is currently facing the threat of a new world deflation-depression, worse than anything seen since the 1930s. The ecological problem has reached a level that the entire planet as we know it is now threatened. Neoliberal capitalism appears to be at an end, along with what some have called “neoliberalism ‘with Chinese characteristics.’”54 Declining U.S. hegemony, coupled with current U.S. attempts militarily to restore its global hegemony through the so-called War on Terror, threaten wider wars and nuclear holocausts. The one common denominator accounting for all of these crises is the current phase of global monopoly-finance capital. The fault lines are most obvious in terms of the peril to the planet. As Evo Morales, president of Bolivia, has recently stated: “Under capitalism we are not human beings but consumers. Under capitalism mother earth does not exist, instead there are raw materials.” In reality, “the earth is much more important than [the] stock exchanges of Wall Street and the world. [Yet,] while the United States and the European Union allocate 4,100 billion dollars to save the bankers from a financial crisis that they themselves have caused, programs on climate change get 313 times less, that is to say, only 13 billion dollars.”55Impact: Nuclear WarDissidence against capitalism is key to prevent nuclear warIndependent Media Center 3 (IMC, grassroots network committed to using media production and distribution as tools for promoting social and economic justice, May 14, [web.web/20050220092917/] AD: 7-4-11, jam)As Adam Smith observed of a previous mercantile system, applicable to today's system of state-corporate mercantilism, "it cannot be very difficult to determine who have been the contrivers of this whole mercantile system; not the consumers, we may believe, whose interest has been entirely neglected; but the producers, whose interest has been so carefully attended to; and among this latter class our merchants and manufacturers have been by far the principal architects." Policy Smith observed, "comes from an order of men, whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it." This raises an interesting issue, namely that the pursuit of Armageddon is quite rational. The dominant institutions of capitalism place a premium on short-term greed. Rational participatory planning incorporating long-term concerns such as human survival are of no interest to these pathological institutions. What matters is short-term profit maximisation. One can see this most clearly in the case of such “externalities” as ecological change where the desire to pursue short-term profit undermines the long-term viability of the system itself (also us as a species; indeed many have surmised that we are in the era of the sixth great extinction of life on Earth this time human induced). The fact that the institutional structures of society compel the ruling classes to pursue highly dangerous “security” policies that are another “externality” of the system of state capitalism compels the population to constrain and eventually overthrow these institutions because apocalypse is institutionally rational. This brings us back however to Russell's problem. How do we answer Russell’s problem? There are those who do believe it can be answered, in the affirmative that is. Really this is just about the entire intellectual class which spins tails about human nature, most especially what are referred to as evolutionary psychologists and realist international relations thinkers; their doctrines are essentially prophecies of doomsday. Russell himself stated, "I am no prophet. Mankind perhaps decided that it has existed long enough and its time has come to yield the place to the animals we have hitherto considered lower. This is the view of those who are called statesmen and realists”. For those actually interested in human freedom and survival Russell’s problem is to be solved in the manner Bertrand Russell himself sought to solve it; not by lofty speculations and social “theories” but by political dissidence in all its manifestations. Chomsky has stated that the people of the third world rely on a thin margin of survival provided by turbulence and dissidence within the imperial states. In fact humanity relies on a thin margin of survival provided by turbulence and dissidence within the imperial states. The global justice movement has an awesome responsibility: human survival depends upon its success. The concerns expressed in this essay ought to occupy more of its time. Impact: Structural Poverty/EthicsCapitalism is an economy of death which produces war, militarism, nuclearism and structural poverty and requires unethical exploitation of surplus labor valueMarsh 95 (James L., Professor of Philosophy at Fordham University, Critique, Action, and Liberation p. 271-272 GAL)At the stage of relative surplus value, capitalism, because the investment in human beings decreases proportionally to that in technology and science, tends to produce a surplus population. Marx states the general law of capitalist accumulation as follows: "the greater the social wealth, functioning capital, the extent and energy of its growth, and therefore also the greater mass of the proletariat and productivity of its labor, the greater is the industrial reserve army." Capitalism structurally produces unemployment, poverty, homelessness. hunger, and so on. These are the effects of the original relationship of domination in the workplace, in which the worker is hired not for her own self-satisfaction and profit, but for the capitalist's. From this relationship all bad things follow. Capital is a Moloch on whose altar the poor and oppressed are sacrificed.Capitalism, then, structurally produces poverty. In a certain structural sense, capitalism intends to produce poverty. When the laborer is confronting the capitalist face-to-face with only her own labor power to sell, she is already denuded of wealth, divorced from land and means of production, not having the wherewithal to buy means of subsistence. During the process of further capitalist accumulation and circulation, she is further impoverished by being deprived of the surplus value she has produced and by being de-skilled as the mental control and direction of the work passes to the capitalist manager and machine. Finally, as we have seen, because of the relatively greater investment in means of production compared to labor, the industrial reserve army forms. Poverty of the worker is prior to. contemporaneous with, and consequent to the labor-capital encounter. Such marginalization. in which people are dropped by the wayside of the system as useless or superfluous, is perhaps a fourth, distinct kind of injustice, in addition to exploitation, tyranny and colonization.Contrary to what Habermas says, therefore, the face-to-face confrontation of the laborer with the capitalist is an ethical one in the life-world, grounding or founding the systemic aspects of capitalism and the colonization of life-world by system. Prior to colonization and founding it are exploitation and domination. When Marx refers to the rate of surplus value, the proportion of unpaid to paid labor time, as the rate of exploitation, he is referring to this ethical relationship. When he speaks of the movement from formal to real subsumption culminating in the process of extracting relative surplus value, he is speaking of the same relation. Formal subsumption. in which the laborer is gathered in the capitalist workplace to produce surplus value in a situation allowing the worker some control and direction of the work, is replaced by real subsumption. in which the worker is subordinated to a scientifically and technologically regimented workplace.The worker becomes an appendage of the machine. As capitalism develops more and comes more into its own. labor is devalued more and more, deprived, de-skilled. and impoverished. The increasing life and wealth of capital is the increasing death and poverty of the worker. Capitalism is an economy of death, of which militarism, nuclearism. and the warfare-welfare state are only the most recent examples. Impact: Trade WarsImperial capitalism makes trade wars inevitableDickens and Ormrod 7 (Peter, Affiliated Lecturer in the Department of Sociology, Faculty of Politics, Psychology, Sociology and International Studies , U of Cambridge, and J.S., Senior Lecturer of Applied Social Science @ U of Brighton, "Cosmic society: towards a sociology of the universe," book, p. 63-64, jam)The contradictions of imperialism. As capitalism extends its dominion, it becomes subject to a range of crises. One of Harvey’s intellectual predecessors argued that there is an important limit to all-conquering imperialism. It is one that may have a special relevance today and links up well with our second theme of hegemony. Lenin (1963) argued that there is a ‘contradictory tension’ to the continuing expansion of capitalism through end- less expansion across the globe. It is one in which imperialism is itself generating obstacles to the dynamism of capitalism. Lenin was pointing to the newest phase of capitalism, in which private sector monopolies displace competitive capitalism and operate relatively unhindered across the globe. Massive private corporations and the banks are therefore largely dictating the course of events. But this is a straitjacket for capital. The further expansion of capital is held back by such monopolies since capital depends and thrives on the tendency towards equal economic conditions and equal rates of profit across the globe. These would be the optimal conditions for further expan- sion but monopoly capitalism attempts to override these conditions. The barriers presented by monopoly capital are further strengthened by nation states. These typically make trade tariffs to protect their regions and to boost their own regional or transnational ‘spatial fixes’. Managing local and transna- tional capital, they attempt to make hegemonic projects in their national, or cross-national, interests. Examples in the pre-Second World War period included Britain isolating its Commonwealth trade, Japan expanding into Manchuria and parts of Asia, Germany extending into Eastern Europe and Italy into parts of Africa (Harvey 1982). Making such spatial fixes is not always an easy task. There is tension between capital based in a region that is employing local labour and multinational capital attempting to invest elsewhere. Making barriers against ‘free trade’ in these ways can easily be made the forerunner to outright warfare between those competing blocs of power. This might seem like absolute disaster, and of course it is for those who suffer as a result of war. But for capital it is a barrier overcome. Assets are devalued by warfare and it represents new opportunities to invest and restart the process of capital accumulation. The more powerful states are not just attempting to establish their own ‘spatial fix’ in their own or in other regions where they have dominion. As Lenin was well aware, they are exporting their social and political problems to other states. The position was stated clearly by Cecil Rhodes in the late nineteeth century: My cherished idea is a solution for the social problem, i.e., in order to save the 40,000,000 inhabitants of the United Kingdom from a bloody civil war, we colonial statesmen must acquire new lands to settle the surplus population, to provide new markets for the goods produced by them in the factories and mines. The Empire, as I have always said, is a bread and butter question. If you want to avoid civil war, you must become imperialists. (cited in Hardt and Negri 2000: 232) The perspective of Lenin and Rhodes continues to be useful today. The Chinese government, for example, is actively creating its own restrictions on world free trade and is negotiating with African countries to provide the resources it needs for its own spatial fix under the rule of its unelected leaders. And Lenin’s view of states creating their own ‘spatial fixes’ is especially important for our sociology of outer space. As we will describe in the next chapter, new ‘outer spatial fixes’ are being created by some of the developing nations such as China and India. Japan is also developing its own outer space programme. Impact: VTLCapitalism reduces everything to market abstractions—negates value to life and makes extinction inevitableKovel 2(Joel, Professor of Social Studies at Bard , “The Enemy of Nature,” p140-141)The precondition of an ecologically rational attitude toward nature is the recognition that nature far surpasses us and has its own intrinsic value, irreducible to our practice. Thus we achieve differentiation from nature. It is in this light that we would approach the question of transforming practice ecologically — or, as we now recognize to be the same thing, dialectically. The monster that now bestrides the world was born of the conjugation of value and dominated labour. From the former arose the quantification of reality, and, with this, the loss of the differentiated recognition essential for ecosystemic integrity; from the latter emerged a kind of selfhood that could swim in these icy waters. From this standpoint one might call capitalism a ‘regime of the ego’, meaning that under its auspices a kind of estranged self emerges as the mode of capital’s reproduction. This self is not merely prideful the ordinary connotation of ‘egotistical’ — more fully, it is the ensemble of those relations that embody the domination of nature from one side, and, from the other, ensure the reproduction of capital. This ego is the latest version of the purified male principle, emerging aeons after the initial gendered domination became absorbed and rationalized as profitability and self-maximization (allowing suitable ‘power-women’ to join the dance). It is a pure culture of splitting and non-recognition: of itself, of the otherness of nature and of the nature of others. In terms of the preceding discussion, it is the elevation of the merely individual and isolated mind-as-ego into a reigning principle. ‘~ Capital produces egoic relations, which reproduce capital. The isolated selves of the capitalist order can choose to become personifications of capital, or may have the role thrust upon them. In either case, they embark upon a pattern of non-recognition mandated by the fact that the almighty dollar interposes itself between all elements of experience: all things in the world, all other persons, and between the self and its world: nothing really exists except in and through monetization. This set-up provides an ideal culture medium for the bacillus of competition and ruthless self-maximization. Because money is all that ‘counts’, a peculiar heartlessness characterizes capitalists, a tough-minded and cold abstraction that will sacrifice species, whole continents (viz. Africa) or inconvenient sub-sets of the population (viz. black urban males) who add too little to the great march of surplus value or may be seen as standing in its way. The presence of value screens out genuine fellow-feeling or compassion, replacing it with the calculus of profit-expansion. Never has a holocaust been carried out so impersonally. Impact: VTLNo value to life under capitalismDillon 99(Michael Dillon, University of Lancaster, “Another Justice” Political Theory Vol. 27, No. 2, Aprill 1999, JSTOR)Otherness is born(e) within the self as an integral part of itself and in such a way that it always remains an inherent stranger to itself." It derives from the lack, absence, or ineradicable incompleteness which comes from having no security of tenure within or over that of which the self is a particular hermeneutical manifestation; namely, being itself. The point about the human, betrayed by this absence, is precisely that it is not sovereignly self-possessed and complete, enjoying undisputed tenure in and of itself. Modes of justice therefore reliant upon such a subject lack the very foundations in the self that they most violently insist upon seeing inscribed there. This does not, however, mean that the dissolution of the subject also entails the dissolution of Justice. Quite the reverse. The subject was never a firm foundation for justice, much less a hospitable vehicle for the reception of the call of another Justice. It was never in possession of that self-possession which was supposed to secure the certainty of itself, of a self-possession that would enable it ultimately to adjudicate everything. The very indexicality required of sovereign subjectivity gave rise rather to a commensurability much more amenable to the expendability required of the political and material economies of mass societies than it did to the singular, invaluable, and uncanny uniqueness of the self. The value of the subject became the standard unit of currency for the political arithmetic of States and the political economies of capitalism. They trade in it still to devastating global effect. The technologisation of the political has become manifest and global. Economies of evaluation necessarily require calculability. Thus no valuation without mensuration and no mensuration without indexation. Once rendered calculable, however, units of account are necessarily submissible not only to valuation but also, of course, to devaluation. Devaluation, logically, can extend to the point of counting as nothing. Hence, no mensuration without demensuration either. There is nothing abstract about this: the declension of economies of value leads to the zero point of holocaust. However liberating and emancipating systems of value-rights-may claim to be, for example, they run the risk of counting out the invaluable. Counted out, the invaluable may then lose its purchase on life. Herewith, then, the necessity of championing the invaluable itself. For we must never forget that, "we are dealing always with whatever exceeds measure. But how does that necessity present itself? Another Justice answers: as the surplus of the duty to answer to the claim of Justice over rights. That duty, as with the advent of another Justice, is integral to the lack constitutive of the human way of being.Impact: WarCap is the root cause of warHerod 7 (James, Columbia U graduate?and political activist, “Getting Free” Pg. 62-63 JF)AWar is the health of the state, said Randolph Bourne. AWar is a racket, said Smedley Butler. Both were right. The state (and its war machine) is needed by capitalists. War is a necessary and inevitable feature of profit taking. War is needed not only to maintain empire and control domestic unrest but as a source of profit. All this is always done in the name of the national interest, but most people realize now that this phrase is just a euphemism for the interests of the national and international ruling class, not the interests of the general populations of nations. Capitalism would probably collapse without the military-industrial complex. The U.S. economy is now heavily dependent on the arms industry, as are the economies of several other industrialized nations. These countries spend billions from general tax revenues making weapons that they sell (or more often, give away) to tin-pot dictators the world over. The Pentagon itself is the most enormous war machine in the history of the world and is tightly integrated with the arms industry. The more wars there are, the more money the arms dealers make. Every time a cruise missile is fired, a weapons maker gets to build another one, at a million dollars a shot. Every time some country’s infrastructure is destroyed, transnational corporations get to go in and rebuild it, making billions. Of course, they never put it back like it was.Impact: Warming and WarCapitalism causes extinction- global warming and nuclear warFoster 8 (John Bellamy, prof of sociology @ U of Oregon, “ Peak Oil and Energy Imperialism” Monthly Review Vol. 60.3 July-August JF)The supreme irony of the peak oil crisis of course is that the world is rapidly proceeding down the path of climate change from the burning of fossil fuels, threatening within a matter of decades human civilization and life on the planet. Unless carbon dioxide emissions from the consumption of such fuels are drastically reduced, a global catastrophe awaits. For environmentalists peak oil is therefore not a tragedy in itself since the crucial challenge facing humanity at present is weaning the world from excessive dependence on fossil fuels. The breaking of the solar energy budget that hydrocarbons allowed has generated a biospheric rift, which if not rapidly addressed will close off the future.43 Yet, heavy levels of fossil fuel, and particularly petroleum, consumption are built into the structure of the present world capitalist economy. The immediate response of the system to the end of easy oil has been therefore to turn to a new energy imperialism—a strategy of maximum extraction by any means possible: with the object of placating what Rachel Carson once called “the gods of profit and production.”44 This, however, presents the threat of multiple global conflagrations: global warming, peak oil, rapidly rising world hunger (resulting in part from growing biofuel production), and nuclear war—all in order to secure a system geared to growing inequality. In the face of the immense perils now facing life on the planet, the world desperately needs to take a new direction; toward communal well-being and global justice: a socialism for the planet. The immense danger now facing the human species, it should be understood, is not due principally to the constraints of the natural environment, whether geological or climatic, but arises from a deranged social system wheeling out of control, and more specifically, U.S. imperialism. This is the challenge of our time.***FRAMEWORK/ALT***Herod AltOur alternative is to vote negative to refuse to participate in activities which support capitalism. We must hollow out capitalist structures by refusing to invest our energy in reforms and rescue operationsHerod 2004(James, Getting Free, ) ? It is time to try to describe, at first abstractly and later concretely, a strategy for destroying capitalism. This strategy, at its most basic, calls for pulling time, energy, and resources out of capitalist civilization and putting them into building a new civilization. The image then is one of emptying out capitalist structures, hollowing them out, by draining wealth, power, and meaning out of them until there is nothing left but shells.? ? ? This is definitely an aggressive strategy. It requires great militancy, and constitutes an attack on the existing order. The strategy clearly recognizes that capitalism is the enemy and must be destroyed, but it is not a frontal attack aimed at overthrowing the system, but an inside attack aimed at gutting it, while simultaneously replacing it with something better, something we want.? ? ? Thus capitalist structures (corporations, governments, banks, schools, etc.) are not seized so much as simply abandoned. Capitalist relations are not fought so much as they are simply rejected. We stop participating in activities that support (finance, condone) the capitalist world and start participating in activities that build a new world while simultaneously undermining the old. We create a new pattern of social relations alongside capitalist relations and then we continually build and strengthen our new pattern while doing every thing we can to weaken capitalist relations. In this way our new democratic, non-hierarchical, non-commodified relations can eventually overwhelm the capitalist relations and force them out of existence.? ? ? This is how it has to be done. This is a plausible, realistic strategy. To think that we could create a whole new world of decent social arrangements overnight, in the midst of a crisis, during a so-called revolution, or during the collapse of capitalism, is foolhardy. Our new social world must grow within the old, and in opposition to it, until it is strong enough to dismantle and abolish capitalist relations. Such a revolution will never happen automatically, blindly, determinably, because of the inexorable, materialist laws of history. It will happen, and only happen, because we want it to, and because we know what we’re doing and know how we want to live, and know what obstacles have to be overcome before we can live that way, and know how to distinguish between our social patterns and theirs.? ? ? But we must not think that the capitalist world can simply be ignored, in a live and let live attitude, while we try to build new lives elsewhere. (There is no elsewhere.) There is at least one thing, wage-slavery, that we can’t simply stop participating in (but even here there are ways we can chip away at it). Capitalism must be explicitly refused and replaced by something else. This constitutes War, but it is not a war in the traditional sense of armies and tanks, but a war fought on a daily basis, on the level of everyday life, by millions of people. It is a war nevertheless because the accumulators of capital will use coercion, brutality, and murder, as they have always done in the past, to try to block any rejection of the system. They have always had to force compliance; they will not hesitate to continue doing so. Nevertheless, there are many concrete ways that individuals, groups, and neighborhoods can gut capitalism, which I will enumerate shortly.? ? ? We must always keep in mind how we became slaves; then we can see more clearly how we can cease being slaves. We were forced into wage-slavery because the ruling class slowly, systematically, and brutally destroyed our ability to live autonomously. By driving us off the land, changing the property laws, destroying community rights, destroying our tools, imposing taxes, destroying our local markets, and so forth, we were forced onto the labor market in order to survive, our only remaining option being to sell, for a wage, our ability to work.? ? ? It’s quite clear then how we can overthrow slavery. We must reverse this process. We must begin to reacquire the ability to live without working for a wage or buying the products made by wage-slaves (that is, we must get free from the labor market and the way of living based on it), and embed ourselves instead in cooperative labor and cooperatively produced goods.? ? ? Another clarification is needed. This strategy does not call for reforming capitalism, for changing capitalism into something else. It calls for replacing capitalism, totally, with a new civilization. This is an important distinction, because capitalism has proved impervious to reforms, as a system. We can sometimes in some places win certain concessions from it (usually only temporary ones) and win some (usually short-lived) improvements in our lives as its victims, but we cannot reform it piecemeal, as a system.<CONTINUED><CONTINUED>? ? ? Thus our strategy of gutting and eventually destroying capitalism requires at a minimum a totalizing image, an awareness that we are attacking an entire way of life and replacing it with another, and not merely reforming one way of life into something else.Many people may not be accustomed to thinking about entire systems and social orders, but everyone knows what a lifestyle is, or a way of life, and that is the way we should approach it.? ? ? The thing is this: in order for capitalism to be destroyed millions and millions of people must be dissatisfied with their way of life. They must want something else and see certain existing things as obstacles to getting what they want. It is not useful to think of this as a new ideology. It is not merely a belief-system that is needed, like a religion, or like Marxism, or Anarchism. Rather it is a new prevailing vision, a dominant desire, an overriding need. What must exist is a pressing desire to live a certain way, and not to live another way. If this pressing desire were a desire to live free, to be autonomous, to live in democratically controlled communities, to participate in the self-regulating activities of a mature people, then capitalism could be destroyed. Otherwise we are doomed to perpetual slavery and possibly even to extinction. Meszaros AltReforms will inevitably fail, the solution to our problems can’t be found within their framework of formal politics- there is no escaping the logic of either/or- continue pushing for futile reforms, or engage in radical critique to accomplish the withering away of the capitalist stateMeszaros 8(Istvan, Chair of Philosophy at the University of Sussex, The Challenge and Burden of Historical Time, p323-328)The unreality of postulating the sustainable solution of the grave problems of our social order within the formal and legal framework and corresponding constraints of parliamentary politics arises from the fundamental misconception of the structural determinations of capital’s rule, as represented in all varieties that assert the dualism of civil society and the political state. The difficulty, insurmountable within the parliamentary framework is this that since capital is actually in control of all vital aspects of the social metabolism, it can afford to define the separately constituted sphere of political legitimation as a strictly formal and legal matter, thereby necessarily excluding the possibility of being legitimately challenged in its substantive sphere of socioeconomic reproductive operation. Directly or indirectly, capital controls everything, including the parliamentary legislative process, even if the latter is supposed to be fully independent from capital in many theories that fictitiously hypostatize the “democratic equality” of all political forces participating in the legislative process. To envisage a very different relationship to the powers of decision making in our societies, now completely dominated by the forces of capital in every domain, it is necessary to radically challenge capital itself as the overall controller of social metabolic reproduction.What makes this problem worse for all those who are looking for significant change on the margins of the established political system is that the latter can claim for itself genuine constitutional legitimacy in its present mode of functioning, based on the historically constituted inversion of the actual state of the material reproductive affairs. For inasmuch as the capital is not only the “personification of capital” but simultaneously functions also “as the personification of the social character of labor, of the total workshop as such,” the system can claim to represent the vitally necessary productive power of society vis-à-vis the individuals as the basis of their continued existence, incorporating the interest of all. In this way capital asserts itself not only as the de facto but also the de jure power of society, in its capacity as the objectively given necessary condition of societal reproduction, and thereby as the constitutional foundation to its own political order. The fact that the constitutional legitimacy of capital is historically founded on the ruthless expropriation of the conditions of social metabolic reproduction- the means and material of labor-from the producers, and therefore capital’s claimed “constitutionality” (like the origin of all constitutions) is unconstitutional, is an unpalatable truth which fades away in the mist of a remote past. The “social productive powers of labor, or productive power or social labor, first develop historically with the specifically capitalist mode of production, hence appear as something immanent in the capital-relation and inseparable from it.This is how capital’s mode of social metabolic reproduction becomes eternalized and legitimated as a lawfully unchallengeable system. Legitimate contest is admissible only in relation to some minor aspects of the unalterable overall structure. The real state of affairs on thee plane of socioeconomic reproduction-i.e., the actually exercised productive power of labor and its absolute necessity for securing capital’s own reproduction- disappears from sight. Partly because of the ignorance of the very far from legitimate historical origin of capital’s “primitive accumulation” and the concomitant, frequently violent, expropriation of property as the precondition of the system’s present mode of functioning; and partly because of the mystifying nature of the established productive and distributive relations. As Marx notes:<CONTINUED><CONTINUED>The objective conditions of labor do not appear as subsumed under the worker; rather, he appears as subsumed under them. Capital employs Labor. Even this relation is in its simplicity is a personification of things and a reification of persons.None of this can be challenged and remedied within the framework of parliamentary political reform. It would be quite absurd to expect the abolition of the “personification of things and the reification of persons” by political decree, and just as absurd to expect the proclamation of such an intended reform within the framework of capital’s political institutions. For the capital system cannot function without the perverse overturning of the relationship between persons and things: capital’s alienated and reified powers dominate the masses of the people. Similarly it would be a miracle if the workers who confront capital in the labor process as “isolated workers” could reacquire mastery over the social productive powers of their labor by some political decree, or even by a whole series of parliamentary reforms enacted under capital’s order of social metabolic control. For in these matters there can be no way of avoiding the irreconcilable conflict over the material stakes of “either/or”Capital can neither abdicate its-usurped-social productive powers in favor of labor, nor can I share them with labor, thanks to some wishful but utterly fictitious “political compromise.” For they constitute the overall controlling power of societal reproduction in the form of “the rule of wealth over society.” Thus it is impossible to escape, in the domain of the fundamental social metabolism, the severe logic of either/or. For either wealth, in the shape of capital, continues to rule over human society, taking it to the brink of self-destruction, or the society of associated producers learns to rule over alienated and reified wealth, with productive powers arising from the self-determinated social labor of its individual-but not longer isolated-members. Capital is the extra-parliamentary force par excellence. It cannot possibly be politically constrained by parliament in its power of social metabolic control. This is why the only mode of political representation compatible with capital’s mode of functioning is one that effectively denies the possibility of contesting its material power. And precisely because capital is the extra-parliamentary force par excellence, it has nothing to fear from the reforms that can be enacted within its parliamentary political framework.Since the vital issue on which everything else hinges is that “the objective conditions of labor do not appear as subsumed under the worker” buy, on the contrary, “he appears as subsumed under them,” no meaningful change is feasible without addressing the issue both in a form of politics capable of matching capital’s extra-parliamentary powers and modes of action, and in the domain of material reproduction. Thus the only challenge that could affect the power of capital, in a sustainable manner, is one which would simultaneously aim at assuming the system’s key productive functions, and at acquiring control over the corresponding political decision making processes in all spheres, instead of being hopelessly constrained by the circular confinement of institutionally legitimated political action to parliamentary legislation.There is a great deal of critique of formerly leftwing political figures and of their now fully accommodating parties in the political debates of the last decades. However, what is problematic about such debates is that by overemphasizing the role of personal ambition and failure, they often continue to envisage remedying the situation with in the same political institutional framework that, in fact, greatly favors the criticized “personal betrayals” and the painful “party derailments.” Unfortunately, though the advocated and hoped for personal and government changes tend to reproduce the same deplorable results.All this could not be very surprising. The reason why the now established political institutions successfully resist significant change for the better is because they are themselves part of the problem and not of the solution. For in their immanent nature they are the embodiment of the underlying structural determinations and contradictions through which the modern capitalist state- with its ubiquitous network of bureaucratic constituents- has been articulated and stabilized in the course of the last four hundred years. Naturally, the state was formed not as a one-sided mechanical result but through its necessary reciprocal interrelationship to the material ground of capital’s historical unfolding, as not only being shaped by the latter but also actively shaping it as much as historically feasible under the prevailing- and precisely through the interrelationship also changing- circumstances.Given the insuperably centrifugal determination of capital’s productive microcosms, even at the level of the giant quasi-monopolistic transnational corporations, only the modern state could assume and fulfill the required function of being the overall command structure of the capital system. Inevitably, that meant <CONTINUED><CONTINUED>the complete alienation of the power of overall decision making from the producers. Even the “particular personifications of capital” were strictly mandated to act in accord with the structural imperatives of their system. Indeed the modern state, as constituted on the material ground of the capital system, is the paradigm of alienation as regards the power of comprehensive decision making. It would be therefore extremely na?ve to imagine that the capitalist state could willingly hand over the alienated power of systemic decision making to any rival actor who operates within the legislative framework of parliament.Thus, in order to envisage a meaningful and historically sustainable societal change, it is necessary to submit to a radical critique both the material reproductive and the political inter-determinations of the entire system, and not simply some of the contingent and limited political practices. The combined totality of the material reproductive determinations and the all-embracing political command structure of the state together constitutes the overpowering reality of the capital system. In this sense, in view of the unavoidable question arising from the challenge of systemic determinations, with regard to both socioeconomic reproduction and the state, the need for a comprehensive political transformation-in close conjunction to the meaningful exercise of society’s vital productive functions without which far-reaching and lasting political change is inconceivable-becomes inseparable from the problem characterized as the withering away of the state. Accordingly, in the historic task of accomplishing “the withering away of the state,” self-management through full participation, and the permanently sustainable overcoming of parliamentarism by a positive form of substantive decision-making are inseparable.This is a vital concern and not “romantic faithfulness to Marx’s unrealizable dream,” as some people try to discredit and dismiss it. In truth, the “withering away of the state” refers to nothing mysterious or remote but to a perfectly tangible process that must be initiated right in our own historical time. It means, in plain language, the progressive reacquisition of the alienated power of political decision making by the individuals in their enterprise of moving toward a genuine socialist society. Without the reacquisition of this power- to which not only the capitalist state but also the paralyzing inertia of the structurally well-entrenched material reproductive practices are fundamentally opposed- neither the new mode of political control of society as a whole by its individuals is conceivable, nor indeed the nonadversarial and thereby cohesive and plannable everyday operation of the particular productive and distributive units by the self-managing freely associated producers. Radically superseding adversariality, and thereby securing the material and political ground of globally viable planning- an absolute must for the very survival of humanity, not to mention the potentially enriched self realization- of its individual members- is synonymous with the withering away of the state as an ongoing historical enterprise. Rejection SolvesThe act of rejection creates the fissures necessary to resist global capitalism Holloway 05 (John, 8-16, Ph.D Political Science-University of Edinburgh , “Can We Change The World Without Taking Power?”, )On the question of fissures. We often feel helpless because capitalism weighs so heavily on us. But when we say No we start off with an appreciation of our own strength. When we rebel we are in fact tearing a little hole in capitalism. It is very contradictory. By rebelling we are already saying no to the command of capital. We are creating temporary spaces. Within that crack, that fissure, it is important that we fight for other social relations that don't point towards the state, but that they point towards the sort of society we want to create. At the core of these fissures is the drive to self-determination. And then it is a question of working out what does this mean, and how to be organised for self-determination. It means being against and beyond the society that exists. Of expanding the fissures, how to push these fissures forward structurally. The people who say we should take control of the state are also talking about cracks. There is no choice but to start with interstices. The question is how we think of them, because the state is not the whole world. There are 200 states. If you seize control of one, it is still only a crack in capitalism. It is a question of how we think about those cracks, those fissures. And if we start off from ourselves, why on earth should we adopt capitalist, bourgeois forms for developing our struggle? Why should we accept the template of the concept of the state?As an intellectual your rejection of capitalism has emancipatory results- relentless criticism allows capitalism to be challenged.Kovel 2 Professor of Social Studies at Bard(Joel, The Enemy of Nature, p224)Relentless criticism can delegitimate the system and release people into struggle. And as struggle develops, victories that are no more than incremental by their own terms- stopping a meeting stopping the IMF, the hopes stirred forth by a campaign such as Ralph Nader’s in 2000 – can have a symbolic effect far greater than their external result, and constitute points of rupture with capital. This rupture is not a set of facts added to our knowledge of the world, but a change in our relation to the world. Its effects are dynamic, not incremental, and like all genuine insights it changes the balance of forces and can propagate very swiftly. Thus the release from inertia can trigger a rapid cascade of changes, so that it could be said that the forces pressing towards radical change need not be linear and incremental, but can be exponential in character. In this way, conscientious and radical criticism of the given, even in advance of having blueprints for an alternative, can be a material force, because it can seize the mind of the masses of people. There is no greater responsibility for intellectualsAT: FrameworkAny move 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 GAL)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, extremely problematical. For they circularly assume that their enthusiasm for the virtues of ‘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 ‘metaphysical’, ‘ideological’, etc. The effect of circumscribing in this way the scope of the one and only admissible 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 way of transubstantiating into ‘ideal types’ (or by putting into methodological ‘brackets’) the discussion of contending 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 advocacy of the Popperian principle of ‘little by little’ in the ‘emotivist’ <CONTINUED><CONTINUED>theory of value – inevitably always favours the 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 semantic/analytical terms. And who would suspect of ideological bias the impeccable – methodologically 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 methodological principles themselves were in the first place constitution. This why the allegedly ‘non-ideological’ 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. AT: FrameworkInsisting that current order is the only possible framework for political demands replicates the failure of the labor movement – it’s a numbing self-censorship that destroys resistance to capitalMeszaros 1 (Istvan, prof. emeritus @ Univ. of Sussex, Socialism or Barbarism, p 65-66, JM)The labor movement throughout its long history remained sectional and defensive. Indeed, these two defining characteristics constituted a veritable vicious circle. Labor in its divided and often internally torn plurality could not break out of its paralyzing sectional constraints, in dependency to the plurality of capitals, because it was articulated defensively as a general movement; and vice versa, it could not overcome the grave limitations of its necessary defensiveness vis-a-vis capital, because up to the present time it remained sectional in its organized industrial and political articulation. At the same time, to make the vicious circle even tighter, the defensive role assumed by labor conferred a strange form of legitimacy on capital's mode of social metabolic control. For, by default, labor's defensive posture explicitly or tacitly consented to treating the established socioeconomic and political order as the necessary framework of, and the continuing prerequisite to, what could be considered "realistically feasible" out of the advocated demands, demarcating at the same time the only legitimate way of resolving the conflicts that would arise from the rival claims of the interlocutors. This amounted to a kind of self-censorship, much to the delight of capital's eager personifications. It represented a numbing self-censorship, resulting in a strategic inactivity that continues to paralyze even the more radical remnants of the organized historical left, not to mention its once upon a time genuinely reformist but by now totally tamed and integrated constituents. So long as the defensive posture of capital's "rational interlocutor"-whose rationality was defined a priori by what could be fitted into the practical premises and constraints of the ruling order--could produce relative gains for labor, the self-proclaimed legitimacy of capital's overall political regulatory framework remained fundamentally unchallenged. Once under the pressure of its structural crisis, however, capital could not yield anything of significance to its "rational interlocutor" but, on the contrary, had to take back also its past concessions, ruthlessly attacking the very foundations of the welfare state as well as labor's protective/defensive legal safeguards through a set of "democratically enacted" authoritarian anti-trade union laws. In this way, the legitimacy of the established political order was eroded, exposing at the same time the total untenability of labor's defensive posture. AT: Framework/Reforms GoodTheir framework which makes critical analysis of capitalism off-limits for discussion prevents all forward progress: while incremental reforms may achieve positive ends, the left must embrace the fundamental critique of capitalism, even for modest reforms like the plan to be realized.McChesney and Foster 2010 (Robert W., Gutgsell Endowed Professor of Communications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and John Bellamy, professor of sociology at the University of Oregon, “Capitalism, the Absurd System: A View from the United States”, Monthly Review, Volume 62, Number 2, June, Accessed July 1, 2010 GAL Emphasis in original)But the main lesson to be learned from the Sweden of left-liberal and social democratic dreams is not that capitalism can be reformed and therefore need not be fundamentally challenged. Instead, the main lesson is that those progressives who aspire to radical social reforms can only hope to have sufficient leverage to win these reforms if the threat of socialism is looming on the horizon. In Sweden’s case: the Soviet Union across the Baltic. The left can expect to achieve most in every respect when the threat it represents is one to be taken seriously.The current and pathetically weak state of the progressive forces in the United States points to the dangers of political demobilization. On issue after issue, progressives tend to garner a significant percentage of the American people’s support, yet they do not have anything remotely close to commensurate political influence. The recent debacle over health care, in which the Obama administration and its Congressional allies successfully played the left-wing and voting base of the Democratic Party for patsies and delivered on a gold platter a bill to the liking of the corporate sector, is the most recent evidence. Of course part of the liberal-left’s weakness in U.S. politics is due to the news media, unfavorable election laws, and a number of other factors with which progressives are all too familiar. But a more significant reason for that weakness is that nobody in power fears the liberal-left—and no one should. The liberal-left tends to trip over itself as it establishes its pro-market bona fides for decision makers. “Take us seriously, pretty please; we are not really radicals and certainly not socialists, we want to make your free market system work better, and don’t we have some jolly-good ideas,” they seem to say. The only way to exact major reforms from those in power is to show them that we really mean it; to convey the message that if the real demands of the people, expressed in mass movements, are not met by the system (or are met only in very limited ways), then we as a body will make serious attempts to accomplish these ends by transcending the current system of power. Think of the great progressive reforms in modern U.S. history. The Wagner Act. Social Security. The Voting Rights Act. These came when those in power were petrified. They arose because of mass revolts from below, and because radicals recognized that it was the peculiar responsibility of the left to help mobilize the working class to fight for their own interests and their own needs—to take to the streets and fight power head on. Consider why rulers in other nations, like France or Greece, tend to have greater difficulty implementing cutbacks in social programs during crises: Because, when they look out the window, they see a mass of people who would threaten the perpetuation of their system, if the vested interests were to engineer a class war from above in an attempt to turn back the clock. This makes the position of the capitalist class in such countries much more tenuous. The ability of the Swedish Social Democrats to win their tremendous reforms arose through the struggles of a working-class movement that was always populated with “extremist” elements open to expropriating private capital altogether. From the birth of democracy in antiquity, it has been true that those with property will only concede fundamental rights to those without property when they fear for the very survival of their own privileges. “If there is no struggle,” as Frederick Douglass said in 1857, “there is no progress….Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will….If we ever get free from the oppressions and wrongs heaped upon us, we must pay for their removal. We must do this by labor, by suffering, by sacrifice, and if needs be, by our lives and the lives of <CONTINUED><CONTINUED>others.”17 People arrive at more radical, revolutionary positions through concrete struggle. The unwillingness, so common among U.S. progressives, to embrace a critique of capitalism, to take it to its radical conclusions, including the necessity of a serious class struggle, has another unfortunate political consequence. It opens the door to phony right-wing populist movements seizing the mantle of “radical” opposition to the status quo. With the economic system off-limits to criticism (even invisible in its main power dimensions), attention necessarily gravitates to government as the root of all evil. The state must therefore be the source of the peoples’ problems; and indeed, it seems very seldom to operate in their real interests. It is the state, after all, that imposes taxes that seem to provide ordinary people few benefits; runs deficits, the burden of which falls disproportionately on those who gain the least; and controls the military and police. In today’s Tea Party ideology, engineered principally by the right, capital is deemed natural, while the state is unnatural—imposed from without on those who would otherwise be free. The social crisis is then seen as a crisis of too much government, too much interference by state interests in the natural order of things. Capitalism is treated as an elemental force, like the wind and tides, or a mere byproduct of human nature. The reality of power in today’s society is hidden behind the mist generated by this false “naturalism.”The underlying principle, therefore, is clear: progressives need a fundamental critique of capitalism and an open discussion about the possible advantages of socialism—even to attempt major reforms within capitalism. And when they begin that critique, we believe, most progressives and most Americans will come to the conclusion that C.B. Macpherson, in his The Life and Times of Liberal Democracy, reached some four decades ago: It is increasingly difficult to reconcile liberal democratic values (much less anything remotely resembling genuine democracy) with today’s monopoly-finance capital. Something has to go. And that is exactly why capitalism is off-limits to honest discussion, and why the constraints placed on public debate in our political culture prevent any real, permanent forward movement.18We have not forgotten the basic realities of class. We know that most of those self-identified as part of the U.S. liberal-left are very privileged, relative to the larger working population. The liberal-left is heavily entrenched in the professional-managerial stratum, or the upper middle class. Many of them are employed by the state. Theirs is a class reality that ties them in innumerable ways to the system. They may want significant change, but most of the liberal-left is materially linked, in a way that the vast majority of the population is not, to the existing power structure. Nevertheless, there is no imaginable path toward socialism in the United States today, in which a considerable portion of those who currently constitute the “liberal-left” do not play an important role as key initiators and supporters of a general revolt in society.The current state of U.S. politics might be described as one in which the right has gained more power by moving right. The left needs to gain more power by moving left. If this means increased political polarization, so be it.Framework is a LinkThe ability to declare capitalism off limits for criticism creates ideological dominance which negates self-knowledge and undermines all social scienceFoster & McChesney 10 (John Bellamy, Prof of Sociology @ U of Oregon, and Robert, Research Professor @ U of Illinois, “Capitalism, The Absurd System: A View From the United States” Monthly Review Vol. 62.2 June JF)The question of how a socialist society would operate raised a horrible, dystopian image in this student’s mind. Such libertarian fears of a totalitarian state imposing socialism by force, even to the point of annihilation, on an unwilling people, who are presumed to be capitalist by nature, are all too common. This brings to mind Fredric Jameson’s comment: “Someone once said that it is easier [for most people in today’s society] to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.”2 Perhaps nothing points so clearly to the alienated nature of politics in the present day United States as the fact that capitalism, the economic system that drives the society, is effectively off-limits to critical review or discussion. To the extent that capitalism is mentioned by politicians or pundits, it is regarded in hushed tones of reverence for the genius of the market, its unquestioned efficiency, and its providential authority. One might quibble with a corrupt and greedy CEO or a regrettable loss of jobs, but the superiority and necessity of capitalism—or, more likely, its euphemism, the so-called “free market system”—is simply beyond debate or even consideration. There are, of course, those who believe that the system needs more regulation and that there is room for all sorts of fine-tuning. Nevertheless, there is no questioning of the basics. This prohibition on critically assessing capitalism begins in the economics departments and business schools of our universities where, with but a few exceptions, it is easier to find an advocate of the immediate colonization of Mars than it is to find a scholar engaged in genuine radical criticism of capitalism. This critical dearth extends to our news media, which have a documented track record of promoting the profit system, and a keen distaste for those that advocate radical change. It reaches all of us in one form or another. Anyone who wishes to participate in civic life quickly grasps that being tagged as anti-free market (or socialist) is a near-certain way to guarantee one’s status as a political outcast. To criticize the system is to criticize the nation and “democracy.” This is a dream world for those atop the system. Such ideological dominance is worth more than a standing army of a million troops to those wishing to maintain their positions of power and privilege. But the illegitimacy of addressing the nature and logic of capitalism handcuffs almost everyone else. As long as serious treatment of capitalism, the dominant social system, remains off-limits, social science itself is deeply compromised. The failure of a society so marked in myriad ways by capitalism to confront this central reality can only be seen as a great evasion. It is the refusal to engage in meaningful self-criticism, to seek self-knowledge. Americans are like the proverbial fish unaware of the water that surrounds and permeates their existence. We come to believe that, as individuals, we are unconstrained in our day-to-day activities, since we remain at liberty, except when the state intrudes on our lives. Everything around us seems to function via Adam Smith’s invisible hand. What we lose sight of is the reality of an alienated, commodified existence with its innumerable chains forged by class and property relations.Now Key/Revolution PossibleThe status quo is a unique opportunity to break down capitalismFoster & McChesney 10 (John Bellamy, Prof of Sociology @ U of Oregon, and Robert, Research Professor @ U of Illinois, “Capitalism, The Absurd System: A View From the United States” Monthly Review Vol. 62.2 June JF)We were provoked to write this article because the possibilities in the United States for a genuine, free-wheeling discussion of capitalism’s defects, and the merits of socialism, are greater today than at any time in generations, and we must not let this historic moment pass. What is striking, and a cause for optimism, is the current degree of criticism of capitalism and the amount of support for socialism—in a media and political culture where criticism of the former and support for the latter have been all but forbidden. Back in 1987, a poll of the U.S. population indicated that 45 percent of the population believed that Marx’s famous words from the Critique of the Gotha Programme delimiting communism—“from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”—were enshrined in the U.S. Constitution. This, of course, said more about the absolute ideals of most Americans, and what they thought they should expect, than about the U.S. Constitution itself.19 Is this possible? Who knows? What we do know is that, as long as we breathe air, we have no real choice but to rebel, because under capitalism humanity has no future.Revolution can move quickly under current conditions but it depends on our willingness to engage in revolutionFoster 10 (John Bellamy, Prof of Sociology @ U of Oregon, “Istvan Meszaros, Pathfinder of Socialism” Monthly Review Vol. 61.9 February JF)The out-of-control destruction that now characterizes the capital system on a world scale, and imperils all life on the planet, has its dialectical antithesis in the potential for an acceleration of history, through the activation of a genuine, mass-based revolutionary struggle for substantive equality. The conservative nineteenth-century cultural historian Jacob Burckhardt, looking back on an earlier era of revolution, once described a “historical crisis” as a time in which a crisis in the whole state of things is produced, involving whole epochs and all or many peoples of the same civilization….The historical process is suddenly accelerated in terrifying fashion. Developments which otherwise take centuries seem to flit by like phantoms in months or weeks, and are fulfilled.6Today the structural crisis of capital provides the historical setting for a new revolutionary movement for social emancipation in which developments normally taking centuries would flit by like phantoms in decades or even a few years. But the force for such necessary, vital change remains with the people themselves, and rests on humanity’s willingness to constitute itself as both subject and object of history, through the collective struggle to create a just and sustainable world. This, Mészáros insists, constitutes the unprecedented challenge and burden of our historical time.Alt Solvency: Space MilitarizationResistance to space militarization is possible but it must happen now- possibilities for action decrease once space weapons are deployedDuvall & Havercroft 6 (Raymond, Prof of Political Science @ U of Minnesota, and Jonathan, Ph.D. U Minnesota, Prof of Political Science @ Oklahoma U, October, “Taking Sovereignty Out of This World: Space Weapons and Empire of the Future,” p. 11, jam)Given these grim prospects for a de-territorialized global rule of late-modern empire, are there any possibilities for resistance? Historically, every advance in the weaponry of imperial powers has always been met with an advance in counter hegemonic weaponry. Most recently, insurgents in Afghanistan and Iraq have been able to counter the technological superiority of the U.S. forces with very simple yet effective Improvised Explosive Devices. As such, it is reasonable to conclude that space weaponry could be countered through a variety of asymmetrical tactics such as disabling space weapons while in orbit through energy, kinetic or even nuclear anti-satellite attacks, attacking the locations where space weapons are produced or launched, attack the research and development centers (such as universities) that are integral to the production of these systems, organizing strikes for the workers involved in harvesting the raw materials for these systems, and refusing to pay taxes to the political apparatuses that control these systems. While it is difficult to imagine what precise form resistance to these systems might take, it is not unreasonable to conclude that even in a context of space-based empire, some form of political and military resistance will be possible. That being said, just because resistance to space-based empire is a possibility, it by no means follows that such space-based empires are either inevitable or desirable. That is why we believe that resistance to placing weapons in space must begin now. Such resistance could take several forms. In the last 15 years social constructivists have made a convincing case that taboos against the use of chemical weapons, nuclear weapons and land mines have shamed states into abstaining from using these weapons.76 IR scholars should build on this research to focus on creating a taboo against the use and hopefully even the development of space weapons. Second, there is a need to educate the public about the dangerous consequences of placing weapons in space. As of this moment, most information about weapons in space is produced by defense agencies and related think tanks with a vested interest in them. As such, most research largely ignores the dangers of these weapons. An increased awareness of those dangers, not only to those potentially targeted by such weapons but also citizens of countries such as the U.S. that may deploy them, may create public pressure to cut funding to the development programs. If action is not taken now, we believe that the possibilities for resistance to these weapons will decrease dramatically once they are placed in orbit. The state of global domination constituted by such a weapons regime would mean that those who dared to speak out against such a regime might themselves become potential targets of such weapons. ***AT’s***Bias / AT:QualificationsAcademics are less likely to question capitalism because of many forms of bias: institutionalized, egoistic, and generalMarsh 95 (James L., Professor of Philosophy at Fordham University, Critique, Action, and Liberation p. 54-56 GAL)We note here a broadening and deepening of the phenomenological insight that the life-world grounds or founds theory. The life-world is not simply the totality of interrelated, perceived objects about which theory necessarily first minks or a supplier of presuppositions for theory or the initial source of language for theory; it is also the lived set of commitments out of which theory emerges. Because of these value commitments, my attention to objects, presuppositions, and language is necessarily selective, highlighting some and leaving out others.For example, if I am a comfortable bourgeois academic, then I will be less likely to notice data in my experience that bring that comfortable life into question. As a result, radical questions—"Is capitalism unjust?" or "In what ways is capitalism contradictory'?" or "How can we overcome capitalism?"—are less likely to arise. Because the questions do not arise, the insights and judgments that might call me to be critical of the system are not forthcoming.It is not surprising, then, that the questions, insights, judgements, and values of the bourgeois academic are often, though not always, those that support and confirm that capitalism is good. A hermeneutical circle exists here that seems unavoidable.One can break out of this circle initially either on the level of practice or theory. On the level of practice I can move to a new set of value commitments that motivate theoretical change. As Walter Benjamin did. I can meet my Asa Lads, fall in love with her. and become a radical Marxist. I can come to a few tentative, new insights and judgments, which then lead me to change my practice. "If my life is to be consistent with my theory, then I must do this." The point here is that, as Lonergan argues, a law of integration is operative in consciousness whereby theory and praxis become consistent. —We can put the point another way. If insight is initially insight into phantasm, into the particular, perceived, remembered, or imagined experience, then what I choose to notice or not to notice, value or not value, revere or disdain will be selective. I cannot notice everything all at once. That selectivity, however, is inevitably limited, structured, determined by the prior value judgments, biases, and presuppositions that govern me. If these are basically bourgeois, then the appropriate experience or phantasms leading to a different, more radical set of insights and judgments will not be forthcoming.If Socrates is correct that the unexamined life is not worth living, then it is also true that the unlived life is not worth examining. In late capitalism, as we shall see. the primary form that unlived life takes is bourgeois: superficial, commodified. individualistic, consumeristic. technocratic. As a result, insights and judgments concerning the deep life of the self—its subjectivity, its sociality, its spirituality, its quality—are not likely to arise. Late capitalism, because it encourages a truncated, limited, impoverished life, also encourages a truncated, limited, impoverished rationality'. As a result, a more or less successful blocking of the desire to know occurs.Lonergan argues in Insight that the unfolding of the desire to know is limited or blocked by various kinds of bias: egoistic, group, dramatic, and general bias. Egoistic bias is simply my self-interest; anything threatening that I reject. Group bias is the bias peculiar to racial, sexual, or class domination. Dramatic bias is that concerned with the role I play in society, which role can lead to a repression giving rise to neuroses or psychoses. General bias refers to the tendency in human beings to restrict their questions to the short-range, the pragmatic, the empirical. Life in Plato's Cave is identified with real life.—In the twentieth century. however, in the United States and western Europe, capitalism is the cave. Currently, the unfolding of the desire to know is more or less blocked by the institutionalization and intensification of various kinds of bias. If. as we shall show, life in late capitalism is more or less objectified, commodified. reified, and quantified, manifesting a conjunction of capitalistic group biases with general bias, then practical life in late capitalism will be more or less successful in limiting the desire to know. Capitalism. we might say. is an institutionalized flight from understanding that systematically fosters illusion, obfuscation. mystification, injustice. Correspondingly, a thought that uncritically <CONTINUED><CONTINUED>takes its bearing from such a context of mystification and illusion, more or less reflecting and legitimating it. will be to that extent subject to illusion and mystification—in a word, ideological.AT: Capitalism in Space Inevitable Resistance to imperialism in space is possible, and their claims of inevitability are just an attempt to reinforce that hegemonic worldview Dickens and Ormrod 7 (Peter, Affiliated Lecturer in the Department of Sociology, Faculty of Politics, Psychology, Sociology and International Studies , U of Cambridge, and J.S., Senior Lecturer of Applied Social Science @ U of Brighton, "Cosmic society: towards a sociology of the universe," book, p. 72, jam)Resistances to military enterprises and to what Harvey calls ‘accumulation by dispossession’ may well be multiple, however. Social movements like the Global Network could mount such ethical opposition to the humanization of space that investment might, for a while at least, be halted. They have been outspo- ken against the militarization of space, but also against the use of nuclear power in space, and have flagged up issues including the creation of space debris and the socio-environmental consequences of opening up space to capital. There is evidence that this movement is gaining in numbers and becoming increasingly militant. The links they have built with other organizations associated with the political left, such as the Yorkshire CND in England, demonstrate the awareness that activists have that issues about outer space are the result and continuation of the dynamic of a global neo-liberal capitalist economy. As mentioned above, third world governments have also contested, albeit to date unsuccessfully, the monopoly that the Western world is developing over outer space. The United Nations’ role in dictating the shape of the humanization of space looks to become increasingly central, though it remains to be seen whether the US influence will continue to dominate proceedings in an era in which blocs of power in other countries such as China and India emerge as major stakeholders in outer space. There is always the danger, however, that these resistances will be blown out of the water by those social alliances attempting to retain power. Culture and the media have a key role to play in dulling or awakening popular consciousness about these issues. As we have already argued, there is a danger that space technology itself disseminates a hegemonic worldview that legitimizes as inevitable the endless expansion of imperial capitalism into space. Organic intellectuals within popular culture and activist organizations will certainly have a key role to play if this is to be resisted. AT: Cap InevitableCapitalism is not inevitable it has just been maintained through violence Kovel, Professor of Social Studies at Bard 2(Joel, The Enemy of Nature, p115-116)This reasoning is, I believe, valid, and necessary for grasping how capital becomes the efficient cause of the crisis. But it is incomplete, and fails to clear up the mystery of what capital is, and consequently what is to be done about it. For example, it is a commonly held opinion that capitalism is an innate and therefore inevitable outcome for the human species. If this is the case, then the necessary path of human evolution travels from the Olduvai Gorge to the New York Stock Exchange, and to think of a world beyond capital is mere baying at the moon. It only takes a brief reflection to demolish the received understanding. Capital is certainly a potentiality for human nature, but, despite all the efforts of ideologues to argue for its natural inevitability, no more than this. For if capital were natural, why has it only occupied the last 500 years of a record that goes back for hundreds of thousands? More to the point, why did it have to be imposed through violence wherever it set down its rule? And most importantly, why does it have to be continually maintained through violence, and continuously re-imposed on each generation through an enormous apparatus of indoctrination? Why not just let children be the way they want to be and trust that they will turn into capitalists and workers for capitalists - the way we let baby chicks be, knowing that they will reliably grow into chickens if provided with food, water and shelter? Those who believe that capital is innate should also be willing to do without police, or the industries of culture, and if they are not, then their arguments are hypocritical.AT: Cap InevitableCapitalist selfishness is not human nature—we can be nice too and not believing that is sadMagdoff & Foster 10 (Fred, Prof Emeritus of plant and soil sci @ U of Vermont, and John Bellamy, prof of sociology @ U of Oregon, “What Every Environmentalist Needs to Know About Capitalism” Monthly Review Vol. 61.10 March JF)Traits fostered by capitalism are commonly viewed as being innate “human nature,” thus making a society organized along other goals than the profit motive unthinkable. But humans are clearly capable of a wide range of characteristics, extending from great cruelty to great sacrifice for a cause, to caring for non-related others, to true altruism. The “killer instinct” that we supposedly inherited from evolutionary ancestors—the “evidence” being chimpanzees’ killing the babies of other chimps—is being questioned by reference to the peaceful characteristics of other hominids such as gorillas and bonobos (as closely related to humans as chimpanzees).34 Studies of human babies have also shown that, while selfishness is a human trait, so are cooperation, empathy, altruism, and helpfulness.35 Regardless of what traits we may have inherited from our hominid ancestors, research on pre-capitalist societies indicates that very different norms from those in capitalist societies are encouraged and expressed. As Karl Polanyi summarized the studies: “The outstanding discovery of recent historical and anthropological research is that man’s economy, as a rule, is submerged in his social relationships. He does not act so as to safeguard his individual interest in the possession of material goods; he acts so as to safeguard his social standing, his social claims, his social assets.”36 In his 1937 article on “Human Nature” for the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, John Dewey concluded—in terms that have been verified by all subsequent social science—that: The present controversies between those who assert the essential fixity of human nature and those who believe in a greater measure of modifiability center chiefly around the future of war and the future of a competitive economic system motivated by private profit. It is justifiable to say without dogmatism that both anthropology and history give support to those who wish to change these institutions. It is demonstrable that many of the obstacles to change which have been attributed to human nature are in fact due to the inertia of institutions and to the voluntary desire of powerful classes to maintain the existing status.37 Capitalism is unique among social systems in its active, extreme cultivation of individual self-interest or “possessive-individualism.”38 Yet the reality is that non-capitalist human societies have thrived over a long period—for more than 99 percent of the time since the emergence of anatomically modern humans—while encouraging other traits such as sharing and responsibility to the group. There is no reason to doubt that this can happen again.39AT: Cap key to DemocracyCapitalism is hampered by true democracy, and looks to hinder democratic progression towards a world without class-divisionsParenti 9 (Michael, PhD in political science from Yale University , “Capitalism’s Self-inflicted Apocalypse,” 2009, )After the overthrow of communist governments in Eastern Europe, capitalism was paraded as the indomitable system that brings prosperity and democracy, the system that would prevail unto the end of history. ?The present economic crisis, however, has convinced even some prominent free-marketeers that something is gravely amiss. Truth be told, capitalism has yet to come to terms with several historical forces that cause it endless trouble: democracy, prosperity, and capitalism itself, the very entities that capitalist rulers claim to be fostering. Plutocracy vs. Democracy Let us consider democracy first. In the United States? we hear that capitalism is wedded to democracy, hence the phrase, “capitalist democracies.” In fact, throughout our history there has been a largely antagonistic relationship between democracy and capital concentration. Some eighty? years ago Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis commented, “We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.” Moneyed interests have been opponents not proponents of democracy. The Constitution itself was fashioned by affluent gentlemen who gathered in Philadelphia in 1787 to repeatedly warn of the baneful and dangerous leveling effects of democracy. The document they cobbled together was far from democratic, being shackled with checks, vetoes, and requirements for artificial super majorities, a system designed to blunt the impact of popular demands. In the early days of the Republic the rich and well-born imposed property qualifications for voting and officeholding. They opposed the direct election of candidates (note, their Electoral College is still with us). And for decades they resisted extending the franchise to less favored groups such as propertyless working men, immigrants, racial minorities, and women. Today conservative forces continue to reject more equitable electoral features such as proportional representation, instant runoff, and publicly funded campaigns. They continue to create barriers to voting, be it through overly severe registration requirements, voter roll purges, inadequate polling accommodations, and electronic voting machines that consistently “malfunction” to the benefit of the more conservative candidates. At times ruling interests have suppressed radical publications and public protests, resorting to police raids, arrests, and jailings—applied most recently with full force against demonstrators in St. Paul, Minnesota, during the 2008 Republican National Convention. The conservative plutocracy also seeks to rollback democracy’s social gains, such as public education, affordable housing, health care, collective bargaining, a living wage, safe work conditions, a non-toxic sustainable environment; the right to privacy, the separation of church and state, freedom from compulsory pregnancy, and the right to marry any consenting adult of one’s own choosing.???About a century ago, US labor leader Eugene Victor Debs was thrown into jail during a strike. Sitting in his cell he could not escape the conclusion that in disputes between two private interests, capital and labor, the state was not a neutral arbiter. The force of the state--with its police, militia, courts, and laws—was unequivocally on the side of the company bosses. From this, Debs concluded that capitalism was not just an economic system but an entire social order, one that rigged the rules of democracy to favor the moneybags. Capitalist rulers continue to pose as the progenitors of democracy even as they subvert it, not only at home but throughout Latin America, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. Any nation that is not “investor friendly,” that attempts to use its land, labor, capital, natural resources, and markets in a self-developing manner, outside? the dominion of transnational corporate hegemony, runs the risk of being demonized and targeted as “a threat to U.S. national security.” Democracy becomes a problem for corporate America not when it fails to work but when it works too well, helping the populace move toward a more equitable and livable social order, narrowing the gap, however modestly, between the superrich and the rest of us.? So democracy must be diluted and subverted, smothered with disinformation, media puffery, and mountains of campaign costs; with rigged electoral contests and partially disfranchised publics, bringing faux victories to more or less politically safe major-party candidates. AT: Cap key to DemocracyDemocracy promoted by capitalism is a sham – current events proveWafawarova 7 (Reason, postgraduate student in International Relations at Macquarie U, Mar 6, [] AD: 7-4-11, jam)Neo-liberal democracy is the pretext upon which the Americans invaded Iraq and now they have a crisis on how they should be handling their defeat there. It is the pretext they used to be in Afghanistan and the same pretext they used to come up with the so-called Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act. It is the pretext they use to call their perceived enemies "axes of evil, dictators, despots, tyrants, extremists and rogue or failed states." Democracy as a model of governance will always be excellent but America's version of democracy is a sham. It is not designed for governance but for fomenting conflict between the middle class and the lower class of the developing countries. AT: Cap key to TechNo motive for meaningful technological innovation under capitalismPalecek 9 (Mike, Iowa author, former federal prisoner for peace, and newspaper reporter, Aug 12, [capitalism-versus-science.htm] AD: 7-1-11, jam)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.Technology can’t eliminate class conflict— tech developments are used solely to produce private wealth—Pharmaceuticals, the Internet, etc. proveWilkie 2005 (Rob, Red Critique, Winter/Spring, “The Daydreams of iPod Capitalism”, )But it is precisely this obsessed reading of technology as the eliminator of class conflict and the creator of ethical communities of cultural sharing that has made the Internet the "new" concept of global capitalism and so useful to the interests of Big Business. While we are witness to dramatic advances in the technologies of health, communication, transportation and commodity production—developments which could be used to raise the living standards of all—capitalism twists the potential of scientific and technological progress away from the meeting everyone's needs and towards the accumulation of vast fortunes for the owners. As one recent study found, rather than ameliorating class divisions, the "tech" years have seen the gap between the rich and the poor double in the United States (Browning C2) and such divisions literally determine who lives and who dies. For example, while nightly news shows act as virtual mouthpieces for the pharmaceutical companies, touting the latest lifestyle drugs and "extreme" plastic surgery techniques, capitalism reduces basic healthcare technologies such as dentistry and annual checkups to the privilege of a few (Park C05). Technology, in other words, cannot solve the problem of class inequality but only heightens the conflict between capital and labor because under the capitalist system technological developments are used solely for the production of private wealth for the few who own and control them. AT: Cap key to TechTechnological advancement under capitalism is inherently destabilizing, and leads to development of ever more deadly weapons of mass destruction.Mead 2004 (Walter Russell, Henry Kissinger Senior Fellow for U.S. Foreign Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations, Transcript of Book talk @ Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs on “Power, Terror, Peace and War”, Mead’s 2004 book, May 27, )The implications of this kind of economic change for foreign policy are enormous. For example, if we think about the key goal of capitalism, in some ways it is to enhance technology, enhance productivity. We are always seeking better and more efficient ways of doing things, we are developing new scientific understanding, and we are applying it to the various technological and economic purposes of life. Productivity goes up, we all get richer. In theory, this should make us all more stable and cosmopolitan. That at least is the end-of-history logic. And yet if we think about it, technological progress creates new challenges as well. If the strongest military force on the planet on September 11, 1901, had steamed into New York Harbor—I’m referring to the British Navy—and decided to spend the morning doing all the damage it could to New York, the British Navy in 1901 probably would have done as much damage as al-Qaeda, an NGO, was able to accomplish on September 11, 2001. But look ahead to 2101 on September 11th and ask yourselves: at that time, when by then high school students working on homework assignments in their biology labs at school will be doing things on a routine basis that today Nobel Prize-winning scientists cannot do, even with the help of massive university research labs, what would a group of terrorists or an individual terrorist be able to do on September 11, 2101? And yet, this increase of productivity and technological ability that lies behind that danger isn’t an avoidable byproduct of capitalism; it’s in the nature of what capitalism is constantly doing. We are creating new and ever more dangerous problems for ourselves simply by doing what it is that we like to do. And the idea that more capitalism necessarily creates more stability in the world is an illusion. I would not take the opposite deterministic view and say it inevitably makes things worse, because in 2101 we’ll be able to do much more to stop nut jobs who want to wage biological war on the rest of the world. Progress doesn’t just help the bad guys, it doesn’t just help the good guys; it raises the level of the competition. But it would be a mistake to think that technological progress will lead to a more orderly world. That weapons of mass destruction are already a lot easier to make than they used to be. The fact that a country like Pakistan could not only make nuclear weapons undetected by and large by both international and national means of detection, but also that a nuclear bazaar could be erected in shadows and the world not know for a significant period of time that this is happening, these things are also a function of progress. In 1945, when the first atomic bombs were built, it was much harder to do and much easier to figure out if somebody was trying to do it than it is today. So we will see, as biology and chemistry become more destructive and as nuclear technology becomes ever easier to deal with, it will be much harder to know what is happening on such a vital subject as weapons of mass destruction. This is inevitably destabilizing because it means that both national powers, like the U.S. and others, and international organizations will be less possessed of the information they need for the decisions that they must make. Technological progress is destabilizing in the international arena. AT: Cap key to TechCapitalism inhibits scientific development—the alternative solvesPalecek 9 (Mike, writer, “Capitalism Versus Science” JF)We are constantly bombarded with the myth that capitalism drives innovation, technology, and scientific advancement. We are told that competition, combined with the profit motive, pushes science to new frontiers and gives big corporations incentive to invent new medicines, drugs, and treatments. The free market, we are told, is the greatest motivator for human advance. But in fact, the precise opposite is true. Patents, profits, and private ownership of the means of production are actually the greatest fetters science has known in recent history. Capitalism is holding back every aspect of human development, and science and technology is no exception. There is a large international market for fossils. Capitalism has reduced these treasures, which rightly belong to all of humanity, to mere commodities. Privately held fossils are regularly leased to museums so that they may be studied or displayed. Private fossil collections tour the world, where they can make money for their owners, instead of undergoing serious study. And countless rare specimens sit in the warehouses of investment companies, or the living rooms of collectors serving as nothing more than a conversation piece. It is impossible to know how many important fossils are sitting, waiting to be discovered in some millionaire’s office. The manufacturing industry in particular is supposed to be where capitalist innovation is in its element. We are told that competition between companies will lead to better products, lower prices, new technology and new innovation. But again, upon closer inspection we see private interests serving as more of a barrier than an enabler. Patents and trade secrets prevent new technologies from being developed. The oil industry in particular has a long history of purchasing patents, simply to prevent the products from ever coming to market. Competition can serve as a motivator for the development of new products. But as we have already seen above, it can also serve as a motivator to prevent new products from ever seeing the light of day. Companies will not only refuse to fund research for the development of a product that might hurt their industry, but in some cases they will go to extraordinary lengths to prevent anyone else from doing the same research. Humanity today is being held back by an economic system designed to enslave the majority for the benefit of a minority. Every aspect of human development is hindered by the erroneously-named free-market. With the development of computers, the internet and new technologies, humanity stands at the doorstep of a bright future of scientific advancement and prosperity. We are learning more and more about every aspect of our existence. What was once impossible, is now tangible. What was once a mystery, is now understood. What was once veiled, is now in plain sight. The advancement of scientific knowledge will one day put even the farthest reaches of the universe at our fingertips. The only thing that stands in our way is capitalism.AT: Cap key to TechOur link outweighs your turn technological innovations only mask the very human relation with nature that causes environmental destruction esnuring the future devastation is always worse Kovel 2(Joel, The Enemy of Nature, p77-77)To draw out the broad ecological outlines of capitalist society is one thing to prove that this will inexorably lead to ecocatastrophe unless capital is overthrown is another. Here the question becomes not what capital is doing to ecosystems, human and natural, but whether it can adapt and change its ways, given the gathering breakdown of its natural ground - or to be more exact, whether it can do so in time to permit a mending of its relations with nature. Everyone appreciates how fabulously adaptable capital has been. It has eluded destruction time and again, so much so that its capacity to adapt to ecological breakdown is pretty well taken for granted. Market society has been fabulously successful in producing wealth. Why not, so the standard argument runs, will it not be just as successful in producing ecological integrity? But where this line of reasoning goes astray is in not realizing that this time, the lesion arises from capitalist production as such. The problem afflicting previous crises was how to resume a pattern of growth interrupted by one stress or another. Now, however, it is precisely the pattern of growth that causes the problem. Yes, capital can produce 'green commodities' or anti-pollution devices; it can even recycle and conserve resources as well as energy. But because it does so as capital, it does so by producing itself before anything else, and this gathering sea of capital will have the effects documented above, essentially washing out the marginal gains achieved by efforts at recuperation. This proposition is no more provable than its converse, the popularly assumed idea that capital will work its way out of the ecological crisis. The question is, rather, whether it -is more plausible, and for this purpose we may introduce yet another line of reasoning. Capitalist production includes all those forces that enter into the generalized production of commodities. But these include the prevalent human dispositions that enter into production. If it is true that capitalism induces a kind of mentality turned away from recognizing nature, we mean for this to be understood as one of the elements (in Marxist terms, a 'force of production') making the ecological crisis more intractable. In plain language, one of the biggest ecological problems with capitalism is the capitalist.AT: Cap key to TechCapitalism prevents any meaningful technological innovation – stifles cooperation and researchPalecek 9 (Mike, Iowa author, former federal prisoner for peace, and newspaper reporter, Aug 12, [capitalism-versus-science.htm] AD: 7-1-11, jam)The manufacturing industry in particular is supposed to be where capitalist innovation is in its element. We are told that competition between companies will lead to better products, lower prices, new technology and new innovation. But again, upon closer inspection we see private interests serving as more of a barrier than an enabler. Patents and trade secrets prevent new technologies from being developed. The oil industry in particular has a long history of purchasing patents, simply to prevent the products from ever coming to market. Competition can serve as a motivator for the development of new products. But as we have already seen above, it can also serve as a motivator to prevent new products from ever seeing the light of day. Companies will not only refuse to fund research for the development of a product that might hurt their industry, but in some cases they will go to extraordinary lengths to prevent anyone else from doing the same research. The 2006 documentary "Who Killed the Electric Car" goes into great detail about the role of big oil companies, auto manufacturers, and the US Federal Government in preventing an alternative vehicle from hitting the road. The filmmaker claims that auto companies would lose out if an electric vehicle was ever produced because of the simplicity of their maintenance. The replacement parts side of the auto industry would be decimated. Oil companies would see a dramatic reduction in the demand for their products as the world switched to electric vehicles. It is claimed that hydrogen fuel cells, which have very little chance of being developed into a useful technology, are used as a distraction from real alternatives. The film maker blasts the American government for directing research away from electric vehicles and towards hydrogen fuel cells. But the most damning accusations are against major oil companies and auto manufacturers. The film suggests that auto companies have sabotaged their own research into electric cars. What’s worse, is that oil companies have purchased the patents for NiMH batteries to prevent them from being used in electric vehicles. These are the same batteries that are used in laptop computers and large batteries of this type would make the electric vehicle possible. But Chevron maintains veto power over any licensing or use of NiMH battery technology. They continue to refuse to sell these batteries for research purposes. Some hybrid vehicles are now using NiMH batteries, but hybrid vehicles, while improving mileage, still rely on fossil fuels. While the purchasing of patents is an effective way of shelving new innovations, there are certainly other ways the capitalist system holds back research and development. The very nature of a system based on competition makes collaborative research impossible. Whether it be the pharmaceutical industry, the auto industry or any other, capitalism divides the best engineers and scientists among competing corporations. Anyone involved in research or product development is forced to sign a confidentiality agreement as a condition of employment. Not only are these people prevented from working together, they are not even allowed to compare their notes! Peer review is supposed to be an important piece of the scientific method. Often, major advancements are made, not by an individual group researchers, but by many groups of researchers. One team develops one piece of the puzzle, someone else discovers another and still another team of scientists puts all of the pieces together. How can a system based on competition foster such collaborative efforts? Simply stated, it can’t. The governments of the world clearly recognize this as a problem; every time they are met with a serious crisis, they throw their free-market ideals out the window and turn to the public sector. It has been argued many times that World War Two was won by nationalization and planning. Capitalism in Britain was essentially put on hold, so that the war effort could be effectively organized. In the United States, such large scale nationalization did not take place, but when it came to research and development, the private sector was not trusted to handle it on their own. Fearing that the Nazis were developing the atomic bomb, the US government initiated a massive public program to ensure they were the first to wield a weapon of mass destruction. The Manhattan project succeeded where private industry could not. At one point, over 130,000 people were working on the project. The world’s best and brightest were brought together into a massive collaborative undertaking. They discovered more about nuclear fission in the span of a few years, than they had in the decades since the first atom was split in 1919. Regardless of what one thinks of the atom bomb, this was doubtlessly one of the greatest scientific advancements of the 20th century. AT: Cap key to TechResearch under capitalism is market-driven- profitability outweighs public good or curiosity driven scienceMazzolini 97 (Elizabeth, Johns Hopkins U, JF)Academic capitalism is as sweeping as the globalization to which it has been a compulsory response. The term describes the phenomenon of universities' and faculty's increasing attention to market potential as research impetus. According to Slaughter and Leslie, globalization has efficiently linked prestige to research funding to marketability. Slaughter and Leslie point out that federal research and development policies have, especially since World War II, emphasized the technological as being key for global competitiveness, so that academic capitalism is most visible in applied science and technology departments. There is a trickle-down effect for the humanities, in an increasing reliance on communication training, valuable in corporate settings. In other words, the humanities are useful only insofar as they support the most marketable research coming out of the university. Slaughter and Leslie's book presents formidable sets of statistics and policy research that demonstrate the decreasing degree to which higher education is beholden to the public good, and the increasing degree to which higher education is obligated to the extra-academic market. As universities are forced by diminishing public funds to raise tuition, faculty likewise are forced by diminishing support from their universities to seek outside funding. This places faculty in the position of having to anticipate and answer to the vagaries of the market. Research, according to Slaughter and Leslie, has become less "curiosity-driven" and more market-driven. Faculty's enslavement to market whims is further ensured by not only less public money, but also less control over what little money there is. Unlike the unconditional love that characterizes undesignated public funds, money from external sources is doled out conditionally, as from a stingy aunt who demands that you perform "I'm a Little Teapot" for your birthday money. Market money comes with the expectation that there will be returns from the investment in the form of profitable products or processes. The period that Slaughter and Leslie write about, approximately 1970-1990, has been marked by dramatic declines in block grants—unconditional love funds from the federal government granted to universities to use as they see fit—and a concomitant increase in academic capitalism, Slaughter and Leslie's titular neologism. The book's assumption that commercial competitiveness sullies academic research indicates not only an idealized past, but also an idealized separation of academy from market. However, even the universities of yore that were not dancing for the dollars of the stingy aunt were deeply structured by class and economic forces. My own university started as one of several land grant institutions that were set aside for agricultural research in the nineteenth century. Currently this same university has high-profile contracts with Nike, Pepsi, Barnes and Noble, and the U.S. Defense Department. Contemporary sources of funding seem quite different in kind from early federal subsidies for agriculture, but to suggest, as I take Slaughter and Leslie to do, that it is only after World War II that knowledge production had economic impetus is strikingly inaccurate. On a smaller scale, market forces circulate within departments, and moreover cannot be separated from curiosity. For example, in an English department, my research interests and those of my colleagues emerge from previous scholarship that got published and contributed toward jobs and tenure because of its particularized market value. Along with Slaughter and Leslie, it seems obvious that marketable technology has cultural pride of place. However, market forces are locally as well as globally constitutive, not, as Academic Capitalism maintains, instrumental and external to what they operate on. As such, they work not only visibly and sometimes hamhandedly but also subtly and more importantly, axiomatically. Attending and objecting to federal-level policy stakes out grounds of righteousness that threaten to cripple structural responses, such as local academic labor unions. AT: Coalitions/KrishnaThis is a link: The “rainbow coalition” of progressive causes they claim will emerge will necessarily fail and promote acquiescence to capitalismZizek 99 (Slavoj, Ph.D., Senior researcher @ Institute of Sociology, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, October 28, , JM)Do we not witness the same phenomenon today, and in even stronger shape, with the growth of an underclass excluded, sometimes for generations, from the benefits of affluent liberal-democratic society? Today’s ‘exceptions’—the homeless, the ghettoized, the permanently unemployed—are the symptom of the late capitalist universal system, a growing and permanent reminder of how the immanent logic of late capitalism works: the proper capitalist utopia is that, through appropriate measures (for progressive liberals, affirmative action; for conservatives, a return to self-reliance and family values), this ‘exception’ could be—in the long term and in principle, at least—abolished. And is not a homologous utopia at work in the notion of a ‘rainbow coalition’: in the idea that, at some utopian future moment, all ‘progressive’ struggles— for gay and lesbian rights, for the rights of ethnic and religious minorities, the ecological struggle, the feminist struggle, and so on—will be united in the common ‘chain of equivalences’? Again, this necessity of failure is structural: the point is not simply that, because of the empirical complexity of the situation, all particular ‘progressive’ fights will never be united, that ‘wrong’ chains of equivalences will always occur—say, the enchainment of the fight for African-American ethnic identity with patriarchal and homophobic ideology—but rather that emergencies of ‘wrong’ enchainments are grounded in the very structuring principle of today’s ‘progressive’ politics of establishing ‘chains of equivalences’: the very domain of the multitude of particular struggles with their continuously shifting displacements and condensations is sustained by the ‘repression’ of the key role of economic struggle—the leftist politics of the ‘chains of equivalences’ among the plurality of struggles is strictly correlative to the silent abandonment of the analysis of capitalism as a global economic system and to the acceptance of capitalist economic relations as the unquestionable framework.AT: Gibson-GrahamGibson-Graham’s method surrenders to capitalism and allows the alt to become co-optedPoitevin 1 (Rene, sociology@NYU, Socialist Reivew, , accessed: 30 June 2011, JT)I begin with the postmodern (mis)appropriation of Althusser's notion of "overdetermination," namely the intuition that reality is so complex that it is better understood as a multicausal process rather than as a "structural" or systemic mechanism, as in the traditional Marxist explanation of capitalism. Then, through a close reading of J.K. Gibson-Graham's (which is the professional name of scholars Julie Graham and Katherine Gibson), The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It),2 I show that despite its intuitive analytical appeal and theoretical sophistication, their book espouses an unconvincing and ultimately reactionary postmodern/post-Marxist politics - one that is ultimately predicated around how to make capitalism more user friendly. I will show that to practice or "perform" postmodern Marxist politics in our present situation is not to engage in what the Amherst School of postmodern Marxism describes as a "politics of opportunity and attainment,"3 but to practice the politics of surrender instead. I will make clear that what ultimately gives internal consistency to many of the critiques of postmodern and post-Marxist theorists is a profound distortion and co-optation of the most critical, unique, and politically mobilizing features of Marxist theory, on one hand, combined with a renaturalization of a capitalism predicated on liberal notions of social and economic reform, on the other.4Gibson-Graham construct a straw person in order to reject Marxism, making a revolution impossiblePoitevin 1 (Rene, sociology@NYU, Socialist Reivew, , accessed: 30 June 2011, JT)The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It) begs another question: Who are they going after? Is it capitalism or is it Marx? Their book spends so much time on what is supposedly wrong with Marxism that at times it reads more like The End of Marxism As We Knew It. This approach is typical of a pattern that, to quote Wendy Brown, "responds less to the antidemocratic forces of our time than to a ghostly philosophical standoff between historically abstracted formulations of Marxism and liberalism. In other words, this effort seeks to resolve a problem in a (certain) history of ideas rather than a problem in history."19 Simply put, postmodern Marxist politics has more to do with the micropolitics of the ivory tower than with the plight of the workers who clean their campuses. However, once it becomes clear that a necessary condition for the primacy of postmodern theory and politics is that Marxism has to go (otherwise you do not have to become a postmodern to address their concerns), J.K. Gibson-Graham's anti-Marxist hostility, while actively embracing the Marxist label in order to render it useless, makes a lot of sense. And once again, all this is done with impeccable logic: Given that Marxism is still the only doctrine that calls for the systematic overthrow of capitalism, getting rid of Marx(ism) is also to get rid of the need for revolution with a big "R."20 One of the problems with trying to make the case for postmodern Marxism is that in order to get rid of Marxism and declare its tradition obsolete, you have to distort its legacy by constructing a straw man. This straw man-reading of Marx is predicated upon the double maneuver of collapsing Marxist history into Stalinism, on the one hand, and reducing Marxist theory to "essentialism," "totality," and "teleology," on the other. As J.K. Gibson-Graham themselves acknowledge, without any regrets, "Indeed, as many of our critics sometimes charge, we have constructed a 'straw man.'"21 What is left out of their quasi-humorous dismissal of Marxism is the complicity of such a straw man in the long history of red-baiting and anti-Marxist repression in this country and around the world. AT: Gibson GrahamGibson-Graham’s discursive focus is epistemologically flawed and dooms their movement to failurePoitevin 1 (Rene, sociology@NYU, Socialist Reivew, , accessed: 30 June 2011, JT)A third feature of J.K. Gibson-Graham's work, in particular, and of the whole radical democracy tradition, in general, is its post-structuralist extremism.26 For postmodern Marxists it is not enough to point out that, as both Foucault and Habermas argue, we inhabit an intellectual regime characterized by a paradigm shift from the "philosophy of consciousness" to the "philosophy of language."27 Nor is it good enough for postmodern/post-Marxists to recognize the pitfalls embedded in Hegelian epistemology and argue instead, as Spivak does, for strategic-- uses-of-essentialism as a corrective to the excesses of teleological thinking and fixed notions of class.28 No way. As far as postmodern Marxism is concerned, the only way to compensate for constructions of capitalism that are too totalizing is through the unconditional surrender of the Marxist project. As J.K. Gibson-Graham themselves make clear, "to even conceive of 'capitalism' as 'capitalisms' is still taking 'capitalism' for granted."29 And to try to redistribute the heavy theoretical and political burden placed upon the proletariat by reconfiguring political agency through "race-class-gender," as opposed to just class, is still a futile endeavor: essentialism is still essentialism whether one essentializes around one or three categories. This strand of post-structuralism, one that once again, can be directly traced back to Laclau and Mouffe's Hegemony and Socialist Strategy,30 is predicated on the faulty epistemological premise that what really matters is "discourse." As Laclau and Mouffe clarify, "our analysis rejects the distinction between discursive and nondiscursive practices. It offirms that every object is constituted as an object of discourse."31 The problem with this approach is that once we enter this world of epistemological foundationalism predicated on the claim that there is "nothing but discourse," we enter a world of relativism in which all we can do is "create discursive fixings," as J.K. Gibson-Graham themselves prescribe, that will guarantee that "any particular analysis will never find the ultimate cause of events."32 It is this ideological postmodern insistence on reducing all of social reality to discourse that ultimately overloads its theoretical apparatus and causes it to buckle beneath them. The Amherst School's "provisional ontology" is incapable of escaping the performative trap of trying to get rid of essentialism by essentializing all of reality as "discursive." The postmodern Marxist approach to ontology boils down to substituting in political practice every occurrence of "continuity" with "discontinuity" as a way to get rid of essentialism and macro-narratives. Even Foucault, the great master of discontinuity, distances himself from such mirror-reversal solutions when theorizing the limits of discourse and accounting for the "divergence, the distances, the oppositions, the differences" that constitute the episteme of a period.33 AT: Gibson-GrahamIn Gibson-Graham’s attempt to get rid of capitalocentrism, they reinforce it by constructing a form of obscured liberalism.Poitevin 1 (Rene, sociology@NYU, Socialist Reivew, , accessed: 30 June 2011, JT)My main point here is that throughout The Full Monty - and in J.K. Gibson-Graham's review of the film as well - property relations are never questioned or challenged. In the postmodern/post-Marxist "noncapitalist" world, corporations get to keep ownership of the means of production and their profits, while working class communities continue to lap dance their way through "identification across difference" rather than doing union organizing. That this kind of argument can be presented not only as "noncapitalist" but also as Marxist thinking should be enough to demonstrate the political bankruptcy of this paradigm. It is also interesting that JK Gibson-Graham maintain that challenging their analysis of The Full Monty, or not endorsing the politics of the film, "is inherently conservative and capitalocentric."48 I disagree strongly. The politics advocated by J.K. Gibson-Graham through their reading of The Full Monty is nothing but liberal politics with post-structuralist delusions of grandeur. It is one thing to say that we are at a political conjuncture in which the thing to do is to work hard for reform, not "revolution." But it is another thing to argue that revolutionary practice cannot happen on epistemological grounds, and that all we can do is make capitalism as user friendly as possible while obscuring and co-opting the Marxist tradition. J.K. Gibson-Graham's reading of The Full Monty is both liberal and reactionary. What the postmodern Marxist's reading of The Full Monty demonstrates is that in their desire to get rid of "capitalocentrism" - the alleged obsession of Marxists with seeing "capitalism" everywhere - they end up reconfiguring and consolidating capitalism back in. In their unreflective romanticizing of reform, and in their haughty contempt for revolutionary thinking and politics, J.K-.Gibson-Graham's style of postmodern/post-Marxism delivers what boils down to good old-fashioned liberalism: a mild, state-administered "economic justice" platform centered around individual private liberties, neatly packaged in postmodern gift wrapping. The bottom line is this: When one looks closely at what postmodern/post-Marxist theory actually offers, and after it is done "representing capitalism through the lens of overdetermination,"49 all one can strategize about is how to make capitalism more "user friendly." Gone is the project of getting rid of it. Strangely enough, postmodern/ post-Marxists do not regard these positions as a surrender of the Marxist project at all, but rather, as the exact fulfillment of that commitment.50 AT: Gibson-GrahamGibson-Graham’s approach denies the existence of capitalism and therefore destroys any hope of overcoming it, causing a regression to status quo oppression. Whole-sale rejection is keyPoitevin 1 (Rene, sociology@NYU, Socialist Reivew, , accessed: 30 June 2011, JT)Let me finish by addressing the "vision thing" in Marxist theory, and by putting forward some minimal suggestions for how to proceed. The problem with the Left in this country is not Marx's theorizing of capital, it is the Left's profound poverty of vision. Simply put, we cannot think "Revolution" anymore because we cannot think "Capitalism" anymore. What passes for "radical democracy" nowadays is so timid and so willing to declare and settle for quick victories that one has to wonder sometimes where exactly it is that the radicalism in radical democracy lies. And to make matters worse, we are living in a period in which the Left itself is the one in charge of convincing us that the "Revolution" is not only politically unfeasible, but also epistemologically impossible. To paraphrase Marx's famous eleventh thesis on Feuerbach, postmodern Marxists have interpreted the world for too long - the point is to change it. Do we need reform? Of course we do, but to construct reform as a "sufficient" condition for social change is to engage not in the politics of empowerment but in the practice of a politics of surrender with delusions of grandeur. Furthermore, in a post-structuralist epistemological framework in which structural and systemic explanations are forbidden, all we are left with is a blurred capacity to prioritize what is to be done. In short, in the postmodern Marxist world, it is impossible to structurally explain how the top 1 percent of the world population has more wealth than the bottom 92 percent. To do that would require the admission that there is something called capitalism with a logic to it. Recall that in the postmodern Marxist world, the political importance of "any relationship... [is determined by] how we wish to think of the complex interaction"; it is not based on institutional or systemic mechanisms of how inequality gets generated and reproduced.51 And given the postmodern Marxists' insistence on defining capitalism from the get-go as having "no essential or coherent identity,"52 it is no surprise that such academics are totally irrelevant to real people's struggles against globalization, the IMF, the WTO, and NAFTA. It's the case of the chicken coming home to roost. It is time to stop the politics of surrender and denial. It is time to stop pretending that if we repeat things over and over again for long enough (this is called "performative" in postmodern parlance), things will eventually change. The fact is that the Left has been getting crushed for quite some time now. The fact is that it is going to take more than a cadre of postmodern intellectuals and a new definition of capitalism to establish a just economic and political system. And attempts to co-opt and hijack Marxism for some reformist agenda is not going to do it either. AT: No AlternativeThe ‘no alternative’ claim wishes away real inequalities and renders us powerless to change things no matter how bad they getMeszaros 95 (Istvan, prof emeritus @ U of Sussex, “Beyond Capital” Pg. xiv-xv)The self-serving slogan of ‘there is no alternative’ is often coupled with an equally tendentious clause of self-justification which proclaims that ‘in the real world’ there can be no alternative to the advocated course of action (or inaction). This proposition is supposed to be a self-evident truth, automatically exempting all those who continue to assert it from inconveniencing themselves with the burden of proof. Yet, the moment we ask the question, what sort of ‘real world’ are they talking about, it becomes clear that it is an utterly fictitious one. For the structural defects and explosive antagonisms of the world in which we actually happen to live are apologetically denied or blindly disregarded by those who expect us to believe that in the ‘real world’ there is no alternative to the meek acceptance of the conditions necessary for the trouble-free functioning of the global capital system. In the name of reason, common sense, and ‘real politics’ we are invited to resign ourselves to the existing state of affairs, no matter how destructive its antagonisms. For within the parameters of the established order – eternalized as the rational framework of the fundamentally unalterable ‘real world’, with ‘human nature’ and its corresponding ideal reproductive instrumentality: the ‘market mechanism’, etc. – no solutions can be envisaged to the ubiquitous contradictions. Thus we are expected to pretend to ourselves that classes and class contradictions no longer exist or no longer matter. Accordingly, the only viable course of action in the thus postulated ‘real world’ is supposed to be to ignore, or to ‘explain away’ the evidence of structural instability provided by our own eyes, wishfully sweeping under an imaginary carpet the chronic problems and crisis symptoms of growing severity with which our social order confronts us every day. As things stand today, the ideologists of the established order do not believe any longer even in the earlier popularized notion of changing their order ‘little by little’. With the end of the ascending phase of capitalism no real change can be considered legitimate; neither by major structural intervention nor indeed ‘little by little’. AT: No AlternativeThere is only no alternative if we think under capital and accept it—accepting this means accepting all capitalism’s values and the destruction that followsMeszaros 7 (Istvan, Prof Emeritus of Philosophy @ U of Sussex, “The Only Viable Economy” The Monthly Review Vol. 58.11 April JF)It is not at all accidental or surprising that the proposition of “there is no alternative” occupies such a prominent place in the socioeconomic and political conceptions formulated from capital’s standpoint. Not even the greatest thinkers of the bourgeoisie—like Adam Smith and Hegel—could be exceptions in this respect. For it is absolutely true that the bourgeois order either succeeds in asserting itself in the form of dynamic capital expansion, or it is condemned to ultimate failure. There can be really no conceivable alternative to endless capital expansion from capital’s standpoint, determining thereby the vision of all those who adopt it. But the adoption of this standpoint also means that the question of “what price must be paid” for uncontrollable capital expansion beyond a certain point in time—once the ascendant phase of the system’s development is left behind—cannot enter into consideration at all. The violation of historical time is therefore the necessary consequence of adopting capital’s standpoint by internalizing the system’s expansionary imperative as its most fundamental and absolutely unalterable determinant. Even in the conceptions of the greatest bourgeois thinkers this position must prevail. There can be no alternative future social order whose defining characteristics would be significantly different from the already established one. This is why even Hegel, who formulated by far the most profound historical conception up to his own time, must also arbitrarily bring history to an end in capital’s unalterable present, idealizing the capitalist nation state11 as the insuperable climax of all conceivable historical development, despite his sharp perception of the destructive implications of the whole system of nation states. Thus, there can be no alternative to decreeing the pernicious dogma of no alternative in bourgeois thought. But it is totally absurd for socialists to adopt the position of endless (and by its nature uncontrollable) capital expansion. For the corollary idealization of—again characteristically unqualified—“consumption” ignores the elementary truth that from capital’s uncritical self-expansionary vantage point there can be no difference between destruction and consumption. One is as good as the other for the required purpose. This is so because the commercial transaction in the capital relation—even of the most destructive kind, embodied in the ware of the military/industrial complex and the use to which it is put in its inhuman wars—successfully completes the cycle of capital’s enlarged self-reproduction, so as to be able to open a new cycle. This is the only thing that really matters to capital, no matter how unsustainable might be the consequences. Consequently, when socialists internalize the imperative of capital expansion as the necessary ground of the advocated growth, they do not simply accept an isolated tenet but a whole “package deal.” Knowingly or not, they accept at the same time all of the false alternatives—like “growth or no-growth”—that can be derived from the uncritical advocacy of necessary capital expansion. The false alternative of no growth must be rejected by us not only because its adoption would perpetuate the most gruesome misery and inequality now dominating the world, with struggle and destructiveness inseparable from it. The radical negation of that approach can only be a necessary point of departure. The inherently positive dimension of our vision involves the fundamental redefinition of wealth itself as known to us. Under capital’s social metabolic order we are confronted by the alienating rule of wealth over society, directly affecting every aspect of life, from the narrowly economic to the cultural and spiritual domains. Consequently, we cannot get out of capital’s vicious circle, with all of its ultimately destructive determinations and false alternatives, without fully turning around that vital relationship. Namely, without making society—the society of freely associated individuals—rule over wealth, redefining at the same time also their relation to time and to the kind of use to which the products of human labor are put. As Marx had written already in one of his early works:AT: No AlternativeTheir demand for a detailed blueprint at this stage is bad- we first need agreement on broad principlesLibcom No Date (, “The Economics of Freedom – An Anarcho-synidicalist alternative to capitalism” accessed 7/6/11 JF)Getting from here to there is not going to be easy, but capitalism was created by humanity and can be replaced by humanity. The collective act of wrenching control of our own economic lives from the hands of capitalism is the long-overdue revolution we so desperately need. The success of replacing capitalism will be measured by how much it leads to us taking control of our own destiny, rather than simply passing it on to some other power, as previous failed revolutions have done. Real progress is best made not by producing detailed blueprints (for that way lies the slide into abstract politics and leadership), but by sticking to basic principles, and concentrating our efforts on taking action for real change. Real democracy requires real solidarity - and that means agreeing the basics and then trusting ourselves and the rest of humanity to get on with it. Keeping it real is the key.AT: No AlternativeIt’s unnecessary to plan and understand the post-capitalist society – we should allow for the possibility of a revolution to spontaneously occur Hudis 5 (Peter, Ph.D. candidate @ Loyola U in philosophy, [38/developing-a-philosophically-grounded-alternative-to-capitalism/] AD: 7-4-11, jam)The problem with approaches that assume that mass consciousness is trapped in existing social relations and that “socialist” consciousness is the property of an enlightened vanguard party is that the radical critique of society is abstracted from its cognitive source in spontaneous mass struggles. It is true that such struggles cannot by themselves develop a fully-fledged vision of a socialist society. But at specific turning points spontaneous struggles have generated a social consciousness that points beyond capitalism. An example of this was the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. The workers’ councils and revolutionary committees that arose directly opposed the Soviet occupation but did not call for a return to capitalism. On the contrary, they inspired a return to Marx’s “humanist” vision, as found in his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, where he attacked both capitalism and “vulgar communism” in the name of “positive humanism.” The spontaneous revolt helped deepen and redefine the very meaning of socialism, in a way that that far outlived the immediate events. Too many theoreticians want to tie consciousness to social reality while assuming away the connection between social realities and their consciousness. Intellectuals do have a vital role to play in developing a vision of a non-capitalist world; but their ability to do so hinges on absorbing impulses as well as ideas generated by spontaneous struggles (like the feminist movement of the ‘60s and ‘70s, which helped redefine what is needed to create a truly new, human society). The biggest problem with the approach taken by “Leninist” vanguard parties is that they tend to reinforce the division of labor that characterizes class society, with the result that the concept of “socialism” gets reduced to the mere nationalization of property and state control of industry. As John Holloway puts it, “The idea of a ‘theory of society’ suggests a distance between the theorist and the object of theory. The notion of a theory of society is based on the suppression of the subject, or…on the idea that the knowing subject can stand outside the object of study, can look at human society from the vantage point of the moon, as it were.” (Holloway 2002, p. 135) This separation between the “knowing subject” (the intellectual vanguard) and “the object of study” (“the masses”) impacts the understanding of socialism itself, since a hierarchical relation between leader and led defines the approach to working out an “alternative.” Yet history has shown that nationalized property and state control of industry under the hierarchical control of “radical” intellectuals is no alternative at all. To adequately respond to the question can humanity be free in an age of so many aborted and unfinished revolutions? the premises that have defined traditional approaches to conceiving of a radical alternative need to be seriously rethought or abandoned. AT: No AlternativeWe don’t need blueprints for post-capitalism – what matters is that we begin a process of theorizing Hudis 5 (Peter, Ph.D. candidate @ Loyola U in philosophy, [38/developing-a-philosophically-grounded-alternative-to-capitalism/] AD: 7-4-11, jam)The problem has only become more acute since the 1980s. It isn’t just that a concept of a non-capitalist society can assist today’s social movements. It has become vital for their very existence and forward motion. While spontaneous mass struggles often suggest the elements of a new society, the task of working out a comprehensive vision of non-capitalist social relations takes hard theoretical labor. Such labor requires more than spontaneous activity. It also requires more than the work of “enlightened” intellectuals who are isolated from mass struggles. What is needed today is not simply a general conception of socialism. We need more—Marx’s concept of a “revolution in permanence” that uproots the very basis of value production. Developing and projecting that concept requires a philosophic nucleus of activists and theoreticians who establish a dialogue with ongoing freedom struggles. To achieve this, we need to recognize that the form of organization, crucial as it is, does not exhaust the concept of organization. As Dunayevskaya stated in 1987: “The burning question of the day remains: What happens the day after? How can we continue Marx’s unchaining of the dialectic organizationally, with the principles he outlines in his Critique of the Gotha Program? The question of ‘what happens after?’ gains crucial importance because of what it signals in self-development and self-flowering—’revolution in permanence.’ No one knows what it is, or can touch it, or can decide upon it before it appears. It is not the task that can be fulfilled in just one generation…It has the future written all over it. The fact that we cannot give a blueprint does not absolve us from the task. It only makes it more difficult”(Dunayevskaya 1988, microfilm no. 10960). It was to focus the discussion of priorities for the Left in this direction that I began with a statement from Marx’s letter of 1881 to Domela Nieuwenhuis. That statement came directly after the following sentence: “A doctrinaire and of necessity fantastic anticipation of a future revolution’s program of action only serves to distract from the present struggle” (Marx 1986). Marxists have never stopped quoting this sentence, because it meant to them that they didn’t need to “speculate” about the future. But they usually didn’t quote what follows the sentence, where Marx speaks of the importance of “the dream of an imminent end,” because that wasn’t concrete to them. It has, however, become concrete to our age—far more so than Marx himself could ever have envisioned. This is no call to draw up “blueprints” for a new society, let alone regressing to “doctrinaire” anticipations of the future. Devising blueprints for the future is a form of Enlightenment reasoning that (to borrow a line from Hegel)4 “upsets the household arrangements by bringing in the goods and furnishings belonging to the world of the here and now.” But while we don’t need blueprints we do need a vision of the future. The future of the planet may well depend on it. AT: Non-FalsifiableMarxism is essentially falsifiable even if secondary predictions are falseAvakian 7 (Bob, Chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA, Dec 16, [revcom.us/avakian/makingrevolution/] AD: 7-6-11, jam)Of course, it is possible that a scientific theory is true—correctly reflects reality—in its main and essential aspects, but is shown to be incorrect in certain secondary aspects—and, in accordance with that, some of its particular predictions prove not to be true. And when that is the case, the application of the scientific method leads to a further development of the theory—through the discarding, or modifying, of certain aspects and the addition of new elements into the theory. In fact, this happens all the time with scientific theories in all fields—physics, geology, biology, archaeology, medicine, and so on. To determine whether a theory as a whole has been falsified—has been shown, through investigation and analysis, utilizing scientific methods, not to be true—or whether, on the other hand, only certain secondary aspects have been falsified in this way, it is necessary to examine whether those things that have been shown not to be true actually bear on and undermine the main and essential elements of that theory or only secondary aspects which do not go to the essence of the theory as a whole. To put this another way, if the elements which have been shown not to be true can be eliminated, or modified, without calling into question the fundamental assertions of the theory, then it is not the theory itself, but only secondary aspects of the theory, that have been falsified; whereas, if the demonstration that certain elements of the theory are in fact not true causes the theory itself to collapse, then it is the theory as a whole, and in its essence, that has been falsified. Let’s see how all this applies to Marxism. There are definitely things in Marxism that are falsifiable. For example, dialectical materialism. If the world were made up of something other than matter in motion—if that could be shown—then clearly Marxism in its fundamentals, in its essence and at its core, would be falsified, proven wrong. Or, if it could be shown that, yes, all reality consists of matter, but that some forms of matter do not change, do not have internal contradiction and motion and development—that too would be a fundamental refutation of dialectical materialism. But none of that has been shown. Another “core element” of Marxism is concentrated in the statement by Marx, cited earlier, concerning the foundation of all society in the struggle of people to produce and reproduce the material requirements of life, and the fact that in carrying out this most fundamental activity people enter into definite production relations, which are independent of their will. That is falsifiable, as is the Marxist analysis of the underlying dynamics of change in society, rooted in the contradictory relation between the productive forces and the production relations, and the economic base and the superstructure. That is also falsifiable—but it has not been falsified. It is true—the examination of human society in a scientific way bears out the truth that Marx was concentrating in that analysis. There is the Marxist analysis of the basic contradictions and the driving forces and dynamics of the capitalist system in particular, including the pivotal element of the production of surplus value through the exploitation of wage-labor by capital. All that is falsifiable—but it hasn’t been falsified—it is true, it corresponds to reality. There is the Marxist analysis, sharpened by Lenin, of the nature of the state as a decisive part of the relation between the economic base and the legal, political and ideological superstructure. This analysis that the state, of whatever kind, always represents a dictatorship of one class or another—this, too, is falsifiable. Show us a state that is not an instrument of class rule. If anyone could show that—in reality, and not in fanciful illusions—then at least that part of Marxism would be shown to be false (and that is a crucial part of Marxism). But this has not been shown to be false: Everywhere experience has shown, often at the cost of great sacrifice and suffering, that in fact this Marxist analysis of the state—that all states, even the “most democratic” ones, are in fact dictatorships—is profoundly true. All these are core elements of Marxism—of scientific communist theory. All of them are falsifiable—but the application of a scientific approach and method has shown them not to be false but true, to in fact correspond to reality. AT: Non-ViolenceHistory proves that pacifism failsChurchill 86 (Ward, was a professor of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder, "Pacifism as Pathology," book, p. 2, jam) Even the most casual review of twentieth-century history reveals the graphic contradictions of the pacifist posture, the costs of its con- tinued practice and its fundamental ineffectiveness in accomplishing its purported transformative mission.[3] Nonetheless, we are currently beset by “nonviolent revolutionary leaders” who habitually revise his- torical fact as a means of offsetting their doctrine’s glaring practical deficiencies, and by the spectacle of expressly pacifist organizations claiming (apparently in all seriousness) to be standing “in solidarity” with practitioners of armed resistance in Central America, Africa, and elsewhere.[4] Despite its inability to avert a revitalized militarism in the United States, the regeneration of overt racism, and a general rise in native fascism, pacifism - the stuff of the spent mass movements of the ‘60s - not only continues as the normative form of “American activism,” but seems to have recently experienced a serious resurgence.[5] The purpose here is to examine the pacifist phenomenon briefly in both its political and psychological dimensions, with an eye toward identifying the relation- ship between a successful reactionary order on the one hand, and a pacifist domestic opposition on the other. Violence liberated India from the BritishChurchill 86 (Ward, was a professor of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder, "Pacifism as Pathology," book, p. 11, jam)While other examples are less crystalline in their implications, they are instructive. The vaunted career of Gandhi exhibits characteristics of a calculated strategy of nonviolence salvaged only by the existence of violent peripheral processes.[38] While it is true that the great Indian leader never deviated from his stance of passive resistance to British colonization, and that in the end England found it cost-prohibitive to continue its effort to assert control in the face of his opposition, it is equally true that the Gandhian success must be viewed in the context of a general decline in British power brought about by two world wars within a thirty-year period.[39] Prior to the decimation of British troop strength and the virtual bank- ruptcy of the Imperial treasury during World War II, Gandhi’s move- ment showed little likelihood of forcing England’s abandonment of India. Without the global violence that destroyed the Empire’s abil- ity to forcibly control its colonial territories (and passive populations), India might have continued indefinitely in the pattern of minority rule marking the majority of South Africa’s modern history, the first locale in which the Gandhian recipe for liberation struck the reef of reality. [40] Hence, while the Mahatma and his followers were able to remain “pure,” their victory was contingent upon others physically gutting their opponents for them.AT: Non-ViolenceViolence pressures the state to change – civil rights era provesChurchill 86 (Ward, was a professor of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder, "Pacifism as Pathology," book, p. 11-12, jam)Similarly, the limited success attained by Martin Luther King and his disciples in the United States during the 1960s, using a strategy con- sciously guided by Gandhian principles of nonviolence, owes a con- siderable debt to the existence of less pacifist circumstances. King’s movement had attracted considerable celebrity, but precious little in the way of tangible political gains prior to the emergence of a trend signaled in 1967 by the redesignation of the Student Nonviolent Co- ordinating Committee (SNCC; more or less the campus arm of King’s Civil Rights Movement) as the Student National Coordinating Com- mittee.[41]The SNCC’s action (precipitated by non-pacifists such as Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown) occurred in the context of armed self- defense tactics being employed for the first time by rural black leaders such as Robert Williams, and the eruption of black urban enclaves in Detroit, Newark, Watts, Harlem, and elsewhere. It also coincided with the increasing need of the American state for internal stability due to the unexpectedly intense and effective armed resistance mounted by the Vietnamese against U.S. aggression in Southeast Asia.[42] Suddenly King, previously stonewalled and red-baited by the estab- lishment, his roster of civil rights demands evaded or dismissed as be- ing “too radical” and “premature,” found himself viewed as the lesser of evils by the state.[43] He was duly anointed the “responsible black leader” in the media, and his cherished civil rights agenda was large- ly incorporated into law during 1968 (along with appropriate riders designed to neutralize “Black Power Militants” such as Carmichael, Brown, and Williams.)[44] Without the specter, real or perceived, of a violent black revolution at large in America during a time of war, King’s nonviolent strategy was basically impotent in concrete terms. As one of his Northern organizers, William Jackson, put it to me in 1969: “There are a lot of reasons why I can’t get behind fomenting violent ac- tions like riots, and none of ‘em are religious. It’s all pragmatic politics. But I’ll tell you what: I never let a riot slide by. I’m always the first one down at city hall and testifying before Congress, tellin’ ‘em, “See? If you guys’d been dealing with us all along, this never would have hap- pened.” It gets results, man. Like nothin’ else, y’know? The thing is that Rap Brown and the Black Panthers are just about the best things that ever happened to the Civil Rights Movement.” Jackson’s exceedingly honest, if more than passingly cynical, outlook was tacitly shared by King.[45] The essential contradiction inherent to pacifist praxis is that, for survival itself, any nonviolent confrontation of state power must ultimately depend either on the state refraining from unleashing some real measure of its potential violence, or the ac- tive presence of some counterbalancing violence of precisely the sort Non-violence is an ideological weapon of capitalismHerod 7 (James, Columbia U graduate?and political activist, “Getting Free” Pg. 2-3, 5 JF). This does not mean, though, that we should not think strategically in order to win and defeat our oppressors. It means that we have to learn how to destroy them without firing a single shot. It means that we have to look to and invent if necessary other weapons, other tactics. But we must be careful not to fall into the nonviolence/violence trap. Is tearing down a fence a violent act or is it resistance to the violence of those who erected the fence in the first place? Is throwing a tear gas canister back at the police who fired it an act of violence or is it resistance to an act of violence? Nonviolence is a key ideological weapon of a violent ruling class. This class uses it to pacify us; it uses its mass media to preach nonviolence incessantly. Such rhetoric is an effective weapon because we all (but they don't) want to live in a peaceful world. We would do well to chart a careful course through this swamp. AT: Overview EffectDesires to overview the earth are manifestations of a primary human narcissism Ormrod 7 (James S., Senior Lecturer of Applied Social Science @ U of Brighton, Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society, Sep, Vol. 12, Iss. 3, p. 260, jam)The view of Earth from space Clive, the activist so keen on zero-gravity sex, and his wife, Caroline, also put forward another common fantasy. They said they wanted to go into space to see the Earth from that far away. There is clearly a theme of separation and transcendence in such fantasies. Early space tourist Dennis Tito, who had previously been campaigning to get the industry established, listened to opera during his stay on the International Space Station - trying to create, one can imagine, an other-worldly experience. Travelling to space does entail a separation from social life and "mother" Earth. It also aggrandizes the self, recreating the omnipotence of primary narcissism. Abercrombie and Longhurst (1998, p 82) have suggested that the tourist's gaze commodifies and consumes its object - it places the seer in a position of power over the seen. Activists referred explicitly to their wish to see the Earth so small that it could be covered by their thumb. This could be read as a desire to see the (m)other "under the thumb" and subservient. Yet fantasies about being in Earth orbit also retain strong themes related to the subjective experience of unity characteristic of primary narcissism. Many activists anticipated a new sense of unity with the Earth, not only upon returning to Earth, but while still in space, observing it as a whole of which they feel part. White argues that it is "the ultimate journey from part to whole" (1987, p 3). Earthly political divisions are invisible from space. One activist, Penny, suggested that Earthly conflicts could be put into perspective and we could achieve a new sense of unity. So travelling to space and looking back at Earth might seem like a journey of separation, but it also denies the break from primary narcissism. The object is at once lost, even discarded, and at the same time consumed and brought back into one unified being with the self. There is a tension between humility and power in their fantasies - the self is subsumed by the whole at the same moment it transcends it. A different lens through which the journey into space and back could be interpreted is Jung's (1956) myth of the hero. The journey into outer space could be read as a parallel to an internal, psychic journey. For Jung, myths were particular cultural manifestations of underlying universal "archetypes": shared representations of the unconscious. For him, all hero myths seek to express the human psychic journey, charting the emergence of ego consciousness in adolescence and eventually death, a return to the womb, and rebirth in immortal form. The passage often involves a period of separation and wandering, symbolizing a longing for the lost object that cannot be possessed. In this sense, a journey away from Earth into space represents the necessary break from the mother. Return to Earth then becomes a much desired return to the womb, a "re-entry" to use the space terminology. But the fantasy of a journey into space is not the story of "normal" human development. It appears to play out the necessity of separation and return, but in fact it is a way of denying the true nature of loss. AT: Perm- HollowayThe revolution must take place in the form of insubordination and refusal to live according to the dictates of capital. Demands on the state take the command structure of capital as their principal reference point, which will always result in betrayal and cooption.Holloway 5 (John, teacher at the Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences at the Autonomous University of Puebla, “Can we change the world without taking power?” Znet, August 16, Accessed 7/13/11)I don’t know the answer. Perhaps we can change the world without taking power. Perhaps we cannot. The starting point—for all of us, I think—is uncertainty, not knowing, a common search for a way forward. Because it becomes more and more clear that capitalism is a catastrophe for humanity. A radical change in the organisation of society, that is, revolution, is more urgent than ever. And this revolution can only be world revolution if it is to be effective.But it is unlikely that world revolution can be achieved in one single blow. This means that the only way in which we can conceive of revolution is as interstitial revolution, as a revolution that takes place in the interstices of capitalism, a revolution that occupies spaces in the world while capitalism still exists. The question is how we conceive of these interstices, whether we think of them as states or in other ways.In thinking about this, we have to start from where we are, from the many rebellions and insubordinations that have brought us to Porto Alegre. The world is full of such rebellions, of people saying NO to capitalism: NO, we shall not live our lives according to the dictates of capitalism, we shall do what we consider necessary or desirable and not what capital tells us to do. Sometimes we just see capitalism as an all-encompassing system of domination and forget that such rebellions exist everywhere. At times they are so small that even those involved do not perceive them as refusals, but often they are collective projects searching for an alternative way forward and sometimes they are as big as the Lacandon Jungle or the Argentinazo of three years ago or the revolt in Bolivia just over a year ago. All of these insubordinations are characterised by a drive towards self-determination, an impulse that says, ‘No, you will not tell us what to do, we shall decide for ourselves what we must do.’These refusals can be seen as fissures, as cracks in the system of capitalist domination. Capitalism is not (in the first place) an economic system, but a system of command. Capitalists, through money, command us, telling us what to do. To refuse to obey is to break the command of capital. The question for us, then, is how do we multiply and expand these refusals, these cracks in the texture of domination?There are two ways of thinking about this.The first says that these movements, these many insubordinations, lack maturity and effectiveness unless they are focused, unless they are channelled towards a goal. For them to be effective, they must be channelled towards the conquest of state power—either through elections or through the overthrowing of the existing state and the establishment of a new, revolutionary state. The organisational form for channelling all these insubordinations towards that aim is the party.The question of taking state power is not so much a question of future intentions as of present organisation. How should we organise ourselves in the present? Should we join a party, an organisational form that focuses our discontent on the winning of state power? Or should we organise in some other way?The second way of thinking about the expansion and multiplication of insubordinations is to say, ‘No, they should not be all harnessed together in the form of a party, they should flourish freely, go whatever way the struggle takes them.’ This does not mean that there should be no coordination, but it should be a much looser coordination. Above all, the principal point of reference is not the state but the society that we want to create.The principal argument against the first conception is that it leads us in the wrong direction. The state is not a thing, it is not a neutral object: it is a form of social relations, a form of organisation, a way of doing things which has been developed over several centuries for the purpose of maintaining or developing the rule of capital. If we focus our struggles on the state, or if we take the state as our principal point of reference, we have to understand that the state pulls us in a certain direction. Above all, it seeks to impose upon us a separation of our struggles from society, to convert our struggle into a struggle on behalf of, in the name of. It separates leaders from the<CONTINUED><CONTINUED> masses, the representatives from the represented; it draws us into a different way of talking, a different way of thinking. It pulls us into a process of reconciliation with reality, and that reality is the reality of capitalism, a form of social organisation that is based on exploitation and injustice, on killing and destruction. It also draws us into a spatial definition of how we do things, a spatial definition which makes a clear distinction between the state’s territory and the world outside, and a clear distinction between citizens and foreigners. It draws us into a spatial definition of struggle that has no hope of matching the global movement of capital.There is one key concept in the history of the state-centred left, and that concept is betrayal. Time and time again the leaders have betrayed the movement, and not necessarily because they are bad people, but just because the state as a form of organisation separates the leaders from the movement and draws them into a process of reconciliation with capital. Betrayal is already given in the state as an organisational form.Can we resist this? Yes, of course we can, and it is something that happens all the time. We can refuse to let the state identify leaders or permanent representatives of the movement, we can refuse to let delegates negotiate in secret with the representatives of the state. But this means understanding that our forms of organisation are very different from those of the state, that there is no symmetry between them. The state is an organisation on behalf of, what we want is the organisation of self-determination, a form of organisation that allows us to articulate what we want, what we decide, what we consider necessary or desirable. What we want, in other words, is a form of organisation that does not have the state as its principal point of reference.The argument against taking the state as the principal point of reference is clear, but what of the other concept? The state-oriented argument can be seen as a pivoted conception of the development of struggle. Struggle is conceived as having a central pivot, the taking of state power. First we concentrate all our efforts on winning the state, we organise for that, then, once we have achieved that, we can think of other forms of organisation, we can think of revolutionising society. First we move in one direction, in order to be able to move in another: the problem is that the dynamic acquired during the first phase is difficult or impossible to dismantle in the second phase.The other concept focuses directly on the sort of society we want to create, without passing through the state. There is no pivot: organisation is directly prefigurative, directly linked to the social relations we want to create. Where the first concept sees the radical transformation of society as taking place after the seizure of power, the second insists that it must begin now. Revolution not when the time is right but revolution here and now. AT: Perm- HydraAnything short of total rejection will cause capitalism to regenerate itself stronger than before, like chopping off a single head of a hydraKovel, Professor of Social Studies at Bard, 02(Joel, The Enemy of Nature, p142)The value-term that subsumes everything into the spell of capital sets going a kind of wheel of accumulation, from production to consumption and back, spinning ever more rapidly as the inertial mass of capital grows, and generating its force field as a spinning magnet generates an electrical field. This phenomenon has important implications for the reformability of the system. Because capital is so spectral, and succeeds so well in ideologically mystifying its real nature, attention is constantly deflected from the actual source of eco-destabilization to the instruments by which that source acts. The real problem, however, is the whole mass of globally accumulated capital, along with the speed of its circulation and the class structures sustaining this. That is what generates the force field, in proportion to its own scale; and it is this force field, acting across the numberless points of insertion that constitute the ecosphere, that creates ever larger agglomerations of capital, sets the ecological crisis going, and keeps it from being resolved. For one fact may be taken as certain - that to resolve the ecological crisis as a whole, as against tidying up one corner or another, is radically incompatible with the existence of gigantic pools of capital, the force field these induce, the criminal underworld with which they connect, and, by extension, the elites who comprise the transnational bourgeoisie. And by not resolving the crisis as a whole, we open ourselves to the spectre of another mythical creature, the many-headed hydra, that regenerated itself the more its individual tentacles were chopped away. To realize this is to recognize that there is no compromising with capital, no schema of reformism ,that will clean up its act by making it act more greenly or efficiently. We shall explore the practical implications of this thesis in Part III, and here need simply to restate the conclusion in blunt terms: green capital, or non-polluting capital, is preferable to the immediately ecodestructive breed on its immediate terms. But this is the lesser point, and diminishes with its very success. For green capital (or 'socially/ecologically responsible investing') exists, by its very capital-nature, essentially to create more value, and this leaches away from the concretely green location to join the great pool, and follows its force field into zones of greater concentration, expanded profitability - and greater ecodestruction.AT: Perm- No Third WayEngaging the politics of capitalism causes extinction – there is no middle groundMeszaros 1 (Istvan, prof. emeritus @ Univ. of Sussex, Socialism or Barbarism, pp. 80-81, JM)Those who talk about the "third way" as the solution to our dilemma, asserting that there can be no room for the revival of a radical mass movement, either want to deceive us by cynically calling their slavish acceptance of the ruling order "the third way," or fail to realize the gravity of the situation, putting their faith in a wishfully non-conflictual positive outcome that has been promised for nearly a century but never approximated even by one inch. The uncomfortable truth of the matter is that if there is no future for a radical mass movement in our time, there can be no future for humanity itself. If I had to modify Rosa Luxemburg's dramatic words, in relation to the dangers we now face, I would add to "socialism or barbarism" this qualification: "barbarism if we are lucky." For the extermination of humanity is the ultimate concomitant of capital's destructive course of development. And the world of that third possibility, beyond the alternatives of "socialism or barbarism," would be fit only for cockroaches, which are said to be able to endure lethally high levels of nuclear radiation. This is the only rational meaning of capital's third way. The now fully operative third and potentially deadliest phase of global hegemonic imperialism, corresponding to the profound structural crisis of the capital system as a whole on the political and military plane, leaves us no room for comfort or cause for self-assurance. Instead, it casts the darkest possible shadow on the future, in case the historical challenges facing the socialist movement fail to be successfully met in the time still within our reach. This is why the century in front of us is bound to be the century of "socialism or barbarism." AT: Perm- Do NothingIncluding the plan kills solvency: we must refuse the call to action in order to remain truly open to revolutionary opportunityZizek 4 (Slavoj, , Professor of Sociology at the Institute for Sociology, Ljubljana University, “Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle” P. 71-73 JF)The stance of simply condemning the postmodern Left for its accommodation, however, is also false, since one should ask the obvious difficult question: what, in fact, was the alternative? If today’s ‘post-politics’ is opportunistic pragmatism with no principles, then the predominant leftist reaction to it can be aptly characterized as ‘principled opportunism’: one simply sticks to the old formulae (defence of the welfare state, and so on) and calls them ‘principles’, dispensing with the detailed analysis of how the situation ahs changed – and thus retaining one’s position of Beautiful Soul. The inherent stupidity of the ‘principled’ Left is clearly discernible in its standard criticism of any analysis which proposes a more complex picture of criticism of any analysis which proposes a more complex picture of the situation, renouncing any simple prescriptions on how to act: ‘there is no clear political stance involved in your theory’ – and this from people with no stance but their ‘principled opportunism’. Against such a stance, one should have the courage to affirm that, in a situation like today’s, the only way really to remain open to a revolutionary opportunity is to renounce facile calls to direct action, which necessarily involve us in an activity where things change so that the totality remains the same. Today’s predicament is that, if we succumb to the urge of directly ‘doing something’ (engaging in the anti-globalist struggle, helping the poor…), we will certainly and undoubtedly contribute to the reproduction of the existing order. The only way to lay the foundations for a true, radical change is to withdraw from the compulsion to act, to ‘do nothing’ – thus opening up the space for a different kind of activity.AT: Perm- CivilityThe perm is just an example of leftist ‘civility’ which fears offending the ruling class. ‘Working within the system’ is a shameless capitulation which prevents transformation.Red Critique 2005 (Winter/Spring, “Left Populisms”, )In the face of the militancy of capital, the Left has retreated to polite formulas and put a stop to all polemic. Confronted with capital's offensive, the Left has slavishly embraced civility (one of its favorite idols) and excluded critique for fear of offending the ruling class. Civility in other words is a declaration of silence in response to the war of profits on people. It is the class lie that says that only by "working within" the system can it be changed. But by changing the system the civility-ists mean change within the system—to which they have shamelessly capitulated. Not surprisingly, every effort to think outside the system, which is necessary for transforming the inside of the system, is more or less violently marginalized through the discourse of civility. Civility says to the working class: Don't offend your exploiters, embrace them! You'll get more with "kindness" than you will with critique!?Civility is always an attack on critique.?Because it brings the ("uncivil") outside to bear on the ("civil") inside, critique is one of the most effective weapons in all struggles for transformation.?A Left that dispenses with critique is a Left that has, beneath its occasionally militant rhetoric, in fact dispensed with the struggle for social and economic justice. AT: Perm- No Partial CorrectionsThe permutation still causes extinction—no combination of capitalism and the alternative is possible because of the absolute confliction of values and orientations towards limitMeszaros 7 (Istvan, Prof Emeritus of Philosophy @ U of Sussex, “The Only Viable Economy” The Monthly Review Vol. 58.11 April JF)There can be not even partial correctives introduced into capital’s operational framework if they are genuinely quality-oriented. For the only qualities relevant in this respect are not some abstract physical characteristics but the humanly meaningful qualities inseparable from need. It is true, of course, as stressed before, that such qualities are always specific, corresponding to clearly identifiable particular human needs both of the individuals themselves and of their historically given and changing social relations. Accordingly, in their many sided specificity they constitute a coherent and well defined set of inviolable systemic determinations, with their own systemic limits. It is precisely the existence of such—very far from abstract—systemic limits which makes it impossible to transfer any meaningful operating determinations and orienting principles from the envisaged alternative social metabolic order into the capital system. The two systems are radically exclusive of each other. For the specific qualities corresponding to human need, in the alternative order, carry the indelible marks of their overall systemic determinations, as integral parts of a humanly valid social reproductive system of control. In the capital system, on the contrary, the overall determinations must be unalterably abstract, because capital’s value relation must reduce all qualities (corresponding to need and use) to measurable generic quantities, in order to assert its alienating historical dominance over everything, in the interest of capital expansion, irrespective of the consequences. The incompatibilities of the two systems become amply clear when we consider their relationship to the question of limit itself. The only sustainable growth positively promoted under the alternative social metabolic control is based on the conscious acceptance of the limits whose violation would imperil the realization of the chosen—and humanly valid—reproductive objectives. Hence wastefulness and destructiveness (as clearly identified limiting concepts) are absolutely excluded by the consciously accepted systemic determinations themselves, adopted by the social individuals as their vital orienting principles. By contrast, the capital system is characterized, and fatefully driven, by the—conscious or unconscious—rejection of all limits, including its own systemic limits. Even the latter are arbitrarily and dangerously treated as if they were nothing more than always superable contingent obstacles. Hence anything goes in this social reproductive system, including the possibility—and by the time we have reached our own historical epoch also the overwhelming grave probability—of total destruction. Naturally, this mutually exclusive relationship to the question of limits prevails also the other way round. Thus, there can be no “partial correctives” borrowed from the capital system when creating and strengthening the alternative social metabolic order. The partial—not to mention general—incompatibilities of the two systems arise from the radical incompatibility of their value dimension. As mentioned above, this is why the particular value determinations and relations of the alternative order could not be transferred into capital’s social metabolic framework for the purpose of improving it, as postulated by some utterly unreal reformist design, wedded to the vacuous methodology of “little by little.” For even the smallest partial relations of the alternative system are deeply embedded in the general value determinations of an overall framework of human needs whose inviolable elementary axiom is the radical exclusion of waste and destruction, in accord with its innermost nature. At the same time, on the other side, no partial “correctives” can be transferred from the operational framework of capital into a genuinely socialist order, as the disastrous failure of Gorbachev’s “market socialist” venture painfully and conclusively demonstrated. For also in that respect we would always be confronted by the radical incompatibility of value determinations, even if in that case the value <CONTINUED><CONTINUED>involved is destructive counter value, corresponding to the ultimate—necessarily ignored—limits of the capital system itself. The systemic limits of capital are thoroughly compatible with waste and destruction. For such normative considerations can only be secondary to capital. More fundamental determinations must take the precedence over such concerns. This is why capital’s original indifference to waste and destruction (never a more positive posture than indifference) is turned into their most active promotion when conditions require that shift. In fact waste and destruction must be relentlessly pursued in this system in direct subordination to the imperative of capital expansion, the overwhelming systemic determinant. The more so the further we leave behind the historically ascending phase of the capital system’s development. And no one should be fooled by the fact that frequently the preponderant assertion of counter value is misrepresented and rationalized as “value neutrality” by capital’s celebrated ideologists.AT: Perm- InterpassivityDon’t succumb to the temptation to act- the plan is an example of interpassivity- just doing things to make everything stay the sameZizek 2002(Slajov, “Revolution at the Gates” pg. 170-1)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 the hegemonic ideological coordinates. In short, our historical moment is still 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.'If, 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 on 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.6This kind of activity provides the perfect example of interpassivity:7 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 that 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 capitalist system, in the way the political space and state apparatuses work." AT: ReductionismSociety is structured by class which is a product of pre-existing economic circumstances – that idea is distinct from economic reductionism Wright 83 (Erik, prof of sociology at the U of Wisconsin–Madison, Sep, American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 89, No. 2, pp. 452-459, jam)In one way or another, all Marxists construct typologies of social forms based on the social organization of production and the class structure rooted in that social organization. Much of Giddens's book is devoted to challenging this way of distinguishing among societies. The accusation of class reductionism is, of course, a familiar criticism of Marxism. What is unusual about Giddens's argument is that, while he rejects general class-based typologies of societies, he defends the importance of class analysis, and, in particular, he accepts the essential Marxist character- ization of capitalism as structured above all by its distinctive class rela- tions. The heart of his argument is that it is only in capitalist society that class constitutes the underlying structural principle of the whole society. While various kinds of noncapitalist society had classes, only in capitalism does class permeate and structure all aspects of social life. Giddens thus draws the distinction between "class-divided societies" (societies "within which there are classes, but where class analysis does not serve as the basis for identifying the basic structural principle of that society" [p. 108]) and "class society." Giddens's defense of this claim is complex and rests on his definitions and analysis of the concepts of power, resources, and domination. The gist of the argument is that only in capitalism are the relations of domination over allocative resources (basically, in less technical terms, eco- nomic resources) the central relations that sustain power relations in general, whereas in noncapitalist societies the relations of domination over au- thoritative resources (basically, social-political resources) constitute the basis of power. If we identify the concept of class strictly with the relations of domination over allocative resources, it follows that a general class typology of social forms is unsatisfactory. There are two problems with Giddens's critique. First, even in his own analysis, when he attempts to identify what it is in the structures of feudalism and capitalism that explains why in capitalism allocative re- sources are of primary importance in domination relations whereas in feudalism authoritative resources are of primary importance, he empha- sizes the importance of the differences between property relations in the two kinds of societies. It is the institutional form of property relations in capitalism (the institutional separation of the state from production) that explains the centrality of allocative relations of domination in capitalism, whereas the fusion of authoritative and allocative relations of domination within feudal property relations explains the centrality of authoritative domination in feudalism. This comes very close to traditional Marxist explanations for the use of extra-economic coercion in feudal exploitation compared with the purely economic mechanisms of exploitation in cap- italism. Thus there lurks behind Giddens's own analysis a kind of prop- erty-relations typology of social forms which is rather like Marxist accounts. A second difficulty presented by Giddens's critique of Marxist class reductionism lies in his definition of class itself. Giddens insists that the concept of class be narrowly linked to the relations of domination "created by private ownership of property" (p. 107), with "ownership" taken to mean the direct control over the use and disposition of property and "private" designating legally guaranteed individual or family rights of disposition of that property. This means that, wherever the appropriation of surplus rests on directly coercive means, such appropriation is treated by Giddens as a result of the control over authoritative resources (e.g., military personnel) and not ownership of private property and thus not class relations. Many Marxists, myself included, define classes in terms of the mech- anisms through which surplus products or surplus labor is appropriated, not by private ownership of the means of production as such. Such ap- propriation always involves specific combinations of economic and po- litical mechanisms: in feudalism exploitation involves the direct use of extra-economic coercion; in capitalism the political face of class relations is restricted to the guarantee of contracts and the supervision of the labor process. In both types of society, however, it is the mechanisms of surplus appropriation which specify the distinctive character of class relations. The basic error in Giddens's critique, therefore, is his implicit equation of class reductionism with economic reductionism. The Marxist typology of social forms is indeed a class-based typology, but this is not reducible to a simple one-dimensional economic typology. When class relations are defined in terms of mechanisms of exploitation which I think is the central meaning of class in the Marxist tradition Giddens's distinction between "class society" and "class-divided society" becomes a distinction between two kinds of class societies: one in which exploitation occurs through a primarily economic mechanism and one in which exploitation involves direct coercion. AT: Reforms GoodMust address structural causes- reforms are derailed and clawed backMeszaros 2006 (ISTV?N, Monthly Review, September, “The Structural Crisis of Politics)I would like to begin with a brief survey of the very disquieting—indeed, I should say, of worldwide threatening—developments in the field of politics and the law. In this respect I wish to under-line that it was no less than twenty-three years ago that I became personally acquainted in Paraiba, Brazil with the painful circumstances of explosive food riots. Twenty years later, at the time of President Lula’s electoral campaign, I read that he had announced that the most impor-tant part of his future strategy was his determination to put an end in the country to the grave social evil of famine. The two intervening decades from the time of those dramatic food riots in Paraiba were obvi-ously not sufficient to solve this chronic problem. And even today, I am told, the improvements are still very modest in Brazil. Moreover, the somber statistics of the United Nations constantly underline that the same problem persists, with devastating consequences, in many parts of the world. This is so despite the fact that the productive powers at the disposal of humankind today could relegate forever to the past the now totally unforgivable social failure of famine and malnutrition. It might be tempting to attribute these difficulties, as frequently hap-pens in traditional political discourse, to more or less easily corrigible political contingencies, postulating thereby the remedy through changes in personnel at the next suitable and strictly orderly electoral opportu-nity. But that would be a customary evasion and not a plausible explanation. For the stubborn persistence of the problems at stake, with all of their painful human consequences, point to much more deeply rooted connections. They indicate some apparently uncontrollable force of iner-tia which seems to be able to turn, with depressing frequency, even the “good intentions” of promising political manifestos into the paving stones of the road to hell, in Dante’s immortal words. In other words, the challenge is to face up to the underlying causes and structural determinations which tend to derail by the force of inertia many political programs devised for corrective intervention. To derail them even when it is originally admitted by the authors of such programs that the existing state of affairs is unsustainable. AT: Space Solves Capitalism’s ProblemsGoing to space accelerates crises on Earth and just delays capitalism’s moment of reckoning- not a long term solution to capitalism’s inherent contradictions.Dickens and Ormrod 7 (Peter, Affiliated Lecturer in the Department of Sociology, Faculty of Politics, Psychology, Sociology and International Studies , U of Cambridge, and J.S., Senior Lecturer of Applied Social Science @ U of Brighton, "Cosmic society: towards a sociology of the universe," book, p. 158, jam)This brings us back to our conceptual starting points: Harvey’s notion of ‘spa- tial fixes’ as solutions to capital’s continuing crises of accumulation, and Gramsci’s notion of hegemony, or rule by consent. Current and future forms of outer space humanization are, under current political and social arrangements, no more and no less than attempts at saving capitalism. But success is not guaranteed. Whether cosmic socio-spatial fixes are profitable or necessary will depend not only on environmental degradation or social crisis on Earth but on making the resources of outer space into a series of successful primary circuits of capital. Such a project could well be made a future hegemonic project, one led by a dominant social and economic bloc. Such ‘fixes’ would offer another promise of staving off capitalism’s tendency towards crisis formation, suitably packaged as a boon to the Earth’s population. At the same time, it is far from clear when and how such fixes will be seriously attempted, what forms they would take and how successful they would be. Needless to say, there is no clear indication that they will resolve the crises of unemployment, poverty and environmental degradation on Earth. If the ‘risk society’ thesis is taken seriously, there is every possibility that such interven- tions may make matters even worse. But how is the development of space made a ‘common sense’ enterprise? AT: Space Solves Resource ScarcitySpace doesn’t solve resources – plan only benefits the wealthyMarshall 95 (Alan, the Institute of Development Studies at Massey University, Feb, Space Policy, Vol. 11, Iss. 1, p. 41-52, jam)Perhaps the most frequently elaborated rationale from human space expansion is the pursuit of new raw materials - raw materials which on Earth are unavailable or have become enormously rare. From this perspective, development in space is based upon the search for resources. Historical precedents for such a model can be cited lo support this idea. For instance, British colonialism in South East Asia secured a ready supply of tin for England's industrial revolution. American economic imperialism in Latin America supplied the USA's burgeoning automobile industry with cheap rubber during the early twentieth century. Those that advocate the development of the solar system in the search for raw materials often appeal to the neo-Malthusianism with regards to the need to find ever more resources to satiate the expanding population of planet Earth. Although the grand plan to develop outer space so as to remedy an over-populated and resource deficient world reeks of du?bious economic principles, and transparent self-interest, Malthusian sentiments are still widely held by those within the astronautics industry (especially by those charged with promoting the virtues of the industry). Even if resource depletion was directly linked to the population of the planet, the development of even more resources is not likely to provide for the necessities of most of the world's people. New resources contribute to the consumptive wants of the wealthy, not to the needs of the populous poor. Going to space doesn’t lead to commercially viable resource extraction- resources found would only be helpful in supplying future coloniesMarshall 95 (Alan, the Institute of Development Studies at Massey University, Feb, Space Policy, Vol. 11, Iss. 1, p. 41-52, jam)There is a major problem with regarding expansionist development into the Solar System as being based upon the search for raw materials: there are none. At least those minerals that have been identified as existing in the Solar System (be that lunar titanium, asteroidal nickel or planetary volatiles) exist abundantly enough on the Earth to render an extraterrestrial mining programme commercially inviable. It seems that the only use for extraterrestrial resources is not in their ability to support commercial endeavours, but in supplying a number of colonists or planetary visitors with materials from which to build parts of the physical fabric of their colony. If such colonies are developed, they will not have got there on the basis of supplying the homeland with cheap raw materials. So what economic force would have motivated the colony in the first place? Evidently we cannot use economic models of outer space development based upon the search for raw materials because we soon come up against a circular argument: why should we develop the Solar System? To provide resources for space colonies. Why should we colonize space? To utilize resources in the development of the Solar System? And so we come back to the original question: why should we develop the Solar System? AT: Space Solves ResourcesSpace can’t solve resource scarcity – transport costs outweigh benefitsDickens 9 (Peter, Affiliated Lecturer in the Department of Sociology, Faculty of Politics, Psychology, Sociology and International Studies , U of Cambridge, May, The Sociological Review, Vol. 57, Iss. Supp. s1, p. 68-82, jam)The resources to be incorporated within future circuits of capital will take a range of forms. As regards the secondary circuit, capital is now starting to flow into forms of outer space activity other than tourism. For example, Declan O’Donnell and his United Societies in Space (an organisation of space lawyers) have attempted to establish an International Space Development Authority corporation (ISDAC) similar in function to the World Bank. This would operate as a space bank for investment in a future space colonisation programme. Loans would be made to developing countries, assisting them to invest in outer space. On a more superficial level, companies such as Pizza Hut have paid (via intermediaries such as Space Marketing Inc.) to put their logos on space rockets. With a much longer-term perspective, private companies are now working on research for lunar and asteroidal mines, these being actively supported by a number of pro-space organizations (Prado 2008). The Moon might seem a more obvious target but asteroids are currently seen as a better bet due to their metallic density. Metals found on the Moon are, after all, just the dispersed debris of asteroids. Compared with an equal mass taken from the Moon, asteroids have about three hundred times as much free metal. In the 1990s the market value of metals in the small known asteroid, known as 3554 Amun, was $20 trillion. This includes $8 trillion worth of iron and nickel, $6 trillion worth of cobalt and about $6 trillion in platinum-group metals (Lewis 1996). The Moon, however, remains attractive from a different viewpoint. Millions of tons of Helium-3 could be obtained from there, one metric ton being currently worth about $3 million. Caution is needed, however, regarding the prospects of all these materials as direct inputs into Earthly production-processes. The costs of returning materials to Earth would add so much to the cost of extracting them that it seems likely they will be unavailable for Earthly use in the foreseeable future. Advocates realising this emphasize the use of space resources in space rather than bringing them down to Earth (Prado 2008 op.cit.) AT: State checks CapState intervention is key to mediate the law of capitalist accumulation- it is necessary to solve problems of overproduction and underconsumption.Marsh 95 (James L., Professor of Philosophy at Fordham University, Critique, Action, and Liberation p. 272-273 GAL)Now Marx here is speaking about a different epoch of capitalism, laissez-faire capitalism in which the state was not involved positively to the extent that it has been in the twentieth century. What this earlier phase and the later phase have in common is the effective operation of this general law of capitalist accumulation. What has changed is the form that such operation takes; in earlier capitalism it is relatively independent of the state, in late capitalism relatively dependent on the state. In late capitalism the state positively mediates in different ways the law of capitalist accumulation. Let us briefly consider some of the ways that such mediation occurs:The welfare state plays a role of modifying and containing, without eliminating, the worst effects of the general law. in order not to endanger accumulation and legitimation. Enough money must be in the hands of enough people to enable then to buy the goods produced by the economic system; sufficient numbers of working people must be sufficiently satisfied with their lot in order not to endanger legitimation.Policies of the welfare state can and do increase poverty; such were the policies of Reagan-Bush on taxation and weakening unions during the 1980s.State intervention in the economy can take the positive form of investing in social needs such as education, housing, public transportation, and health care, or the form of a military Keynsianism that leaves such social needs untouched, or tax payer bailouts of savings and loans and banking as parts of financial capital.Even though there is an ostensible effort to meet such social needs, the wealthy often benefit and the poor are not served. Thus, for example, investment in housing by the government creates housing for middle or upper income groups and housing for the poor is not built. 2*Taxpayers often finance the international ventures of capitalism through such devices as subsidies to foreign governments and businesses in order that they can buy the goods produced by corporations in the first world. Such subsidies, of course, mean less money spent on our own poor at home.State intervention maintains demand for capitalist goods- capitalism could not survive without itMarsh 95 (James L., Professor of Philosophy at Fordham University, Critique, Action, and Liberation p. 153 GAL)Finally. Nozick's model of a noninterventionist state is incompatible with the survival of capitalism itself. For capitalism as a system of private entrepreneurs or companies presupposes buyers and sellers bringing their goods to market. In an economy, however, in which there is no general social planning, there is no guarantee against overproduction occurring resulting in depressions and recessions. It is for good, systematic, and historical reasons that the interventionist. Keynsian welfare state came into being. Such a state intervened in the economy in various positive ways in order to stave off or minimize unemployment and to insure that people have enough money to buy the goods produced by the system. Not only does such intervention help those who are worst off. but it also maintains a demand for the capitalist's goods. —The arising of the welfare state, therefore, is essential for the survival of capitalism itself. Not only is such a state more compassionate and more respectful of the social character of human beings and. therefore, more just, as we shall see more fully soon, but it also insures the survival of capitalism itselfAT: State checks CapThe State can’t check capitalism- needs of the people are ignored in favor of the interests of the richMarsh 95 (James L., Professor of Philosophy at Fordham University, Critique, Action, and Liberation p. 274 GAL)In general, then, we could say that the state mitigates the general law of capitalist accumulation, manages it to the benefit of some classes and groups rather than others, directs it so that the needs of some are emphasized and those of others are ignored, "inflicts" it in the sense of using it as a weapon against labor and other resisting, dissenting groups, and creates it in the sense of developing forms such as military spending, policies of taxation, and "welfare for the rich" that enhance profitability and. directly or indirectly, increase poverty. The state does not disinterestedly serve the common good but rather spends in such a way as to favor the rich and corporations and slight the needs of the general population. The general needs of the people are ignored in favor of the particular interests of capital.State doesn’t check cap, only the alt does- capitalism wouldn’t survive a week without the massive backing it gets from the StateMeszaros 1 (Istvan, prof. emeritus @ Univ. of Sussex, Socialism or Barbarism, p 19, JM)Despite all protestations to the contrary, coupled with neo-liberal fantasies about "rolling back the boundaries of the state," the capital system could not survive for a week without the massive backing it constantly receives from the state. I have discussed this problem elsewhere, and therefore a brief me noon should suffice here. What Man called the "extraneous help" given by Henry VIII and others to early capitalist development hat reappeared in the twentieth century in an unimaginably massive form, from "common agricultural policies" and export guarantees to immense state-financed research funds and the insatiable appetite of the military-industrial complex." What makes the problem much worse is that no amount of this extraneous help is ever enough. Capital, at the present phase of historical development, has become totally dependent on an ever increasing provision of it. In this respect, too, we are approaching a systemic limit in that we are confronted by the chronic insufficiency of extraneous help in regard to what the state is now capable of delivering. Indeed, the structural crisis of capital is inseparable from the chronic insufficiency of such extraneous help under conditions in which the defects and failures of this antagonistic system of societal reproduction oil for an unlimited supply of it. AT: State key to Solve Global ProblemsThere is no reason why the state is necessary to create agreements to address global problemsHerod 7 (James, Columbia U graduate?and political activist, “Getting Free” Pg. 62 JF)Critics of a decentered world claim that many of our problems are worldwide in scope and therefore require world institutions to deal with them. It’s true that we face many global crises that can only be solved on the global level, but it is not true that we need a world government to solve them. Local communities could start negotiating global agreements on their own initiative, bypassing governments. If existing treaties, negotiated by governments, are worth supporting, local communities could simply endorse these (and there are many such treaties, dealing with the oceans, land mines, torture, and so forth). Or they could revise these where necessary to improve them and make them compatible with anarchy. Or they could start writing their own treaties. Naturally, this assumes that we have local communities that are trying to take back control of their lives. The recent phenomenon in the United States wherein over two hundred city councils have passed resolutions against the USA Patriot Act and in defense of the Bill of Rights indicates the direction we should be moving in. The experiences gained in the sister cities movement or the international networks of NGOs might be relevant here. The idea that we need national governments (or even worse, a world government) to reach global agreements to deal with our problems is ridiculous. National governments, more often than not, are the causes of these crises.AT: TeleologicalMarxist analysis is true and useful – it is more science than teleologyAvakian 7 (Bob, Chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA, Dec 16, [revcom.us/avakian/makingrevolution/] AD: 7-6-11, jam)Popper includes Marx and Marxism, along with Hegel and others, in what he characterizes as “historicism,” by which he means a certain kind of determinism, akin or equivalent to teleology: the notion that there is some design or purpose in nature, and/or history, and that things are all being directed, in accordance with this design or purpose, toward some predetermined end. And Popper attempts to show that such theories, including Marxism, lead in reality to totalitarianism. This is linked to Popper’s claim that Marxism cannot meet, and in fact fails, the test of falsifiability. Here, I will not attempt to speak to and refute everything that is wrong with not only Popper’s conclusions but his basic approach and method—to do that might well require more volumes than Popper’s original material—but I will focus on a few elements which are central to Popper’s thesis and which, upon scientific examination, reveal at least some of the basic flaws not only in Popper’s conclusions but in his method and approach as well. Let’s begin with the question of capitalism’s development into imperialism and, along with that, the fact that the class contradictions in the imperialist countries themselves, rather than being intensified, as Marx and Engels had originally predicted, became mitigated and modified. Already, toward the end of the 19th century, Engels in particular had begun to analyze how the widespread British colonial empire—and the exploitation and depredation that British imperialism carried out in its colonies—had led to changes in the condition of sections of the British working class. But here is what Popper says about Engels’ analysis: “Forced to admit that in Britain the prevailing tendency was not towards an increase in misery [among the working class] but rather towards a considerable improvement, he hints that this may be due to the fact that Britain ‘is exploiting the whole world’; and he scornfully assails ‘the British working class’ which, instead of suffering as he expected them to do, ‘is actually becoming more and more bourgeois’.” (Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, Vol. 2, Hegel and Marx, p.187) Here it is Popper who has insinuated into the discussion a certain method, and certain motives, which he attributes to Engels. Engels is angry, according to Popper, because the British working class did not suffer as he expected—and, the implication is, wanted—them to suffer; and this, says Popper, is the reason Engels is speaking about this British working class in the “scornful” terms he does. Note that here Popper in effect ignores, or sidesteps, the question of whether Engels is right (and, as we shall see presently, when Popper does try to show that Engels is not right, Popper falls into assertions that are not only false but fatuous). Popper is out to show that Engels (along with Marx) was proceeding according to an apriorist and instrumentalist theory, and when reality (in this case in the persons of the British workers) did not conform to this apriorist and instrumentalist theory, then the conclusion was that there was something wrong with reality (with the reality of the British working class) rather than with the theory. So argues Popper. And he further elaborates on this with the comment that “Marx blamed capitalism for ‘proletarianizing the middle class and the lower bourgeoisie’, and for reducing the workers to pauperism. Engels now blames the system—it is still blamed—for making bourgeois out of workers. But the nicest touch in Engels’ complaint is the indignation that makes him call the British who behave so inconsiderately as to falsify Marxist prophecies ‘this most bourgeois of all nations’.” (Popper, p. 188) Note that here Popper smuggles in the concept of “prophecies”—attributing this religious orientation to Engels, and Marx—and paints them as fanatics who are bent on forcing reality to conform to their essentially religious-teleological convictions. This is a canard common to the “anti-totalitarian” theorists, such as Popper. And Popper extends this as well to Lenin and his analysis of capitalism’s development into the stage of imperialism and its effects on the working class in countries like England. Speaking of Lenin’s description of how imperialism has led to the bourgeoisification of a part of the British proletariat, Popper remarks: “Having given such a pretty Marxist name, ‘the bourgeoisification of the proletariat’, to a hateful tendency—hateful mainly because it did not fit in with the way the world should go according to Marx—Lenin apparently believes that it has become a Marxist tendency.” (Popper, p. 188, emphasis added here) But the truth is that Engels, as well as Lenin, was applying Marxism—the scientific theory of communism—to analyze what had actually happened in objective reality, while it is Popper himself who is proceeding according to an apriorist and instrumentalist theory (namely, the theory that Marxism is not a science but a “historicist” approach which attempts to shape reality to its teleological conceptions…and becomes infuriated when reality refuses to oblige). Popper’s own apriorism and instrumentalism in this regard becomes strikingly clear when he attempts to refute the analysis of Engels—which was carried further and generalized by Lenin with the further development of reality, in the first part of the 20th century—concerning the effects of imperialism in the imperialist countries themselves, as well as in the colonized world. Listen to what Popper is not embarrassed to argue: “There are countries, for instance the Scandinavian democracies, Czechoslovakia, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, to say nothing of the United States, in which a democratic interventionism secured to the workers a high standard of living, in spite of the fact that colonial exploitation had no influence there, or was at any rate far too unimportant to support the hypothesis…. Furthermore, although the misery imposed upon the natives through colonization is one of the darkest chapters in the history of civilization, it cannot be asserted that their misery has tended to increase since the days of Marx. The exact opposite is the case; things have greatly improved. And yet, increasing misery would have to be very noticeable there if the auxiliary hypothesis [about the effects of colonialism and imperialism] and the original theory [of Marx] were both correct.” (Popper, p. 189, emphasis added here) It is hard to know which is more astounding: the fact that someone who claims to be making a serious argument, by way of critiquing Marxism, can actually state things such as this, which are so flagrantly and demonstrably in conflict with reality (and this was clearly the case at the time that Popper wrote this); or that such a person, authoring such statements, can apparently be taken seriously by people who think of themselves as seriously engaging reality, and many of whom consider themselves “progressive” opponents of the injustices in the world. Here, I don’t believe it is necessary to cite much of the great <CONTINUED><CONTINUED>abundance of facts and analysis which give the lie to Popper’s claims (and in particular the ones highlighted in the passages above), since the stinging refutation that reality itself provides is there for anyone willing to see, or to do even minimal investigation into the matter. But let me just introduce a few basic facts into the picture. In Democracy: Can’t We Do Better Than That?, at the beginning of chapter 5 (“Imperialism, Democracy, and Dictatorship”) I cited a few statistics which point to the profound disparities in the world, particularly between the imperialist countries, on the one hand, and the colonies (or neo-colonies) of the Third World, on the other hand. For example: the gross national product, per capita (in relation to each person) was then (the early 1980s) more than 35 times greater in Great Britain than in India; more than 25 times greater in France than in Senegal; and more than 40 times greater in the U.S. than in Haiti; and so on. In the 20 or so years since that was written, with the effects of things like IMF-imposed Structural Adjustment Programs in many Third World countries, and the opening up of these countries and their peoples to even more unfettered exploitation and plunder by imperialism, the situation for great numbers of people in the Third World has only grown worse. (And it has been estimated, for example, that with regard to things like nutritional standards, the people in Latin America are worse off than their ancestors were at the time of the invasion by the Spanish and other European colonialists, 500 or so years ago.) The recent book by Mike Davis, Planet of Slums, provides a compelling picture of the desperate situation and extreme misery of literally billions of people throughout the Third World, whose lot today is hardly better than it was in “the days of Marx.” In short, the words of Marx, in characterizing the results of the capitalist accumulation process—words which Popper cites in order to mock Marx—stand out as all the more profoundly true today, and the reality that these words capture (even while they cannot do so fully) stands as a stinging rebuttal to Popper, especially as this is viewed not simply within the narrow circle of a handful of imperialist countries but rather on a world scale: “The accumulation of wealth at the one pole of society involves at the same time an accumulation of misery, of the agony of toil, of slavery, ignorance, brutalization, and of moral degradation, at the opposite pole.” (Marx, as cited in Popper, p. 186) For anyone with a willingness to look honestly at the situation in the world, there can be no doubt that the kind of thing that is cited above from Popper, in his attempt to discredit the Marxist and Leninist analysis of imperialism and its effects, should be dismissed as monumental foolishness if it were not for the very sinister intent and effect of Popper’s denial and distortion of reality. [9] AT: Totalitarianism Accusations of totalitarianism are ideological ruses to prevent radical changeZizek 1 (Slavoj, professor of philosophy @ European Graduate School, "Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism?" p. 3-4, jam)Throughout its entire career, 'totalitarianism' was an ideological notion that sustained the complex operation of 'taming free radicals', of guaranteeing the liberal-democratic hegemony, dismissing the Leftist critique of liberal democracy as the obverse, the 'twin', of the Rightist Fascist dictatorship. And it is useless to try to redeem 'totalitarianism' through division into subcategories (emphasizing the difference between the Fascist and the Communist variety): the moment one accepts the notion of ‘totalitarianism', one is firmly located within the liberal-democratic horizon.1 The contention of this book is thus that the notion of 'totalitarianism', far from being an effective theoretical concept, is a kind of stopgap: instead of enabling us to think, forcing us to acquire a new insight into the historical reality it describes, it relieves us of the duty to think, or even actively prevents us from thinking. Today, reference to the 'totalitarian' threat sustains a kind of unwritten Denkverbot (prohibition against thinking) similar to the infamous Berufsverbot (prohibition against being employed by any state institution) in late 1960s Germany - the moment one shows the slightest inclination to engage in political projects that aim seriously to challenge the existing order, the answer is immediately: 'Benevolent as it is, this will necessarily end in a new Gulag!" The 'return to ethics' in today's political philosophy shamefully exploits the horrors of Gulag or Holocaust as the ultimate bogey for blackmailing us into renouncing all serious radical engagement. In this way, conformist liberal scoundrels can find hypocritical satisfaction in their defence of the existing order: they know there is corruption, exploitation, and so on, but every attempt to change things is denounced as ethically dangerous and unacceptable, resuscitating the ghost of 'totalitarianism'. AT: Totalitarianism/Stalin!The Soviet Union and China both represent capitalism – appropriation of laborMeszaros 1 (Istvan, prof. emeritus @ Univ. of Sussex, Socialism or Barbarism, p 86-87, JM)If (and where) capital had a straightforward political way of controlling the system's expanded reproduction, there would be (and there was) no need for the intermediary of genuine conversion. The process could be more or less arbitrarily settled on the basis of political decisions, as it actually happened under the Soviet-type capital system. In other words, we are again concerned with a subsidiary element of the overall theory. It is a matter of secondary importance whether surplus labor is appropriated politically or economically. What is of primary importance is that under all conceivable varieties of the capital system surplus labor muse be appropriated by a separate body superimposed on, and structurally dominating, labor. Here, as you can see, the fundamental category is "surplus labor" and not "surplus value." as people often erroneously assume. "Surplus value" and the specific forms of its appropriation and realization are absolutely essential under capitalism. But the capital system embraces much more than its capitalist variety. There have been—and indeed even today there are still in existence—forms of the capital system that cannot be simply described as capitalist. You know how many people have tried to characterize the now defunct Soviet system as "state capitalist." I do not think that such characterization makes any sense at all The Soviet system was not state capitalist", it was "post-capitalist." Nevertheless, this system also operated on the basis of the appropriation of surplus labor by a separate body, structurally dominating labor and operating the political extraction of surplus labor. In other words, the Soviet labor force was not in control of the regulation and allocation of its own surplus labor, which in that system did not have to be convened into surplus value. The Soviet-type system was a historically specific form of the capital system in which the appropriation of surplus labor had to be politically controlled. That is what has come to an end in the former Soviet Union, but by no means everywhere In the Chinese system you still find the predominance of the political control of surplus labor extraction. Although many people talk about the “market framework of the Chinese system,” in reality - when you consider the totality of China's social metabolic reproduction - the market is very much subsidiary to it. So, primarily, in the Chinese system the political appropriation of surplus labor is still going on. and indeed on a massive scale In this sense, when you look at the problem of conversion from the angle of "surplus labor," rather than "surplus value"—which must be present in a particular variety of the capital system — then you find that in the capitalist variety (based on surplus value) it is essential to operate with the intermediary of conversion whose particular details are historically contingent. They also depend on the historic phases of capitalist developments. Thus the more advanced monopolistic phases of capitalist development must obviously operate in a significantly different way the conversion of surplus value into prices, as compared to a much earlier phase of development known to Man. No link – the Soviets distorted MarxArendt 2 (Hannah, prof on the Committee on Social Thought at the U of Chicago, Summer, Social Research, Vol. 69, Iss. 2, pg. 273, jam)But the challenge with which Marx confronts us today is much more serious than these academic quarrels over influences and priorities. The fact that one form of totalitarian domination uses, and apparently developed directly from, Marxism, is of course the most formidable charge ever raised against Marx. And that charge cannot be brushed off as easily as can charges of a similar nature-against Nietzsche, Hegel, Luther, or Plato, all of whom, and many more, have at one time or another been accused of being the ancestors of Nazism. Although today it is so conveniently overlooked, the fact that the Nazi version of totalitarianism could develop along lines similar to that of the Soviet, yet nevertheless use an entirely different ideology, shows at least that Marx cannot very well stand accused of having brought forth the specifically totalitarian aspects of Bolshevik domination. It is also true that the interpretations to which his teachings were subjected, through Marxism as well as through Leninism, and the decisive transformation by Stalin of both Marxism and Leninism into a totalitarian ideology, can easily be demonstrated. Nevertheless it also remains a fact that there is a more direct connection between Marx and Bolshevism, as well as Marxist totalitarian movements in nontotalitarian countries, than between Nazism and any of its so-called predecessors.AT: Transition WarsThe crackdown won’t happen, capital can’t afford to attack its labor – the alternative is too diffuse for the violence to work – and it would only increase the success of the transition away from the status quo.Meszaros 95 (Istvan, Prof @ U of Sussex. Beyond Capital. P 725-727)Another argument which is often used in favour of permanent accommodation is the threat of extreme authoritarian measures that must be faced by a socialist revolutionary movement. This argument is backed up by emphasizing both the immense destructive power at capital's disposal and the undeniable historical fact that no ruling order ever cedes willingly its position of command over society, using if need be even the most violent form of repression to retain its rule. The weakness of this argument is twofold, despite the factual circumstances which would seem to support it.First, it disregards that the antagonistic confrontation between capital and labour is not a political/military one in which one of the antagonists could be slaughtered on the battlefield or riveted to chains. Inasmuch as there can be chains in this confrontation, labour is wearing them already, in that the only type of chains compatible with the system must be 'flexible' enough to enable the class of labour to produce and be exploited. Nor can one imagine that the authoritarian might of capital is likely to be used only against a revolutionary socialist movement. The repressive anti-labour measures of the last two decades — not to mention many instances of past historical emergency characterized by the use of violence under the capital system —give a foretaste of worse things to come in the event of extreme confrontations. But this is not a matter of either/or, with some sort of apriori guarantee of a 'fair' and benevolent treatment in the event of labour's willing accommodation and submission. The matter hinges on the gravity of the crisis and on the circumstances under which the antagonistic confrontations unfold. Uncomfortable as this truth may sound to socialists, one of the heaviest chains which labour has to wear today is that it is tied to capital for its continued survival, for as long as it does not succeed in making a strategic break in the direction of a transition to a radically different social metabolic order. But that is even more true of capital, with the qualitative difference that capital cannot make any break towards the establishment of a different social order. For capital, truly, 'there is no alternative' — and there can never be — to its exploitative structural dependency on labour. If nothing else, this fact sets well marked limits to capital's ability to permanently subdue labour by violence, compelling it to use, instead, the earlier mentioned 'flexible chains' against the class of labour. It can use violence with success selectively, against limited groups of labour, but not against the socialist movement organized as a revolutionary mass movement. This is why the development of 'communist mass consciousness' (to use Marx's expression), in contrast to the vulnerability of narrow sectarian orientation, is so important.The second point that must be made in this context is equally important. It concerns the innermost determinations of the capital system as a necessarily expansion-oriented and accumulation-driven social metabolic order. The point is that the exercise of power through the repressive machinery of violence is extremely wasteful in the system's own terms of reference; even if undoubtedly it can serve the purpose of redressing the power relations in capital's favour in a situation of emergency. What must weigh heavily in the balance is that it is impossible to secure the required expansion and capital-accumulation on a permanent basis through the perpetuation of economically wasteful emergency, apart from its anything but negligible political dangers. The idea of' Big Brother' successfully ruling over labour as a permanent condition is too fantastic even for a work of Orwellian fiction, let alone for the actuality of capital's mode of social metabolic reproduction. For the latter must perish if it is unable to secure its own reproduction through the appropriation of the fruits of ever more productive <CONTINUED><CONTINUED>labour and the concomitant expanded realization of value, which in its turn is inconceivable without a dynamic process of 'productive consumption'. And neither ever-improving labour productivity, with the necessarily increasing socialization of the labour process as its precondition, nor the required — ever-expanding — scale of 'productive consumption' is compatible with the idea of a permanent state of emergency. Moreover, as Chomsky rightly argued many years ago, the surveillance system that must go with a successful enforcement of permanent authoritatian rule involves the absurdity (and, of course, the corresponding cost) of infinite regress in monitoring not only the population at large but also the monitoring personnel itself, as well as the monitors of the monitors,290 etc. We must add here that the idea of capital's permanent rule through the use of violence must also postulate the total unity of global capital against the national labour forces which happen to be effectively under the control of capital's particular units in the existing (but by no means unified) global order. This vacuous postulate of capital's global unity and uniformity arbitrarily brushes aside not only the law of uneven development. It also ignores the abundant historical evidence which shows that the exercise of force on a mass scale — through war — always needed masses of people to be able to impose violence on their counterparts, motivated as a rule for many centuries by national rivalries. Indeed, the national articulation of the global capital system, far from being a historical accident, had a great deal to do with capital's need to maintain control over the labour force with at least some degree of consensus. Otherwise the inter-capitalist rivalries, all the way to the most comprehensive international conflagrations, would be unmanageably risky from the point of view of total social capital, nullifying the inner logic of the system to fight out to the full the conflict of interests and make the strongest prevail in the Hobbesian helium omnium contra omnes. For in every situation of major inter-capitalist confrontation the capital system itself would be in danger of being overthrown by its labour antagonist, in the absence of a sufficiently high degree of consensus — present as a rule to a very high degree in national conflicts — between capital and labour belonging to the same side. (In fact some radical socialists tried to counter this consensus, unsuccessfully, with the programme inviting the workers at the outbreak of the First World War 'to turn their weapons against their national bourgeoisie'.) Thus, to sum up, all of the arguments in favour of capital's permanent rule through the imposition of violence on a mass scale suffer from having to define their conditions of realization in a self-contradictory way. Accordingly, as mentioned in Section 18.2.5, to project the rule of capital, in its direct antagonistic confrontation with labour, by way of a completely unstable, hence necessarily transient, state of emergency, as the permanent condition of its future normality, is a mind-boggling notion. To be sure, no one should doubt that the use of violence may postpone for a shorter or longer period of time the success of labour's positive emancipatory efforts; but it cannot prevent the exhaustion of capital's productive potentialities. On the contrary, if anything, it can only accelerate their exhaustion if violence is used on a mass scale, thereby radically undermining the objective conditions of capital's rule.AT: Transition WarsThe spread of capitalism causes transition wars and political instability.Mead ’97 (Walter Russell, Henry Kissinger Senior Fellow for U.S. Foreign Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations, “Roller-Coaster Capitalism: Creative Destruction at Work”, Foreign Affairs, January/February, )Whatever the verdict on his predictive powers, Greider's contrarian view of the contemporary world has something important to say. There is a recurring tendency in Western and, especially, American thought to equate the spread of market economics with the stabilization of social and political conditions. Nothing could be further from the truth. Capitalism is the world's most powerful form of social organization because it is the most revolutionary. Capitalism did not defeat communism because capitalism was more stable; rather, the frozen stability of planned communist society was unable to match the social and economic dynamism of capitalist activity.At a distance, one can reconcile the roller-coaster-like ride of capitalist history with the more comforting, Panglossian version of the Whig narrative of progress. Over time, capitalism does lead to democracy and democracy does lead to peace. But, as in the United States after the 1920s, the expanses of time are longer than today's cramped conventional wisdom can perceive, and the ride is bumpier, even if Greider's precise scenario does not come to pass.Look at France. The rise of capitalism did unleash a process that ultimately consolidated democracy and made the French peaceful. But how long did that take, and what happened in the meantime? Five republics, two empires, two royal dynasties, and a series of expansionary wars that ranged from Moscow to Indochina by way of the upper Nile. And France's progress from precapitalist monarchy to capitalist democracy was relatively smooth and benign. Contrast Germany's journey down that road, or Japan's. Some countries, like Russia, that made promising starts a century ago have taken terrible detours, inflicting on themselves and others untold suffering.That capitalism has been unleashed across Asia and Latin America is in one sense cause for rejoicing. Capitalism will open new doors to richer and fuller lives for hundreds of millions of people. The dismantling of regulations and controls in Western society does create opportunities for faster economic growth and individual creativity.But, alas, that is not all it does. That China, India, Indonesia, and Vietnam are now sprinting up the track previously traveled by Germany, France, and Japan does not mean that a universal era of freedom, prosperity, and peace has dawned. Historical change is accelerating. As rural masses pour into swelling cities in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, as new technologies and enterprises rip up the fabric of traditional society, as new political forces duel for control of rapidly evolving societies, tensions are certain to rise. The more capitalism spreads, the more change must be endured, the more risks must be run, the more destruction will go hand in hand with creation.The triumph of the West in the Cold War, the rapid spread of capitalism through the developing world, and the triumph of neoliberal capitalism over the more regulated and stable mixed economy that prevailed in the last generation do not constitute the end of history but lay the groundwork for an immense acceleration of the historical process. The 21st century will be even more volatile than the bloody century now drawing to a close. This, not the future of the stock market, is the real message of Greider's book, and those who fail to heed it run risks at least as great as those serene French aristocrats who scoffed at Rousseau.AT: UtilThe greatest happiness for the greatest number is structurally impossible under capitalism- utilitarianism means you should vote negMeszaros 95 (Istvan, Prof Emeritus of Philosophy @ U of Sussex, “Beyond Capital” 3.2, JF)A great deal has been written about the so-called ‘naturalistic fallacy’ concerning ‘pleasure’ and the ‘desirable’ in utilitarian discourse. However, the real fallacy of utilitarian philosophy – fully embraced in one form or another by the representatives of marginal utility theory – is to talk about ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number’ in capitalist society. For the suggestion that anything even remotely approaching the greatest happiness of the greatest number of human beings can be achieved under the rule of capital, without even examining let alone radically changing the established power relations, constitutes a monumental vacuous assumption, whatever the subjective intentions of the major utilitarian philosophers behind it. Marginal utility theory, instead of acting in this respect as a corrective to Bentham and Mill, makes everything worse by asserting not only that it is possible to maximise every individual’s utility within the established framework of production and distribution, but also that the desired maximisation is actually being accomplished in the ‘normal’ processes of self-equilibrating capitalist economy. People who deny the reality of such a happy state of affairs are dismissed even by the enlightened paternalist Alfred Marshall by saying that ‘they nearly always divert energies from sober work for the public good, and are thus mischievous in the long run’. In this way even the indirect acknowledgment of capital’s uncontrollability does not last very long. Admitting that the controlling power of the businessman/entrepreneur cannot account for the functioning of the system, let alone guarantee the satisfaction of the wants generated under capitalism, does not lead to a badly needed critical examination. On the contrary, the broadest possible extension of the notion of the controlling subject (done in such a way that it fictitiously embraces the totality of individuals) – which is another way of saying that no identifiable subject is really in control, other than what Hegel characterised with the notion of ‘bad infinity’ – is used for the most apologetic purpose. For with the help of this extension and individualistic harmonisation of all ‘legitimate’ claims the actually existing class subjects of the system capital and labour – are fictitiously ‘transcended’ towards ‘bad infinity’, thereby simply assuming out of existence the problems and antagonistic contradictions of the established socioeconomic order. The mathematical and ‘scientific’ garb in which this conceptual framework of assuming out of existence the dilemmas of control is dressed up well serves the purpose of removing the temptation of contesting the various tenets of the ‘subjective revolution’ and ‘marginalist revolution’ in other than the purely self-referential ‘rational’ terms of the theory, far away from actual substantive social – not to say class – issues. AT: UtilVote neg- capital can’t generate the greatest good for the greatest number and impoverishes future generations by always prioritizing short term interests over long term sustainabilityTran 8 (Quy, U of Toronoto, “A Critique of Capitalism” Pg. 44 JF)Thus, capitalism is unethical because it is severely biased economically and socially, not taking into account the welfare of the poor, the environment, and indefinite future populations. On Utilitarian grounds, ‘the greatest good for the greatest number’ is best achieved not through the self-interested motives of individuals, but on the basis of equal opportunity, fairness, and numerous social endeavours. On Libertarian grounds, it is precisely capitalism which makes slaves of the poor and beggars of the disadvantaged. Socialist policies, on the contrary, work to break the chains of misfortune, and as Rawls puts it, “to redress the bias of contingencies in the direction of equality.” 19 Sadly, the starvation, water shortages, living conditions, and easily treatable diseases seen in Third World do not reflect present problems of scarcity, or a lack of resources, but our atomistic, capitalistic views. When the majority of people in developed countries enjoy luxuries, and where billions of dollars are used to fund wars, the only rational explanation for third world poverty is the self-interested motives of individuals. If our selfishness hinders our ability to transfer resources across geographical dimensions to alleviate the needsat present, it would be foolish to believe that we could transfer resources across temporal dimensions to sustain the needs of the future. Capitalism is unethical because it “demands selfishness at every turn”, 20 putting social interests and global needs secondary to drives for profit and power. Even if we admit that capitalism brings economic growth and prosperity, all the money in the world does not add up to sustainability. In this case, a capitalistic notion of progress simply means progression towards our own demise.***CAP VS. OTHER KRITIKS***1nc Link: K Authors [Pomo, Derrida, Foucault, Baudrillard, Deleuze, Heidegger, Rorty, Adorno, Lyotard][] misidentifies the causes of oppression, mystifying capitalist social relations and undermining any basis from which to critique domination. Marsh 95(James L., Professor of Philosophy at Fordham University, Critique, Action, and Liberation p.310-312 GAL)To the extent that postmodernism celebrates some of these effects of late capitalist domination in an era of flexible accumulation, postmodernism becomes part of the legitimating ideology, a kind of negative idealism, a contemporary equivalent to the German ideology Marx was so critical of. even though many of its practitioners similarly claimed to be representing the valid concerns of the left. Such an ideological role, which postmodernism plays in spite of the intentions of some of its left practitioners such as Derrida. Foucault. Baudrillard. and Deleuze. occurs in the following ways. In celebrating loss of self and reference and the play of differance, postmodernism praises what should be criticized and thus gives in to the worst aspects of capitalist domination. In addition, crucial sources of agency, critique, and resistance to the system are lost.In misidentifying the cause of alienation and exploitation, locating it in being or logocentric reason or anonymous relations of power, postmodernism leaves hidden in darkness the capitalist social relations in the West and state socialist relations in the East that are the main causes of such exploitation. In its particularism and criticism of totality, postmodernism leaves unthematized the grip that capitalist totalities have over our lives. In criticizing and attempting to transcend western rationality, postmodernism deprives itself of a precious resource for understanding and criticizing such domination. What are the standards in the light of which capitalist and state socialist domination should be criticized? Why not just capitulate and accept the beneficence of such domination, as Rorty does? In overgeneralizing its critique of pathological rationality to western rationality as such, postmodernism leaves hidden and uncriticized the more specific forms of classism. sexism, and racism, and the positive resources of the tradition that can function as positive sources of critique and resistance are lost. In its one-sided negative totalization of rationality' and modernity', the postmodern critique of domination becomes arbitrary and decisionistic. Again, why resist domination rather than capitulate? Finally, in its one-sided pessimistic rejectionism postmodernism leaves itself without any positive leverage points of transcendence in the intellectual, social, and political traditions of the West, its institutions, or social movements. Consequently, postmodernism legitimates a pessimistic quietism similar to that present in the earlier critical theory of Marcuse and Adorno.Finally postmodernism operates as a kind of negative idealism similar to the idealism Marx criticized in German Ideology'. Criticizing bad forms of western identity on a conceptual level, as we have seen throughout this book in our discussions of Derrida. late Heidegger. Adorno. Foucault. Lyotard. and Baudrillard. is equated with full liberation; as a result real material oppression, racist, sexist, heterosexist. and classist. is minimized or ignored. Spouting the language of differance or Denken or geneology or simulation turns into a pseudo-radical jargon masquerading as real radicalism: the jargon of "differ-ance." For the determinate commitment and sacrifice called for by Marx or Lukacs or late Sartre or Marcuse is substituted the "play of the signifier" and theses of undecidability and dissemination. The postmodern Nero plays on the violin of differance while the Rome of The New World Order burns.<CONTINUED><CONTINUED>In its celebration of particularism, misidentification. deprivation, over-generalization, decisionism. quietism, and negative idealism, postmodernism becomes, contrary to the intentions of some of its practitioners, a legitimating ideology of late capitalism in its phase of flexible accumulation. That which should function, if it is genuinely radical and critical, as a critique of fashion becomes a slave of fashion, the latest intellectual and cultural fad. That it often comes in leftist clothes bearing leftist gifts only conceals its ideological role and makes it more harmless, and. therefore, more harmful: a harmless intellectual play that really poses no threat to the system and. indeed, serves it in a way that is reprehensible. Even Reagan, after all. was anti-intellectual and in this sense against reason. It is quite fashionable these days to be against reason. Antirationalism and anti-intellectualism are two of the reigning cultural fads that serve quite well an anti-intellectual capitalist system; postmodernism becomes a negative, idealistic ideology that leaves this system quite intact.Link: PostmodernismTheir one-sided attack on modernity goes too far- they undermine any rational criteria to criticize pathological modernityMarsh 95 (James L., Professor of Philosophy at Fordham University, Critique, Action, and Liberation p. 262-263 GAL)A third implication is the putative superiority of this account to a post-modem account. Postmodernism tends to elide the difference between cultural rationalization and social rationalization, mediatization of life-world by system and colonization of life-world by system, pathology and progress in modernity. My account. I would argue, is both more hermeneutically nuanced and more comprehensive than postmodernism, doing justice to the manifest differences in modernity and accounting both for the positive steps forward and the negative steps backward. My account thus is less one-sided than either a basically optimistic Parsonian account, which does justice to the positive but not the negative aspects of modernity, and a pessimistic, postmodern account, which emphasizes and recognizes the pathology of modernity but does not recognize sufficiently the growth of learning, rationality, and freedom that has occurred.A methodologically conscious critical theory can do no more and no less. My goal here is to give an account of modernity while at the same time indicating my methodology and criteria. Both the content and form, substance and method are fallibilistic. but my challenge to the postmodernist is the following: if you wish to disagree with me. what is your account, your method, your criteria: it is possible that I am one-sided or wrong, but using such criteria as parsimony, comprehensiveness, and consistency. I have offered a putatively valid argument about modernity, its successes and failures, progress and pathology, truth and error. An alternative approach attempting to avoid self-contradiction or arbitrariness has to come up with a better argument, better method, better criteria. Mere poetic-philosophical "dogmatizing" about the evils of modernity, the perniciousness of Gestell. the omnipresence of logocentrism. the all-pervasiveness of power, and the dominance of instrumental reason will not do. What is dogmatically asserted can be rationally questioned or denied. What is rationally asserted, using modem methods, criteria, concepts, and values to overcome modernity, is self-contradictory.Link: PostmodernismPostmodernism’s de-differentiated attack on modernity naturalizes and mystifies capitalist social relations Marsh 95(James L., Professor of Philosophy at Fordham University, Critique, Action, and Liberation p. 293-294 GAL)Throughout this book we have been developing a systematic critique of postmodernism. Performatively or self-referentially. postmodernism lands in pragmatic self-contradiction. Descriptively, postmodernism does not clarify and. indeed, covers over differences within experience such as those between communicative and instrumental rationality, liberating and oppressive power, cultural and social rationality, life-world and system. Hermeneutically. post-modernism shows itself to be a one-sided, de-differentiated, undialectical account of history, rationality, freedom, and modernity. Politically, post-modernity is normatively deficient, cannot identify' contradictions within the socioeconomic-political system that would be bases of transcendence, cannot systematically identify' classes or groups that are likely agents of social change, and as I will show in this chapter, is ideological. Indeed, postmodernism is the distinctive ideology produced by late capitalism in its phase of flexible accumulation. As an ideology it is dominantly French but has American versions in thinkers like Rorty and German versions in late Heidegger and his supporters.My claim here, is that, even though postmodernism has valid insights and questions and critiques concerning modernity, late capitalism, and communications media, critical theory is more adequate for describing, interpreting, criticizing, and positing an adequate alternative to capitalist or state socialist modernity. Dialectical reason and critique, dialectical phenomenology or critical modernism in my version of critical theory, emerges chastened and fallibilistic from its encounter with postmodernism but. nonetheless, is a more adequate alternative than either early naive modernism or postmodernism. Critical modernism emerges as a limited dialectical Aufhebung of naive modernism and postmodernism. -Postmodernism is quite accurate and insightful about the fragmentation, superficiality and fictionality of much of modern life. To the extent, however, that it takes this fact as indicating something permanent, essential, or necessary about human life, postmodernism runs the risk of reifying and naturalizing what is a particular historical result of capitalist social relations. To the extent that postmodernism celebrates this fact, it functions, perhaps contrary to its intentions, as an ideological justification for late capitalism. It manifests, as Jameson puts it. "the cultural logic of late capitalism." Such a logic and ideology covers up and legitimizes what is an alienating, unhappy, dehumanizing effect of late capitalist social relations. This "ideology" mystifies and justifies what should be criticized and overcome, the fact that in late capitalism everyday consciousness is robbed of its power to synthesize; it becomes fragmented."-Link: Postmodernism Their totalizing argument goes too far, and rejects the positive aspects of modernity which could be used to critique dominationMarsh 95 (James L., Professor of Philosophy at Fordham University, Critique, Action, and Liberation p 222-223 GAL)As we have already seen, the postmodernist, like the positivist. has performative and descriptive difficulties. If the critique of reason is made rationally, then it is self-contradictory. If it is made irrationally, then it is made arbitrarily without evidence, and we do not have to take it seriously. Again the postmodernist, like the positivist. misses the varieties and kinds of rationality and. therefore, the critique of rationality ends up being itself a one-sided totalization. Here we need to note again that the postmodernist is not an irrationalist; rather she is criticizing modern, western rationality and pointing toward a postmodern rationality such as Denken (Heidegger) or geneology (Foucault).Given its inadequacy on performative and descriptive levels, we would expect the postmodernist interpretation of history to be one-sided and off the mark, but in a different, opposite way from that of the positivist or technocrat. If the latter emphasizes the positive, bright side of history, the postmodernist emphasizes or overemphasizes the negative, pessimistic, dark side of history. The postmodernist seems to miss the progress, previously pointed out. in the growth of modernity toward differentiation, reflectivity, autonomy, and institutionalization of individual and group rights. All is reduced in a curiously one-sided way to a pathology of western Ratio, whether that be interpreted as "calculative thinking." "logocentrism." "identity-thinking." or "discipline." Corresponding to a one-sided totalization of rationality on a descriptive level is a one-sided totalization on a hermeneutical level.Curiously enough, as a matter of logical and hermeneutical implication, the postmodernist seems to be a disillusioned positivist. If we think of the positivist's triumphalism of technocratic reason and then simply put a sign of negation after that, then we have essentially the postmodernist account. Here is the reason for these thinkers' insistence on negativity, difference, and absence.Like the technocrat, postmodernists also have normative difficulties. They wish to criticize modernity as pathological, but because they have rejected the tradition of western rationality as normatively cogent or binding, they can give little or no account of the norms or criteria in the light of which modernity is deemed pathological. The critique of modernity, therefore, ends up being either hermeneutically self-contradictory, using the resources of tradition to criticize it as bankrupt, or arbitrary, making ungrounded claims and critiques. A contradictory split develops between postmodernism's rejection of rationality and its critique of modernity. Evidential rationality and critique fall apart in a way that compromises both.Link: PostmodernismTheir totalizing critique of modernity leaves no basis for resisting capitalism- the alt is incapable producing social changeMarsh 95(James L., Professor of Philosophy at Fordham University, Critique, Action, and Liberation p.354-355 GAL)I am arguing here that my version of critical theory provides a basis for rational hope, in contrast to middle Frankfurt School theory and postmodernism. Both of these schools are deficient in the following ways. They are normatively inadequate insofar as they do not give an ethical account concerning the reasons for resisting capitalism and state socialism and moving to a different form of life. Why should one resist capitalism rather than just conform to its dictates and worship its pomps?Both schools fail to do justice to the modern differentiation among forms of rationality. Such a legitimate differentiation is lumped together in a de-differentiated fashion with the pathology of the modern, on the one hand, and with the hubris of the modern, on the other, attempts on the part of thinkers such as Descartes and Husserl to achieve a totally certain, apodictic. presuppositionless philosophy. In such a de-differentiation and lumping together is an irony; approaches claiming to do justice to difference end up obliterating it.Because of the one-sided, negative totalization of modernity and its institutions, postmodernism and some forms of critical theory are unable to thematize the contradictoriness of such institutions in such a way as to provide a basis for social change. According to these accounts, everything has been swallowed up in total one-dimensionality.Consequently, no systematic way exists to identify those social groups and movements that are or could be legitimate agents of social change. All of the above problems come home to roost here: the inadequate normative basis, the hermeneutical one-sidedness. and the overstatement of one-dimensionality have left such approaches bereft of adequate guidance for social change. The result is. or should be if they are consistent, political pessimism and quietism. The socioeconomic-political present is so bankrupt, so sold out. so subject to "discipline" or "instrumental reason" or "logocentrism" or "identitarian reason" that little or no positive bases, leverage points, or identifiable groups exist capable of initiating social change. My own version of critical theory as dialectical phenomenology—because it does supply such a normative basis; provides a differentiated, nuanced account of modernity; articulates multiple contradictions within capitalist institutions; and systematically identifies groups capable of initiating social change—does provide such a basis.Link: BadiouBadiou’s approach is incompatible with historical materialism- he reduces everything to positivist pragmatism destroys the possibility of revolutionary action against capitalismLotta, Duniya, and K.J.A. 9 (Raymond, Marxist scholar, Nayi, Demarcations journal, and K.J.A. “Alain Badiou’s “‘Politics of Emancipation’ A Communism Locked Within the Confines of the Bourgeois World” Demarcations 1 Summer-Fall Pg. 115-116 JF)We cannot enter into a discussion of Badiou’s overall philosophy here, as our focus is political philosophy. But we do make the following observation. Badiou’s philosophical construct, derived principally from mathematical set theory, is very much of a piece with postmodernist notions of a diffused social reality lacking structural dynamics or tendential motion. Badiou’s philosophy is especially polemical against historical materialism, Marx’s breakthrough in scientifically approaching human society, history, and the dynamics of change. Badiou’s key philosophical principles are established in Being and Event, about which Oliver Feltham, its English translator and a Badiou scholar in his own right, has said: “Usually Being and Event is read as effectuating a pulverization of the Marxist conception of history as an orientated totality … there is no History, only historical situations.”147 In invoking history with a capital “H,” Feltham is referring to teleology, the idea that there is a pre-set pattern and outcome of history, that anything that has happened had to have happened, and that history is unfolding towards a final goal driven by a will and purpose. While there have been secondary teleological tendencies in the communist movement, Badiou—even if there is on his part a “sincere attempt” to oppose this mechanical and religious tendency—has completely negated the scientific essence and approach of Marxism. Marxism identifies fundamental relations, structures and processes, and dynamics that underlie social formations and their historical development. It identifies a coherence in history, rooted in the transmission of productive forces from one generation to another. There is no fixed trajectory or outcome, no “will or purpose,” in human history. But the laws governing social development do operate—they operate as tendencies; there are factors of chance; complex interactions between the different levels of society; and there is the conscious, dynamic role of people. Bob Avakian has criticized and further ruptured with the secondary tendencies in the communist movement toward mechanical materialism, determinism, and teleology, as part of the new synthesis in communist theory that he has brought forward—on the basis of materialism and dialectics. Badiou, on the other hand, attempts to “detach” philosophy and a theory of social change (“the idea of communism”) from materialism and from dialectics— in his attempt to move beyond what he conceives of as a construct, not the reality, of contradiction. Badiou’s theory negates the ability of people to scientifically understand reality beyond the surface level of phenomena and appearance, leading to a profoundly positivist, pragmatic, and empiricist philosophy, assigning knowledge and “truth” to what works, and to what appears. As a necessary consequence, it deprives revolutionary forces of any ability to consciously influence, shape, and transform reality—rather than simply tailing spontaneity and bowing down before necessity. The ultimate horizon of this theory is defined by ”what is”—or what appears to be—not “what could be” and “what should be.” Ultimately, “what is” must of necessity “be”: this world of capitalism-imperialism, with all its horrors. Link: BadiouBadiou’s pursuit of equality without revolution will inevitably fail- inequality is an inevitable result of the fundamental contradictions of capitalismLotta, Duniya, and K.J.A. 9 (Raymond, Marxist scholar, Nayi, Demarcations journal, and K.J.A. “Alain Badiou’s “‘Politics of Emancipation’ A Communism Locked Within the Confines of the Bourgeois World” Demarcations 1 Summer-Fall Pg. 14-15 JF)The kind of egalitarian politics advanced by Alain Badiou can resonate among sections of democratic intellectuals and radicalized youth. We are living in a period of extreme and unprecedented polarization in the world, of vast and howling differences in wealth, security, and human welfare. There is a thirst for justice towards others and reciprocity on an equal footing in the times in which we live. But the grotesque inequalities that mark, and mar, the world are a product and manifestation of the division of society into classes, and of the exploitative production relations on which this rests. They are an expression, on a world scale, of the fundamental contradiction of capitalist society, between socialized production and private appropriation by the capitalist class. Polarization may, to some degree, in some circumstances, be reduced with redistribution and reform, but it is impossible to overcome the profound inequalities of the “late imperialist” economic and social order without resolving this fundamental contradiction of capitalism, its exploitative core. These profound inequalities cannot be overcome without making revolution to transform the economic base and superstructure of society. Alain Badiou is outraged by the state of the world but recoils from the scale and scope of the struggle and transformations required to bring a radically new world into being: proletarian revolution whose first great step is the seizure of state power. His claim that “the age of revolutions is over”22 and his rejection of the revolutionary seizure of power is reinforced by incorrect verdicts on the first wave of socialist revolution. He offers a political project of “pure equality” to be applied in a society divided into classes and in coexistence with bourgeois state power. He heralds this as a new politics of emancipation and declares that it embodies the interests of a “generic humanity” transcending class. But Badiou’s “generic” is in fact quite “particular.” Alain Badiou is driven to a framework of understanding of the “problem” confronting humanity and its “solution” that corresponds to the class position and class outlook of a very definite segment of society, the radicalized petite bourgeoisie. He sees the problem of vast inequalities, but does not follow through to the taproots of exploitation in the economic base of society; he sees the solution as a “pure Idea of equality” in the political realm, not in achieving the “4 Alls.” Alain Badiou wants “equality” but shrinks from the complex process of making a revolution that not only overcomes social inequality but also achieves something far higher than equality.Link: BadiouBadiou’s subtraction means hiding in a comfort zone of privilege—it refuses to destroy status quo power relationsLotta, Duniya, and K.J.A. 9 (Raymond, Marxist scholar, Nayi, Demarcations journal, and K.J.A. “Alain Badiou’s “‘Politics of Emancipation’ A Communism Locked Within the Confines of the Bourgeois World” Demarcations 1 Summer-Fall Pg. 95-96 JF)So what, then, does it mean to function “at a distance from the state” in some opposition to the state … but in non-antagonism to the state? How is this possible, given the repressive force of the bourgeois state? It can only mean a politics of autonomy informed by a calculus of playing within the rules and parameters of the existing order. To do otherwise would be to invite reaction, forcing the constriction and contraction of such spaces. To be (and stay) at some nonantagonistic political distance from the state requires the self-imposition of constraint—a kind of internalization of the dictates of bourgeois power. Badiou is not wholly unaware of the kinds of contradictions we have been identifying, and how this does indeed delimit a sustainable politics. He takes refuge—and this is consistent with his view of equality as subjective engagement—in the notion that this kind of politics exists as idea and subjective impulse: There is certainly a ‘doing’ [faire] of politics, but it is immediately the pure and simple experience of a thought, its localization. It cannot be distinguished from it.112 The pivotal question is how can anything truly emancipatory and transformative occur or be brought about without the strategic orientation of destroying these “dominant” relations? How can the process of “subtraction” that creates this “distance” from the state, these points and spaces of “autonomy,” be emancipatory when Alain Badiou talks about leaving reactionary relations intact? The politics of genuine emancipation is a politics of confronting and transforming all of social reality—all of its oppressive and exploitative relations—not “subtracting” out of that reality, ideologically ensconced in safe sites of “autonomy and independence” in fundamental coexistence with bourgeois society.Link: Badiou Badiou’s opposition to the state is only a reform—it doesn’t assume the omnipresent unity of bourgeois capitalist relationsLotta, Duniya, and K.J.A. 9 (Raymond, Marxist scholar, Nayi, Demarcations journal, and K.J.A. “Alain Badiou’s “‘Politics of Emancipation’ A Communism Locked Within the Confines of the Bourgeois World” Demarcations 1 Summer-Fall Pg. 92-94 JF)So how does Badiou conceptualize politics at a “distance from the state”? It is based on what he calls “subtraction” from the state, as distinguished from “destruction” of the state: [a subtraction] is no longer dependent on the dominant laws of the political reality of a situation. It is irreducible, however, to the destruction of these laws as well. A subtraction might leave the laws of the situation intact. What subtraction does is bring about a point of autonomy. It’s a negation, but it cannot be identified with the properly destructive part of negation.…We need an ‘originary subtraction’ capable of creating a new space of independence and autonomy from the dominant laws of the situation.108 The essence of a “subtracted” politics at a “distance from the state” lies in an “independence and autonomy,” and “unlike the insurrectional form of the party, the politics of subtraction is no longer immediately destructive, antagonistic or militarized.109 [emphasis ours] At the same time, this politics claims to be free of the state’s dominance and influence, as it has “subtracted” from participation in what Badiou calls the capitalo-parliamentarism of the bourgeois state. With this conceptual framework, he provides a model for a politics for the advanced capitalist countries, supposedly realized in Organization Politique in France (for which Badiou is a guiding figure). But as we shall see, Badiou’s “distance from the state” has proven rather foreshortened. His political trajectory has in fact brought him to a new-found proximity to the state. Badiou is now calling for reformist “prescriptions” of the bourgeois state (while continuing to shun participation in the electoral-parliamentary apparatus) What stands out is that these are not emancipatory struggles led by emancipating ideology. Again, ideology and outlook count for very little in Badiou’s formalist methodology. And the putative ways in which these movements might be considered “distant from the state,” operating with “independence and autonomy,” crash against social reality. The fundamental illusoriness, and poverty, of Badiou’s concept begins to reveal itself. The root problem with Badiou’s political orientation of durable “independence and autonomy” from the bourgeois state is its failure to grasp the integrative unity of bourgeois capitalist society and the ways in which the bourgeois state permeates all of society. Which is to say, bourgeois class power and bourgeois economic relations, and the ideological influences that correspond to those relations, pervade the space (or “spaces”) of capitalist society. On the one hand, it is not possible within capitalist society to establish an alternative mode of production, to put an end to the exploitation of wage labor and create a planned economy based on social need (a point which Badiou will occasionally acknowledge). Socialism is indeed the only alternative to capitalism; but it can only be established, develop, and function systemically—on the basis of the socialization of ownership of the means of production and the leadership and coordinating role of a new state power. On the other hand, any truly transformational politics is going to bring you into collision and antagonism with the existing bourgeois state. Mao’s famously provocative statement about the Paris Commune is rather apt in this regard: “If the Paris Commune had not failed but had been successful, then in my opinion, it would have become by now a bourgeois commune. This is because it was impossible for the French bourgeoisie to allow France’s working class to have so much political power.” Badiou can advocate for, and may even find, some “space” within the existing system and state power, because his politics of equality is not transformational; it does not stand in fundamental antagonism to bourgeois relations.Link: BadiouBadiou’s understanding of the “event” is preventative to changeLotta, Duniya, and K.J.A. 9 (Raymond, Marxist scholar, Nayi, Demarcations journal, and K.J.A. “Alain Badiou’s “‘Politics of Emancipation’ A Communism Locked Within the Confines of the Bourgeois World” Demarcations 1 Summer-Fall Pg. 102-103 JF)Alain Badiou’s notion of the “event” is among his most widely known and widely discussed concepts. For many progressive and radical readers of his work, the event has come to signify the possibility of emancipatory breaks in the status quo. It has also come to signify a central role for “the subject” who stays faithful to the event and soldiers through for the realization of new possibilities opened up by this radical break. Alain Badiou’s philosophical trinity of “event-subject-truth” has excited interest for affirming radical change and introducing a novel approach to the dynamics of such change that seemingly puts the conscious subject back on center-stage. This is said to stand in contrast to structural determinist theories of change that underemphasize the role of consciousness and subject. For these reasons, the event is seen in some progressive circles as “an expression of the counter-view that a substantially better world inspired by radically novel events in various domains is possible, and depends for its realization on the energy and commitment of forward-looking people.”128 Reality cries out for a “substantially better world.” Poverty, misery, desperation, repression and violence swell the ranks of the “wretched of the earth.” However, once again, Alain Badiou’s event, and especially his conception of the “subject” combined with an explicit rejection of the “party-state,” offers no real alternative to the system that produces this world of oppression.Badiou’s event makes us passive subjects waiting for change that will never comeLotta, Duniya, and K.J.A. 9 (Raymond, Marxist scholar, Nayi, Demarcations journal, and K.J.A. “Alain Badiou’s “‘Politics of Emancipation’ A Communism Locked Within the Confines of the Bourgeois World” Demarcations 1 Summer-Fall Pg. 105-106 JF)So, at a time when the world seems to be descending into ever greater catastrophe and horror, and when radical possibilities seem bleak, Alain Badiou offers us the secular miracle of the event. This is the hope and possibility of a deus ex machina that will “rescue” us from the oppressive present. In the imperialist citadels, it is generally the case that relative stability characterizes the situation in normal times, which is different from the situation in the oppressed nations. Badiou’s event resonates with those yearning for a break in imperialist society’s deadening and stultifying normalcy. A snap in this fabric, an event, including and especially spontaneous mass upsurges, is—and understandably so—appealing to all those who want a different world, and who hunger for such exceptional moments when things are thrown open and new possibilities and new capabilities emerge. But Badiou takes the normalcy of imperialist society as cause for quietism. All Badiou asks of the “subject”-to-be (because it is the “event” that creates the conditions for the creation of a subject) is to have faith in this miracle. Implicitly this involves waiting for the event, and explicitly this involves faith and loyalty (“fidelity”) in the wake of it. Until then, as we saw in Chapter 4, a reformist politics of tinkering on the margins and making “prescriptions” to the imperialist state is all that can be done. What is in common between those reformist politics of non-“evental” life in the metropoles and Badiou’s approach to the event is that, in both, the subject and the subjective factor can only trail in the wake of events and are ultimately severed from the revolutionary goal of the seizure of state power. His is not a conscious, revolutionary subject but one formed in the wake of the event, and essentially “tailing” spontaneously. This “subject” is not actively working on and transforming the pre-“evental” situation, or working on the event itself, guided by revolutionary aims and seeking to make the greatest gains for the revolutionary struggle. Badiou’s logic of the “subject” waiting for the event begets a determinism premised on the principle that the “subject” and consciousness cannot affect, shape, and transform the larger objective situation. In fact, Badiou enshrines this as principle: [Politics indifferent to the] “dialectic of the objective and subjective … the deployment of subjective thought should take place from within the subjective itself, through the hypothesis of the foundation of the subjective in the subjective and nt in the confrontation of the subjective to the objective” [let alone in]“reference to the economy, the state, alienation, etc.”135[emphasis ours, words in brackets from Hallward]s.Link: BadiouBadiou’s event detaches all events from causality—severing revolutionary forces from the expectancy that is necessary to enact change Lotta, Duniya, and K.J.A. 9 (Raymond, Marxist scholar, Nayi, Demarcations journal, and K.J.A. “Alain Badiou’s “‘Politics of Emancipation’ A Communism Locked Within the Confines of the Bourgeois World” Demarcations 1 Summer-Fall Pg. 115-116 JF)Alain Badiou presents the event as "pure chance, which cannot be inferred from the situation"129—"absolute contingency,"130 as Oliver Feltham, a Badiou scholar, describes it. In other words, the event is something absolutely new and "beyond" what can be explained as an outcome of prior conditions and contradictions. For this reason, the event is also unexpected. Badiou has stated: "it is the essence of the event not to be preceded by any sign, and to surprise us by its grace, however vigilant we may be...."The day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night."131 Alain Badiou is theorizing, and celebrating, an aspect of the dynamics of "the objective" situation—the fact that deep and profound social contradictions of the system often result in intense, spontaneous, and unexpected eruptions. The "immediate triggers" and subsequent dynamics of such eruptions are often not foreseeable and may not be directly related to the major, underlying contradictions. And even when underlying causes and triggers can be recognized, the intensity of these situations often cannot be anticipated, much less precisely predicted. For example, May '68 in France, the student uprising in Mexico at the time of the 1968 Olympics, or the Los Angeles rebellion in 1992—all had triggering elements and dynamics reflecting and giving expression to major concentrations of social contradictions; yet what happened was nevertheless unexpected, both in its ferocity and in the novel forms of struggle, organization, and consciousness which emerged from these conjunctures. Few would dispute the elements of suddenness and surprise of these situations; and these qualities cannot be mechanically reduced to underlying material causes. This is important. The communist movement has been marked, and blinkered, historically by a tendency to linearly project the future out of whatever set of contradictions presents itself at any given time, to fail to see the possibility of leaps and ruptures in development, and to be unable to imagine the fact that new possibilities can very suddenly and "without warning" open up. Forging a better understanding of the dialectical link between causality and accident is a very important philosophical challenge. But Alain Badiou seeks to completely detach the event from these causes, casting this event in the ethereal glow of "pure chance." This might seem, on first glance, to "liberate" the subjective; in fact, as we shall see, it ends by fastening the chains of determinism still tighter on those who would act to bring about fundamental change. Everything in nature, and society, is a product of causality and contingency (chance), of necessity and accident. In treating these events as "pure chance," Alain Badiou negates the element of causality—the historical, material, and social antecedents of these events. This stands in opposition to a scientific conception of and approach to society and the possibility of its transformation, rooted in a scientific analysis and synthesis of the underlying structures and dynamics of development. The 17th century philosopher Spinoza defined a miracle as "an event of which the causes cannot be explained."132. But what appears as a "miracle"—including the "miracle" of the event—has both material determinants and antecedents at many levels, along with, and interacting with, the role of accident. And there are the event's human actors who are part of historically specific class and social forces, responding to and acting on the event, and its antecedent conditions, towards different outcomes. There are many examples of sharp turns in history and contemporary society where the deep contradictions of the system erupt in unexpected and seismic ways. But if society cannot be reduced to a linear and mechanical unfolding of cause and effect, neither can it be reduced to a random series of events. An observation by Lenin made at the time of the 1917 February Revolution in Russia is quite relevant: There are no miracles in nature or history, but every abrupt turn in history, and this applies to every revolution, presents such a wealth of content, unfolds such unexpected and specific combinations of forms of struggle and alignment of forces of the contestants, that to the lay mind there is much that must appear miraculous.133 There are strong elements of chance and contingency in that "hot mix" of factors that result in the event, especially in how these elements mutually interact and come together and how new things come into being. But reality is not all accident: there is also relative stability and unity; and forms and patterns of particular forms of matter in motion, including in human society, can be identified and understood. There are also underlying social contradictions<CONTINUED><CONTINUED>, including but not limited to key economic developments, changes in class relations, emergent political, social, and cultural phenomena, etc., that shape the development of a social formation and the overall situation. There is much that can and should be understood, anticipated, and worked on by conscious revolutionary forces, exactly in order to maximize advances for the revolutionary struggle, including towards the seizure of power—if the conditions come into being that can enable revolutionary forces to "wrench" a revolutionary opening out of situations of great upheaval. And, in regard to the many things that happen that are unanticipated—well, revolutionary forces have to be, as Bob Avakian has put it, "constantly tense to that possibility while consistently working to transform necessity into freedom."134 This is the correct dialectical materialist understanding of reality—and an active, transformative, revolutionary orientation based on that.Link: BadiouBadiou’s politics amounts to paltry reformism that is both made possible by and supportive of status quo imperialismLotta, Duniya, and K.J.A. 9 (Raymond, Marxist scholar, Nayi, Demarcations journal, and K.J.A. “Alain Badiou’s “‘Politics of Emancipation’ A Communism Locked Within the Confines of the Bourgeois World” Demarcations 1 Summer-Fall Pg. JF)This is the painful political and ideological point of arrival of Alain Badiou's radical politics of emancipation. He draws the wrong conclusions and lessons from the first wave of socialist revolutions and societies; he proceeds to declare that "the age of revolutions is over"; and he advances a politics "for which state power is neither the objective nor the norm." But reality impinges on the illusion, and despite efforts to reduce this politics to a purely subjective experience, Alain Badiou finds himself in close proximity to the state, a supplicant for "prescriptions" for reform. Yes, there is still a small measure of distance—Badiou continues to reject elections and parliaments. But with his ideological and political line, Badiou objectively accommodates to the premises, constraints, and confines of bourgeois democracy. What remains is the hollow shell of a politics which somehow stands in some relation to a dubious and tenuous "communist hypothesis" but which, in his words, "promises nothing. It is both without party and without program. It is a prescriptive form of thought..."123 And the world stays fundamentally unchanged. Capitalism-imperialism continues humming in the "background," crushing lives and destroying spirits in its meat-grinder of exploitation. And the horrors continue unabated. To cast the imperialist state as the receptor and receptacle of "prescriptions," and to argue for non-antagonism towards it, is to accept and reinforce the imperialist status quo. It is to proceed from the standpoint of "our country"—what is feasible and acceptable within its frame. It is—and this need not involve conscious intent—to rationalize a politics that can go no further than aiming for better terms within the imperialist citadels themselves—leaving intact the nexus of exploitative and parasitic relations. And here is the irony: the very space for an illusory "radical" politics at a "distance from the state" is a product of the exploitative relations and associated privileges deriving in large measure from the larger imperialist-dominated lopsidedness of the world. Alain Badiou is known to identify with the wretched of the earth; has consistently taken the right position in defending the rights of "sans-papiers," the undocumented immigrants of France; is known to be against the wars of imperialist aggression. But by rejecting the very goals and the very instrumentalities that make possible a revolutionary rupture from imperialism—a rupture that would put an end to all of these horrors and begin a process of genuine emancipation in the service of world humanity—Alain Badiou can only turn inwards to a paltry reformism which is objectively predicated on the very existence, nature, and role of imperialism. Regardless of intent, Alain Badiou has landed himself in a very unpleasant space: "Eurocentric social-chauvinism and social democracy."124Link: BadiouBadiou’s is a philosophy of passivity that recreates the status quo Lotta, Duniya, and K.J.A. 9 (Raymond, Marxist scholar, Nayi, Demarcations journal, and K.J.A. “Alain Badiou’s “‘Politics of Emancipation’ A Communism Locked Within the Confines of the Bourgeois World” Demarcations 1 Summer-Fall Pg. JF)Upsurges like those defined as events by Badiou can hold within them potentially constitutive elements of a revolutionary situation. But the task of revolutionaries is not to passively await—but rather to "hasten while awaiting"—the emergence of such a revolutionary situation, which comes about "as a result of the unfolding of the contradictions of the system itself, as well as the political and ideological work of the revolutionaries."138 This includes raising the ideological and political consciousness of masses of people through a whole ensemble of forms, including consistent ideological work, as well as identifying key faultlines around which mass political resistance to the state can open up questions of legitimacy; it includes strengthening the party in its understanding, its influence, and its numbers (a crucial task, as the strength of the party going into a potential revolutionary situation has everything to do with whether such an opening will be seized, or even recognized); and it includes as well bringing forward a significant section of people from different strata, but including a critical mass within the proletariat, who think and act as "emancipators of humanity," people imbued with a basic understanding of the long-term goals and outlook of communism. All this is part of "working on" the objective situation, of hastening. Alain Badiou's philosophical approach, with its lack of defining relations between different elements and levels of reality, does not actually reflect reality. Badiou's theory stands as an obstacle to being able to identify particular and various channels and pathways through which it becomes possible to wrench freedom out of necessity—and on that basis to transform the objective situation, especially the ideological and political consciousness of people. For all his rhapsodizing of the subject, Badiou objectively writes off the dynamic role of the subjective factor, or consciousness. In doing so, Badiou's philosophy and theory of the event succumbs to the relative stability that prevails in the imperialist countries. Passivity in the face of unfavorable objective situations has a deeply corrosive ideological effect. Over time, and almost inevitably, this passivity and determinism ideologically begets the "tolerability of the status quo," as one learns to accept what one cannot fundamentally change...while waiting for the miracle.Link: Bataille Bataille’s theories can’t further Marxist politicsPotter 92 (Russell, English Department @Colby College, Postmodern Culture, Vol. 3, Iss. 1, "The Black (W)hole of Bataille: A Genealogy of Postmodernism?" jam)That Bataille's greatest strength is a negation--albeit a negation that exceeds itself and is figuratively transformed into an affirmation (as with Nietzsche's 'active nihilism')--makes the question of his legacy equally accursed. Like Nietzsche, Bataille is at once everywhere and nowhere; he provides a spur, an incitement to discourse, without supplying either a dogmatic structure (Freud's Oedipus) or an overriding goal (Marx's proletarian revolution). It is this dilemma that faces Julian Pefanis, who in attempting to construct a genealogy of postmodernism by charting the influence of Bataille finds himself continually obliged to construct a more unitary--and a more useful--Bataille than either Bataille's texts or Pefanis's own theorizations of heterology would seem to offer. Bataille’s Logic of expenditure without reserve reifies capitalism and maintains the system that makes their impacts inevitable-Shaviro 8 Steven (Professor of English At Wayne State. Capitalism, Consumerism, and Waste, ) May 21st 2008Finally, this crazed consumerism is the way that the capitalist mode of production manages a loss that it incessantly disavows, but that it cannot actually escape. Unproductive expenditure may well be the very point of the conjunctive synthesis of consumption. For this synthesis continually exempts or extracts something from the otherwise infinite processes of production and circulation. It provides a terminus for the otherwise aimless and limitless movement of the valorization of capital. For the conjunctive synthesis marks the point at which the circuits of money and commodities (C-M-C and M-C-M’) are broken, so that exchange comes to a momentary end. In the residual subject’s jouissance, the commodity is withdrawn from circulation, in order to be used up or destroyed. The conjunctive synthesis thereby deducts something from capital accumulation. And yet, without this synthesis and its deductions, the capitalist economy could not function at all. As Marx and Engels tell us, even in the ‘normal’ situation of bourgeois society, “a great part not only of the existing products, but also of the previously created productive forces, are periodically destroyed.” Or, as David Harvey puts it, since capital is always in danger of being choked by overproduction and overaccumulation, it must continually resort to “violent paroxysms” of “the devaluation, depreciation, and destruction of capital.” Specifically, this is what happens on a major scale in moments of economic crisis. But on a minor or “molecular” level, the conjunctive subject or consumer is itself always in crisis — and it can only alleviate this situation by indulging in another round of shopping, purchasing, and consuming.Link: BaudrillardTheir hyperreality claims are an insightful observation, but they have totalized them to the point of collapsing into Cartesian solipsism— they are left nothing but images totally disconnected from social reality.Marsh 95(James L., Professor of Philosophy at Fordham University, Critique, Action, and Liberation p. 291-292 GAL)Postmodern theorists have responded to such claims by arguing that what dominates now is an economics and politics of the image, in which the difference between image and reality is either smudged or reality is measured by or subordinated to the image. We judge political candidates, for example by how well they correspond to the images projected for them by the media. Because of the prevalence of such phenomena, we have moved into a new postindustrial age. a mode of information rather than mode of production. For this reason. Marxist or neo-Marxist analyses and critiques based on an account of social reality as at least somewhat distinct from the image, on the importance of political economy, and on normative conceptions of society' are outmoded and anachronistic. -Such an account, however, is as one-sided or perhaps even more one-sided than that of naive modernism. We note a residual idealism that does not take into account socioeconomic realities already pointed out such as the corporate nature of media, their role in achieving and legitimating profit, and their function of manufacturing consent. In such a postmodernist account is a reduction of everything to image or symbol that misses the relationship of these to realities such as corporations seeking profit, impoverished workers in these corporations, or peasants in Third-World countries trying to conduct elections. Postmodernism does not adequately distinguish here between a reduction of reality' to image and a mediation of reality' by image. A media idealism exists rooted in the influence of structuralism and poststructuralism and doing insufficient justice to concrete human experience, judgment, and free interaction in the world.-It is also paradoxical or contradictory to say it really is true that nothing is really true, that everything is illusory or imaginary. Postmodernism makes judgments that implicitly deny the reduction of reality to image. For example. Poster and Baudrillard do want to say that we really are in a new age that is informational and postindustrial. Again, to say that everything is imploded into media images is akin logically to the Cartesian claim that everything is or might be a dream. What happens is that dream or image is absolutized or generalized to the point that its original meaning lying in its contrast to natural, human, and social reality' is lost. We can discuss Disneyland as reprehensible because we know the difference between Disneyland and the larger, enveloping reality' of Southern California and the United States.2Link: BaudrillardTheir arguments are just descriptive of capitalism’s mode of accumulation in the information age—the consciousness industry’s hegemony is never complete, there is always the possibility of resistanceMarsh 95(James L., Professor of Philosophy at Fordham University, Critique, Action, and Liberation p.298-99 GAL)This work of art very powerfully and succinctly sums up the points made in the preceding discussion: the basic capitalist control 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 onesided. It is still the same mode of production. I would argue, the same capitalist beast in modern dress, but the role of information is an aspect of a new regime of capitalist accumulation, what I will later call "flexible accumulation." Information as Baudrillard, Poster, and others have 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 Adomo, hegemony is never total. Like the late capitalist state, late capitalist media are caught in a contradictory tension between accumulation and legitimation, capitalist oligarchy and democracy.Link: BaudrillardBaudrillard’s focus on simulation and hyperreality obscures the material realities of production, consumption, and the capitalist systemMarsh 95(James L., Professor of Philosophy at Fordham University, Critique, Action, and Liberation p.309-310 GAL)The emphasis of postmodernism on the image, information, and consumption is. therefore, illumined in noting that, to a greater extent than before, flexible accumulation is marked by an increased commodification of image and information and consumption. The media are themselves businesses, big corporations out to make a profit. They achieve this end by marketing information and images that become themselves commodities. A separate, fictionalized, reified, fetishized world comes into being more or less at odds with, covering over, legitimating, and reflecting the real social, economic world. Information and image function as ideology legitimating the real world and the structure of domination within it. Reality and fiction, real and "hyperreal." production and consumption, formation of commodities and information about them intersect and mediate in such a way as to create a "postmodern carnival." In this respect. Baudrillard is insightful and correct in pointing out the role of image, information, and simulation in the new regime of capitalism. What he tends to do. however, is to make these the whole story in such a way as to miss the way they relate to and mediate the realities of production, consumption, and the larger capitalist economy. Link: BhabhaBhabha ignores class and dissolves politics by reducing it to debates over signification, rather than political economy. Bhabha excludes the way class structures discourse, which amounts to an ideological legitimization of capital.Young 2006 (Robert, Red Critique, Winter/Spring, “Putting Materialism back into Race Theory”, )If Gilroy deploys the post-colonial racialized agent for displacing class, then Homi Bhabha's postcolonial theory detaches race from political economy by reinscribing race within the problematics of signification. In The Location of Culture, Bhabha's last chapter, "Race', time and the revision of modernity", situates the question of race within the "ambivalent temporality of modernity" (239). In this way, Bhabha foregrounds the "time-lag" between "event" and "enunciation" and, for Bhabha, this produces space for postcolonial agency. Political agency revolves around deconstructing signs from totalities and thereby delaying the connection between signifier and signified and resistance is the effect of this ambivalence. Hence, for Bhabha, "the intervention of postcolonial or black critique is aimed at transforming the conditions of enunciation at the level of the sign" (247). This idealist reading of the social reduces politics to a struggle over the sign rather than the relations of production.Indeed, Bhabha re-understands the political not as an ideological practice aimed at social transformation—the project of transformative race theory. Instead, he theorizes "politics as a performativity" (15). But what is the social effect of this understanding of politics? Toward what end might this notion point us? It seems as if the political now calls for (cosmopolitan) witnesses to the always already permanent slippage of signification and this (formal) process of repetition and reinscription outlines a space for "other forms of enunciation" (254). But will these "other forms of enunciation" naturally articulate resistance to the dominant political and ideological interests? For Bhabha, of course, we "need to think beyond narratives of originary and initial subjectivities and to focus on those moments or processes that are produced in the articulation of cultural differences" (1). However, cultural differences, in themselves, do not necessarily mean opposition. Indeed, at the moment, cultural difference represents one of the latest zones for commodification and, in this regard, it ideologically legitimates capitalism. Bhabha homogenizes (cultural) difference and, consequently, he covers over ideological struggles within the space of cultural difference. In short, this other historical site is not the site for pure difference, which naturally resists the hegemonic; for it, too, is the site for political contestation.Bhabha's formalism makes it seem as if ambivalence essentially inheres in discourse. Ambivalence results from opposed political interests that inflect discourses and so the ambivalence registers social conflict. In Marxism and the Philosophy and Language, Volo?inov offers this materialist understanding of the sign: Class does not coincide with the sign community, i.e. with the community which is the totality of users of the same set of signs for ideological communication. Thus various different classes will use one and the same language. As a result, differently oriented accents intersect in every ideological sign. Sign becomes an arena of class struggle. (22)The very concept—ideology—that could delineate the political character and therefore class interests involved in structuring the content of discourses, Bhabha excludes from his discourse.In the end, Bhabha's discourse advocates what amounts to discursive freedom and he substitutes this for material freedom. Like Gilroy, Bhabha's discursive freedom takes place within the existing system. In contrast to Bhabha, Marx theorizes the material presupposition of freedom. In the German Ideology, Marx argues that "people cannot be liberated as long as they are unable to obtain food and drink, housing and clothing in adequate quality and quantity" (61). Thus for Marx "[l]iberation" is an historical and not a mental act" (61). In suppressing the issue of need, Bhabha's text reveals his own class interests. <CONTINUED><CONTINUED>The studied preoccupation with "ambivalence" reflects a class privilege, and it speaks to the crisis for (postcolonial) subjects torn between national affiliation and their privileged (and objective) class position within the international division of labor. The ambivalence is a symptom of social antagonism, but in Bhabha's hands, it becomes a transhistorical code for erasing the trace of class.Link: ChowTheir focus on critiquing instrumentalism destroys effective left wing politics—we should focus on changing material conditions instead of reducing everything to an effect of flawed ontologyHirschkop 2007 (Ken, “On Being Difficult: A REVIEW OF: Rey Chow, The Age of the World Target: Self-Referentiality in War, Theory and Comparative Work”, 7/25, GAL)This defect - not being art - is one that theory should prolong and celebrate, not remedy. For the most egregious error Chow makes is to imagine that obstructing instrumentalism is somehow a desirable and effective route for left-wing politics. The case against instrumentalism is made in depth in the opening chapter, which argues with reference to Hiroshima and Nagasaki that "[t]he dropping of the atomic bombs effected what Michel Foucault would call a major shift in epistemes, a fundamental change in the organization, production and circulation of knowledge" (33). It initiates the "age of the world target" in which war becomes virtualized and knowledge militarized, particularly under the aegis of so-called "area studies".It's hard not to see this as a Pacific version of the notorious argument that the Gulag and/or the Holocaust reveal the exhaustion of modernity. And the first thing one has to say is that this interpretation of war as no longer "the physical, mechanical struggles between combative oppositional groups" (33), as now transformed into a matter technology and vision, puts Chow in some uncomfortable intellectual company: like that of Donald Rumsfeld, whose recent humiliation is a timely reminder that wars continue to depend on the deployment of young men and women in fairly traditional forms of battle. Pace Chow, war can indeed be fought, and fought successfully, "without the skills of playing video games" (35) and this is proved, with grim results, every day.But it's the title of this new epoch - the title of the book as well - that truly gives the game away. Heidegger's "Age of the World Picture" claimed that the distinguishing phenomena of what we like to call modernity - science, machine technology, secularization, the autonomy of art and culture - depended, in the last instance, on a particular metaphysics, that of the "world conceived of and grasped as a picture", as something prepared, if you like, for the manipulations of the subject. Against this vision of "sweeping global instrumentalism" Heidegger set not Mallarmé, but H?lderlin, and not just H?lderlin, but also "reflection", i.e., Heidegger's own philosophy. It's a philosophical reprise of what Francis Mulhern has dubbed "metaculture", the discourse in which culture is invoked as a principle of social organization superior to the degraded machinations of "politics", degraded machinations which, at the time he was composing this essay, had led Heidegger to lower his expectations of what National Socialism might achieve. In the fog of metaphysics, every actually existing nation - America, the Soviet Union, Germany - looks just as grey, as does every conceivable form of politics. For the antithesis of the "world picture" is not a more just democratic politics, but no politics at all, and it is hard to see how this stance can serve as the starting point for a political critique. If Chow decides to pursue this unpromising path anyhow, it is probably because turning exploitation, military conquest and prejudice into so many epiphenomena of a metaphysical "instrumentalism" grants philosophy and poetry a force and a role in revolutionising the world that would otherwise seem extravagant. Or it would do, if "instrumentalism" was, as Chow claims a "demotion of language", if language was somehow more at home exulting in its own plenitude than merely referring to things.Link: Deep Ecology/K of AnthropocentrismAnthropocentrism is not the root cause of other oppressions- the causal direction is the other way around: human-over-human domination causes the domination of the non-human world, which their lack of a concrete alternative makes impossible to address. Hay 2 (Peter, Main currents in Western Environmental Thought, 67-68)Dcvall notes that 'deep ecology* has increasingly become associated with radical environmental activism, or the use of tactics such as eco-tagc, sit-ins, guerrilla theater, demonstrations, and other forms of direct action' (1991: 251; see also Dcvall and Sessions 1985: 17-39; Nacss 1989: 130-62). Christopher Manes constructs a fully fledged political program around radical confrontation in the name of deep ecology, claiming of ccotagc that it is 'the activity that more than anything else defines radical cnvironmcntalism* (1990: 21). Despite such contributions, an enduring criticism of deep ecology has been that it is difficult to get a credible politics from it. Naess would not agree. He argues that 'the ecological movement cannot avoid politics', and that "in principle, it is desirable that everyone in the ecological movement engage in political activity' (1989: 130-31). But, of course, this is Naess using 'deep ecology' as synonymous with *ecology movement. On the other hand, even Warwick Fox has argued that the deep ecology platform 'is limited in terms of political scope', noting that 'of the widely known "four pillars" of Green politics — ecology, social justice, grassroots democracy, and nonviolence ... the deep ecology platform essentially picks up on just one: ecology* (1995a: 165). Critics have been even harsher, saying, with Sylvan and Bennett:there is no new political vision forthcoming from Deep Ecology or ccos-ophy. Similarly for any accompanying economic vision. Present arrangements arc highly incompatible with Deep Ecology, yet no alternatives are really offered. The deep ecopolitics promised is but empty rhetoric, attractive noise signifying nothing (1994: 123).These deficiencies exist because (it is usually argued), by identifying an amorphous cultural disposition to 'anthropocentrism' as the root cause of environmental decay, deep ecology insufficiently acknowledges the reality of exploitative power relations between people, from which environmental degradation follows as a sure consequence. Put baldly, the deep ecology position is that culturally embedded anthropocentrism drives humans to impose dominance upon the non-human world. Its critics, on the other hand, reverse the causal direction: for them, the desire of some humans to dominate others leads to the dominance and degradation of non-human nature as the latter is harnessed to serve the project of human-over-human domination.Link: Deleuze & Guatarri Deleuze & Guatarri strip Marxism of any revolutionary potential Allen 11 (David J., MA in Continental Philosophy from the U of Warwick, Ph.D candidate, May 3, [speculativehumbug.2011/03/05/jameson-on-deleuze-and-guattari/] AD: 7-14-11, jam)One final issue to make some comments on: A key way, Jameson notes (197), in which Deleuze and Guattari transform the Marxist problematic (or perhaps exit it) is in their identification of the agencies of revolution and emancipation from capitalist social relations not with the working class or any other class for that matter, but precisely with what Jameson terms the hors-classe, i.e. those who fall outside of the hierarchies and class structures of social reality altogether (schizophrenics, minorities, experimenters with the limits of experience…). Jameson seems to see this development cautiously as a positive one, ‘perhaps more congenial to the current climate of identity politics at the same time that it clings to an older political value of subversion and contestation in order to rewrite it and give it a new theoretical justification’ (197). But I have some worries about this deviation from the Marxist problematic of resistance from within the system. The crux of the Marxist task of identifying agencies of resistance is to identify groups exploited by capitalist social relations but who, in virtue of their very exploitation, are in a position to control the means of production (whether that be industrial production or some other form of social production). It is this ambiguity in the structure of exploitation, whereby power is put in the hands of the exploited precisely in order to exploit them, that lies at the heart of a Marxist conception of resistance. The worry is of course that Deleuze and Guattari’s extra-systemic agent lacks the necessary involvement in capitalist social relations to be in a position to do the capitalism harm, to reconfigure social relations. This issue is at the heart of the ongoing debate between anarchists and Marxists regarding the relationship between anti-capitalism and the state. Whilst I don’t want to decide this issue here, I’ve yet to hear anything too persuasive said by anarchists against the Marxist on this issue, so comments are welcome! Link: Derrida Derrida forsakes class politics for internationalism Hutnyk 4 (John, Academic Director, Convenor of PhD Cultural Studies @ Goldsmiths, U of London, [doc/26894628/Hutnyk-Bad-Marxism-Capitalism-and-Cultural-Studies] AD: 7-6-11, jam)A new Marx? Revamped? Back from the dead? Let’s cut to the chase – there are some problems relating to what I am sorely tempted to call ‘the a-political tone recently adopted by Derrida’.1The full title is Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International. The problems appear at the very moment when Derrida has (finally) (re)turned to Marx. Derrida does call it a return, and though he had promised it long ago, Gayatri Spivak has rightly quipped: ‘when was ever the time to have left off reading Marx?’ (1996). Derrida has anticipated, and writes: ‘And if one interprets the gesture we are risking here as a belated-rallying-to-Marxism, then one would have to have misunderstood quite badly’ (1993/1994:88). I want to read this ‘gesture’ and indeed I do think we ‘have to’ misunderstand in just this ‘bad’ way, to insist upon this misunderstanding so as to draw out consequences and politics, to insist upon a bad Marxism that will become clearer. It will also be possible to later show that even gesturing to a belated rallying Marxism is unlikely in Derrida’s case. What is the problem? Derrida proposes the foundation of a New International. I will want to argue that this call, which is an explicit call for an Internationalist ‘politics’, abruptly empties and simplifies where previous confrontations – say with the conservative Claude Lévi-Strauss, for example at the very moment when that author claims to be most anti-ethnocentric, or with hasty readings and denunciations, say, of Heidegger – called forth more. This recent Derrida however, if I were to call out some names, is a Social Democratic Derrida; Opportunist Derrida; Liberal, Universalist, Bourgeois Derrida. Of course, this is not about getting into a sectar- ian slagging match, but I do want to mark the possibility of reading a political practice into some of Derrida’s early ‘internationalist’ work that now seems to resolve itself into only a new elite International. Where previously an inspiring critique could be found in Derrida’s detailed readings, the concern of the newly proposed International with justice seems more rarefied and inaccessible – indeed, it could be open only to a cabal of well-trained and credentialled (frequent-flyer, internet-connected) experts in law. An anti-class, anti-proletarian, anti-party International might do for the shorthand critique of what Derrida proposes in Specters of Marx. Then, a book or two later, in Archive Fever the extension is to an International connected via the worldwide web. In Specters of Marx, evoking ghosts of 1848 (the year of the publi- cation, if not the writing, of the Manifesto), Derrida announces a new International that would be: … without status, without title, and without name, barely public even if it is not clandestine, without contract, ‘out of joint’, without co-ordination, without party, without country … without common belonging to a class. The name of new International is given here to what calls to the friendship of an alliance without institution among those who, even if they no longer believe in the Socialist-Marxist International, in the dictatorship of the proletariat … [or in the] … union of the prole- tarians of all lands, continue to be inspired by at least one [my emphasis] of the spirits of Marx or Marxism … even if this alliance no longer takes the form of the party or of a workers’ international, but rather of a kind of counter-conjuration, in the (theoretical and practical) critique of the state of international law, the concepts of State and nation, and so forth: in order to renew this critique, and especially to radicalise it. (Derrida 1993/1994:85–6) The important words here are the alliance with just one of the spir- its of Marxism (minimal programme), and this International’s dis- missal of the party, the class, the workers, the proletariat and of their ‘union’ in all lands (and thus, in all lands this will be ‘barely public’ – and we should remember that the ‘entire public and pri- vate space of humanity’ is to be transformed by email). In favour of an international critique of law and concepts, of the state ‘and so forth’, which would no doubt be worthy and worthwhile, but surely in favour too of a massive restriction of the scope and possibility of Marxism so much so that its internationalism becomes almost unrecognisable. Indeed, an avoidance of using, in this context, the c-word for the International (socialist, he says, not communist) – is it too hasty to read this as symptomatic of a non-Marxism, of a reduction sliding rapidly into renunciation of those who might still remain organised in the party-worker-communist forms? There is much in the way of rampant anti-Marxism and anti-Leninism about today, and surely Derrida would not want to further contribute to this. Yet, the Marx Derrida deals with seems to offer less even than the electronic archive. An International that gives up on institutionalis- ing at the very moment of its constitution seems inadequate in the face of a recognition that justice must exceed its examples. Link: Derrida Derrida’s anti-Marxist politics make it impossible to organize against capitalismHutnyk 4 (John, Academic Director, Convenor of PhD Cultural Studies @ Goldsmiths, U of London, [doc/26894628/Hutnyk-Bad-Marxism-Capitalism-and-Cultural-Studies] AD: 7-6-11, jam)Here we have Derrida as a squaddie.1The repetition – from 1990 – of a familiar narrative of anti-Stalinist, anti-party ‘struggle’ can be found here in the not-‘Marxist’ who sings the ‘Internationale’ and wants to fight. Michael Ryan began his book Marxism and Deconstruction by say- ing that ‘Millions have been killed because they were Marxists; no one will be obliged to die because s/he is a deconstructionist’ (1982:1). This may or may not be accurate, not because the first clause is false – it is all too horribly true2– but because perhaps some may be obliged to die through neglect because of the second clause also. Despite the oblique, Derrida has said he is not a Marxist or a communist in the strict sense – though Ryan reported that Derrida had said he was a communist during one of the GREPH seminars of 1976 (on Gramsci) (1982:xiv). The strict sense of being a communist suggests a host of problems for bad Marxism; to do with discipline, the party, commitment to a certain practice, a shared level of theo- retical and principled agreement, a theoretical and practical obliga- tion to collective will – to those things it would seem Derrida would call dogma or doctrine and would separate and forget: dictatorship of the proletariat, class struggle, dialectical and materialist method. Today, in the face of the ten catastrophes and more, the question of organisation, the need for (party) discipline (even in the party of the new type), the need for, at least, coordination of struggles…. All this suggests that at some point a strict discipline must be considered. (This does not mean that Derrida must be first up against the wall, but rather that the question must be discussed.) Link: Derrida Derrida’s linguistic games are useless – only class focus can produce meaningful analysisHutnyk 4 (John, Academic Director, Convenor of PhD Cultural Studies @ Goldsmiths, U of London, [doc/26894628/Hutnyk-Bad-Marxism-Capitalism-and-Cultural-Studies] AD: 7-6-11, jam)Revamping ruthlessly, Derrida’s excavation of concepts also leads him to drop (any simple notion of) class. In the Sprinkler interview of 1990 he says: ‘The concept of class struggle and identification of a class are much more problematic than the Althusserians thought at the time. Thus any sentence in which “social class” appeared was problematic for me’ (Derrida and Sprinkler 1993:204). This means he could not engage in discussion with those who used such terms. There is a troublesome contradiction here, that sends any contem- porary discussion of Marx back to the past of the nineteenth, or ‘at least … the first half of the twentieth century’. He suggests that the end of the decade (Mai ’68 and all that) obliged the Althusserians to ‘complicate their discourse’, but there is no evidence that Derrida did likewise with regard to this snapshot of Marxism in the 1960s. We are left waiting to find out when Derrida is to debate his own more complicated analysis of class. He remains contradictory where he claims a ‘modern’ difference for the context of his own view: he says: I believe in the gross existence of social classes, but the modernity of industrial societies (not to mention the third world [but why not?]) cannot be approached, analysed, taken into account within a political strategy, starting off from a concept whose links are so loose. (Derrida and Sprinkler 1993:204) But he still believes that the analysis of conflicts in social forces, at which the concept of class struggle was aimed, is ‘still absolutely indispensable’ (Derrida and Sprinkler 1993:204). What is it that allows this silencing of the Third World and class politics inside Derrida’s text, and the promotion of First World modernity? And this alongside an acknowledgement of class, but outside political strategy? It amounts to class struggle without class, or class analysis without struggle. It is not clear which is indispensable, now or in the past. And what horizon of time is crossed here, where an old conflict with Althusser retains salience for the ‘International’ today? What debts are deferred? Extending from this modernity are some significant claims for the role of ‘theory’ and the character of ‘new’ communications: Derrida writes of contemporary capitalist society in a way that seems again to homogenise and simplify – and lead to paralysis – at the very time that he wants to warn against these things: ‘A developed capi- talist society is characterised by the fact that the worlds of educa- tion, research and information (universities and research institutes) directly or indirectly irrigate the social fabric’ (Derrida and Sprinkler 1993:230). In this context (should we refer to centralisation, or rather to the process of subsumption as discussed by Negri?), the role of ideas becomes ‘more and more’ important, more central and more marked by ‘new’ forms of communication: … what is called theoretical discourse … is more directly in contact with the decision-making instances – it is both more permeable and more penetrating. It communicates along new, more diversified, more overdetermined trajectories with the ‘general’ discourse of society, with ‘public opinion’, with the discourse of politicians, with the mili- tary discourse, with the juridical discourse. (Derrida and Sprinkler 1993:230) But the International Jury Derrida conjures into being will be only the global end of a system of codification, regulation and normalisation that extends throughout contemporary capitalist societies. The con- stitution of social subjects in law occurs in line with a mode of pro- duction managed by the state and the social sciences which requires ‘communities’ within society, within the state, constituted via market forces, enforcements, educative disciplines etc., all arranged to bring individuals into a universal form/mode of production. Recuperation of social antagonisms occurs here (via ‘theoretical’ disciplines of cul- tural studies, philosophy, law, education, etc.) to align all production not via mediating institutions, but via institutionally managed divi- sions, separation and differences. These divisions were once only insti- tutionalised, but are now so fully generalised throughout society that the enclosures are smooth and there seems to be no outside. As Hardt and Negri write in their book The Labour of Dionysius: ‘Social space has not been emptied of these disciplinary institutions, but completely filled with the modalities of control’ (1994:260). How is the International anything but the absolute extension of such a modality? The warning Derrida offers is that we should not ‘underestimate what is happening in places where this discourse appears too complicated or sophisticated’. But he then asserts that, really (?), this discourse – and so our chance to follow it, to not simplify, to ‘renew’, is limited because ‘it is indeed less decipherable, more confined, more “private” than before on account of the mass-mediatisation that homogenises, and thus simplifies and censors, more and more’ (Derrida and Sprinkler 1993:230). The pattern recurs over and again – a back and forth that produces a verbose paralysis, and analysis that simplifies as it complicates, complicates and simplifies. It would be an error to dis- miss this only as a bourgeois and wordy dialectics with nothing to say, but there is a certain force in the critique which archives in a closing way. All too quickly into a white static dead end.Link: Derrida Derrida’s pomo internationalism has nothing to say about the material conditions of capitalismHutnyk 4 (John, Academic Director, Convenor of PhD Cultural Studies @ Goldsmiths, U of London, [doc/26894628/Hutnyk-Bad-Marxism-Capitalism-and-Cultural-Studies] AD: 7-6-11, jam)Instead of an international clique of deconstructing jurists and a list of ten code-words telegraphed to Marx, organised resistance around a series of struggles on an internationalist register could be considered. Abject paralysis, however verbose, in the face of capital and telematics, and a nostalgia for the pastoral face-to-face of com- munity or old school vanguard might instead be reconfigured through recognition of new sites of contestation alongside older, not yet exhausted ones. There would have to be more than ten words to signal this recoding, based upon actually existing struggles and potential zones of engagement. Where Derrida mentions unem- ployment and homelessness, we might point to the struggles around the Job Seekers’ Allowance in Britain (see Aufheben 4 for an excellent and informed discussion of this in relation to squatters, hunt sabo- teurs and the various campaign coalitions against the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act of 1994: ?. Virginia.EDU/~spoons/aut_html/auf4cjball.htm?); where Derrida mentions economic war or the global market, the campaigns against Maastricht and the European Union (Contra the Capital of Europe, Madrid Summit Alternative Declaration), or against ASEAN and APEC (Manila Peoples’ Forum, for example: ?. ~cpp-ndf/intl3.htm?). The various campaigns against neoliberalism encompassing a politics that is anti-debt and anti- SAP (structural adjustment programme) also. The proliferation of the arms trade and nuclear weapons would suggest examination of the various campaigns against militarism, for example in Europe and in Australia, if not almost everywhere to some degree, and of course in various political stripes. The issue of so-called inter-ethnic wars demands attention to movements against chauvinism such as the coalition against the Bharatiya Janata Party in India, which brings together differing communist and progressive elements in principled, sometimes more, sometimes less, alliance; and the issues of drug cartels and international law might suggest attention to the anti-heroin trade campaigns in Ireland, community struggles in the inner city which do not buy into the ‘war-on-drugs’ scare- mongering of bureaucrats; or movements in several nations to reg- ulate police powers and covert insurgency, usually backed by Reaganite Contra-style cloak-and-dagger support, such as the peo- ple’s movements in Latin America or defence campaigns against police violence in the UK (for example see ? film.co.uk?). To this I would add attempts to recruit and organise R&D workers of all levels to political action that addresses the institutional role of research in technology development and expansion; mobilisations among professional and intellectual asso- ciations to reject co-option to good news consultancies and provi- sion of alibis for transnational corporations; struggles against casualisation, wages for housework and against immigration and asylum law. Cultural work to foster alliances between anti-racists and anti-imperialists for cooperative struggle. And many more. What this requires is some effort to read at several speeds, working out the contemporary dynamics of class decomposition and recom- position, the relation of ‘ethnicities’ to political alliances, the prac- ticalities of agitation and revolution adequate and necessary in the face of current restructurings, the tricks of subsumption and co- option. It is not necessary to cower in the confusion that comes from celebration of speed, nor only to revel in the dilettante seman- tic flamboyance of fashionable pessimism (which may be entertain- ing, and gets a few stage laughs, but …). All this may proceed with party and organisational structures to greater or lesser extent debated and disciplined in each case, but always more organised than Derrida’s proposed anti-party, anti-located, undeclared pomo- International. (I am starting to slide into rant mode here, so should temper this with less typing …) Link: FoucaultFoucault leaves no criteria for preferring one form of power to another- they leave no basis for resisting dominationMarsh 95 (James L., Professor of Philosophy at Fordham University, Critique, Action, and Liberation p. 78-79 GAL)Finally. Foucault's political rejection of truth does not square at all with his truth of politics. He criticizes various claims of truth because they express and contribute to strategies of power and control. On the other hand. Foucault does think that some political options are better, freer, "truer" than others. The disciplinary society is clearly not the ideal; a freer use of sexuality is clearly desirable; a more democratic, decentralized society is clearly preferable to the present regime in the West. Foucault's. as his activism in the 1960s and his work with prisoners indicates, is a leftist, postmodern politics. Yet this leftist politics seems not to have any greater legitimacy than rightist postmodern politics. Foucault gives us no reason, evidence, or argument for preferring the one to the other.To his credit. Foucault is aware of these difficulties and tries to provide a way out by privileging the counterpower of marginalized or subjugated groups like prisoners, homosexuals, and African-Americans. Again, however, the question is. Why privilege this form of power over others? Why is such subjugation wrong? Why resist such subjugation? I agree with Foucault's preferences and sympathies here, but he gives us no adequate basis for distinguishing, as Marx, critical history, and liberation philosophy do or try to do. between illegitimate and legitimate power, domination or liberation, injustice or justice.Impact: Cap key to BiopowerBiopolitics is the result of capitals law of value being applied to life- it inevitably causes genocideInternationalist Perspective 2000“Capitalism and Genocide,” Foucault's concept of bio-power can also be refunctioned to explicitly link it to the basic tendencies of the development of capitalism, in which case it provides a point of intersection between the triumph of the real domination of capital economically, and the political and ideological transformation of capitalist rule, while at the same time making it possible to grasp those features of capital which propel it in the direction of genocide. The extension of the law of value into every sphere of human existence, the culminating point of the real domination of capital, is marked by the subordination of the biological realm itself to the logic of capital. This stage corresponds to what Foucault designates as bio-politics, which encapsulates both the "statification of the biological", and the "birth of state racism". Bio-politics entails the positive power to administer, manage, and regulate the intimate details of the life -- and death -- of whole populations in the form of technologies of domination: "In concrete terms ... this power over life evolved in two basic forms ... they constituted ... two poles of development linked together by a whole intermediary cluster of relations. One of these poles ... centered on the body as a machine: its disciplining, the optimization of its capabilities, the extortion of its forces, the parallel increase of its usefulness and its docility, its integration into systems of efficient and economic controls, all this was ensured by the procedures of power that characterized the disciplines: an anatomo-politics of the human body. The second ... focused on the species body, the body imbued with the mechanics of life and serving as the basis of the biological processes: propagation, births and mortality, the level of health, life expectancy and longevity, with all the conditions that can cause these to vary. Their supervision was effected through an entire series of interventions and regulatory controls: a bio-politics of the population." Such a bio-politics represents the subjugation of biological life in its diverse human forms to the imperatives of the law of value. It allows capital to mobilize all the human resources of the nation in the service of its expansion and aggrandizement, economic and military. The other side of bio-politics, of this power over life, for Foucault, is what he terms "thanatopolitics," entailing an awesome power to inflict mass death, both on the population of one's enemy, and on one's own population: "the power to expose a whole population to death is the underside of the power to guarantee an individual's continued existence. .... If genocide is indeed the dream of modern powers ... it is because power is situated at the level of life, the species, the race, and the large-scale phenomena of population." Nuclear, chemical, and biological, weapons make it possible to wield this power to condemn whole populations to death. Bio-politics, for Foucault, also necessarily entails racism, by which he means making a cut in the biological continuum of human life, designating the very existence of a determinate group as a danger to the population, to its health and well-being, and even to its very life. Such a group, I would argue, then, becomes a biological (in the case of Nazism) or class enemy (in the case of Stalinism, though the latter also claimed that biological and hereditary characteristics were linked to one's class origins). And the danger represented by such an enemy race can necessitate its elimination through physical removal (ethnic cleansing) or extermination (genocide). The Foucauldian concept of bio-politics allows us to see how, on the basis of technologies of domination, it is possible to subject biological life itself to a formidable degree of control, and to be able to inflict mass death on populations or races designated as a biological threat. Moreover, by linking this concept to the real domination of capital, we are able to see how the value-form invades even the biological realm in the phase of the real domination of capital. However, while bio-power entails the horrific possibility of genocide, it is Foucault's ruminations on the binary division of a population into a "pure community" and its Other, which allows us to better grasp its necessity. Such a perspective, however, intersects with the transformations at the level of the political and ideological moment of capital, and it is to these, and what I see as vital contributions to their theorization by Antonio Gramsci and Ernst Bloch, that I now want to turn in an effort to better elucidate the factors that propel capital in the direction of mass death and genocide.Alt Solves Disciplinary PowerOur alternative solves best for their impacts- we can more effectively incorporate Foucault’s insights into our rejection of capital logicMarsh 95 (James L., Professor of Philosophy at Fordham University, Critique, Action, and Liberation p. 261)We can see. therefore, a development in Marxism-critical theory moving from Marx's discussion of alienated labor to Weber's account of bureaucracy to Lukacs' account of reification linking Marx and Weber to Habermas' discussion of systems of money and bureaucratic power in relation to the life-world to contemporary Marxist political economy in the work of such thinkers as Edwards. Reich. Gordon, and others. Capital colonizes not only the public life-world but also the psyche and mind of the worker. Foucaultian insights into the disciplinary, normalizing power expressed in the gaze of teacher-judge or doctor-judge or administrator-judge and intending to create a conformist, homogenized individual are genuine contributions to a critical theory of society that incorporates them without the deleterious consequences of Foucault's postmodernism. Neo-Marxist critical theory and political economy are the more comprehensive and methodologically sound viewpoints, able to learn from and incorporate but also to criticize and go beyond Foucault. Such viewpoints enable us to see how both money and bureaucratic power are expressions of capitalism and capital logic.Link: GirouxTheir leftist cultural critique is a diversion from serious class analysis—they reduce class to inequality, instead of a structural antagonism between labor and capital at the point of production. Giroux turns politics into symbolic contestation over culture, ignoring how the material and class forces shape agency.Red Critique 2006 (Winter/Spring, ‘The Opportunism of the Transpatriotic Left”, )The new post-9/11 U.S. "left" has grown "wise", has denounced militancy, and has become a faith-based network of hospitality devoted to what Lenin has called "yielding and getting on with everyone" (One Step Forward, Two Steps Back). It has, to paraphrase Lenin again, ceased to be ashamed of the praises lavished on it by liberals who have turned opportunism into a way of life.Left used to mean "radical", when radical meant grasping things by the root. In its cultural critique it argued that the binaries of gender and race in which the representations of women, people of color, and gays were systematically devalued were necessitated by class relations, capital accumulation, and the search for profits. Capital needed such cultural hierarchies to legitimate the exploitation of labor in production. The left argued that exploitation is justified by capital by its naturalizing of?differences. The critique of culture was necessary, therefore, to expose the ideologies of capital and unify the exploited and oppressed peoples of the world to fight back against the monopolists and owners. Culture was a way of knowing—not avoiding—the class dynamics of capitalism.Now the left cultural critique has become a diversion from class. The very idea of class itself has, in fact, been turned into a trope of opportunity and opportunism. In the conciliationist idioms of the left class has come to mean nothing more than a "lifestyle"—not inequality at the point of production but pleasures in the shopping malls.What is amusing is, of course, that the left writers (George Yudice, The Expediency of Culture) now claim that shopping, which actually helps to prevent the fall of the rate of profit of capital itself, is the place of resistance since, according to them, revolution is a thing of the past. All that we now have is consumption. Culture as resistance assumes that social inequalities are not at root class questions that have to be dealt with at the point of production, but questions of the ethics of distribution which is really a trope for consumption and its "surprising" effects of power.These unforeseen results of power caused by the proliferation of signifiers is what Henry Giroux ("Cultural Studies in Dark Times") celebrates as resistance to inequalities which he regards to be the effect of lack of access to discourse. For him, democracy is unfettered access to discourse which is his translation of the bourgeois freedom of speech. He presupposes that material forces do not produce material effects because they must be mediated through culture which has its own autonomous laws that disrupt objective causality. Culture, Giroux claims, "offers a site where common concerns, new solidarities, and public dialogue refigure the fundamental elements of democracy". The cultural in Giroux's writings dissolves politics into the shifting terrain of symbolic contestation. <CONTINUED><CONTINUED>Such an understanding of culture is itself deeply complicitous with capitalism because it turns culture into a self-agency free of class forces. Without such a concept of the material basis of culture in class relations there can be no "reconfiguration" of the fundamental elements of democracy and the status quo is maintained through the practices of mere resistance.Nothing represents the contemporary left and the complexities of its shifting opportunism more clearly than Lars von Trier's latest film, Manderlay. The film is, in the left vocabularies, "radical". Its radicalism, however, is a transpatriotic radicalism whose loyalty is not to any particular nation or state but to capital itself (Hardt and Negri, Multitude). When this left talks about "anti-capitalism", it actually means anti-corporationism. It has no problem with capitalism itself. Even left socialism is a market socialism. Through various cultural relays and affective displacements the transpatriotic left obscures the material inequality among people with a libertarian abstract freedom and, in effect, legitimates the free market.Link: Hardt and NegriHardt and Negri rely on a flawed theory of globalization as a social network, which results in a theory of resistance which leaves the economic relations of capital intact.Wilkie 2006 (Rob, Red Critique, Winter/Spring, “Global Networks, Imperial Culture”, )It is said that the labor theory of value has lost its explanatory effectivity because globalization represents a fundamental transformation in the relations between capital and labor resulting from the shift from an industrial to a post-industrial and now to a technological society built not on the exploitation of labor but the generation of knowledge. For example, in his seminal book, The Rise of the Network Society, Manuel Castells articulates the basic premise of globalization as emerging from developments in technology that, he argues, are transforming "the material basis of society" (1) from the industrial age in which value is produced by labor to an informational age of knowledge and cultural exchange in which "value added is mainly generated by information" (243). He writes that as a result of the application of new scientific developments in communication and management technologies to production, capitalism has, for the first time, become global, shaping all social relationships. However, what is significant about Castells' argument, in the context of debates over capitalist development, is of course not only his claim that globalization constitutes the universalization of capital globally, but that the new universality of capitalism is founded on the interconnection of informational networks, the global flows of messages and images; in short, on cultural changes which blur the boundaries between owners and workers, production and consumption, labor and exchange. Instead of a class conflict over the control of the means of production, Castells describes global capitalism as defined by a cultural struggle over consumption between the "interacting" who, he argues, are able to "selec[t] their multidirectional circuits of communication" (371), and the "interacted", who are limited to "a restricted number of prepackaged choices" (374).The most popular version of this narrative on the left is, of course, Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt's Empire. Negri and Hardt's theory of empire, which draws from Castells' theory of globalization as a social network, is based upon a similar assumption that with the growth of the productive capacity of capitalism and its expansion globally, the source of value has also shifted from productive labor to "immaterial labor", including service labor, knowledge labor, and labor that "produces or manipulates affects" (Multitude 108). Since, from their view, resources produced through the new forms of labor (such as "affect") cannot ever be "fully captured" by capital (Multitude 146) because they exceed the boundaries of the working day, the "multitude" whose labor this represents is becoming "an autonomous agent of production" (Empire 405) that is not dependent on capital to set it in motion. Thus, the site of contestation is no longer the extraction of surplus labor but rather the political control of this multitude and thus their creative powers. In other words, for Negri and Hardt, insofar as "proletarian internationalism" represents the "outside" of an earlier, "national" stage of capitalism (Empire 48), the globalization of production means that "there is no longer an 'outside' to capital" (Multitude 102) and thus workers whose surplus labor is exploited as a collective are no longer the agent(s) of change. Instead, Negri and Hardt posit an "impure politics" of the multitude based on finding "the potential for liberation that exists within Empire" (Empire 46) and thus, despite the radical rhetoric, that all that is necessary in the end for the development of what they describe as a "spontaneous and elementary communism" (Empire 294) is the formation of a counter-empire that only differs from the current social relations politically but not necessarily economically.The deep influence of the work of Castells and Hardt and Negri in ideologically displacing surplus value as the basis of the expansion of capital and thus of the urgent need to transform the property relations at the core of capitalist production can be seen in the fact that this is a theory of globalization which is shared not only by critics of corporate globalization such as Naomi Klein, who argues that in the factories of the new global economy "the classic Marxist division between owners and workers doesn't quite work" (226). It is also the logic of globalization's most vocal supporters, such as Thomas Friedman, for whom it represents the potential end of any limits to capitalism, whether it is the geographic outside of the periphery, or the economic outside of class (The World is Flat).In other words, despite their local differences what links all of these theories of globalization is that they represent globalization as largely "constituted" by cultural processes which, through technological advances, have escaped the determinacy of the economic. In doing so they suggest that the main terrain of struggle and freedom for workers rests in the legal, political, and cultural surfaces of capitalism rather than in changing the underlying economic relations that determine class inequality. The main crux of their argument, in other words, is to deny the continued existence of exploitation and therefore to deny the historical relation of globalization to class society by making it appear that changes in the "culture" of the workplace—for example, the shift from the rigid structures of Fordism to the "flexible" structures of Post-Fordism—bring about a fundamental material change in the class position of workers.Link: Heidegger/Ontology FocusTechnology doesn’t inevitably lead to domination- capitalism is the real cause of colonization of the life-world. Their focus on ontology lets capitalist social relations off the hook.Marsh 95(James L., Professor of Philosophy at Fordham University, Critique, Action, and Liberation p. 328-329 GAL)A second kind of de-differentiated account underlies a second kind of objection to democratic socialism. Postmodernists such as late Heidegger. Foucault. Baudrillard. Derrida. and Adorno. at times and not always consistently, ascribe a malevolent character to technology as such. Technology as such is inherently dominating, alienating, and forgetful of being and. therefore, by implication incompatible with a fully liberated society. What such an objection misses. I think, is the fundamentally neutral character of technology as such. The capitalist or state socialist unjust, exploitative use of technology is what is destructive, not technology as such. As Noble and others have shown, once exploitative capitalist social relations develop, they can promote forms of technology that are more centralized and dominating, but such domination is not inevitable or required by the nature of technology as such.Indeed, within the context of just social relations, technology can be used to reduce the length of the working day, increase leisure, increase happiness through production of goods, and make more democratic, less decentralized forms of decision-making possible. New electronic technology makes possible two-way consultation between constituents and their representatives, public and expert. Under capitalism, technology is used to maintain or increase the length of the working day, decrease or commodify leisure, maintain or increase misery, and centralize or mystify decision-making.A second problem with such an objection is that it rests on a de-differentiated conception of technology. Heidegger's conception of technology as Ge-Stell. for example, lumps together four different realities, two legitimate and two illegitimate. Such an account does not distinguish between science and technology as legitimate forms of knowledge and scientism and technocracy, the untrue equating of science and technology with rationality. Also Heidegger's account does not distinguish between technology as a part of a legitimate uncoupling from and mediatizing the life-world and technology as part of an alienating colonization of the life-world.Such colonization is rooted in a form of capitalist or state socialist class domination, a domination using and twisting technology to its own ends. To put the matter in Hegelian terms, the tendency of postmodernism is to posit the pathology of the modem on the level of subjective spirit, reason or technology, or absolute spirit, being or will to power, rather than on the level of objective spirit, where it properly belongs. As a result, such a postmodern account and critique, insightful in other respects, can function contrary to its intentions as ideology by letting capital off the hook through ontologizing alienation subjectively or objectively. As a result, because domination is part of the nature of things, reason or being as such, alienation seems difficult or impossible to overcome. Capitalist social relations, about which we can do something, are mystified, occluded, and let off the hook.Link: Heidegger/Ontology FocusThey can’t ever overcome instrumental reason because of their ontological focus- beginning with our critique of capitalist alienation solves their impact best.Marsh 95 (James L., Professor of Philosophy at Fordham University, Critique, Action, and Liberation p. 230-231 GAL)As a result, what Habermas calls the "colonization of the life-world" emerges: imposition of the rule of money and power on spheres whose own intrinsic logic or life is alien to that of science and technology. Politics, for example, rather than being the use of political and moral rationality to achieve public goals through democratic participation, is reduced to public relations, "selling the president." manipulation from on high. Art. rather than being a form of experience allowing people to become aware of their own sensibility, intelligence, and freedom, becomes mass culture in which advertising revenue for the sponsor is more important than artistic excellence, star quality more important than aesthetic quality, and feeling good more important than thinking critically. Capital through the use of technology, capital-technology, imposes its logic on spheres alien to it and subjects them to its rule. Here we have the historical roots for the pathology of the modern.A pathology of the modern, however, rooted in class or group domination, is not the same as cultural rationalization and cannot be reduced to it. If one does that, that is. if one equates cultural rationalization with an irrational, one-sided social rationalization and colonization founded on it. then one has essentially bought the postmodern interpretation and critique of rationality as domination, logocentrism. calculation, discipline. If one realizes, however, that such use of rationality is an abuse, science and technology in the service of class or group domination, then we can retain a critical commitment to modernist rationality. The colonizing of the life-world carried out by capitalism or state socialism reveals itself as irrational by the criteria of such rationality. The properly Marxist, critical theoretical component of a critical modernism receives its full weight here. Rationality, twisted to serve the ends of class or group domination, betrays itself. Rather than ontologizing alienation, as the postmodernists tend to do. we historicize it by rooting it in specific social relations that can be overcome in principle.Link: HeideggerAnd this is not a simple link of omission Heideggerian thoughts refusal to name capitalism as the cause of our faulty ontological relationship with nature is a pre mediated rejection of criticizingKovel 2 (Joel, Professor of Social Studies at Bard, The Enemy of Nature, pg 137-139) 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 craftmanship- or its spiritual associations as described. For who makes chalices anymore? Why not address the people who make Barbie dolls, or methylisocyanate, 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 some thing 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 mystdfiying, 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.Link: Heidegger/K of ScienceTheir totalizing criticism leaves no possibility of social change- we should attack scientism and technocracy, not science and technology as suchMarsh 95 (James L., Professor of Philosophy at Fordham University, Critique, Action, and Liberation p 223-224 GAL)Finally, if the positivist or technocrat understates the pathology of the modern, the postmodernist's tendency is to overstate such pathology, to equate the pathology of the with the modem as such. The result here is a curious overlooking or smudging of difference. In his own way. the post-modernist cannot do justice to the emergence of ethical and political freedom in modernity as distinct from the pathology of technocracy. Phenomena such as the Bill of Rights, democracy, and welfare rights are not adequately accounted for by a postmodern hermeneutic. Indeed, the postmodernist has difficulty discerning the validity in scientific and technological progress itself. Science is not distinguished from scientism. technology from technocracy. The extension of science and technology into spheres such as politics and art. for which they are inappropriate as dominant, hegemonic logics and methods, does not invalidate science and technology themselves. As we have seen in the preceding chapter, science and technology represent a legitimate forward move in learning; their subservience to class and group domination is not. The political consequences of the postmodernist stance toward modernity is a curious pessimism contradicting postmodemism's will to transcend modernity. The picture of rationality and modernity on the first three levels—performative, descriptive, and hermeneutical—is so bleak that there is little or no possibility of social change. If scientific and technological reason has taken over in the service of political and economic repression in a fundamentally one-dimensional social universe, then there would seem to be no way out of the iron cage. If modernity has little or no positive achievements to its name, then there is no positive leverage to be used for transcendence. If western reason is basically bankrupt, repressive, and dominating, then it offers no criteria for distinguishing progress from decline. If all individuals and groups are more or less subject to repressive one-dimensionality and discipline, then there are no identifiable groups whose praxis might plant the seeds for a more humane future. Link: Heidegger- Cap Root Cause of Instrumental RationalityInstrumental rationality has been entrenched as the only valid form of reason because of capitalismMarsh 95 (James L., Professor of Philosophy at Fordham University, Critique, Action, and Liberation p. 68-69 GAL)Rationality as constitutive, therefore, contrasts strongly with instrumental rationality, science-technology ordered toward prediction, control, production, and consumption. Another name for this latter kind of rationality is "acquisitive rationality;"— one that is ordered to acquiring, producing, consuming, prediction, control. Legitimate up to a point within its own sphere of economics, it becomes illegitimate when it is extended and generalized beyond that into the moral, political, aesthetic, and religious spheres. As I will develop more fully later, one of the dominant pathologies of capitalism, and of state socialism as well, is this tendency to generalize instrumental reason as the only legitimate form of rationality. Instrumental or acquisitive rationality becomes an ideology reflecting and legitimizing a one-dimensional capitalist or state socialist societyThe thematizing of constitutive rationality, therefore, marks a significant break from science and technology as ideology. Critical theory up to the advent of Habermas was not very clear about the alternative rationality that would lead us out of the iron cage. As a result, in critical theory, and in postmodernist thinkers such as Foucault and late Heidegger as well, is a tendency to be pessimistic about modernist rationality so narrowly defined. Vulgar technocratic modernism is confused with modernism as such.Alt Solves Technological ThoughtTotal rejection of technology is arbitrary and unnecessary- our criticism dialectically corrects for the excesses of scientism and technocracy while preserving legitimate forms of science and rationality.Marsh 95 (James L., Professor of Philosophy at Fordham University, Critique, Action, and Liberation p. 227-228 GAL)In contrast to Heidegger's basically negative account of modern rationality as a calculation rooted in Gestell. or "enframing." we note in Husserl a fundamental endorsement of the project of science. Enframing is the technological context in modern society in which all qualitative difference is minimized or suppressed or used for the sake of profit. Basically accepting the premise that it is good to be scientific, in the sense of being ordered to judgments in evidence, he finally urges the person so committed to be fully consistent with that premise. Full commitment to judgments grounded in evidence leads one. as we have already seen, to phenomenological reflection on the life-world as the fons et origo of objects, language, and presuppositions essential to the scientific enterprise. Scientism. and in a similar way logicism as he criticizes it in the Formal and Transcendental Logic, is insufficiently scientific because it refuses to move beyond positive science. Scientism is unscientific; logicism is illogical. Husserl enters into the pathology of western Ratio by criticizing it from within dialectically rather than rejecting it from without in a totalizing Heideggerian objectification. Dialectic rather than "rejectionism" is the strategy.The result of Husserl's dialectical criticism of modem philosophy and science is a more reflective, more critical, more comprehensive account of rationality that preserves the legitimate projects of science and transcendental philosophy, negates one-sided objectivism and subjectivism, and develops a new, higher viewpoint, that of transcendental phenomenology. This account contrasts with Heidegger's Denken. a questioning, receptive openness to being which moves beyond evidential, conceptual rationality altogether. For Husserl. the alternative to a less adequate scientistic. subjectivistic rationality can only be a more comprehensive, more critical, more reflective account of rationality.Finally, in contrast to Heidegger's account of the darkness of the modern rooted in Gestell, Husserl tries to show that scientism is rooted in a forgetfulness of the life-world that reifies scientific concepts and mistakes them for the things themselves. Such an account forgets the historical and logical genesis of scientific concepts from perceived things to imagining and drawing of shapes to geometry to abstract formal logic to various calculative techniques. In contrast to Heidegger, however. Husserl does not equate such abstract calculation with rationality as such or with scientific rationality. Rather in its forgetfulness of origins, in its reification. and in its oversimplification such calculation reveals itself as insufficiently rational. The problem with calculation as one degenerate form of modernist reason is not too much but too little rationality. Calculation as forgetfulness of the life-world is not the essence of rationality but the essence of irrationality which as such can be criticized with reason's resources and can be transcended rationally. Heidegger s recourse to Denken is. therefore, not only arbitrary, but redundant and unnecessary. 21 Link: Laclau and MouffeLaclau and Mouffe entrench indeterminancy and empower only the intellectual eliteWood 86 (Ellen, Ph.D in political science from UCLA, "The Retreat from Class," book, p. 63, jam)There are two possible answers, one explicit and one largely, but ominously, implicit. The first answer is, in effect, no one — or everyone. In place of the ‘essentialist working class, Laclau and Mouffe offer us an indeterminate ‘plural subject’, a ‘popular’ force, constituted by people with either multiple social identities or no such identities at all; but since this plural subject is itself constituted by discourse, this is at best a circular answer. If it means anything at all, it means something rather trivial — and disconcertingly familiar. The modern world, we are told, no longer consists of clearly opposed social interests. We live in an increasingly pluralistic society characterized by constant flux and mobility, where people partake of multiple and changing social identities. That is why ‘hegemonic politics’, the politics of discursively constructed social identities, comes into its own as the dominant mode of politics only ‘at the beginning of modern times’.26 (Does this mean that the post-structuralist dissolution of social reality into discourse applies only to ‘modern times’, while earlier there may have existed real material conditions and social relations?) Where have we heard this before? After much theoretical huffing and puffing, has not the mountain laboured and brought forth — pluralism? The alternative — which always lurks menacingly in the background — is a doctrine according to which some external agency, somehow uniquely and autonomously capable of generating a hegemonic discourse out of its own inner resources, will impose it from above, giving the indeterminate mass a collective identity and creating a ‘people’ or ‘nation’ where none existed before. The sinister possibilities inherent in such a view are obvious. In fairness to Laclau and Mouffe, however, it must be said that, although such dangers are implicit in their essentially rootless politics, and although they are ready to attribute a considerable role to intellectuals in constituting social subjects by means of autonomous discursive activity, they seem to be unconscious of the dangers and to have the best of democratic intentionsLaclau and Mouffe entrench neoliberalism, destroying means of struggleWood 86 (Ellen, Ph.D in political science from UCLA, "The Retreat from Class," book, p. 71-72, jam)Laclau and Mouffe also require us to believe that while there is a smooth and non-contradictory continuity between the various forms of ‘democratic struggle’, there is a rigid boundary between class struggles on the economic ‘level’ and struggles in the political sphere. This means that political movements motivated by liberal- democratic discourse bring us closer to socialism than do class struggles impelled by material interests directly antagonistic to the interests of capital. At this point, one begins to suspect that Mouffe and Laclau are not content with the simple proposition that the working class has no privileged position in the struggle for socialism. At first, they seemed to be arguing only that a rejection of ‘economism’ and ‘class reductionism’ — an insistence on the autonomy of politics — implies that the working class is neither more nor less revolutionary than any other social force, that while it is not necessarily revolutionary neither is it necessarily anti-revolutionary or ‘reformist’, and that no other social group can be privileged as an agent of the socialist transformation either. There is no specific working-class interest in socialism, but neither does such an interest reside in any other social group. Nevertheless, for all the apparent class-neutrality of this argument, there are repeated hints that the working class actually has inherent disabilities which make it less likely than other social groups to be the bearer of socialist politics. It is, after all, according to Laclau and Mouffe, a characteristic of the modern proletariat — the class that is a true product of capitalism — to accept capitalist relations of production, while limiting their struggles to relations in production. This sounds very much like, say, André Gorz, who insists unambiguously that it is in the inherent nature of the modern proletariat — itself a product of capital — to be absorbed into the ‘productivist’ values of capitalist relations and therefore to be incapable of generating a fundamental challenge to capitalism. At any rate, Laclau and Mouffe have come a very long way toward accepting that the conditions of the working class, far from encouraging socialist politics, are actually inimical to socialism.Link: VirilioMarx’s explanation of society is more productive than Virilio’sThommesen 3 (Jacob, teaches at Roskilde U in Denmark, ephemera, Vol. 3, Iss. 2, p. 147-155, jam)It seems fair to assume that this latter example is not merely about a new sense of distance due to improved (faster) means of transportation; it also implies that cultural differences will diminish, that traditional cultures are no longer protected by geographical distance. This argument calls for a short comparison, in order to illustrate Virilio's perspective: one may want to draw a parallel to Marx's assertion that every place on earth would soon be subsumed, every ancient culture replaced by the ever-expanding logic of the market: "All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned" (Communist Manifesto)1 Marx's argument, too, combines the geographical aspect of the unlimited spread of market economy, with the cultural aspect: the law of equivalence replacing traditional values and norms. It would seem that they arrive at more or less the same conclusion - globalisation at the expense of local, traditional forms of life - yet offering quite different explanations: Where Virilio focuses on technology as a driving force behind globalisation, Marx emphasized economic laws. Or, as Armitage puts it: "where Marx wrote of the materialist conception of history, Virilio writes of the military conception of history", emphasizing that the latter is driven by technological development (Virilio, 2001b: 2). On one hand, this comparison invites a critique of Virilio's explanation as (even) more one-dimensional than the one offered by Marx: after all, the analysis of political economy is richer and less simplistic than clinging to the 'safe bet' of technological development (i.e. more speed). On the other, Virilio's critical perspective on technology may also be regarded as more complex than Marx's quite optimistic vision of technology - the means of production - as a potential driving force for the emancipation of Man. Virilio’s analysis denies the universality of capitalNot Bored 6 (Not Bored, autonomous, situationist-inspired, low-budget, irregularly published, photocopied journal, Aug 16, [popular-defense.html] AD: 7-13-11, jam)But the problem with Virilio's analysis is the simple fact that "Euro-terrorism" was not the product of ultra-leftist revolutionaries, but the product of the capitalist State itself. In other words, unlike Gianfranco Sanguinetti,[1] Virilio believes everything that he's been told about the Red Brigades. First and foremost, he believes that the "Red Brigades" continued to exist after 1970, and were not quickly infiltrated and then completely controlled by the Italian secret services. Virilio finds nothing weird about the fact that, as he says, "Renato Curcio, ?historic leader of the Red Brigades,'" was "also a former neo-Fascist in the Ordre Nouveau group." Virilio seems to know absolutely nothing about NATO's anti-Communist "Operation Stay-Behind," its Italian branch ("Gladio"), or the role of the P2 Lodge. He seems to think that it was by accident or mere coincidence that Euro-terrorism was used to launch and maintain a state of permanent insecurity: "In 1977," he writes, "the terrorism which providentially sustained the international repression and systems of mass incrimination praised by the various media already afforded a glimpse of this kind of asocial organization" (emphasis in original). But, perhaps worst of all, Virilio believes the exact same lie that was used by Italian prosecutors to arrest, convict and imprison such theorists as Tony Negri[2]: "the Autonomists," he says, "destroy the transmitters of State television networks, obstruct roads and railways, blow up tax offices and airports in Corsica, in Brittany. . . ." As a result, Popular Defense & Ecological Struggles does nothing to help us in these days of Al-Qaeda-style "terrorism," which is also -- and obviously so -- the creation of the very State that claims that it is under sustained attack. But this shitty little book does help us explain why Virilio has never taken the revolutionary movement seriously. (Note for example the weaknesses of the recent collection entitled "Art and Fear.")[3] To him, technology is the only agent of change: "When the European revolutionaries in the nineteenth century claimed that to control the streets is to control the State, they had no idea of the technological way in which they would in fact lose both the streets and the State at the same time!" Virilio takes this idea to ridiculous extremes: "And, in 1868, Gambetta was already denouncing Louis-Napoleon's coup d'etat as having depended on 'the new means of communication that science has placed in the hands of men: the telegraph and the steam engine.'" And so, far from being a technophobe,[4] Paul Virilio is a technological determinist.Link: ?i?ekZizek is disconnected from any notion of class struggle – that dooms revolutionary politicsHardy 10 (Simon, senior lecturer at the U of Worcester in the Institute of Humanities & Creative Arts, Oct 28, [content/slavoj-zizek-idealist-trojan-horse] AD: 7-14-11, jam)However, despite his popularity on the left, from a Marxist point of view it is necessary to conclude that whatever ?i?ek's benefits for the intellectual left, ultimately he adds more confusion than clarity. The most serious problem with his intellectual project is its attempts to reintegrate classical German idealism in with a sort of vulgarised Marxism, interpreted through a Hegelian-Lacanian “reading”. Such an endeavour can only be bad news, cutting away the witty prose and the enjoyable references to modern culture, in the final analysis, ?i?ek’s project is the equivalent of a Cuckoo in the nest. Of course if we accept that ?i?ek is simply a “left-wing” philosopher with a passing interest in Marxism and Leninism then perhaps we can leave the question there – but ?i?ek precisely tries to ingratiate himself with the far left, speaking at various conferences and events, including ones that claim to be advocating a communist (revolutionary) agenda. He describes himself, amongst others things, as a Marxist, even as a Leninist. It is necessary to interrogate these claims, to simply accept them at face value is to allow Trojan Horses to come into the midst of the revolutionary left, ?i?ek as a Marxist The most striking thing which sets ?i?ek apart from Marxists in terms of his style and work is that it totally lacks the systematic and methodical practice of scientific socialism. Capital may be a dryer read than In Defence of Lost Causes, but it is certainly a more serious book in terms of how Marx approached his subject matter. ?i?ek's books are like a blunderbuss shot of ideas, and crawling through the hundreds of separate concepts and ideas in each book to get to the core is hard going. This is not simply an academic question of writing styles, it reflects ?i?eks own attitude to the form and content of concepts within political and philosophical ideas, that is in a sense disconnected from the actuality of class struggle. If everything is seen through an idealistic prism, and then synthesised through modern cultural references, the relevance of the actual struggle of ordinary peoples lives is often lost in the wordcount. ?i?ek's referencing of Marx is sporadic, buried amongst (usually more common) references to the like of Alain Badiou (A French Maoist that ?i?ek likened to Hegel!), Heidegger, Nietzche, Hegel Lacan, Schelling and Kierkegaard. He takes something from each, at times insightful, more often tangential or esoteric, but certainly not always from the materialist branch of philosophy. Indeed he is perhaps most famous for his pioneering work on popularising Lacan. Let’s first of all establish where exactly Lacan fits into the post-Marxist world. Lacan, who rejected Marxism in favour of his own brand of psychoanalysis, was an inspiration for Althusser , who is the founder of modern structuralism. The problem with structuralism is that it relegates the living spirit of Marxism and its social analysis to a dead weight, with no real concept of agency or contingency. The politically active subject, capable of revolutionary action, is simply absent from Althusser. The working class is so dominated by something called the Ideological State Apparatus that it is constantly frustrated from forming a coherent revolutionary consciousness and emancipating itself.] This philosophy neatly dovetails into the major post war Left intellectual trend to relegate the working class to a subordinate position, to declare it ‘no longer revolutionary’, a course that people like Herbert Marcuse and Jurgen Habermas followed. Of course Althusser and ?i?ek would no doubt swear faith in the working class, but their preferred model of society and how consciousness develops does not help them make the case for working class self emancipation. Instead only intellectuals were really free from this ideological domination. Althusser, himself a French intellectual in the thoroughly Stalinised Communist party, privileged the role of intellectuals in political action, denigrating the working class to hopelessly passive objects of oppression. Althusser believed that subjects only become subjects through the mediation of ideology, the interpellation (hailing) of a subject by ideology gives the subject content and meaning. In that sense we are all products of an ideological stranglehold on our consciousness and even sub consciousness. Lacan developed a system of psychoanalysis which ?i?ek attempts to integrate into his political viewpoint. Lacan used the terms Symbolic, the Imaginary and the Real to describe the three orders of human conciousness. Starting from Freud he added a particularly post structuralist twist, the obsession with language which dominated so much of the post war intellectual left in France. Of course language is an interesting field of study, but it is wrong to put it front and centre in the way that Lacan and subsequently (though for different reasons) Habermas does. For Marxists the starting point of investigation is the socio-economic terrain, and from that the corresponding class forces, politics, laws, etc. Language is a crucial part of humanities development as conscious beings, but it always ultimately reflects the socio-economic basis of the society in which it is used. The concept of the Real for Lacan is crucial, it operates outside of language, we cannot know it, it is not synonymous with reality, but <CONTINUED><CONTINUED>has its own essential attributes. This is very similar to the Kantian category of the noumena, the ding an sich (thing in itself) the related essence of phenomena in the real world, but a world of essentials we cannot know. Hegel importantly broke this down. He argued that although the world is full of appearances which exist separate from the essences, we can know the essence through rational investigation. Marx agreed with this, and integrated the concepts of essence and appearance into Capital, for instance in his theory of commodity fetishism. By going back to Lacan, ?i?ek argues that there is a world we cannot know, something which can only take on a metaphysical character since it is unverifiable through even a modicum of empirical analysis. For Lacan (and ?i?ek) the Real is precisely outside the symbolic order of language and cannot be known, a materialist would reply - what use is it for then? Even the concept of class struggle, central to Marxism, is dealt with using Lacan or Laclau as a primary source against Marx. As Robinson and Tormey point out ?i?ek denies the existence of a capitalist class in actuality, so he accepts class struggle but only as antagonism and conflict. Of course these are features of the class struggle, but without linking them to the socio-economic core of where classes come from and what they do, ?i?ek uses class struggle as simply a 'thing which occurs', mediated through a triad of classes which corresponds to Lacan's Three Orders. So the dispossessed so called under class is the Real, the working class becomes the Imaginary order and the ruling class is the Symbolic order. ?i?eks political economy is weak, so his call for class struggle politics comes across as an almost shallow plea for something-to-happen, especially as we shall see, because his theorisation of the proletariat is almost nonexistent. Link: ?i?ekThe parallax view eschews revolutionary class politicsHardy 10 (Simon, senior lecturer at the U of Worcester in the Institute of Humanities & Creative Arts, Oct 28, [content/slavoj-zizek-idealist-trojan-horse] AD: 7-14-11, jam)?i?ek has spilt a lot of ink on books which purport to provide a new reading of Kant and Schelling. Two of the primary ones are the Parallax view and the indivisible remainder, both books which deal with Kantian antinomies (Parallax view) and Schelling's Weltalter (World Formula), and tries to find what is good in them. The problem for Marxists is that both philosophers have an antagonistic relationship to Materialism, Marxism and class struggle politics. Schelling is a devout naturalist idealist and anti materialist who was also a philosophical opponent of Hegel. Kant is the founder of modern German idealism, whose criticism by Hegel was picked up by Karl Marx who rejected most of Kants ideas (though Marx did credit Kant with reintroducing the Dialectic as a concept in philosophy during the Enlightenment.) So why take this course? As ?i?ek himself admitted his “ultimate focus is Hegel and Schelling”, that is the Idealist branch of German philosophy which Marx and Engels criticised and moved away from. Attempts to reintegrate such ideas into a Marxist world-view always lead to disaster, as the neo-Kanitan revival in German social democracy a hundred years ago showed. Even Lacan, the French Structuralist intervention – is relegated to the role of a machine, as in the “Lacan machine reading Hegel reading [Marx, or Lenin, or the Matrix or Mozart, etc]”. Of course a certain intellectual flexibility can help throw new perspectives on things, but ?i?ek errs towards a hypertrophic and eclectic method which has few fixed co-ordinates for genuine critical application. ?i?ek argues that Hegel is in fact only really understandable through the intermediate position of Schelling, because Hegel’s Idea is self-generating and eternal Schelling moderates it and opens a gap through which contingency and immanence can emerge. Schelling is necessary since he provides a theory not so much of becoming but of beginning. Of course it is essential to add to Hegel’s method, indeed more than add, we must synthesisis it into a materialist whole, as Marx did, otherwise we are stranded in the early bourgeois philosophy of rationalism instead of scieintific socialism. ?i?ek’s argument is interesting, but from a Marxist point of view it begs the question – why go there? If ?i?ek is trying to say that The Kant-Hegel-Marx movement (each critiquing the other until the final escape from idealism with Marx) is wrong, that in fact it is Kant-Hegel-Schelling-Hegel (since Schelling is important to bring Hegel into a correct line and resolve contradictions lodged within his system, so we must go through Schelling to get back to Hegel), then we already begin to see the problem for ?i?ek claiming to be a “communist” or at least a scientific socialist. ?i?ek's The Parallax View, regarded by its author as his “magnum opus” acts in fact as a defence and retrenchment of Kojin Karatani’s book Transcritique, which sets out to reformulate both Hegel and Marx as Kantians, that is that they never achieved escape velocity from German Idealism and in fact were pulled backwards in time (both chronologically and philosophically) to Kant. In essence, Karatani and ?i?ek both argue that it is not the synthesis of dialectics (or rather the aufhebung) which is central to Marx's methodology, but in fact the parallax view, that is “the confrontation of two closely linked perspectives between which no neutral common ground is possible.” ?i?ek promises to rehabilitate dialectical materialism using the new model of parallax views as opposed to the dialectical movement. ?i?ek argues that it is precisely the gap between the antinomies which is the dialectical space, the tension and gap is the actual point of genuine knowledge, and we must accept that there is an irreducible antagonism at the core of it. The possibility of synthesis, whilst not ruled out per se, is relegated to a secondary question. It is possible to read this methodology as being very close to Stalin’s own view of dialectics, where he argues it is simply conflict and contradiction, not negation (and sublation). So again we return to the concept of antagonism as inherent within the system but incommensurable with a political project to overcome it. Socialism rather than being the synthesis of working class struggle, boiling over qualitatively into a revolutionary overthrowing of the existing social order, seems a long way off from where ?i?ek ends up standing, despite the fact that he claims fidelity to Communism as an ‘Idea’. Dialectical analysis points to socialism as the natural next step post capitalism by analysing the already existing society and seeing how it precisely could be overcome and sublated into a new order of things. ?i?ek points in the opposite direction, away from a genuine emancipation and towards a space of (permanent?) “tension”. Link: ?i?ekZizek denies the power of the working class to mobilize changeHardy 10 (Simon, senior lecturer at the U of Worcester in the Institute of Humanities & Creative Arts, Oct 28, [content/slavoj-zizek-idealist-trojan-horse] AD: 7-14-11, jam)?i?ek's recent publishing project on the question of violence further reveals what he is trying to do. Publishing works by Robespierre, Lenin and Trotsky, with the intention of placing the revolutionary Act back into political life, ?i?ek interestingly picks Terrorism and Communism by Trotsky as his book of choice. Why is this? Terrorism and Communism has a somewhat controversial reputation amongst revolutionary socialists, it is Trotsky at his most Jacobian. Written at the height of the Russian civil war as Trotsky was commanding the Red Army, the pamphlet seeks to defend the use of revolutionary violence against the criticism of Karl Kautsky. Whilst it should be read as a historical work and a polemic against pacifism and the most counter revolutionary form of reformism, it does contain phrases and policies that are rooted in the environment of a civil war, and therefore pull no punches about democracy, the role of the army and violence in defending a workers’ state. Reading the book it is easy to see where the Stalinists get their concepts of the dictatorship of the proletariat from, rather than seeing undemocratic practices as a necessary retreat from the essence of the programme, caused by the objective factors at the time, the Stalinists in fact exploited some of the conjunctural arguments Trotsky had made and extrapolated them into an entire system of rule. ?i?ek even cheekily points to the rumour that after Stalin's death amongst his papers was a heavily annotated and well read copy of the book, with many ticks next to some of the most authoritarian sections! For ?i?ek, without a theory of the working class, a concept of the proletariat, he can only reduce revolutionary violence to an Act, one which does not require the working class at all. Here we can see the germs of Stalinism – and it is worth reminding ourselves that ?i?ek often jokes about being a Stalinist. As Ian Parker has argued however, ?i?ek pretends to pretend to be a Stalinist, and of course as Lacan said there is always some truth in a joke. Indeed, in his essay, Repeating Lenin, the core of his argument is that in the post modern condition, where politics 'proper' is frustrated by identity politics, pseudo multiculturalism and a post political human rights discourse, Lenin signifies someone willing to Act. But what act? ?i?ek actually believes the most important aspect of Lenin to reclaim is his ability to reformulate Marxism in the wake of some traumatic political event which dislocates the previous co-ordinates and leaves them, in a Lacanian sense, as a floating signifier. It is Lenin, pitched by ?i?ek as a sort of infallible great man/leader, who resets the co-ordinates and bends the situation to his advantage. So ?i?ek formulates it as follows: “'Lenin' is not the nostalgic name for old dogmatic certainty; quite on the contrary, to put it in Kierkegaard’s terms, THE Lenin which we want to retrieve is the Lenin-in-becoming, the Lenin whose fundamental experience was that of being thrown into a catastrophic new constellation in which old coordinates proved useless, and who was thus compelled to REINVENT Marxism — recall his acerbic remark apropos of some new problem: “About this, Marx and Engels said not a word.” The idea is not to return to Lenin, but to REPEAT him in the Kierkegaardian sense: to retrieve the same impulse in today’s constellation. The return to Lenin aims neither at nostalgically reenacting the “good old revolutionary times,” nor at the opportunistic-pragmatic adjustment of the old program to “new conditions,” but at repeating, in the present world-wide conditions, the Leninist gesture of reinventing the revolutionary project in the conditions of imperialism and colonialism, more precisely: after the politico-ideological collapse of the long era of progressism in the catastrophe of 1914... What Lenin did for 1914, we should do for 1990. “Lenin” stands for the compelling FREEDOM to suspend the stale existing (post)ideological coordinates, the debilitating Denkverbot (forbidden thoughts) in which we live — it simply means that we are allowed to think again.” Lenin as a thinking-space? Something must be wrong here. ?i?ek concludes his re-imagining of Lenin as follows “Consequently, to REPEAT Lenin does NOT mean a RETURN to Lenin — to repeat Lenin is to accept that “Lenin is dead,” that his particular solution failed, even failed monstrously, but that there was a utopian spark in it worth saving.” Lenin is therefore resurrected not as Lenin the revolutionary, but as a symbol of something else, a kind of energetic political spirit, a utopian, and ultimately an idealist (or in ?i?ek's case, an Ideal with no actual reality for today). Since Lenin's project was a working class revolution, arguing for a repeat of Lenin without a proletariat as revolutionary subject is an empty distortion, actually a cry for freedom of thought but used in a Hegelian way by ?i?ek. What does ?i?ek say about the working class? In the same essay ?i?ek launches a direct attack on the concept of the proletarian crisis of leadership. In brief, this is the argument put forward by Trotsky in the 1930s that the working class is capable of struggle against capitalism, but is held back by its leadership, trade union officials, social democratic party leaders, MPs and so on, who continually divert struggle into safe parliamentary channels, or organise protest strikes which “never go too far”. A conceptualisation of the extent and depth of the crisis of leadership is crucial for revolutionary strategy today, and can help us overcome some of the modern angst of the left in the advanced liberal democracies, why aren't there more strikes? Why isn't there a greater degree of class conciousness? Etc. ?i?ek attacks this idea arguing that the standard Left schema is to “identify some working class movement which allegedly displayed a true revolutionary or, at least, Socialist potential, but was first exploited and then betrayed by the <CONTINUED><CONTINUED>procapitalist and/or nationalist forces. This way, one can continue to dream that Revolution is round the corner: all we need is the authentic leadership which would be able to organize the workers’ revolutionary potentials. If one is to believe them, Solidarnosc was originally a worker’s democratic-socialist movement, later “betrayed” by being its leadership which was corrupted by the Church and the CIA... This mysterious working class whose revolutionary thrust is repeatedly thwarted by the treacherous nationalist and/or liberal politicians is one of the two fetishes of most of the remaining Trotskyites.” He goes onto describe what he considers other remaining “fetish”, the belief that if Trotsky and Lenin had joined forces against Stalin in 1922 then the emerging bureaucracy would have been defeated. His argument against the crisis of leadership analysis is that for ?i?ek “the 'authentic' working class simply does not exist.” What does he mean by this? Of course it is true that the industrial working class does not exist in the western countries to the same extent as it did in 1920 or the 1930s, that there is a shift to service sector economics or banking and finance and a subsequent change in the form of working class existence. This is true at all times, the working class in Britain of Marx's time was not the working class in Britain of 1917 or 1987. This is simply an argument for continually updating strategy and tactics and relating to new sectors of workers as they come into struggle – it is also an argument for internationalism since the industrial working class now exists in countries like China. So if all that is true then by arguing that the authentic working class does not exist, there must in fact exist an inauthentic working class, that is, not a working class as we know it, or even not a working class. Link: ?i?ekZizek has no alternative – the call to do nothing is the product of cynicism and the absence of the working class in his theoriesHardy 10 (Simon, senior lecturer at the U of Worcester in the Institute of Humanities & Creative Arts, Oct 28, [content/slavoj-zizek-idealist-trojan-horse] AD: 7-14-11, jam)If we start from Marx's famous dictum that the philosophers have only interpreted the world the point however is to change it, then we should start by looking at what is ?i?eks guide to action. Now not every philosophical idea or theory must be directly applicable to revolutionary or emancipatory action of some kind, but ?i?ek has come out with a few proposals which we should probably take a look at. One of ?i?ek's better arguments concerns the current dominant discourse in international relations concerning “humanitarian intervention.” He rightly attacks this as a post political excuse for imperialism. He positions the argument over humanitarianism as being one of “urgency”, that is, the demand that we have to act, and act quickly to prevent genocide, human rights violations etc. This closes down the space for debate and discussion, allowing the status quo (imperialism) to set the agenda and neutralise opposition. Whilst all this is true, his solution exposes the radical weakness of his entire project, from an emancipatory point of view. Maybe it is designed in typical ?i?ekian way to “shock”, but what he proposes is precisely to “do nothing.” This allows time to think, to consider reflectively alternative courses of action. ?i?ek himself cannot propose anything, since he has not genuine concept of the revolutionary working class of a genuine political subjectivity to counter act imperialism. As socialists we oppose imperialist intervention, and call for the arming of those affected by potential genocide (Darfur for instance) to defend themselves. ?i?ek in another work argues that “I am therefore tempted to reverse Marx's theses 11: the first task today is precisely not to succumb to the temptation to act... but to question the hegemonic ideological co-ordinates." But for those of us who have already questioned the hegemonic ideological co-ordinates and already, developed a strategy for action, should we wait? A notion of revolutionary 'Act'ion, but with no proletariat to speak of leads one down the road of revolutionary terrorism, or as ?i?ek himself once called for “Linksfaschismus” (Left fascism) (if this radical choice is decried by bleeding heart liberals then so be it!), that is the violence inflicted on society by another, some kind of authoritarian who dared to Act. This follows from Sharpe's criticism of ?i?ek, that, following in the footsteps of Marcuse, ?i?ek connects the current depoliticisation (post politics) with a structurally overpowering ideology which can lead either towards cynicism or voluntarist ultra leftism. A good example comes from Revolution at the Gates, his edited book of Lenins writings of 1917 ?i?ek, argues that a truly shocking act on a demonstration when faced with the police is for “the individuals to start beating each other up.” Thanks for the advice comrade! Link: ?i?ekZizek’s politics are anti-Marxist and justify inaction Boucher 2 (Geoff, lecturer in literary studies at Deakin U, Australia, PhD from the U of Melbourne, Jan 29, [geoff-boucher/2002/zizek.htm] AD: 7-13-11, jam)But on the other hand, prohibition eroticises, and so there’s an irresistible fascination in the “lethal/suicidal immersion in the Thing” - at least for ?i?ek. Hence, in the “unplugging” from the new world order by the “authentic psychoanalytic and revolutionary political collectives” that ?i?ek now urges (?i?ek, 2000: 160): ‘uncoupling’ does actually involve ‘symbolic death’ - one has to ‘die for the law’ (Saint Paul) that regulates our tradition, our social substance. The term new creation is revealing here, signalling the gesture of sublimation, of erasing the traces of one’s past ('everything old has passed away') and beginning afresh from the zero-point: consequently there is also a terrifying violence at work in this ‘uncoupling,’ that of the death drive, of the radical ‘wiping the slate clean’ as the condition of the New Beginning (?i?ek, 2000: 127). This sort of “Year Zero"-style rhetoric may be meant as a provocation to the relativists, as a gesture of defiance towards the contemporary prohibition on thinking about revolution. (“You say that revolution always leads to the gulag, that I'm a secret stalinist? Very well then - I openly affirm myself a Stalinist. Now what actual arguments do you have against my ‘Stalinism,’ aside from the consensus on the undesirability of social transformation, ie., the current doxa?”) Nonetheless, I suggest that this combination of Leninist voluntarism and “irrational” Pauline materialism does not resist the postmodern couplet of cynical distance and irrational fundamentalism, but repeats its terms. Let me make myself perfectly plain on this point. There is absolutely nothing wrong with the advocacy of revolution, including the resort to violence in order to defend the revolution from reaction. To advocate violence for its own sake, however, to claim that the revolution is made not in the interests of universal justice, but rather so as to “wipe the slate clean” ... this is categorically not Marxism, but a cynical perversion of socialism lifted from the pages of Karl Popper or Hannah Arendt, one that accepts the terms of debate set forth by the enemies and slanderers of socialism, for whom the alternatives are “enthusiastic resignation to capitalism” (“postmarxism”) or “the brutal machine of the totalitarian state, where fascism and socialism meet at the extremes of opposition to liberal democracy” (“totalitarianism”). (“Very well then,” cries ?i?ek in despair, “let us have totalitarian violence rather than this ubiquitous nothing.”) Nothing compels the Left - except for the moral cowardice, the willingness to give way on our revolutionary desire, which is the staple of today’s postmarxian Menshevism - to accept this fatuous opposition between reformism and totalitarianism. Nothing could be more alien to Marx’s thought (or Lenin’s) than this advocacy of a New Beginning starting from the zero-point. What is dialectics - which the adversaries of the dialectic have long stigmatized for its fantasy of progress, for what they claim is its inability to conceptualise that something might be lost in the historical process and not lifted up to a higher form of development - except a teaching on the idiocy of any moralizing opposition to the bourgeois order as corrupt and degenerate? Adam Smith and Milton Friedman together cannot compete with the praise lavished upon capitalism as a socially and morally progressive system by The Communist Manifesto. It is not that capitalism is an economically progressive society whose moral corruption must be eliminated - on the contrary, capitalism is a morally superior system whose economic contradictions retard humanity’s social advance. The proletariat - as Lenin and Trotsky tirelessly repeated - has no culture of its own, and must develop a higher culture by building upon bourgeois norms. Link: ?i?ekZizek is anti-revolutionaryBoucher 2 (Geoff, lecturer in literary studies at Deakin U, Australia, PhD from the U of Melbourne, Jan 29, [geoff-boucher/2002/zizek.htm] AD: 7-13-11, jam)Strange as it may seem, ?i?ek’s rehabilitation of Stalin (?i?ek insists that we cannot have the revolution without the revolutionaries, that is, that we cannot have the insurrectionary moment without the subsequent period of consolidation in which the revolution “eats its own children": no Guevarra without Castro; no Lenin without Stalin) is a symptom of his resistance to revolutionary politics. For ?i?ek, Trotsky (and presumably Guevarra also) remains a “beautiful soul,” a whinger who cannot stand to see the consequences of the act, and instead maintains the hysterical stance of demanding the impossible, so as to protect their Simon-pure desire from “corruption” by its enactment. That is to say, Trotsky’s insistence that the social revolution not become mired in “the familiar filth of capitalism” (for instance, Stalin’s rehabilitation of nationalism and traditional gender roles), strikes ?i?ek as hysteria, in opposition to Stalin’s “gesture of the leader”. Two things are interesting about this. The first is that, in psychoanalysis, the “discourse of the master” (the foundation of a new order through a passage to the act — Lenin’s revolutionary gesture, for instance) is succeeded by the “discourse of the university,” a bureaucratic discourse of legitimation that tries to erase the traces of contingency in the foundation of the new order, to re-write history as an evolutionary process issuing “inevitably” in the current social order. Stalin appears in this light as the bureaucratic leader intent upon the eradication of all traces of the past so as to create a harmonious New Order. But this is itself succeeded by the “discourse of the hysteric,” a discourse that revives the traces of the traumatic origins of the current order, that prods the symbolic texture of the present, searching for the hidden evidence of its imperfection that show how this order might have been otherwise (and might be otherwise once more). And finally, the hysteric is succeeded by the “discourse of the analyst,” a discourse of radical emptying of the “passionate attachments” to the current order, an insistence on “once more an effort” - an insistence that we not give way on our desire and settle for conformity to the new order or the compensations of armchair criticism, but proceed once more to the act. Now, whether Trotsky should be considered, in this light, a hysteric or an analyst, is really irrelevant. What is interesting is ?i?ek’s suspension of this dialectic at the “discourse of the university,” and the related petrifaction of the process into a series of water-tight, necessary and inevitable stages. The insistence of the early ?i?ek’s work, on the radical contingency of the historical process, seems to me a useful corrective to this atrophy of the revolutionary instinct. There is no Lenin without Stalin, and no Trotsky without Stalin either - certainly. But nothing - absolutely nothing - predetermines the victory of Stalin.Alt Solvency: Historical Materialism GoodYou should endorse our project of historical totalizing which recognizes the continuity of class domination – the aff is only a temporary resolution to more fundamental contradictions, which serves as a recolonizing strategy for hegemonic imperialism.San Juan Jr. 2006 (E., Red Critique, Winter/Spring, “Crisis and Contradiction in Globalization Discourse”,)?In order to probe and analyze the multilayered contradictions of any phenomenon, we need to apply the principle of historical totalizing: connecting spheres of culture, ideology, and politics to the overarching structure of production and reproduction. This is axiomatic for any historical-materialist critique. Consequently, the question of cultural identity cannot be mechanically divorced from the historically determinate mode of production and attendant social relations of any given socioeconomic formation. What is the point of eulogizing hybrid, cyborg-esque, nomadic global citizens—even fluid, ambivalent "subject positions" if you like—when the majority of these postmodernized creatures are dying of hunger, curable epidemics, diseases and psychosomatic illnesses brought about precisely by the predatory encroachment of globalizing transnational corporations, mostly based in the U.S. and Western Europe? But it is not just academic postmodernists suffering from the virus of pragmatist metaphysics who apologize for profit-making globalization. Even a latterly repentant World Bank expert, Joseph Stiglitz, could submit in his well-known Globalization and Its Discontents, the following ideological plea: "Foreign aid, another aspect of the globalized world, for all its faults still has brought benefits to millions, often in ways that have almost gone unnoticed: guerillas in the Philippines were provided jobs by a World Bank financed-project as they laid down their arms" (Stiglitz 420). Any one slightly familiar with the Cold War policies of Washington vis-à-vis a neocolony like the Philippines knows that World Bank funds were then used by the U.S. Pentagon to suppress the Communist Party-led peasant rebellion in the 1950s against the iniquitous semi-feudal system and corrupt comprador regime (Doty; Constantino). It is globalization utilized to maintain direct coercive U.S. domination of the Philippines at a crucial conjuncture when the Korean War was mutating into the Vietnam War, all designed to contain "World Communism" (China, Soviet Union). Up to now, despite nationalist gains in the last decade, the Philippine government plays host every year to thousands of U.S. "Special Forces" purportedly training Filipino troops in the war against "terrorism"—that is, against anti-imperialist forces like the Communist Party-led New People's Army and progressive elements of the Moro Islamic National Liberation Front and the Moro National Liberation Front (International Peace Mission).?One needs to repeat again that the present world system, as Hugo Radice argues, remains "both global and national", a contingent and contradictory process (4). Globalization dialectically negates and affirms national entities—pseudo-nations as well as those peoples struggling for various forms of national sovereignty. While a universal "free market" promoted by TNC triumphalism is deemed to be homogenizing and centralizing in effect, abolishing independent states/nationalities, and creating a global public sphere through juxtaposition, syncretic amalgamation, and so on, one perceives a counter-current of fragmentation, increasing asymmetry, unbridgeable inequalities, and particularistic challenges to neoliberal integration—including fundamentalist political Islam, eco-terrorism, drugs, migration, and other movements of "barbarians at the gates" (Schaeffer). Is it a question of mere human rights in representation and life-style, or actual dignity and justice in the everyday lives of whole populations with singular life-forms? <CONTINUED><CONTINUED>Articulating these historical contradictions without theorizing the concept of crisis in capital accumulation will only lead to the short-circuiting transculturalism of Ashcroft and other ideologies waging battle for supremacy/hegemony over "popular common sense" imposing meaning/order/significance on the whole globalization process (Rupert).?Indeed, academic inquirers of globalization are protagonists in this unfolding drama of universalization under duress. One may pose the following questions as a heuristic pedagogical maneuver: Can globalized capital truly universalize the world and bring freedom and prosperity to everyone, as its celebrants claim? Globalization as the transnationalized domination of capital exposes its historical limit in the deepening class inequality in a polarized, segregated and policed world. While surplus-value extraction in the international labor market remains basic to the logic of accumulation, the ideology of neoliberal transnationalism has evolved into the discourse of war on terrorism ("extremism") rationalized as "the clash of civilizations". Contradictions and its temporary resolutions constitute the imperialist project of eliding the crisis of unilateral globalism. A historical-materialist critique should seek to highlight the political economy of this recolonizing strategy operating in the fierce competition of the ruling classes of the U.S., Japan, and Europe to impose hegemonic control in an increasingly boundary-destroying space and continue the neocolonial oppression of the rest of the world. What is needed is a radical critique of the ideology of technological determinism and its associated apologetics of the "civilizing mission", the evangelism of "pre-emptive" intervention in the name of Realpolitik "democracy" against resistance by workers, peasants, women, indigenous communities (in Latin America, Africa, the Philippines and elsewhere [see Houghton and Bell; San Juan, "U.S. Imperial Terror"]), and all the excluded and marginalized peoples of the planet.?Alt Solvency: Critical Theory > PostmodernismTheir totalizing approach can’t ever produce a positive alternative or create meaningful social change- their insights can be absorbed into our more effective framework of critical theoryMarsh 95(James L., Professor of Philosophy at Fordham University, Critique, Action, and Liberation p.311-312 GAL)A second implication is that critical theory may be far more able to explain what is going on in the history of modernity and the most recent phase of flexible accumulation than postmodernism. Critical theory's account is more comprehensive in that it includes positive aspects of modernity not done justice in the postmodern account and more differentiated in that critical theory does justice to the different forms and kinds of rationality pathological and nonpathological, systemic and life-worldly, communicative and instrumental, scientific, aesthetic, and political. Genuine postmodern discoveries, such as that concerning the role of information, can be recognized and absorbed into a more adequate framework of interpretation and critique; critical theory can relate such phenomena systematically to their roots in late capitalist economic, social, and political relations.A third implication is that critical theory may be far more capable than postmodernism of developing a critique of late capitalist modernity'. Critical theory's greater willingness to specify criteria of progress and decline, its commitment to dialectical rationality; and its conscious willingness to engage in argumentation, dialogue, and discussion are advantages in the face of a postmodernism that has trouble with criteria of any kind, engages in a wholesale critique and or rejection of western rationality; and regards all discussion as an expression of the will to power. Critical theory agrees with postmodernism in its judgment about the pathologies in late capitalist and state socialist modernity' but is better able to show why they are pathological and to contrast them to nonpathological forms of life.Finally, critical theory seems far more able than postmodernism to specify and justify an alternative to current regimes of domination. Critical theory is able to indicate groups that are more likely agents of social change because their life-world has been colonized, stresses within a capitalist system subject to various kinds of crises, and finally an alternative kind of socioeconomic system, democratic socialism, that more adequately realizes and expresses the exigencies of reflective, communicative, dialectical rationality. Postmodernism, on the other hand, because its account of modernity' is so bleak on logical, descriptive, hermeneutical. and political levels and because it has no criteria or resources for arguing the superiority' of an alternative, much less criticizing the present regime, leaves us in a hopeless, de-differentiated, postmodern "night in which... all cows are black."***AFF*** ***LINK ANSWERS***No Link: SpaceExpansion into space is not merely an attempt to expand capital but rather is a method of expanding humanity and giving new life to the universeZey 1 (Michael, founder of the Expansionary Institute, May 1, The Futurist, 35(3), p. 28, elibrary, JT)As our species extends our control over this planet, we simultaneously prepare ourselves for extraterrestrial habitation by shaping and transforming terrestrial landscapes. We design a new generation of rockets that can transport us to distant spheres at one-third the speed of light. At the same time, we probe the innermost recesses of nature through such exotic fields as nanotechnology. We must examine the many ways such developments impact the individual, society, and the economy. And we must explore the underlying reasons why our species is feverishly working to advance the planet and ourselves and transform all we encounter. When we truly understand the depth and strength of man's overwhelming imperative to grow and progress, we can more clearly anticipate the future. At first blush, it would seem that there is little mystery about the impulses driving the human species in this quest: We engage in such productive activities merely to enhance our material condition. We invent technologies that will improve our standard of living and make our lives more pleasant and comfortable. Our species from the earliest periods of prehistory seems compelled not just to survive, but to grow, progress, and enhance itself and its environment. At each new level of our development, we endeavor to master our environment as well as the physical dynamics governing our universe. Humanity's activities, including the entire scientific and technological enterprise, represent a unified attempt by the species to spread "humanness" to everything we encounter. Over the centuries, we have labored to improve planet Earth, and we are now preparing to transform the universe into a dynamic entity filled with life. We will accomplish this by extending our consciousness, skills, intellect, and our very selves to other spheres. I label the sum total of our species' endeavors to improve and change our planetary environment-and ultimately the universe itself-vitalization. Vitalization is a force that is conditioning human behavior. The drive to vitalize-to imbue our planet and eventually the cosmos with a consciousness and intelligence-is a primary motivation behind all human productive activity. Humanity’s goals in exploring the universe is not based on capitalist ideals but rather our drive to improve and perfect natureZey 1 (Michael, founder of the Expansionary Institute, , accessed: 2 July 2011, JT)The question that still remains unanswered is, of course, why? What motivates humankind to feverishly prepare itself for what seems to be a grand mission? Humankind, a species residing on an infinitesimal island in a corner of the universe, dares to believe that the fate and future of the universe lie in its hands. What act of pride do we commit, what hubris do we exhibit to entertain the notion that we even have a destiny, let alone such a lofty one? And who are we to believe that we not only possess such a magnificent destiny, but also are capable of mastering the skills and knowledge necessary to fulfill such a mandate. THE EMERGING SENSE OF DESTINY (From Zey, The Future Factor, pg169-170) Throughout this century, many thinkers, philosophers, scientists, and writers have offered visions of the future which as a whole signal the emergence of a brand new cosmology. These novel theories have a few aspects in common. First, each focuses on the unique qualities and abilities of the human species, especially our extraordinary gift of consciousness. These new theories also concentrate on humanity's ability to master the environment and perfect nature. More importantly, this revolutionary new cosmology endeavors to conclusively establish the special role that humanity plays in the universe. AT: Earth TradeoffSpace doesn’t trade off with social issues Dinkin 4 (Sam, regular columnist at The Space Review, Aug 16, [article/206/1] AD: 7-4-11, jam)In order to win the political battle of the budget, space exploration has to perennially out-compete hunger, terrorism, disease and infirmity. The high profile of space exploration is a two-edged sword in this battle because the technological leadership inherent in space exploration is counterbalanced by the perception of conspicuous consumption. The arguments that the next $100 billion spent on space would be better spent on something else are rhetorically effective, but logically empty. The trick space foes use is to compare the last dollar spent on space with the first dollar spent on the alternative. Piercing the rhetoric involves comparing all the money spent on space to all the money spent on the desirable general category: Upping social security payments by 3% would probably not be a big deal to Granny. Similarly, throwing more money at alleviating poverty, seeking clinical immortality, and curbing terror probably won’t have too much impact since so much is being spent on those problems already. There are genuine problems with social equity in medical payments. No one laments the walkup business traveler who sets the benchmark price for airline tickets. But pity Nell who as an uninsured person sets the rack rate—Medicaid and insurance companies demand discounts from hers. Richard Scruggs is putting some of his millions won suing the tobacco industry to use trying to cut this Gordian knot. Canceling the space program would not help get much closer to a solution to the uninsured. When you have 13% of GDP spent on medical, what is another 0.15% going to do for you? Can money help if “The man jus’ upped my rent last night. (‘cause Whitey’s on the moon)” Maybe, but rent control does more harm than good to help alleviate housing shortages. Ironically, relaxing zoning restrictions to allow sleeping quarters tighter than the space shuttle’s would probably help out more. Using money to stop “The price of food… goin’ up.” results in mounds of American cheese that must be stored or destroyed and a billion impoverished farmers overseas. Gil Scott-Heron is not the only person who argues that space money is better spent on earthly matters such as “Junkies makin’ me a nervous wreck.” John Kerry has gotten into the act: We cannot spend nearly $100 billion of the taxpayers money to fund the space station and then say that we do not have enough money to put cops on the beat, clean our environment, and ensure that our children get the best education possible. John Kerry, Senate speech, September 4, 1996 While I agree with John Kerry back in the day that the International Space Station should go, what would an extra $100 billion over 20 years—a nickel per person per day—do for local law enforcement? Presumably, local governments would spend less on cops if the federal government spent more. They are already optimizing between crime and taxes so if the feds spent more, they would spend less. Would federal dollars spent on protection just substitute for state, local or personal dollars? Maybe yes, but if not, that says something different about the value of the activity; if no one is paying for beat cops now, that should mean that they are not important enough to rate a big federal subsidy. No Link: Landsats AffOur aff is an example of good public spending on space- it isn’t directed at enriching the military-industrial complex and benefits the otherwise economically marginalizedDickens 10 (Peter, Affiliated Lecturer in the Department of Sociology, Faculty of Politics, Psychology, Sociology and International Studies , University of Cambridge, "The Humanization of the Cosmos—To What End?," [] AD: 6-29-11, jam)Humanizing Without Colonizing the Cosmos But humanizing outer space can be for good as well as for ill. It can either, as is now happening, be in a form primarily benefiting those who are already in positions of economic, social, and military power. Or humanization can be something much more positive and socially beneficial. What might this more progressive form of cosmic humanization look like? Most obviously, the technology allowing a human presence in the cosmos would be focused mainly on earthly society. There are many serious crises down here on Earth that have urgent priority when considering the humanization of outer space. First, there is the obvious fact of social inequalities and resources. Is $2 billion and upwards to help the private sector find new forms of space vehicles really a priority for public funding, especially at a time when relative social inequalities and environmental conditions are rapidly worsening? The military-industrial complex might well benefit, but it hardly represents society as a whole. This is not to say, however, that public spending on space should be stopped. Rather, it should be addressed toward ameliorating the many crises that face global society. Satellites, for example, have helped open up phone and Internet communications for marginalized people, especially those not yet connected by cable. Satellites, including satellites manufactured by capitalist companies, can also be useful for monitoring climate change and other forms of environmental crisis such as deforestation and imminent hurricanes. They have proved useful in coordinating humanitarian efforts after natural disasters. Satellites have even been commissioned by the United Nations to track the progress of refugees in Africa and elsewhere.Space Changes EverythingSpace travel represents a unique opportunity to question and restructure capitalismLin 6 (Patrick, PhD in philosophy, Utne November/December, p. 47, JM)If space is commercialized, then property claims by governments, corporations, and individuals will need to be made in order to operate various ventures without interference (lawsuits have already been filed on Earth to lay claim to such things as asteroids). We also need to consider what it will mean to actually "own" parts of space. Is our relationship with space one of "positive community of ownership," in that we each own an equal share in space and its contents? If so, several other questions arise. To illustrate the point, imagine there are only eight people alive on Earth and only eight other planets in our solar system: Do we each get our own planet or one-eighth of each planet? And how do we account for future people-must we factor in their legacy before we can claim our shares? On the other hand, if our relationship to space is one of "negative community of ownership," then no one has a prima facie claim to the property in question. In other words, no one owns anything yet, so we share a common starting point of zero. This raises the question of how it is possible to gain ownership. The trick here is to justify the property-giving process in a way that explains why other processes-such as simply pointing at an unclaimed asteroid and saying "That's mine" or perhaps roping off a section of the moon in order to claim it-don't lead to property rights. Of course, we could simply extend our existing rules of property to govern space, assuming all nations involved endorse a free-market system. But if a new age of space exploration marks our opportunity to "start over," then it seems that we should scrutinize unfettered capitalism, along with competing economic models, through a new lens. A purely free-market economy, for instance-while it is efficient at allocating scarce resources and inspiring innovation-is not so much concerned with need or merit, so a hybrid model may be desirable. Even among enlightened people, there will inevitably be property-rights disputes in space, so we will need a regulatory or administrative body that has jurisdiction over those lands, in addition to an enforcement agency. It won't be enough that we govern from Earth. We will need a local organization to maintain law and order in real time as well as to more efficiently administer public policy, urban planning, and other matters. Again, these concerns point to our new era in space exploration as a true opportunity to start over from scratch, bringing with it new responsibility to create a blueprint for society in space. Space Changes EverythingSpace development will fundamentally alter capitalist relations and lead to more fairness for allAshworth 10 (Stephen, Fellow of the British Interplanetary Society, Dec 18, [astronist.demon.co.uk/space-age/essays/Sociology1.html] AD: 6-30-11, jam)Speaking then as a historical materialist (and growing a bushy beard to suit), I propose (not altogether flippantly) that a fairer society will emerge when changes in the material forces of production demand it. Vague appeals to “resistance” and to “alternative forms of consciousness” are irrelevant, according to Marx and Engels; what counts here is a change in the technologies and organisation of production. Clearly, that cannot be planned in advance. But one certainty is that production in space, using the natural raw materials and energy of space and of other worlds, will be significantly different from production on Earth, and therefore, according to Marx and Engels, will trigger changes in social relations. Not, however, according to Dickens and Ormrod, who write that extending terrestrial society into space seems likely “Tragically [...] to make outer space in the image of the Earth itself, with all its power relations and consequent social injustices” (p.176). But would they also argue that the power relations and social injustices of today’s internet world are the same as in the Victorian England of child labour and women’s subordination? Then why imagine that space development will not also change society? Dickens and Ormrod’s fundamental thesis might be stated in a nutshell as: first solve all social problems on Earth, only then, after justice and equality have been achieved for all, turn to the exploration and development of outer space. But they have no idea of when or even whether their social objectives can be achieved. While even if they are achieved, our authors have no guarantee that the resulting society, without the impetus to growth generated by capitalism, will still be capable of expansion into space. Their equation of change with “crisis” strongly suggests that it will not. In the light of historical materialism, which after all “provides a solid foundation for thinking about the cosmos and how and why it is being humanized” (p.50), that programme must be inverted: first go into space and set up space production. The consequences of such an industrial revolution may then play out into a fairer society for all – just as, on Earth, the revolutionary ideals and technologies of the Enlightenment lagged behind the start of colonisation of the Americas by a century or more. But such an inference would run counter to our authors’ polemical purpose, which is not to produce a balanced reckoning of the effects that different social systems have on their members, but to promote “an alternative hegemonic project” (p.176) – of which the claim that it will “genuinely benefit the dispossessed” should be taken with a strong dose of critical realism. American expansion into space would protect rights and represent humanity, regardless of capitalismGoll 2k (Mark, CEO Spaceline, October 8, , accessed: 2 July 2011, JT)Everybody in the world is worried about making sure somebody else doesn't get an advantage in Space. Third world countries don't want space development without their getting a share. Countries with space programs don't want anybody else making claims on space resources ahead of them, The International Space Station is more about keeping everybody even than about making progress into Space. As a result the concept of national claims and private property have effectively been banned from Space. But I feel that America should be the country which colonizes Space. Why? Because the very definition of American excludes race, religion, and a class bound society. No other country can claim to be as representative of all humanity as America. We should be proud of our open, inclusive, democratic, and diverse society. If Neil Armstrong set foot on the Moon for all mankind, then he did so for Americans, and we ought to set a claim before anybody else does.Space Changes EverythingThe resources of space make capitalism sustainableAshworth 10 (Stephen, academic publishing@Oxford, December 18, , accessed: 2 July 2011, JT)Our question therefore becomes: is human civilisation in its current phase of unprecedented growth a supernova, or is it a baby (with Earth’s biosphere as the mother)? Obviously, we do not yet know. But we do know of a burst of growth in our past, around 10,000 years ago, which took our species from a plateau of development as a nomadic tribal society to another plateau, with higher levels of population, technology and complexity of social organisation, via the neolithic agricultural revolution. So let us ask: is there a possible future end-point for our industrial growth, another higher stable state which we could possibly reach? Clearly, there is. Abundant energy and material resources exist in our own and other planetary systems which are capable of sustainably supporting populations and economies many orders of magnitude greater than is possible on Earth alone. But these resources are not at present claimed by any living creatures. Space makes population and economic growth sustainable – a failure to colonize results in a reversion to the Middle Ages and billions of deaths.Ashworth 10 (Stephen, academic publishing@Oxford, December 18, , accessed: 2 July 2011, JT)In this situation, it is reasonable to speculate that some form of life may eventually appear which is capable of reorganising at least some of the unused matter in planetary systems into configurations suitable for abodes of habitation. There is a clear analogy with the colonisation of the land surface on Earth 400 million years ago. Such a species would have to be a highly technological one, and our own species is clearly developing in this direction. This is not to say that the human race will necessarily colonise space in this way, but only that we might. There are thus two plausible end-points to our current phase of growth: collapse back to a pre-industrial level (the supernova burns out), or continued growth taking us onto a sustainable level of technological maturity (the baby grows up). The difference between these two future courses is immense. In terms of population, the carrying capacity of Earth for human populations is greater than the current 6 or 7 billion, but not very much so, perhaps a few tens of billions (depending on the technologies available). Any retreat to medieval levels of technology would cut this figure by a factor of ten, probably down to less than a billion. But the carrying capacity of the Solar System is at least a million times greater than that of a high-tech Earth, and that of the Galaxy at least a billion times greater again than that of the Solar System. The present-day situation of human society is therefore that it finds itself at a cross-roads of unparalleled significance. Space Changes EverythingThe sheer size of space solves for any negative impacts of capitalismAshworth 10 (Stephen, academic publishing@Oxford, December 18, , accessed: 2 July 2011, JT)The point here is that, while the resources of Earth are limited, those of the Solar System are very much greater. Growth in population sizes and in the usage of energy and raw materials may therefore continue for a number of centuries into the future, provided that two conditions are met: Material growth on Earth levels off; Material growth in space and on other planets takes over the upward trend. Is this not equivalent to saying that Earth must settle down with a zero-growth society before space development begins? No, so long as the terrestrial and extraterrestrial economies are linked. While this remains true, it will be possible for investors on Earth to invest capital in extraterrestrial development, and receive dividends back from that development. While most Earth-dwelling people will remain on the mother planet, there will also be flows of people, goods and ideas between Earth and her colonies, which must also have a profound economic effect. A net inflow of value to Earth is in any case necessary in order that terrestrial investment in outer space does not merely produce inflation in the home economy. But that inflow need not be of material goods, and is more likely to consist of energy (solar power delivered on microwaves or lasers) and information (software and product development). But surely ultimately the limits of the Solar System will be reached, and the interplanetary civilisation have to settle down as a zero-growth society? Yes, granted. But this differs from a zero-growth planet Earth due to the immense size of the Solar System, which is larger than Earth by between four and six orders of magnitude, depending how far out one wants to go – to the distance of Mars, say, or to the Oort comet cloud far beyond Pluto. An interplanetary industrial civilisation is secure for the long term in a way that a monoplanetary one is not, because it is too large to form a unity, either politically or environmentally, and because it is forced to adapt to a wide range of hostile environmental conditions. It will therefore be secure against any conceivable environmental or military disaster, because such a disaster can only affect a single planet, or at most a limited region of the system. Climate change or world war on Earth has no effect on Mars, and vice versa. And with the majority of the population in orbiting artificial space colonies, even a major change in solar luminosity could be tolerated (though such a change is not expected to have a noticeable effect for hundreds of millions of years yet). With interplanetary civilisation, the social system as a whole can tolerate decline and collapse in particular locations, because they can then be recolonised from outside. Once humanity achieves interstellar status, this security factor is clearly vastly enhanced. State Checks CapState control checks capitalismHutton 11 (Will, columnist@The Guardian, June 12, , accessed: 3 July 2011, JT)It could be the farmer in East Anglia concerned that there are too few reservoirs to guarantee a secure water supply, despite ever more frequent droughts. Or the families of elderly relatives in a Southern Cross care home worried that they will be forced to move as the company drowns in debts incurred to make its former private equity owners fabulous fortunes. Savers and insurers are no less worried about the creditworthiness of their bank or insurance company. Where do – or where should – any of them look for security and protection? The answer is unambiguous. They look to the much maligned state. For most of my working life, the state has been the subject of consistent and ever more vitriolic attacks from the political right; every reader of this column knows by heart the litany of its alleged faults. The state is by definition inefficient, bureaucratic and monopolistic. It taxes, legislates and regulates, thus getting in the way of enterprise and self-reliance. For conservative extremists, it infantilises everyone and creates dependencies – whether of welfare recipients or companies queuing up for subsidies and grants. We must roll back the state. Unrestrained capitalism will deliver the good society and the good life. This was always over-the-top hooey, exaggerating the state's failings to the point of caricature, ignoring why it exists at all, and inflating the capacity of capitalism to provide all the answers. But increasingly the hooey is being exposed. We are living through a watershed as the state's crucial and indispensable uses become obvious to all. First and foremost, it has just saved us from financial collapse. But that is where its usefulness only begins. There is no other means to fight the growing influence of organised crime, to ensure that the lives of an ageing population end in dignity or that the economy has the resilience to survive shortages of food, energy and raw materials in a world of growing and unforeseen scarcities. Evidence for this being a watershed is plentiful; almost all the coalition's U-turns and policy misjudgments are because it has misunderstood what we now know does and does not work. The privatisation of forests would not promote their efficient custodianship; it would deny people access to public spaces. Fragmenting the NHS, so that any willing provider can tender for and deliver healthcare for the right price, will expose British health provision to the same structure that has emerged in social care – debt-backed vehicles for private equity to make fortunes with no long-term commitment to health provision. Small wonder a rapid retreat is being orchestrated. The state protects capitalism from itselfParenti 9 (Michael, political science lecturer and author, , accessed: 3 July 2011, JT)The capitalist state has two roles long recognized by political thinkers. First, like any state it must provide services that cannot be reliably developed through private means, such as public safety and orderly traffic. Second, the capitalist state protects the haves from the have-nots, securing the process of capital accumulation to benefit the moneyed interests, while heavily circumscribing the demands of the working populace, as Debs observed from his jail cell. There is a third function of the capitalist state seldom mentioned. It consists of preventing the capitalist system from devouring itself. Consider the core contradiction Karl Marx pointed to: the tendency toward overproduction and market crisis. An economy dedicated to speedups and wage cuts, to making workers produce more and more for less and less, is always in danger of a crash. To maximize profits, wages must be kept down. But someone has to buy the goods and services being produced. For that, wages must be kept up. There is a chronic tendency—as we are seeing today—toward overproduction of private sector goods and services and underconsumption of necessities by the working populace. ***ALT ANSWERS***Perm SolvesMacro AND micro politics are necessary - creates alliances and avoids reductionismMarsh 95(James L., Professor of Philosophy at Fordham University, Critique, Action, and Liberation p.346-347 GAL)What seems to be called for and to be more likely with the greater possibility and actuality' of economic and rationality' crisis is a union of workers and citizens groups, economic and cultural movements, purposive rational-action and symbolic interaction, macro- and micropolitics. Links with workers can remind citizen groups of the relationship of their own goals and movements to economic class domination and help supply a unity' to these various groups. On the other hand, movements centered around quality' of life remind workers that mere economic reforms and revolution are not enough either, transformation of quality' of life is essential. Moreover, movements centered on the problems of racism, sexism, and the devastation of the environment remind us of a legitimate specificity, plurality', and irreducibility within social movements. Even though racism, sexism, heterosexism. and environmental pollution are ultimately related to capitalism, they are not reducible to capitalist class domination. A legitimate differance exists among social movements that must be respected. In contrast to postmodernists. I would insist on a legitimate unity' or identity' that should be articulated, an identity-in-difference. Such a politics disavows either a one-sided unity' present in some traditional Marxism or a one-sided pluralism present in liberal or postmodern theories. Such a politics would be aesthetic as well as political, cultural as well as economic, micro as well as macro, but in contrast to many postmodern theories the aesthetic and cultural are linked to the critical and reflective. Rationality' is not simply or primarily instrumental or scientific as some traditional Marxism would have it or simply libidinal and aesthetic as some post-modem theory would have it. but a unity' of political, aesthetic, and scientific. Thus the aesthetic politics of Act-Up. an organization of AIDS activists, breaking into Dan Rather's newscast on CBS during the Gulf War has its legitimate place as do marches protesting the war or worker resistance on the shop floor.The symbolic protest of a Dan Berrigan at the King of Prussia nuclear facility in Pennsylvania has its place as well as political organizing in the Bronx around the issues of health care, housing, and food. Many legitimate struggles, kinds of struggle, and sites of struggle exist, none of which is reducible to the other, but which are or can be linked to one another in different alliances against a common enemy, a racist, sexist, heterosexist capitalism. Linking and alliance are not the same as subsumption and reduction, a common mistake. Such struggles have a common enemy, are subject to common norms of right, morality', and justice, and have a common goal of liberation taking the form of full economic, cultural, and political democracy.In contrast to a politics of assimilation that denies differences or a politics of rigid identity' that becomes separatist, my recommended politics is one of inclusion and alliance. Such a politics flows from the argument of the whole book. On a phenomenological level, cognitional-transcendental structure and the validity' claims of the ideal speech situation are shared by everyone equally, white or African-American, capitalist or laborer, woman or man. heterosexual or homosexual. No person or group of persons is privileged in the ideal speech situation, and each has an equal right to express her needs and desires and claims.Ethically the principles of right, morality, and justice forbid classism. racism, sexism, and heterosexism. Hermeneutically. these forms of domination are distinct but related and are not reducible to one another. Critically, the task of social theory is to criticize these forms of domination with the aim of overcoming them. Finally, on the level of praxis itself, each kind of group subject to its own distinct kind of exploitation can give rise to its own legitimate kind of social movement.It is true that on a hermeneutic-explanatory level class domination is more fundamental and definitive of our social situation than other kinds, but even here one form is not reducible to the other. Also, it is mistaken to infer from such privileging to a privileging on other levels. Ethically, for example, it is not clear that exploitation of labor by capital is worse than that exerted by white over Latino or Indian, heterosexual over homosexual, or man <CONTINUED><CONTINUED>over woman. Here, we note again the advantage of methodologically distinguishing different stages, aspects, and levels in critical theory.Even if I privilege class domination over other forms on a hermeneutic-explanatory level, it may be that social movements arising from racism, sexism, and heterosexism have to be privileged at times in the late capitalist context. Which of these social movements takes the lead depends very much on different local, regional, and national situations. In addition to other kinds of indeterminacy and ambiguity, social theory has to own up to a certain indeterminacy on the level of praxis.Perm SolvesWe shouldn’t shy away from embracing particular struggles which are linked to more universal struggle- we need a dialectic between micro and macro strugglesMarsh 95 (James L., Professor of Philosophy at Fordham University, Critique, Action, and Liberation p. 256-257 GAL)Clearly, then, full liberation in the university should become liberation of the university from the thrall of capital and capitalist values. Such liberation implies a theoretical and practical praxis on the part of students and faculty to become really what they are essentially, the center of the university. Such a movement involves a movement from powerlessness to power, hierarchy to equality, patriarchy to feminism, passivity to activity, ressentiment to critique. Being a radical academic means, first of all. to do what I can. according to my own talents, needs, and available time, to aid such a struggle. We become in Foucault's words "specific intellectuals." engaging the socioeconomic system where it impinges on our own professional lives. Such specificity, however, should be linked as much as possible to a systematic, universal comprehension of the socioeconomic system in which we live. Otherwise, we run a danger of misunderstanding the meaning of the struggle and the causes of the evil against which we struggle, racist, sexist capitalist domination, tyranny, and colonization in this university. We note here a necessary dialectic between micro and macro struggles. Perhaps more adequate as a model than "universal" or "specific" intellectual is Gramsci's notion of organic intellectual: the intellectual as related to. emerging from, and connected to particular groups and struggles but able and willing to relate these specific struggles to the universal in different senses, phenomenological. ethical, hermeneutical-explanatory. critical, programmatic.Capitalism InevitableGreed and capitalism are inevitable – the concepts of property rights and free trade are engrained in our psycheWilkinson 5 (Will, policy analyst@CATO, CATO Policy Report, XXVII(1), January/February, , accessed: 29 June 2011, JT)Perhaps the most depressing lesson of evolutionary psychology for politics is found in its account of the deep-seated human capacity for envy and, related, of our difficulty in understanding the idea of gains from trade and increases in productivity—the idea of an ever-expanding "pie" of wealth. There is evidence that greater skill and initiative could lead to higher status and bigger shares of resources for an individual in the EEA. But because of the social nature of hunting and gathering, the fact that food spoiled quickly, and the utter absence of privacy, the benefits of individual success in hunting or foraging could not be easily internalized by the individual, and were expected to be shared. The EEA was for the most part a zero-sum world, where increases in total wealth through invention, investment, and extended economic exchange were totally unknown. More for you was less for me. Therefore, if anyone managed to acquire a great deal more than anyone else, that was pretty good evidence that theirs was a stash of ill-gotten gains, acquired by cheating, stealing, raw force, or, at best, sheer luck. Envy of the disproportionately wealthy may have helped to reinforce generally adaptive norms of sharing and to help those of lower status on the dominance hierarchy guard against further predation by those able to amass power. Our zero-sum mentality makes it hard for us to understand how trade and investment can increase the amount of total wealth. We are thus ill-equipped to easily understand our own economic system. These features of human nature—that we are coalitional, hierarchical, and envious zero-sum thinkers—would seem to make liberal capitalism extremely unlikely. And it is. However, the benefits of a liberal market order can be seen in a few further features of the human mind and social organization in the EEA. Property Rights are Natural The problem of distributing scarce resources can be handled in part by implicitly coercive allocative hierarchies. An alternative solution to the problem of distribution is the recognition and enforcement of property rights. Property rights are prefigured in nature by the way animals mark out territories for their exclusive use in foraging, hunting, and mating. Recognition of such rudimentary claims to control and exclude minimizes costly conflict, which by itself provides a strong evolutionary reason to look for innate tendencies to recognize and respect norms of property. New scientific research provides even stronger evidence for the existence of such property "instincts." For example, recent experimental work by Oliver Goodenough, a legal theorist, and Christine Prehn, a neuroscientist, suggests that the human mind evolved specialized modules for making judgments about moral transgressions, and transgressions against property in particular. Evolutionary psychology can help us to understand that property rights are not created simply by strokes of the legislator's pen. Mutually Beneficial Exchange is Natural Trade and mutually beneficial exchange are human universals, as is the division of labor. In their groundbreaking paper, "Cognitive Adaptations for Social Exchange," Cosmides and Tooby point out that, contrary to widespread belief, hunter-gatherer life is not "a kind of retro-utopia" of "indiscriminate, egalitarian cooperation and sharing." The archeological and ethnographic evidence shows that hunter-gatherers were involved in numerous forms of trade and exchange. Some forms of hunter-gatherer trading can involve quite complex specialization and the interaction of supply and demand. Most impressive, Cosmides and Tooby have shown through a series of experiments that human beings are able easily to solve complex logical puzzles involving reciprocity, the accounting of costs and benefits, and the detection of people who have cheated on agreements. However, we are unable to solve formally identical puzzles that do not deal with questions of social exchange. That, they argue, points to the existence of "functionally specialized, content-dependent cognitive adaptations for social exchange." Capitalism InevitableEven a drastic decline in living conditions won’t spur revolution – empirically provenFlood 5 (Andrew, Anarchist Organizer and Writer, “Is Primitivism Realistic?” is also nothing automatic about poverty or a decline in living standards being met with mass revolt.? Capitalism, and the market in particular, is also an inbuilt mechanism though which the population are encouraged to accept the hoarding of scarce resources as natural. In the west today this means the rich have access to fast cars, luxury homes and private yachts - not that much of a hardship for the rest of us. But elsewhere in the world the rich have access to these things while the poor literally starve in the streets. If there was to be a real crisis in world food production then this is what would visit the working class in the USA and beyond. To a minor extent this is what happened in depression era America and in post war Europe. In neither case did it lead to significant revolts never mind the collapse of civilisation.History proves elites begin revolution, not slum dwellersBast 8 (Andrew, May 17,, With Zizek, We're All Just Left Joking Around, ]What is frightening, simply put, is ?i?ek’s utter disregard for reality. In the final pages, he grapples with Francis Fukuyama’s 1989 declaration of the “End of History,” undoubtedly a text to be reckoned with—moved past, if you will—in any serious discussion of where humanity is heading. Frankly, I breathed a sigh of relief, eager for his response. What came to mind was a final passage from Fukuyama’s essay: “The end of history will be a very sad time,” the long-time neoconservative and professor of international political economy at the School of Advanced International Study at Johns Hopkins wrote in the midst of the Cold War’s end almost two decades ago. “The struggle for recognition, the willingness to risk one’s life for a purely abstract goal, the worldwide ideological struggle that called forth daring, courage, imagination, and idealism, will be replaced by economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands.” And in conclusion, what does ?i?ek offer? A slipshod analysis of the growing slum cities around the world, and why their dispossessed residents ought be tapped to find strategies for the rest of us to organize resistance against … against … It is still unclear. Global capitalism? Repressive state apparatuses? Overblown institutions? Feeble social welfare organizations? Privatized medical establishments? And on top of all this, if anyone should know, ?i?ek the intellectual should, that revolution rarely, if ever, comes from the peasants. History teaches us, in France, in Russia, in Iran, in Ethiopia, in China, the list goes on and on, that revolution comes from out-of-power elites. And their allegiance sworn to the intellectuals.No AltThe alternative only works in theory – in the real world of scarcity and biases, only capitalism promotes peacePerry ‘95(Mark, Professor of Economics at University of Michigan Flint and Adjunct Scholar at the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, The Freeman, “Why Socialism Failed”, Volume 45, Number 6, June, )Socialism is the Big Lie of the twentieth century. While it promised prosperity, equality, and security, it delivered poverty, misery, and tyranny. Equality was achieved only in the sense that everyone was equal in his or her misery. In the same way that a Ponzi scheme or chain letter initially succeeds but eventually collapses, socialism may show early signs of success. But any accomplishments quickly fade as the fundamental deficiencies of central planning emerge. It is the initial illusion of success that gives government intervention its pernicious, seductive appeal. In the long run, socialism has always proven to be a formula for tyranny and misery. A pyramid scheme is ultimately unsustainable because it is based on faulty principles. Likewise, collectivism is unsustainable in the long run because it is a flawed theory. Socialism does not work because it is not consistent with fundamental principles of human behavior. The failure of socialism in countries around the world can be traced to one critical defect: it is a system that ignores incentives. In a capitalist economy, incentives are of the utmost importance. Market prices, the profit-and-loss system of accounting, and private property rights provide an efficient, interrelated system of incentives to guide and direct economic behavior. Capitalism is based on the theory that incentives matter! Under socialism, incentives either play a minimal role or are ignored totally. A centrally planned economy without market prices or profits, where property is owned by the state, is a system without an effective incentive mechanism to direct economic activity. By failing to emphasize incentives, socialism is a theory inconsistent with human nature and is therefore doomed to fail. Socialism is based on the theory that incentives don't matter! In a radio debate several months ago with a Marxist professor from the University of Minnesota, I pointed out the obvious failures of socialism around the world in Cuba, Eastern Europe, and China. At the time of our debate, Haitian refugees were risking their lives trying to get to Florida in homemade boats. Why was it, I asked him, that people were fleeing Haiti and traveling almost 500 miles by ocean to get to the "evil capitalist empire" when they were only 50 miles from the "workers' paradise" of Cuba? The Marxist admitted that many "socialist" countries around the world were failing. However, according to him, the reason for failure is not that socialism is deficient, but that the socialist economies are not practicing "pure" socialism. The perfect version of socialism would work; it is just the imperfect socialism that doesn't work. Marxists like to compare a theoretically perfect version of socialism with practical, imperfect capitalism which allows them to claim that socialism is superior to capitalism. If perfection really were an available option, the choice of economic and political systems would be irrelevant. In a world with perfect beings and infinite abundance, any economic or political system--socialism, capitalism, fascism, or communism--would work perfectly. However, the choice of economic and political institutions is crucial in an imperfect universe with imperfect beings and limited resources. In a world of scarcity it is essential for an economic system to be based on a clear incentive structure to promote economic efficiency. The real choice we face is between imperfect capitalism and imperfect socialism. Given that choice, the evidence of history overwhelmingly favors capitalism as the greatest wealth-producing economic system available. The strength of capitalism can be attributed to an incentive structure based upon the three Ps: (1) prices determined by market forces, (2) a profit-and-loss system of accounting and (3) private property rights. The failure of socialism can be traced to its neglect of these three incentive-enhancing components. HE Continues… The temptress of socialism is constantly luring us with the offer: "give up a little of your freedom and I will give you a little more security." As the experience of this century has demonstrated, the bargain is tempting but never pays off. We end up losing both our freedom and our security. Programs like socialized medicine, welfare, social security, and minimum wage laws will continue to entice us because on the surface they appear to be expedient and beneficial. Those programs, like all socialist programs, will fail in the long run regardless of initial appearances. These programs are part of the Big Lie of socialism because they ignore the important role of incentives. Socialism will remain a constant temptation. We must be vigilant in our fight against socialism not only around the globe but also here in the United States. The failure of socialism inspired a worldwide renaissance of freedom and liberty. For the first time in the history of the world, the day is coming very soon when a majority of the people in the world will live in free societies or societies rapidly moving towards freedom. Capitalism will play a major role in the global revival of liberty and prosperity because it nurtures the human spirit, inspires human creativity, and promotes the spirit of enterprise. By providing a powerful system of incentives that promote thrift, hard work, and efficiency, capitalism creates wealth. The main difference between capitalism and socialism is this: Capitalism works.No AltEven if cap is bad—its their burden to prove concrete reasons alt is betterJohan Norberg 3, economist, fellow at the Swedish think tank Timbro, recipient of the distinguished Antony Fisher International Memorial Award, 2003, In Defense of Global Capitalism, p. 98Capitalism is not a perfect system, and it is not good for everyone all the time. Critics of globalization are good at pointing out individual harms—a factory that has closed down, a wage that has been reduced. Such things do happen, but by concentrating solely on individual instances, one may miss the larger reality of how a political or economic system generally works and what fantastic values it confers on the great majority compared with other alternatives. Problems are found in every political and economic system, but rejecting all systems is not an option. Hunting down negative examples of what can happen in a market economy is easy enough. By that method water or fire can be proved to be bad things, because some people drown and some get burned to death, but this isn't the full picture. A myopic focus on capitalism's imperfections ignores the freedom and independence that it confers on people who have never experienced anything but oppression. It also disregards the calm and steady progress that is the basic rule of a society with a market economy. There is nothing wrong with identifying problems and mishaps in a predominantly successful system if one does so with the constructive intent of rectifying or alleviating them. But someone who condemns the system as such is obligated to answer this question: What political and economic system could manage things better? Never before in human history has prosperity grown so rapidly and poverty declined so heavily. Is there any evidence, either in history or in the world around us, to suggest that another system could do as well?No mindset shift will occur – individuals won’t adjust their lifestylesPaul R. Ehrlich, Bing Professor of Population Studies, Department of Biology Sciences at Stanford, and Anne H. Ehrlich, Senior Research Associate in the Department of Biological Sciences at Stanford, 1996, Betrayal of Science and Reason: How Anti-Environmental Rhetoric Threatens Our Future, p. 69-70But human beings are specialists in cultural evolution, which can pro-ceed much more rapidly than can genetic evolution. Through ingenuity and invention, it is possible to enlarge human carrying capacity-as in- deed has happened in the past. Today, widespread behavioral changes-such as becoming vegetarian-potentially could increase Earth's carrying capacity for human beings in a short time as well. As-suming full cooperation in the needed changes, it might be possible to support 6 billion people indefinitely (that is, to end human overpopu-lation, if there were no further population growth). But we doubt that most people in today's rich nations would willingly embrace the changes in lifestyle necessary to increase global carrying capacity. How many Americans would be willing to adjust their lifestyles radically to live, say, like the Chinese, so that more Dutch or Australians or Mexicans could be supported? How many Chinese would give up their dreams of American-style affluence for the same reason? Such lifestyle changes certainly seem unlikely to us, since most current trends among those who can afford it are toward more affluence and consumption, which tend to decrease carrying capacity and intensify the degree of overpopulation.No AltTransition will be difficult due to entrenched interests—their alternative is years awayF.E. Trainer 85, academic in the Department of Social Work, Social Policy and Sociology, University of New South Wales and the author of numerous books on the environment and population issues, 1985, Abandon Affluence!, p. 18The magnitude of the social changes under discussion could not be overestimated. If we are to be saved by changes of the sort advocated, then admittedly in historical terms we are calling for shifts of unprecedented scope and pace. In addition, they are changes that most people would at first sight regard as highly unattractive since conventional wisdom claims rising material living standards to be the defining condition of human progress. Moreover, the alternative outlined is one which cannot function unless virtually all people within it are eager to see it succeed and willing to work hard to that end. It is, after all, a model in which individuals and localities must take upon themselves the responsibility for organising and producing most of the things they need. It would be impossible for a dictatorial regime to make such a society work by force. No vanguard party could seize power and run this alternative society effectively against the wishes of the people. A very high level of public understanding and goodwill must therefore be built up before the required social change could become possible. Such conditions cannot be brought about without many years of determined effort devoted to developing awareness and concern. It is easy to underestimate the many grounds for optimism about achieving the necessary changes in public opinion. There is now widespread realisation that our social systems are neither just, nor working well, nor conducive to global security. Many people already practise some version of the alternative outlined and many more endorse aspects of it in principle. There is, however, a very long way to go. In particular, it is not generally understood how the major global problems are tightly inter-related, nor how they arise from the nature of our economic system. Above all there is strong commitment to the tragically mistaken values of affluence and growth. There will be strenuous resistance to these proposals from the many powerful groups which have an interest in the continued pursuit of affluence and growth. Corporations, managers, shareholders, technocrats and others have an enormous stake in keeping the production and consumption party going. Commerce and industry would be appalled at the prospect of GNP being reduced to one-fifth of its present level, and at the thought of people producing for themselves many of the things they now have to buy. At present these groups have the power to define our values and options, but this is only because public awareness and concern are so low. If large numbers of people eventually come to understand how mistaken the affluence and growth model is and come to see the need for a different model, then that new model will prevail.Alt = TotoSocialism in any form expunges freedom and makes extinction possibleRockwell Jr., president of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, 5/19/2008(Llewellyn, “Everything You Love You Owe to Capitalism,” )And yet, sitting on the other side of the table are well-educated people who imagine that the way to end the world's woes is through socialism. Now, people's definitions of socialism differ, and these persons would probably be quick to say that they do not mean the Soviet Union or anything like that. That was socialism in name only, I would be told. And yet, if socialism does mean anything at all today, it imagines that there can be some social improvement resulting from the political movement to take capital out of private hands and put it into the hands of the state. Other tendencies of socialism include the desire to see labor organized along class lines and given some sort of coercive power over how their employers' property is used. It might be as simple as the desire to put a cap on the salaries of CEOs, or it could be as extreme as the desire to abolish all private property, money, and even marriage. Whatever the specifics of the case in question, socialism always means overriding the free decisions of individuals and replacing that capacity for decision making with an overarching plan by the state. Taken far enough, this mode of thought won't just spell an end to opulent lunches. It will mean the end of what we all know as civilization itself. It would plunge us back to a primitive state of existence, living off hunting and gathering in a world with little art, music, leisure, or charity. Nor is any form of socialism capable of providing for the needs of the world's six billion people, so the population would shrink dramatically and quickly and in a manner that would make every human horror ever known seem mild by comparison. Nor is it possible to divorce socialism from totalitarianism, because if you are serious about ending private ownership of the means of production, you have to be serious about ending freedom and creativity too. You will have to make the whole of society, or what is left of it, into a prison. In short, the wish for socialism is a wish for unparalleled human evil. If we really understood this, no one would express casual support for it in polite company. It would be like saying, you know, there is really something to be said for malaria and typhoid and dropping atom bombs on millions of innocents.Alt = Transition WarsThe desire for freedom and growth is innate – moving away risks totalitarianism, violence, poverty and warAligica ’03 (Paul Aligica, Fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University and Adjunct Fellow at the Hudson Institute, “The Great Transition and the Social Limits to Growth: Herman Kahn on Social Change and Global Economic Development”, April 21, )Stopping things would mean if not to engage in an experiment to change the human nature, at least in an equally difficult experiment in altering powerful cultural forces: "We firmly believe that despite the arguments put forward by people who would like to 'stop the earth and get off,' it is simply impractical to do so. Propensity to change may not be inherent in human nature, but it is firmly embedded in most contemporary cultures. People have almost everywhere become curious, future oriented, and dissatisfied with their conditions. They want more material goods and covet higher status and greater control of nature. Despite much propaganda to the contrary, they believe in progress and future" (Kahn, 1976, 164). As regarding the critics of growth that stressed the issue of the gap between rich and poor countries and the issue of redistribution, Kahn noted that what most people everywhere want was visible, rapid improvement in their economic status and living standards, and not a closing of the gap (Kahn, 1976, 165). The people from poor countries have as a basic goal the transition from poor to middle class. The other implications of social change are secondary for them. Thus a crucial factor to be taken into account is that while the zero-growth advocates and their followers may be satisfied to stop at the present point, most others are not. Any serious attempt to frustrate these expectations or desires of that majority is likely to fail and/or create disastrous counter reactions. Kahn was convinced that "any concerted attempt to stop or even slow 'progress' appreciably (that is, to be satisfied with the moment) is catastrophe-prone". At the minimum, "it would probably require the creation of extraordinarily repressive governments or movements-and probably a repressive international system" (Kahn, 1976, 165; 1979, 140-153). The pressures of overpopulation, national security challenges and poverty as well as the revolution of rising expectations could be solved only in a continuing growth environment. Kahn rejected the idea that continuous growth would generate political repression and absolute poverty. On the contrary, it is the limits-to-growth position "which creates low morale, destroys assurance, undermines the legitimacy of governments everywhere, erodes personal and group commitment to constructive activities and encourages obstructiveness to reasonable policies and hopes". Hence this position "increases enormously the costs of creating the resources needed for expansion, makes more likely misleading debate and misformulation of the issues, and make less likely constructive and creative lives". Ultimately "it is precisely this position the one that increases the potential for the kinds of disasters which most at its advocates are trying to avoid" (Kahn, 1976, 210; 1984).Alt = Transition WarsTransition wars will kill the planet but not capitalismFlood ’04 (Andrew, Anarchist organizer and writer, “Civilization, Primitivism, Anarchism,” )However it is worth doing a little mental exercise on this idea of the oil running out. If indeed there was no alternative what might happen? Would a primitivist utopia emerge even at the bitter price of 5,900 million people dying? No. The primitivists seem to forget that we live in a class society. The population of the earth is divided into a few people with vast resources and power and the rest of us. It is not a case of equal access to resources, rather of quite incredible unequal access. Those who fell victim to the mass die off would not include Rubert Murdoch, Bill Gates or George Bush because these people have the money and power to monopolise remaining supplies for themselves. Instead the first to die in huge number would be the population of the poorer mega cities on the planet. Cairo and Alexandria in Egypt have a population of around 20 million between them. Egypt is dependent both on food imports and on the very intensive agriculture of the Nile valley and the oasis. Except for the tiny wealthy elite those 20 million urban dwellers would have nowhere to go and there is no more land to be worked. Current high yields are in part dependent on high inputs of cheap energy. The mass deaths of millions of people is not something that destroys capitalism. Indeed at periods of history it has been seen as quite natural and even desirable for the modernization of capital. The potato famine of the 1840's that reduced the population of Ireland by 30% was seen as desirable by many advocates of free trade.(16) So was the 1943/4 famine in British ruled Bengal in which four million died(17). For the capitalist class such mass deaths, particularly in colonies afford opportunities to restructure the economy in ways that would otherwise be resisted. The real result of an 'end of energy' crisis would see our rulers stock piling what energy sources remained and using them to power the helicopter gunships that would be used to control those of us fortunate enough to be selected to toil for them in the biofuel fields. The unlucky majority would just be kept where they are and allowed to die off. More of the 'Matrix' then utopia in other words. The other point to be made here is that destruction can serve to regenerate capitalism. Like it or not large scale destruction allows some capitalist to make a lot of money. Think of the Iraq war. The destruction of the Iraqi infrastructure may be a disaster for the people of Iraq buts it's a profit making bonanza for Halliburton and co[18]. Not coincidentally the Iraq war, is helping the US A, where the largest corporations are based, gain control of the parts of the planet where much future and current oil production takes placeAlt = Transition WarsSpeeding up the transition will fail and create chaos which prevents social transformationTed Trainer, lecturer in the School of Social Work, University of New South Wales, March 2000, Democracy and Nature, Vol. 6, No. 1, “Where are we, where do we want to be, how do we get there?” there is a boom we in the Eco-village Movement should welcome it, through gritted teeth, because it will give us the time we desperately need. The last thing we want is a collapse of the system in the immediate future. We are far from ready. Hardly any of the hundreds of millions of people who live in rich world cities have any idea of an alternative to the consumer way and their settlements have no provision for anything but maximising the throughput of resources. By all means let’s have a collapse a little later, but the prospects for The Simpler Way depend greatly on how extensively the concept can be established before the mainstream runs into serious trouble. We need at least two more decades to build the understanding, and the most effective way to do that is by developing examples.Economic decline without attitude shift prompts authoritarian take-over—increasing oppression and stopping any transitionF.E. Trainer, academic in the Department of Social Work, Social Policy and Sociology, University of New South Wales and the author of numerous books on the environment and population issues, 1985, Abandon Affluence!, p. 275In keeping with the first part of this chapter the following sections can only be suggestions as to how things could work out if we apply a lot of effort and are luckier than we deserve to be. There is a good chance that we will not get there and that we will slide into some form of totalitarian society. If the material living standards of the overdeveloped countries begin to fall markedly owing to rising costs or to events in the Third World, while people remain convinced that affluence is supremely important, then it is likely that they will accept authoritarian rule by governments promising to restore prosperity and to secure the empire if they are given extraordinary powers. These governments would inevitably rule in the interests of a rich few and force the rest to endure the sort of repression and deprivation now character- istic of many Third World countries. (Stretton, 1977, Ch. 1, gives a chillingly plausible account of this eventuality.) Everything depends on whether or not publics go on clinging to affluence or realise that de-development is required. The problem is therefore entirely one of world-view. Our fate hangs on whether or not enough people come to understand and accept the general alternative philosophy outlined in this chapter. The task before us is, there- fore, an educational one. It is to raise public awareness about the mistaken path we are following, about the impossibility of affluence and growth for all, and about the fact that there is a promising alternative. If we succeed at this task the revolution will be won by default. If enough people opt for a somewhat frugal, self-sufficient and communal alternative way of life then that is what we will have, irrespective of what corporations and politicians might prefer and regardless of their resistanceAlt Decreases GrowthThe alternative would result in limits to growthMarsh 95(James L., Professor of Philosophy at Fordham University, Critique, Action, and Liberation p.319 GAL)Such an ecological socialism implies a questioning, limiting, and directing of economic growth. In contrast to capitalism's unthinking expansionary logic toward more and more profit, a democratic ecological socialism will question growth. How much growth is necessary, what kind of growth, directed toward what kind of ends? It is possible, desirable, and necessary for a democratic socialist community, at least by the time moderate scarcity has been achieved, to limit new investment and insist that the needs served by such investment be genuine and rational. Instead of thirty to forty' brands of toothpaste, maybe we need a new school. Instead of a new weapons system, maybe we need low-income housing. Instead of a new kind of automobile, maybe we need more rapid transit. "True needs" as opposed to "false needs" here would be those that survive the discussion of the ideal speech situation and meet the standards of the PGC. FSD. validity claims, the principles of justice, and human rights.Gibson-GrahamTotalizing views of capitalism cause political cynicism and fragmentation and conservatism – the perm solves best.Gibson-Graham 96 (Katharine, human geography@ Australian National University, Julie, geography@U of Massachusetts, The End of Capitalism (As We Know It), p. 263-64, JT)One of our goals as Marxists has been to produce a knowledge of capitalism. Yet as “that which is known,” Capitalism has become the intimate enemy. We have uncloaked the ideologically-clothed, obscure monster, but we have installed a naked and visible monster in its place. In return for our labors of creation, the monster has robbed us of all force. We hear – and find it easy to believe – that the left is in disarray. Part of what produces the disarray of the left is the vision of what the left is arrayed against. When capitalism is represented as a unified system coextensive with the nation or even the world, when it is portrayed as crowding out all other economic forms, when it is allowed to define entire societies, it becomes something that can only be defeated and replaced by a mass collective movement (or by a process of systemic dissolution that such a movement might assist). The revolutionary task of replacing capitalism now seems outmoded and unrealistic, yet we do not seem to have an alternative conception of class transformation to take its place. The old political economic “systems” and “structures” that call forth a vision of revolution as systemic replacement still seem to be dominant in the Marxist political imagination. The New World Order is often represented as political fragmentation founded upon economic unification. In this vision the economy appears as the last stronghold of unity and singularity in a world of diversity and plurality. But why can’t the economy be fragmented too? If we theorized it as fragmented in the United States, we could being to see a huge state sector (incorporating a variety of forms of appropriation of surplus labor), a very large sector of self-employed and family-based producers (most noncapitalist), a huge household sector (again, quite various in terms of forms of exploitation, with some households moving towards communal or collective appropriation and others operating in a traditional mode in which one adult appropriates surplus labor from another). None of these things is easy to see. If capitalism takes up the available social space, there’s no room for anything else. If capitalism cannot coexist, there’s no possibility of anything else. If capitalism functions as a unity, it cannot be partially or locally replaced. My intent is to help create the discursive conception under which socialist or other noncapitalist construction becomes “realistic” present activity rather than a ludicrous or utopian goal. To achieve this I must smash Capitalism and see it in a thousand pieces. I must make its unity a fantasy, visible as a denial of diversity and change.Gibson-GrahamThe best way to solve capitalism is to let local action coexist with global actions like the plan – the alternative alone can never solveGibson-Graham 2 (Katharine, human geography@ Australian National University, Julie, geography@U of Massachusetts, , accessed: 30 June 2011, JT)Finally, what can we say about an economic politics outside the binary frame? In the face of the programs and plans of anti-globalization theorists and political analysts, our micropolitical experiments can easily be dismissed. Most analysts, like Hardt and Negri, offer a vision of an appropriate political response to globalization that is very distant from the one we are pursuing: Imperial corruption is already undermined by the productivity of bodies, by cooperation, and by the multitude’s designs on productivity. The only event that we are still awaiting is the construction, or rather the insurgence, of a powerful organization. The genetic chain is formed and established in ontology, the scaffolding is continuously constructed and renewed by the new cooperative productivity, and thus we await only the maturation of the political development of the posse. We do not have any models to offer this event. Only the multitude through its practical experimentation will offer models and determine when and how the possible becomes real. (2000: 411) We are no longer capable of waiting for the multitude to construct a powerful organization (Gibson-Graham, 1996). Instead, we continue to be inspired by feminism as a global force, one that started small and personal and largely stayed that way, that worked on cultivating new ways of being, that created new languages, discourses and representations, that built organizations, and that quickly (albeit unevenly) encompassed the globe. Globalization appears to call for one form of politics—mobilization and resistance on the global scale. But we believe there are other ways of practicing transformative politics—involving an opening to the local as a place of political creativity and innovation. To advocate local enactments is in no way to suggest that other avenues should close down. We would hope for the acceptance of multiple powers and forms of politics, with an eye to increasing freedoms and not limiting options. Rather than equivocating, with paradoxical certainty, about when and how a challenge to globalization will arise (the Hardt and Negri position), we have engaged in a here and now political experiment—working on ourselves and in our backyards.29 This is not because we think that we have found the only way forward, but because we have become unable to wait for an effective politics to be convened on some future terrain. The form of politics we are pursuing is not transmitted via a mass organization, but through a language and a set of practices. A language can become universal without being universalist. It can share the space of power with other languages, without having to eradicate or “overthrow” them.30 Academic, NGO, and internet networks can become part of a system of transmission, translation, amplification. In our (admittedly hopeful) vision, the language of the diverse economy and accompanying practices of non-capitalist development may have global purchase one day.Gibson-GrahamAttempts to understand capitalism in its totality reproduces it. Views of capitalist hegemony projects capitalism’s harms on others and destroys any chance for progressive changeGibson-Graham 96 (Katharine, human geography@ Australian National University, Julie, geography@U of Massachusetts, The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It), p. 1-3, JT)Understanding capitalism has always been a project of the left, especially within the Marxian tradition. There, where knowledges of “capitalism” arguably originated, theory is accorded an explicit social role. From Marx to Lenin to the neo-Marxists of the post-World War II period, theorists have understood their work as contributing — whether proximately or distantly — to anticapitalist projects of political action. In this sense economic theory has related to politics as a subordinate and a servant: we understand the world in order to change it. Given the avowed servitude of left theory to left political action it is ironic (though not surprising) that understandings and images of capitalism can quite readily be viewed as contributing to a crisis in left politics. Indeed, and this is the argument we wish to make in this book, the project of understanding the beast has itself produced a beast, or even a bestiary; and the process of producing knowledge in service to politics has estranged rather than united understanding and action. Bringing these together again, or allowing them to touch in different ways, is one of our motivating aspirations. “Capitalism” occupies a special and privileged place in the language of social representation. References to “capitalist society” are a common?place of left and even mainstream social description, as are references — to the market, to the global economy, to postindustrial society — in which an unnamed capitalism is implicitly invoked as the defining and unifying moment of a complex economic and social formation. Just as the economic system in eastern Europe used confidently to be described as communist or socialist, so a general confidence in economic classification characterizes representations of an increasingly capitalist world system. But what might be seen as the grounds of this confidence, if we put aside notions of “reality” as the authentic origin of its representations? Why might it seem problematic to say that the United States is a Christian nation, or a heterosexual one, despite the widespread belief that Christianity and heterosexuality are dominant or majority practices in their respective domains, while at the same time it seems legitimate and indeed “accurate” to say that the US is a capitalist country?1 What is it about the former expressions, and their critical history, that makes them visible as “regulatory fictions,”2 ways of erasing or obscuring difference, while the latter is seen as accurate representation? Why, moreover, have embracing and holistic expressions for social struc?ture like patriarchy fallen into relative disuse among feminist theorists (see Pringle 1995; Barrett and Phillips 1992) while similar concep?tions of capitalism as a system or “structure of power” are still preva?lent and resilient? These sorts of questions, by virtue of their scarcity and scant claims to legitimacy, have provided us a motive for this book.3 The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It) problematizes “capitalism”. as an economic and social descriptor.4 Scrutinizing what might be seen as throwaway uses of the term — passing references, for example, to the capitalist system or to global capitalism — as well as systematic and deliberate attempts to represent capitalism as a central and organizing feature of modern social experience, the book selectively traces the discursive origins of a widespread understanding: that capitalism is the hegemonic. or even the only, present form of economy and that it will continue to be so in the proximate future. It follows from this prevalent though not ubiquitous view that noncapitalist economic sites, if they exist at all, must inhabit the social margins; and, as a corollary, that deliberate attempts to develop noncapitalist economic practices and institutions must take place in the social interstices, in the realm of experiment, or in a visionary space of revolutionary social replacement. Representations of capitalism are a potent constituent of the anticapi?talist imagination, providing images of what is to be resisted and changed as well as intimations of the strategies, techniques, and possibilities of changing it. For this reason, depictions of “capitalist hegemony” deserve a particularly skeptical reading. For in the vicinity of these representations, the very idea of a noncapitalist economy takes the shape of an unlikelihood or even an impossibility. It becomes difficult to entertain a vision of the prevalence and vitality of noncapitalist economic forms, or of daily or partial replacements of capitalism by noncapitalist economic practices, or of capitalist retreats and reversals. In this sense, “capitalist hegemony” operates not only as a constituent of, but also as a brake upon, the anticapitalist imagination.5 What difference might it make to release that brake and allow an anticapitalist economic imaginary to develop unrestricted?6 If we were to dissolve the image that looms in the economic foreground, what shadowy economic forms might come forward? In these questions we can identify the broad outlines of our project: to discover or create a world of economic difference, and to populate that world with exotic creatures that become, upon inspection, quite local and familiar (not to mention familiar beings that are not what they seem).Gibson-GrahamThere is no capitalism but rather only capitalism, Every instance of capitalism is different in context and severity. Each instance must be rejected individually – totalizing claims about the nature of capitalism destroys any hope for progress.Gibson-Graham 96 (Katharine, human geography@ Australian National University, Julie, geography@U of Massachusetts, The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It), p. 246-47, JT)The concept of capitalism itself is haunted by heterogeneity, by the historicity and singularity of each form of economy that might be called capitalist. Each capitalist site is constituted within a social and political context, and that contextualization is itself contaminating of any pure or essential and invariant attribute associated with the concept (“it is necessary to introduce haunting into the very construction of a concept”). There is no capitalism but only capitalisms. Derrida himself acknowledges the inevitability of multiplicity and contamination when he argues parenthetically (in one of the few bracketed extensions and corrections that he added to the original text of the lecture) “with regard to capital” [but there is no longer, there never was just capital, nor capitalism in the singular but capitalisms plural — whether State or private, real or symbolic, always linked to spectral forces — or rather capitalizations whose antagonisms are irreducible.] (p. 59) And what might this plurality entail? To take an admittedly extreme example, perhaps we could acknowledge that even the malign character of capitalism cannot be presumed. The malignancy that is its only appearance in Specters of Marx may not itself be free of contamination. If there are only capitalisms (and no essential capital or capitalism), some capitalist instances may be quite acceptable and benign. And if many others are malignant, for doubtless that will also be the case, it is important to ask about the contexts and conditions that produce the evil rather than accepting it as necessary and natural (for only in relation to such a question can political possibilities come to light). It might also be possible to see certain capitalist practices and institutions (some multinational corporations, for example) as relatively ineffectual and powerless, rather than as uniformly capable of dominance and self-realization.12 We might cease to speak easily of capitalist imperialism as though empire were an aspect of capitalism’s identity (albeit one that masquerades as its history).AT: Dickens and Ormrod- No AltDickens and Ormrod offer only negative criticism and have no means to achieve their goals Ashworth 10 (Stephen, Fellow of the British Interplanetary Society, Dec 18, [astronist.demon.co.uk/space-age/essays/Sociology1.html] AD: 6-30-11, jam)Not yet, anyway. Dickens and Ormrod are not opposed in principle to all space exploration and development. Their concluding section suggests a lukewarm endorsement of space humanisation (the use of satellites for human purposes) provided that it “could emphasise collective responsibilities on Earth and try to ensure that any gains made through space exploration were spread throughout to improve the lot of the dispossessed on Earth” (p.190). They then toy, though inconclusively, with the idea of “spreading a socialist or communist society throughout the whole of nearby outer space”. But for them any kind of space development is in no sense a priority. On the contrary, their emphasis throughout this book is on analysing and criticising the present-day liberal democratic market capitalist social and economic system (“capitalism”) which, originating in Europe some half a millennium ago, has now spread worldwide via colonisation and via links of global warfare, trade, communications, politics and tourism. Here another asymmetry with the pro-space movement is apparent. When Zubrin wants to go to Mars, he describes in detail how he proposes to achieve this. The same is true of O’Neill in regard to space colonies, Schrunk et al. in regard to the Moon, Ashford in regard to space tourism, Bond, Martin et al. in regard to Barnard’s Star, and so on. One may disagree with the goals or the means, but one is left in no doubt as to what they actually are. Cosmic Society, by contrast, is based on “critical realism” (p.41-42), which in practice means it focuses overwhelmingly on destructive criticism, not on constructive proposals. The political project which Dickens and Ormrod promote in this book is merely to prevent capitalist expansion into space, while the means of achieving this negative goal are only hinted at in vague terms. In chapter 1, abstract cosmologies which only privileged elites can understand are judged to be “a bad thing” and “undesirable” (p.45, 48). But a theory of the universe which everyone in the lay public can feel at home with and yet which is also true to the mathematical complexities of cosmological reality is not offered, and neither do our authors even express a view as to whether such a theory is possible. AT: Dickens and Ormrod- No AltDickens and Ormrod oversimplify all space exploration as being driven by large corporations and the military industrial complex- they vaguely assert the existence of alternatives while offering no roadmap to actual changeAshworth 10 (Stephen, Fellow of the British Interplanetary Society, Dec 18, [astronist.demon.co.uk/space-age/essays/Sociology1.html] AD: 6-30-11, jam)Chapter 3 discusses military involvement in space. It concludes: “War is no longer an occasional disturbance to an otherwise peaceful society. Rather, it has been made a permanent feature of the social order.” (p.100) This is an astonishing conclusion. Wars have continued throughout history. One of the most remarkable features about global society since 1945 is that direct military conflicts between great powers have stopped. This is due, not to any outbreak of sanity, but to several material factors acting in concert: the increasing destructiveness of modern weapons, particularly nuclear weapons, the increasing vulnerability of society to disruption, increasing global trade links, the rise of the mass media and public opinion, and increasing risk-aversion, which combine to reduce the attractiveness of war as a means of achieving policy goals. Obviously wars have continued, but since 1945 they have been marginalised in the poorer regions of the world. These regions are progressively shrinking as previously poor countries industrialise and integrate into the global economy. This remarkable situation is not mentioned. Apparently, the link between capitalist development and increasing public security is not in line with the polemical purpose of this book, and therefore cannot be discussed. Like much present-day climate science, the facts are being spun to suit the desired policy outcome. Dickens and Ormrod have such a strong focus on selecting only those arguments which fit the Marxist-Leninist worldview that they have completely failed to notice the power struggle over the future of manned spaceflight which is so prominent at present. While big aerospace companies lobby for ambitious government exploration programmes which provide jobs at public expense but generate no profits, it is maverick entrepreneurs, some extremely rich but most not wealthy at all, who are pushing for the development of marketable services such as space tourism, and eventually space settlement. One would have expected this conflict to have attracted the attention of commentators who have “a concern throughout with social power” (p.1). But with the vested interests pushing for socialist-style programmes while the capitalists set up small companies to challenge the status quo, often unsuccessfully, the reality is too complex to illustrate the simplistic ideology of class struggle, and must therefore be ignored. Offering blatantly false assertions in order to reinforce the ideological message is not beyond these authors, when they approvingly report Amitai Etzioni’s criticism of the space race published in 1964. One of the claims made for the Apollo programme and for planetary exploration, according to Etzioni, “was that the structure of the universe itself would be better understood by space travel, but this too turned out to be a chimera, a money-making device” (p.188-189). In reality, while not making conspicuous amounts of money, lunar and planetary research via the Apollo landings and unmanned probes has led to a revolution in understanding of the Solar System, including a resolution of the long-standing mystery of the origin of the Moon. Etzioni, too, so far as can be judged from the report in Cosmic Society, is strong on the assertion that there are better alternatives to the conventional wisdom, but painfully shy about revealing what those alternatives might actually be. AT: Dickens and Ormrod-Alt = TotoTheir lack of a positive alternative means that their movement against capitalism will result in violent revolution and totalitarianismAshworth 10 (Stephen, Fellow of the British Interplanetary Society, Dec 18, [astronist.demon.co.uk/space-age/essays/Sociology1.html] AD: 6-30-11, jam)In chapter 2 the mechanisms of “the contemporary global capitalist society” are described; our authors clearly disapprove of the existing social and economic arrangements but have nothing to offer in their place beyond vague hints of “alternative forms of consciousness” (p.77). They conclude: “the humanization of outer space is a product of economic and social crisis and [...] a means of reasserting hegemonic authority” (p.77). “Space technology itself plays a central role in disseminating a hegemonic Western culture [...]. There is, however, always hope for resistance, and for the moment it is to organic intellectuals within the Global Network and similar organizations that we must look for critical new visions of our relationship with the universe.” (p.78) In other words, they feel free to condemn Western democratic capitalism for its supposed failings and express hope, not for its correction or improvement through the institutions which exist for that purpose, but rather for “resistance” as if it were some inflexible tyranny like that of Nazi Germany, even though they have only the haziest ideas whether a better alternative might exist or what it might look like. To that end, the repeated use of terms like “crisis” and “class hegemony” set up an implication that all this capitalist imperialism must be completely swept away and replaced with a socialist utopia. This is finally made explicit, towards the end of the book, when reporting with approval the views of authors who believe that “a great mass of people subordinated to global capital and global power” constitute “a powerful counter-force resisting and eventually overcoming capitalist imperialism” (p.181-182). This is a bold step to take, because the historically aware reader (or even a sociologist in the dictionary sense of the term) will immediately object, firstly, that capitalism has proved itself by far the most efficient economic system yet seen, having liberated the populations of the developed world from hunger, disease and ignorance, and secondly, that violent revolutions have in the past installed totalitarian dictatorships. Mention of Marx, Lenin and Luxemburg as examples to follow (p.182) hardly instils confidence. These obvious objections are not addressed in the book. AT: Dickens and Ormrod- Alt = TyrannyNo alternative to U.S space dominance – more repressive structures would replace itAshworth 10 (Stephen, Fellow of the British Interplanetary Society, Dec 18, [astronist.demon.co.uk/space-age/essays/Sociology1.html] AD: 6-30-11, jam)In general it is therefore clear what Dickens and Ormrod wish to do away with, but impossible to say, beyond vague hints and allusions, what they want to see appear in their place. A socialist society? A police state? A Marxist-Leninist dictatorship? Note their chilling comment on modern society “in which there is simply not enough repression” (p.74) – whether or not the authors intended it as such, to the reader this suggests a clear enough invitation for the secret police to move in and start arresting those guilty of thought crimes! Any validity their criticisms of present-day society may possess is completely lost as a result of this structural weakness. So, granted: “The United States government is by far the dominant military force in outer space. And its aim in militarizing outer space is to achieve what the US Joint Chiefs of Staff call ‘full-spectrum domination’, one in which the US government actively enforces a monopoly over outer space as well as air, land and sea.” (p.94) Fine. A clear enough statement of fact. So why the disapproving tone, why the constant insinuation that this is some terrible tyranny consolidating its power over the world? How else would you enforce world security? And supposing that it does represent an intolerable tyranny: what are you proposing to do about it? What alternative might be possible, what is the roadmap towards realising that alternative (space people love roadmaps) – and how might it be policed? Would it promote social peace and prosperity if the military domination of one country were replaced by the military domination of an international bureaucracy such as the United Nations, or by a balance between a number of competing superpowers, as in the 1960s? Would its achievement starting from our present position be remotely practical? Is a peaceful world with no military domination at all conceivable? These questions are not addressed. Instead, we get brief mentions of “resistance”, one form of which is “localised social movements now being made international in scope” such as the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space (p.72, 100). The Joint Chiefs of Staff must be quaking in their boots. Could socialism – the traditional antithesis to capitalism – possibly be the answer? Though neither it nor communism (nor indeed alternative consciousness) were deemed important enough to make it into the index (while capitalism and its “see also” entries account for 24 lines of page references), there is a mention on page 6 of “socialist space programmes” which, we are told, the authors do not wish to ignore. Despite that reassurance, little more is heard about them, and the authors’ views on the Soviet space programme remain tantalisingly hidden – apart from the fact that it “emerged from a history of Russian cosmism, which saw space exploration as central to the progressive future of the Soviet people” (p.79-80). But the preoccupation here, the reader is told, is with “capitalist space development”, exploring “the relationship between the humanization of outer space and the central dynamics of capitalism rooted in inequality and alienation” (p.6). Crucially, whether any other social dynamics are possible is another question that is not addressed, leaving a vague implication that of course there must be a better alternative, but it is either so obvious as not to require any specific mention, or so obscure that nobody has the slightest idea what it might be. This technique of argument by loaded implication is a general stylistic feature of Cosmic Society. AT: Dickens and Ormrod- Psychoanalysis BadTheir armchair psychoanalysis of our authors is similar to the totalitarian abuse of psychiatry- “if you disagree with us, you must be mentally ill!”Ashworth 10 (Stephen, Fellow of the British Interplanetary Society, Dec 18, [astronist.demon.co.uk/space-age/essays/Sociology1.html] AD: 6-30-11, jam)But the most egregious example of mendacious argument in Cosmic Society concerns the allegation of “cosmic narcissism”, which pro-space advocates, we are told, demonstrate in an extreme form: “These activists are pursuing fantasies about exploring and developing space which manifest themes from the infant’s experience of self during the stage of primary narcissism” (p.74). This is a “kind of personality disorder” first outlined by Freud (p.73). “The promise of power over the whole universe [sic] is therefore the latest stage in the escalation of the narcissistic personality. [...] Space travel and possible occupation of other planets further inflate people’s sense of omnipotence” (p.75). And an earlier author “examines how in Western societies people experience the world (or indeed the universe) through the ‘having’ mode, whereby individuals cannot simply appreciate the things around them, but must own and consume them” (p.75). But “narcissistic relationships with external nature are intrinsically unsatisfying. Objectifying nature and the cosmos does not actually empower the self, but rather enslaves it.” (p.76) What we have here, issued in measured academic cadences, is nothing short of outrageous. That university academics could sink so low is a scandal. Dickens and Ormrod (and their numerous sociological predecessors listed on p.73) are saying in effect: you disagree with us, therefore you must be suffering from a “personality disorder”! This charge inevitably links them with the abuses of the Soviet system (see for example Sidney Bloch and Peter Reddaway, Psychiatric Terror: How Soviet Psychiatry Is Used to Suppress Dissent, Basic Books, 1977). Consider, firstly, the lop-sidedness of the argument. Space advocates are suffering from infantile fantasies, a disorder characterised by Freud as “adult narcissism”? Well and good: then what about people who suffer infantile fantasies of developing “alternative forms of consciousness” (p.77)? What about people who talk earnestly about the “crises of capitalism”, with approving references to Marx, Engels and Lenin, and to authors who talk glibly of “overthrowing the social order” (p.182), more than a decade after the final collapse of the Soviet bloc? Who are so intolerant of dissent and so desperate to be right that their opponents have to be denigrated as psychiatric nutcases? How exactly did Freud characterise their psychological syndrome? “Adult Marxissism”? The implication is silently insinuated that by producing such armchair psychoanalysis our sociologists – themselves claiming to be oracles of pure adult reason untainted by infantile fantasies – have wisely trumped anything a space activist could possibly say on the matter. After all, the sociologists clearly know what will make other people happy – what will “empower” and what “enslaves” the self (p.76) – better than those people know themselves! But these totalitarian implications cannot be stated, for to do so would at once expose them as evident nonsense. AT: Dickens and Ormrod-Psychoanalysis BadDickens and Ormrod’s alternative is far more fantastical than plans for space colonization- they divert attention from the utopian nature of their goals by using psychoanalysis to attack space advocates Ashworth 10 (Stephen, Fellow of the British Interplanetary Society, Dec 18, [astronist.demon.co.uk/space-age/essays/Sociology1.html] AD: 6-30-11, jam)Constant references to “accumulation [of capital] by dispossession” and a total lack of references to accumulation by the creation of new wealth sneak in the misinformation that we live in a zero-sum society in which capitalism can only function by dispossessing vulnerable people of what is rightfully theirs. Certainly, there are new resources in space, but they can only ever be claimed by the already powerful (p.59-61). The broad mass of people benefit only to the extent that they are even further oppressed under the intensified sway of the ruling class, with ultimately their “every move being watched and targeted” from space (p.100). And the desired implication is unashamedly blatant when the plans of space advocates – often accompanied by detailed calculations and designs, and well supported by the historical precedent of globalisation – are dismissed as “daydreaming” and “fantasies” (p.141; 74, 190), while the authors’ own preferred future – which they are only able to allude to in the vaguest possible terms and which has highly discouraging historical precedents – is a “hope” and an “aim” (p.78; 190) towards which “alliances” are “forged” (p.189, 190). Thus the relative plausibility of these two future scenarios is reversed, not by reasoned argument, but by the choice of loaded words to describe them. Similarly, the charge that space advocates are indulging in “escapism” is rich indeed, coming from authors who insinuate on every page that all the desperately difficult problems of world development, wealth distribution and security will magically disappear after the installation of “alternative forms of consciousness” and “popular control”. In reality, dreams of escaping into a socially just society which does not suffer from these problems are far more fantastic than the plans of would-be space colonists, which deal with the world as it is, not as an unattainable utopia. ***IMPACT ANSWERS***AT: Cap Turns CaseTechnological solutions aren’t supposed to be permanent, but capitalism creates innovation to solve future problems as wellAshworth 10 (Stephen, Fellow of the British Interplanetary Society, Dec 18, [astronist.demon.co.uk/space-age/essays/Sociology1.html] AD: 6-30-11, jam)The word “fix” is another favourite in Cosmic Society. A “fix” is a botch-up job: a mere “sticking-plaster”, a temporary, unstable solution to some social or economic problem (p.49-78, 113). The impression created is that such a solution is of no value because it merely creates new problems which then have to be solved in their turn – an example given is that the use of satellites has given rise to dangerous space junk (p.66-67, 153-154). Here again, the use of a misleading word is being offered as a substitute for argument, because the argument by itself would be too weak for the authors’ polemical purpose, and would attract tiresome counter-arguments. Obviously, one would not necessarily expect technological solutions to social or economic problems to be permanent, if they were introduced during a period of rapid technological change such as the one we are living in now. A long-established spacefaring civilisation would clearly routinely clear up its space junk or avoid creating any in the first place, but in order for us to progress to that stage we first have to see the problem and experience sufficient motivation to work out a solution appropriate to our current institutional and technological level. Later on we may find that our solution, that “temporary fix”, breaks down, and will feel the need to move on to the next higher level of solution. But because our authors have no interest in the likely end-point of this iteration, they therefore have no patience with the painstaking, step by step, evolutionary means which are the only ones through which it can be approached, and so those means must be denigrated as a “fix”. Cap Sustainable Capitalism is sustainable – empirics prove and markets adaptAshworth 10 (Stephen, Fellow of the British Interplanetary Society, Dec 18, [astronist.demon.co.uk/space-age/essays/Sociology1.html] AD: 6-30-11, jam)For example, the authors are happy to talk about the crises and contradictions which sadly afflict capitalism and imperialism (e.g. p.63, 67, 77, 179), but are silent on the crises and contradictions of, say, socialism (which on p.6 was implicitly linked with the Soviet Union). Since what they call capitalism is alive and well (and in fact so dynamic that it has created all the problems lamented in this book), while countries founded on socialist principles have either collapsed (the Soviet Union) or abandoned them for capitalist ones (China, Eastern Europe), perhaps they thought the crises of capitalism were so little-known that they would be of more interest? Meanwhile, the question whether a social system can exist which is not subject to what “critical realists” call crises and contradictions is again left unspoken (argument by implication). The reader is clearly being invited to believe that there is, even though our authors cannot tell them anything more about it, for it is purely hypothetical. One tantalising hint appears during a discussion of science fiction, in which sometimes “Travel into outer space therefore represents an opportunity to start a socially just, perhaps even socialist, society” (p.159). Would such a utopian state emulate socialist societies on Earth – with a secret police, forced labour camps for dissidents, shortages of consumer products, and compulsory political meetings? Dickens and Ormrod’s otherwise incisive analysis fails to address this highly relevant question. A variation of this stylistic technique is a deliberately misleading choice of words. Continuing with the example just given, if capitalism suffers repeated crises, or if it contains internal contradictions, how can it have survived to the present day in such rude health? The answer seems to be that when Dickens and Ormrod (basing their discussion on Marx and Engels, p.50) use the word “crisis”, they actually mean no more than change, and when they speak of capitalism having “contradictions”, they mean no more than that our economic system is subject to the sorts of pressures which drive change. Thus: “The global market is proving increasingly unable to contain the many contradictions of capitalism” (p.179) actually means: the global market is developing in response to pressures for change. While the use of words such as “crisis” and “contradiction” may not help in elucidating economics, it does surround the economic system with a superficial aura of unsustainability and illegitimacy, which perfectly suits the authors’ polemical purpose. Thus an adaptable system which is responsive to changing circumstances is made to sound as if it were on the brink of collapse, without the inconvenience of actually having to produce arguments in support of such a dubious hypothesis. Similarly, slipping in the term “late capitalism” (meaning modern democratic capitalism, p.127) supplies the implication that the authors know how soon capitalism will be superseded by a different economic system, when in reality clearly they do not. Scarcity arguments and biased and flawedJerry Taylor, Cato Natural Resource Studies Director, 02[“Sustainable Development: A Dubious Solution in Search of a Problem,” August 26, ]If resources are growing more abundant while the concentration of pollutants in air sheds and watersheds continues to decline, how can we explain the proliferation of various stylized sustainability indices that point to a deterioration of the planet’s resource base? There are five common weaknesses with such reports. First, they are almost always built upon a selective but fundamentally arbitrary or irrelevant set of indicators. Second, they are often built not upon actual resource data but upon hypotheses or theories about resource health that do not comport with the data or that rest upon highly suspect data fundamentally inconsistent with the larger data sets available to analysts. Third, they ignore the well-documented propensity of capitalist societies to create and invent new resources when old resources become relatively more scarce (that is, they assume that resources are fixed and finite when they are not). Fourth, they are highly aggregated and often subjective calculations of data sets that lack common denominators. Finally, they are frequently heavily biased by ideological assumptions about politics and government action. Accordingly, they provide little help to policy analysts or political leaders. Democracy Checks Negative Impacts of CapDemocracy checks the harms of capitalism Ashworth 10 (Stephen, Fellow of the British Interplanetary Society, Dec 18, [astronist.demon.co.uk/space-age/essays/Sociology1.html] AD: 6-30-11, jam)The constant use of the word “capitalism” itself, unqualified by any adjective such as “democratic” or “liberal”, misleads readers by inciting them to fall into line with the authors’ assumption that the system is completely unregulated by governments answerable to a popular electorate. The authors can then offer “popular control” as a better alternative (p.123) without having to address difficult questions about the degree of popular control already in place, the practical limits of such control, or about where the optimum social balance between legislation and a free-market capitalist economy might lie. Obviously, in reality the capitalist system is highly regulated by governments. Space Cap Good: PovertyEconomic growth due to space development will decrease povertyAshworth 10 (Stephen, academic publishing@Oxford, December 18, , accessed: 2 July 2011, JT)Because of the arithmetic realities of the multiplication of capital, if an economy is growing, the gap between the richest and poorest members of society must inevitably increase as the average per-capita wealth increases. This will certainly be the case in a society engaged in interplanetary growth. But poor as well as rich have benefited from historically recent revolutions in terrestrial food production, transport, communications, medicine, military technologies and so on. In other words, while social inequalities widen in a growing economy, all levels of society enjoy some benefit, because its total available wealth is increasing faster than the personal wealth of its richest members. This is a necessary outcome of sustainable growth because of the concomitant demands of a growing economy for a more highly educated and motivated workforce in order to function at a higher technological level, and for growing mass markets of consumers with increasing discretionary spending powers. Space Cap Good: WarSociety is ungovernable. This means that wars and conflicts are inevitable. The interplanetary expansion of capitalism is key to avoiding escalation.Ashworth 10 (Stephen, academic publishing@Oxford, December 18, , accessed: 2 July 2011, JT)Ultimately the jump to interplanetary status is necessary, not only for the long-term growth of civilisation, but also for its long-term survival. This latter point follows from the fact that society is fundamentally ungovernable and its future development therefore unpredictable. This is a basic concept of cybernetics: a complex system cannot be fully controlled by a less complex one, for example, by a subsystem of itself such as a government. Thus wars or other destructive expressions of internal conflict cannot be ruled out, and long-term stability therefore requires an overall society spread out over a volume of space which is large in relation to the transport technologies available. In this scenario, competing centres of power are sufficiently widely spaced as to be capable of only weak interaction with one another. This condition is satisfied by pre-industrial societies on one planet, but industrial societies with planet-wide transport and communications need to be spread out on an interplanetary scale. It also follows from the fact that planetary environments are ungovernable (though proponents of terraforming would disagree, they presuppose a spacefaring civilisation in any case). In the face of environmental change, pre-industrial societies on one planet have survival prospects no better than those of any other land-dwelling species. An industrial society on one planet may imagine that it can control its environment (as was widely believed on Earth during the climate mania), but in practice this is questionable. It must be clear that a society which houses a large fraction of its population, food production, industrial activity and so on in artificial protective structures spread widely throughout the Solar System has achieved a vastly greater level of security and long-term sustainability than one ensconced on a single planet alone and dependent upon the stability of the natural environmental conditions found there. AT: Space Resources LimitedResources in the solar system are finite, but it will be millions of years before they start to be depleted and by then society will have reformed entirelyAshworth 10 (Stephen, academic publishing@Oxford, December 18, , accessed: 2 July 2011, JT)Because of astronomical realities, civilisation in any one planetary system must inevitably arrive at a zero-growth society in terms of its flows of material and energy resources. The scope for economic growth through software and nanotech development, leading to further gains in information processing power and in the efficiency of material processes, is not so sharply limited. Clearly this kind of growth can continue long after a planetary system has been fully populated, but perhaps in the long run, after some thousands of years, growth here too may trend towards zero. The ultimate carrying capacity of the asteroid belt has been estimated in the region of at least 10 million billion people at the current average level of per-capita energy consumption (John S. Lewis, Mining the Sky, Addison-Wesley, 1996, p.196). For the Solar System as a whole, larger populations are conceivable, depending on what assumptions one starts from. Human civilisation thus has an opportunity for considerable further growth in the Solar System, but that growth has a material limit. Civilisation in one planetary system is effectively economically isolated from those in other systems, due to the immense distances between the stars, in which even information transmitted at the speed of light takes from years to millennia or even longer to be received. The nature of an interplanetary civilisation, its institutions and cultural norms, are impossible to predict at this early stage. So we can say that the society which will one day face the need to change from a capitalist society to a zero-growth society will be quite different from our own. The challenge that we face here and now is a different one, that of ramping down material growth on Earth at the same time as ramping it up in space. This can be done without requiring an overhaul of the economic system, because while material growth on Earth is slowing, growth in terms of product efficiency and information processing may Cap Good: GeneralFree market capitalism is vital to preventing extinction and ensuring equality and value to life – also solves disease and povertyRockwell ‘02(Llewellyn H., President of the Mises Institute, The Free Market, “Why They Attack Capitalism”, Volume 20, Number 10, October, )If you think about it, this hysteria is astonishing, even terrifying. The market economy has created unfathomable prosperity and, decade by decade, for centuries and centuries, miraculous feats of innovation, production, distribution, and social coordination. To the free market, we owe all material prosperity, all our leisure time, our health and longevity, our huge and growing population, nearly everything we call life itself. Capitalism and capitalism alone has rescued the human race from degrading poverty, rampant sickness, and early death. In the absence of the capitalist economy, and all its underlying institutions, the world’s population would, over time, shrink to a fraction of its current size, in a holocaust of unimaginable scale, and whatever remained of the human race would be systematically reduced to subsistence, eating only what can be hunted or gathered. And this is only to mention its economic benefits. Capitalism is also an expression of freedom. It is not so much a social system but the de facto result in a society where individual rights are respected, where businesses, families, and every form of association are permitted to flourish in the absence of coercion, theft, war, and aggression. Capitalism protects the weak against the strong, granting choice and opportunity to the masses who once had no choice but to live in a state of dependency on the politically connected and their enforcers. The high value placed on women, children, the disabled, and the aged— unknown in the ancient world—owes so much to capitalism’s productivity and distribution of power. Must we compare the record of capitalism with that of the state, which, looking at the sweep of this past century alone, has killed hundreds of millions of people in wars, famines, camps, and deliberate starvation campaigns? And the record of central planning of the type now being urged on American enterprise is perfectly abysmal. Cap Good: GeneralCapitalism is key to reduce poverty and promote civil rights and growthBast 1 (Joseph, pres of Heartland Institute, February 1, , accessed: 1 July 2011, JT)Recent changes around the world really have exposed the fallacies of some ideas and affirmed others. Free enterprise has replaced socialism as the economic model for nations pursuing peace, freedom, and prosperity. The so-called "Third Way" popular in European politics is essentially capitalism clothed with socialist or populist rhetoric, making it a good slogan for winning elections though not, apparently, for governing. President Clinton's admission in 1994 that "the era of big government is over," while hardly sincere, was accurate. Big government no longer captures the imagination of the nation's best and brightest, or even of most plain folk. A Gallup poll conducted in November 2000 found that 65 percent felt "big government" was the biggest problem facing the nation. Here in the U.S., poverty recently fell to its lowest level in the nation's recorded history, this at a time when welfare reform has slashed welfare rolls nationwide by 50 percent. An annual study of 161 countries, published by The Heritage Foundation and the Wall Street Journal, proves that a country's civil rights record and level of prosperity depend largely on how free their economies are from government regulation and interventions. This is the kind of "natural experiment" that social scientists rely on to test their theories, and there's no debate as to who was right. The passage of time has revealed the truth about some issues that were fiercely debated the last time you checked in, such as whether or not economic liberties must be protected in order to secure civil liberties (the answer is yes), and whether sustained economic growth and prosperity are possible without private property rights and markets (nope). It could even be said that, 200 years after Adam Smith said the way to prosperity is to limit government power and allow markets to work, we've finally reached a stage in history where all but the willfully blind have to admit he was right all along. Capitalism is key to growth, innovation, lowering the death rate, and freedomRockwell 3 (Llewellyn, pres of Ludwig von Mises Institute, March 12, , accessed: 1 July 2011, JT)Let us never underestimate the social benefits that flow from this seemingly technical mechanism. The market economy has created unfathomable prosperity and, decade by decade, century by century, miraculous feats of innovation, production, distribution, and social coordination. To the free market, we owe all material prosperity, all leisure time, our health and longevity, our huge and growing population, nearly everything we call life itself. Capitalism and capitalism alone has rescued the human race from degrading poverty, rampant sickness, and early death. In the absence of the capitalist economy and all its underlying institutions, the world's population would, over time, shrink to a small fraction of its current size, with whatever was left of the human race systematically reduced to subsistence, eating only what can be hunted or gathered. The institution that is the source of the word civilization — the city — depends on trade and commerce, and cannot exist without them. And this is only to mention the economic benefits of capitalism. It is also an expression of freedom. It is not so much a social system but the natural result of a society wherein individual freedom is respected, and where businesses, families, and every form of association are permitted to flourish in the absence of coercion, looting, and war. Capitalism protects the weak from the strong, granting choice and opportunity to the masses, who once had no choice but to live in a state of dependency on the politically connected and their enforcers. Cap Good: GeneralEven if capitalism has flaws, it’s better than the alternativeBoaz 8 (David, exec VP of CATO, October 15, , accessed: 29 June 2011, JT)Communism’s failure involved Stalin’s terror-famine in Ukraine, the Gulag, the deportation of the Kulaks, the Katyn Forest massacre, Mao’s Cultural Revolution, Che Guevara’s executions in Havana, the flight of the boat people from Vietnam, Pol Pot’s mass slaughter — a total death toll of 94 million people, according to the Black Book of Communism. Prominent American leftists — from Lillian Hellman and Dalton Trumbo and lots of other writers to Alger Hiss of the State Department and FDR speechwriter Michael Straight, who became the publisher of The New Republic – were members of the party that did these things. And that party had total control in the countries that it ruled. There were no opposition parties, no filibusters, no election-related maneuverings that prevented the party in power from getting what it wanted. What the Communist Party wanted, it got. Communism in practice was communist theory made real. In the United States, on the other hand, economic and political outcomes are always the result of jockeying between parties and interest groups. So even if Ronald Reagan and his advisers wanted to give Americans “unregulated capitalism,” they had to deal with Tip O’Neill and the Democrats, and with critics in the media, and with many other players. As these forces played out, in the late 1970s and early 1980s some deregulation did occur, along with some tax-cutting. And indeed there was some financial deregulation in the Clinton years as well. And what is the ”failure,” as Meyerson puts it, of this semi-deregulated capitalism? Does it involve mass starvation? Does it involve terror-famines? Does it involve millions of deaths? No, so far it involves a sharp decline in the stock market from record levels. Taking 1980 as the starting point for Meyerson’s nightmare vision of “unregulated capitalism,” here’s what has happened to the S&P 500. It’s had some dips, but it still reflects vast wealth creation, and vast increases in the assets of our IRAs and 401(k)s. The “failure” of capitalism and the failure of communism are not morally equivalent, and Meyerson should be embarrassed to even imply such a comparison. Cap Good: GeneralCapitalism is key to preserving freedom and preventing totalitarianism and mass starvationRockwell 8 (Llewellyn, jr pres Ludwig Von Mises Institute, May 17, , accessed: 29 June 2011, JT)All of history has been defined by the struggle for food. And yet that struggle has been abolished, not just for the rich but for everyone living in developed economies. The ancients, peering into this scene, might have assumed it to be Elysium. Medieval man conjured up such scenes only in visions of Utopia. Even in the late 19th century, the most gilded palace of the richest industrialist required a vast staff and immense trouble to come anywhere near approximating it. We owe this scene to capitalism. To put it differently, we owe this scene to centuries of capital accumulation at the hands of free people who have put capital to work on behalf of economic innovations, at once competing with others for profit and cooperating with millions upon millions of people in an ever-expanding global network of the division of labor. The savings, investments, risks, and work of hundreds of years and uncountable numbers of free people have gone into making this scene possible, thanks to the ever-remarkable capacity for a society developing under conditions of liberty to achieve the highest aspirations of the society's members. And yet, sitting on the other side of the table are well-educated people who imagine that the way to end the world's woes is through socialism. Now, people's definitions of socialism differ, and these persons would probably be quick to say that they do not mean the Soviet Union or anything like that. That was socialism in name only, I would be told. And yet, if socialism does mean anything at all today, it imagines that there can be some social improvement resulting from the political movement to take capital out of private hands and put it into the hands of the state. Other tendencies of socialism include the desire to see labor organized along class lines and given some sort of coercive power over how their employers' property is used. It might be as simple as the desire to put a cap on the salaries of CEOs, or it could be as extreme as the desire to abolish all private property, money, and even marriage. Whatever the specifics of the case in question, socialism always means overriding the free decisions of individuals and replacing that capacity for decision making with an overarching plan by the state. Taken far enough, this mode of thought won't just spell an end to opulent lunches. It will mean the end of what we all know as civilization itself. It would plunge us back to a primitive state of existence, living off hunting and gathering in a world with little art, music, leisure, or charity. Nor is any form of socialism capable of providing for the needs of the world's six billion people, so the population would shrink dramatically and quickly and in a manner that would make every human horror ever known seem mild by comparison. Nor is it possible to divorce socialism from totalitarianism, because if you are serious about ending private ownership of the means of production, you have to be serious about ending freedom and creativity too. You will have to make the whole of society, or what is left of it, into a prison. In short, the wish for socialism is a wish for unparalleled human evil. If we really understood this, no one would express casual support for it in polite company. It would be like saying, you know, there is really something to be said for malaria and typhoid and dropping atom bombs on millions of innocents. Cap Good: CompetitivenessCapitalism is key to American competitivenessTofte 4 (Kirk, manager of BWIA Private Investment Fund, August 20, , accessed: 1 July 2011, JT)The author uses his book to argue convincingly that our nation’s wealth has come from one source and one source alone – its adherence to the principles of the free enterprise system. But DiLorenzo’s work is not a boring polemic about economic theory. Because he uses the history of the United States to make his points, his illustrative stories are always interesting and often very entertaining. The first use of this narrative technique by DiLorenzo may also be the best example of its effectiveness. It comes in the third chapter, How Capitalism Saved the Pilgrims. The party first charged with the settling of America by England, the Virginia Company, sent a total of 604 settlers to the Tidewater region around Jamestown over a two-year period beginning in 1607. These pioneers found a moderate climate, rich soil, plentiful game and an abundance of seafood. Yet within a few months of their arrivals in the New World, 526 of the original 644 settlers were dead due to starvation or disease. Why? The Virginia Company had made an investment in these settlers by giving them free passage to America. They, in turn, were to compensate the Virginia Company for seven years through their labor as indentured servants. But since it would take seven years before their labor would benefit them directly, the group became indolent to the point of risking their own lives by not performing the agricultural tasks required of them. In other words, the imposition of an essentially communal ownership of land and property for seven years by the Virginia Company caused their settlement efforts to fail miserably. In 1611 the British government amended the system to allow each man to own three acres of his own land and work for no more than one month a year to make his contribution to the colony. It was from this point onward that America began to grow mightily. In chapter after chapter DiLorenzo relates stories of how the American people used capitalism, laissez-faire economics and the free enterprise system to overcome most of the obstacles they faced throughout their history. The author points out, for example, that the American Revolution was primarily a revolt against the British economic system, mercantilism, which was limiting the freedom of the colonists to benefit from the free enterprise system that had taken root in America. During the constitutional period there was an internal political struggle within the country between those who favored an "American mercantilism" (Federalists such as Alexander Hamilton and John Adams) and those who fought against government interference in the economy (Republicans like Thomas Jefferson and James Madison). Fortunately for the history of our country, the Republicans emerged victorious in the struggle and dominated the federal government for almost fifty years after the election of 1800. America’s economic freedom, however, has been steadily eroded by government intervention since the first half of the nineteenth century. DiLorenzo says it this way, "any discussion of economic freedom must consider degrees of freedom, for neither the United States nor any other nation has ever had an economy that was generally free from government interference – that is, free of taxes and regulations." In Chapter Seven of his book, The Truth About "Robber Barons," DiLorenzo makes an important and very useful distinction. He contrasts ‘market entrepreneurs’ with ‘political entrepreneurs.’ The former succeeds by always striving to please his customers who can hire or fire him at a moment’s notice. The latter "succeeds primarily by influencing government to subsidize his business or industry, or to enact legislation that harms his competitors." It is in this sense alone that the United States has a "mixed economy" today. Our wealth has primarily been created by market entrepreneurs such as James J. Hill, John Rockefeller, Bill Gates and most small business owners. It is diminished currently by political entrepreneurs such as subsidized farmers and defense contractors. Finally, a good portion of our wealth has been to a great extent squandered by government run enterprises. Cap Good: CompetitivenessPublically run corporations are not subject to profit evaluation making them poorly run and uncompetitiveRockwell 2 (Llewellyn, jr pres Ludwig Von Mises Institute, February 7, , accessed: 30 June 2011, JT)What it does not illustrate is the downside of the market economy, which is about both profits and losses, thank goodness. That the market permits and accommodates business failure is a virtue of the capitalist economy, one not found in the public sector. The free market, when it's not being distorted by government intervention, includes mechanisms that punish firms that cook the books and exaggerate their productive power. Wild overvaluations do not last in the private sector, whereas government failures can go on for decades. Imagine if government agencies were privately owned and traded, and their bonds included a default premium. Their collapse would make Enron look like slow motion. How long would you hold on to your HUD stock, for example? Like all government agencies, its books have been in complete disorder for decades. As bad as the failure of Enron is, at least we know that it failed. The market was in a position to make a judgment about its operations. We owe this to the fact that private businesses, whether or not their stocks trade, are accountable to their customers and to financial realities. Congress can storm around and decry the evils of Enron's management, but the only reason anyone knows anything about it is that Enron had to function in a free market — unlike Congress. We can regret the collapse while remembering that it is far better that unviable operations fail than survive. In socialist economies and in the public sector generally, unprofitable industries not only survive; they are never exposed as unprofitable in the first place. The scandal of Enron is infinitesimal compared to institutions like Amtrack, the Post Office, or the Department of Defense, which can blow through billions and trillions without providing adequate service. They get away with it only because they can use coercion instead of persuasion to profit from the rest of us. It's apparently true that Enron fudged its books, invented profits that didn't exist, and hid losses by creating far-flung subsidiaries. But such shenanigans can't be compared to the nonsense at the federal level, where there is no such thing as profit and loss, and where it takes an expert to discover basics such as how much the budget is growing relative to revenue. If Enron's finances were tainted by corruption, every line in the federal budget represents a special interest seeking something for nothing. Cap Good: CompetitivenessCapitalism is key to failure – allowing industries to survive even when they are failing destroys competitivenessRockwell 2k (Llewellyn, jr. pres Ludwig Von Mises Institute, October 20, , accessed: 30 June 2011, JT)Let's broaden the lesson. When people think of capitalism, they think of wealth and profits. But one of the main features of the market economy is its ability to generate losses and produce business failures. And just as some envy-filled politicians can't sleep well knowing that profits are distributed unequally, others can't bear the thought of business failure. In fact, both profit and loss have social and economic merit and should be allowed to take their nature course. Agitation for laws against sudden plant closings were a staple of political rhetoric in the 1980s. We endured 70 years of bellyaching that "family farms" are being out-competed by corporate monoliths and foreign imports. Politicians still roam the land haranguing us about the catastrophic transformation of the industrial Midwest into the "rust belt." But none of these trends produce disaster, any more than the failure of an internet startup causes social convulsions. The misery is sector-specific and temporary. The market adjusts because the free economy permits people to adjust to change on the upside and downside. Immense damage can result from the attempt to stave off inevitable losses. Protectionism is the classic example. Businesses losing money attempt to shield themselves from foreign competition by keeping artificially high the prices consumers pay for goods and services. These higher prices are a form of taxation, and the protected industries are receiving the revenue. "Counter-cyclical" fiscal and monetary policies also backfire, the most famous example being the Hoover administration and the New Deal that followed, which, as Murray Rothbard showed in his classic study, actually prolonged America's Great Depression. Antitrust is another example. It is a form of regulation that comes to the defense of a marginal firm that is being out-competed by a more profitable firm. This is why nearly all antitrust cases begin with one business accusing another of malfeasance. Perhaps the best example of industries that have failed is in the public sector. The second half of the life of the Soviet economy can be seen as an elaborate effort to keep failing industries alive. And in the US, the quality and efficiency of public schools have dropped every year for many decades, and yet they are not permitted to go out of business. The same is true for all government "services," which survive only because they aren't subject to market judgement. Cap Good: DemocracyCapitalism is key to democracy – its collapse allows for autocracy to make a comebackMises 80 (Ludwig Von, econ@NYU, Economic Freedom and Interventionism, ch. 1, , accessed: 29 June 2011, JT)In the precapitalistic society the superior men knew no other method of utilizing their own superiority than to subdue the masses of inferior people. But under capitalism the more able and more gifted men can profit from their superiority only by serving to the best of their abilities the wishes and wants of the majority of less gifted men. "Precisely because they are producing for profit, the businessmen are producing for the use of the consumers." In the market economy, the consumers are supreme. Consumers determine, by their buying or abstention from buying, what should be produced, by whom and how, of what quality and in what quantity. The entrepreneurs, capitalists, and landowners who fail to satisfy in the best possible and cheapest way the most urgent of the not-yet-satisfied wishes of the consumers are forced to go out of business and forfeit their preferred position. In business offices and in laboratories the keenest minds are busy fructifying the most complex achievements of scientific research for the production of ever better implements and gadgets for people who have no inkling of the scientific theories that make the fabrication of such things possible. The bigger an enterprise is, the more it is forced to adjust its production activities to the changing whims and fancies of the masses, its masters. The fundamental principle of capitalism is mass production to supply the masses. It is the patronage of the masses that makes enterprises grow into bigness. The common man is supreme in the market economy. He is the customer "who is always right." In the political sphere representative government is the corollary of the supremacy of the consumers in the market. The officeholders depend on the voters in a way similar to that in which the entrepreneurs and investors depend on the consumers. The same historical process that substituted the capitalistic mode of production for precapitalistic methods substituted popular government — democracy — for royal absolutism and other forms of government by the few. And wherever the market economy is superseded by socialism, autocracy makes a comeback. It does not matter whether the socialist or communist despotism is camouflaged by the use of aliases such as "dictatorship of the proletariat" or "people's democracy" or "Führer (leader) principle." It always amounts to a subjection of the many to the few. It is hardly possible to misconstrue more improperly the state of affairs prevailing in the capitalistic society than by dubbing the capitalists and entrepreneurs a "ruling" class intent upon "exploiting" the masses of decent men. We do not have to raise the question as to how the men who under capitalism are businessmen would have tried to take advantage of their superior talents in any other thinkable organization of production activities. Under capitalism they are vying with one another in serving the masses of less gifted men. All their thoughts aim at perfecting the methods of supplying the consumers. Every year, every month, every week, something unheard of before appears on the market and is very soon made accessible to the many. Precisely because they are producing for profit, the businessmen are producing for the use of the consumers. Cap Good: DemocracyDemocracies prevent economic instability, genocide, and nuclear warDiamond 95 (Larry, senior fellow@Hoover Institute, December, , accessed: 5 July 2011, JT)The experience of this century offers important lessons. Countries that govern themselves in a truly democratic fashion do not go to war with one another. They do not aggress against their neighbors to aggrandize themselves or glorify their leaders. Democratic governments do not ethnically "cleanse" their own populations, and they are much less likely to face ethnic insurgency. Democracies do not sponsor terrorism against one another. They do not build weapons of mass destruction to use on or to threaten one another. Democratic countries form more reliable, open, and enduring trading partnerships. In the long run they offer better and more stable climates for investment. They are more environmentally responsible because they must answer to their own citizens, who organize to protest the destruction of their environments. They are better bets to honor international treaties since they value legal obligations and because their openness makes it much more difficult to breach agreements in secret. Precisely because, within their own borders, they respect competition, civil liberties, property rights, and the rule of law, democracies are the only reliable foundation on which a new world order of international security and prosperity can be built.Cap Good: DemocracyCapitalism provides the framework necessary for democratizationNarizny 6 (Kevin, committee on international relations,@U of Chicago, December 2, , p. 6-7, accessed: 3 July 2011, JT)How, then, is capitalism linked to democratization? Numerous scholars have addressed this question from the perspective of class conflict, focusing on the tension between the rule of capital and mass participation in politics (e.g., Moore 1966; Therborn 1977; Jessop 1978; Przeworski 1991; Rueschemeyer et al. 1992; Boix 2003). Some argue that democratic institutions deradicalize the lower classes, allowing capitalist elites to trade limited political concessions for continued structural control over the economy; others argue that capitalism facilitates the growth of civil society, an essential permissive condition for the rise of democracy. However, none suggests that capitalists themselves have an essential interest in democratization. 6In contrast, I argue that, under certain circumstances, capitalists should regard democracy not as a distasteful compromise, but rather as their best defense against an even greater threat than class conflict: the rent-seeking state. The relationship between capitalism and democratization derives from the logic of interfirm competition. In the pure form of capitalism described above, no single actor or group of actors is able to dominate any given market. For any type of product demanded, several firms will compete for customers, and several more will consider entering the market if the opportunity for profit arises. In this scenario, the state does not control the market; it simply provides a legal framework for enforcing contracts and preventing the formation of monopolies. Each firm would like the government to grant it special privileges, so that it could derive additional income from rents, but the state does not play favorites. Thus, the market remains highly competitive, and only the most efficient producers are able to remain in business. At the same time, consumers benefit from low prices. Cap Good: DemocracyCapitalism is key to democracy – its collapse allows for autocracy to make a comebackMises 80 (Ludwig Von, econ@NYU, Economic Freedom and Interventionism, ch. 1, , accessed: 29 June 2011, JT)In the precapitalistic society the superior men knew no other method of utilizing their own superiority than to subdue the masses of inferior people. But under capitalism the more able and more gifted men can profit from their superiority only by serving to the best of their abilities the wishes and wants of the majority of less gifted men. "Precisely because they are producing for profit, the businessmen are producing for the use of the consumers." In the market economy, the consumers are supreme. Consumers determine, by their buying or abstention from buying, what should be produced, by whom and how, of what quality and in what quantity. The entrepreneurs, capitalists, and landowners who fail to satisfy in the best possible and cheapest way the most urgent of the not-yet-satisfied wishes of the consumers are forced to go out of business and forfeit their preferred position. In business offices and in laboratories the keenest minds are busy fructifying the most complex achievements of scientific research for the production of ever better implements and gadgets for people who have no inkling of the scientific theories that make the fabrication of such things possible. The bigger an enterprise is, the more it is forced to adjust its production activities to the changing whims and fancies of the masses, its masters. The fundamental principle of capitalism is mass production to supply the masses. It is the patronage of the masses that makes enterprises grow into bigness. The common man is supreme in the market economy. He is the customer "who is always right." In the political sphere representative government is the corollary of the supremacy of the consumers in the market. The officeholders depend on the voters in a way similar to that in which the entrepreneurs and investors depend on the consumers. The same historical process that substituted the capitalistic mode of production for precapitalistic methods substituted popular government — democracy — for royal absolutism and other forms of government by the few. And wherever the market economy is superseded by socialism, autocracy makes a comeback. It does not matter whether the socialist or communist despotism is camouflaged by the use of aliases such as "dictatorship of the proletariat" or "people's democracy" or "Führer (leader) principle." It always amounts to a subjection of the many to the few. It is hardly possible to misconstrue more improperly the state of affairs prevailing in the capitalistic society than by dubbing the capitalists and entrepreneurs a "ruling" class intent upon "exploiting" the masses of decent men. We do not have to raise the question as to how the men who under capitalism are businessmen would have tried to take advantage of their superior talents in any other thinkable organization of production activities. Under capitalism they are vying with one another in serving the masses of less gifted men. All their thoughts aim at perfecting the methods of supplying the consumers. Every year, every month, every week, something unheard of before appears on the market and is very soon made accessible to the many. Precisely because they are producing for profit, the businessmen are producing for the use of the consumers. Cap Good: DiseaseCapitalism is key to solving for disease spreadNorberg 3 (Johan, senior fellow@CATO, In Defense of Global Capitalism, p. 154, JT)[One common objection to the market economy is that it causes people and enterprises to produce for profit, not for needs. This means, for example, pharmaceutical companies devoting huge resources to research and medicines to do with obesity, baldness, and depression, things that westerners can afford to worry about and pay for, whereas only a fraction is devoted to attempting to cure tropical diseases afflicting the poorest of the world's inhabitants, such as malaria and tuberculosis. This criticism is understandable. The unfairness exists, but capitalism is not to blame for it. Without capitalism and the lure of profit, we shouldn't imagine that everyone would have obtained cures for their illnesses. In fact, far fewer would do so than is now the case. If wealthy people in the West demand help for their problems, their resources can be used to research and eventually solve those problems, which are not necessarily trivial to the people afflicted with them. Capitalism gives companies economic incentives to help us by developing medicines and vaccines. That westerners spend money this way does not make things worse for anyone. This is not money that would otherwise have gone to researching tropical diseases—the pharmaceutical companies simply would not have had these resources otherwise. And, as free trade and the market economy promote greater prosperity in poorer countries, their needs and desires will play a larger role in dictating the purposes of research and production. It is not a problem for the Third World that more and more diseases have been made curable in the Western world. On the contrary, that is something that has proved to be a benefit, and not just because a wealthier world can devote more resources to helping the poor. In many fields, the Third World can inexpensively share in the research financed by wealthy Western custom?ers, sometimes paying nothing for it. The Merck Corporation gave free medicine to a project to combat onchocerciasis (river blindness) in 11 African states. As a result those states have now rid themselves almost completely of a parasite that formerly affected something like a million people, blinding thousands every year.22 The Monsanto Corporation allows researchers and companies free use of their technique for developing "golden rice," a strain of rice enriched with iron and beta carotene (pro-vitamin A), which could save a million people annually in the Third World who are dying of vitamin A deficiency diseases. A number of pharmaceutical companies are lowering the prices of inhibitors for HIV/AIDS in poor countries by up to 95 percent, on condition that the patents are preserved so that they can maintain full prices in wealthier countries. ]Unmitigated disease spread causes extinctionRyan 97 (Frank, fellow of The Royal College of Physicians, Virus X, p. 366, JT)How might the human race appear to such an aggressively emerging virus? That teeming, globally intrusive species, with its transcontinental air travel, massively congested cities, sexual promiscuity, and in the less affluent regions — where the virus is most likely to first emerge — a vulnerable lack of hygiene with regard to food and water supplies and hospitality to biting insects' The virus is best seen, in John Hollands excellent analogy, as a swarm of competing mutations, with each individual strain subjected to furious forces of natural selection for the strain, or strains, most likely to amplify and evolve in the new ecological habitat.3 With such a promising new opportunity in the invaded species, natural selection must eventually come to dominate viral behavior. In time the dynamics of infection will select for a more resistant human population. Such a coevolution takes rather longer in "human" time — too long, given the ease of spread within the global village. A rapidly lethal and quickly spreading virus simply would not have time to switch from aggression to coevolution. And there lies the danger. Joshua Lederbergs prediction can now be seen to be an altogether logical one. Pandemics are inevitable. Our incredibly rapid human evolution, our overwhelming global needs, the advances of our complex industrial society, all have moved the natural goalposts. The advance of society, the very science of change, has greatly augmented the potential for the emergence of a pandemic strain. It is hardly surprising that Avrion Mitchison, scientific director of Deutsches Rheuma Forschungszentrum in Berlin, asks the question: "Will we survive!” We have invaded every biome on earth and we continue to destroy other species so very rapidly that one eminent scientist foresees the day when no life exists on earth apart from the human monoculture and the small volume of species useful to it. An increasing multitude of disturbed viral-host symbiotic cycles are provoked into self-protective counterattacks. This is a dangerous situation. And we have seen in the previous chapter how ill-prepared the world is to cope with it. It begs the most frightening question of all: could such a pandemic virus cause the extinction of the human species?Cap Good: EconomyCapitalism is key to economic well-beingRockwell 2 (Llewellyn, jr pres Ludwig Von Mises Institute, July 18, , accessed: 29 June 2011, JT)If you think about it, the hysteria is astonishing, even terrifying. The market economy has created unfathomable prosperity and, decade by decade, century by century, miraculous feats of innovation, production, distribution, and social coordination. To the free market, we owe all material prosperity, all leisure time, our health and longevity, our huge and growing population, nearly everything we call life itself. Capitalism and capitalism alone has rescued the human race from degrading poverty, rampant sickness, and early death. In the absence of the capitalist economy and all its underlying institutions, the world's population would, over time, shrink to a fraction of its current size, with whatever was left of the human race systematically reduced to subsistence, eating only what can be hunted or gathered. Even the institution that is the source of the word civilization itself--the city--depends on trade and commerce, and cannot exist without them. Global economic collapse causes global nuclear warMead 92 (Walter, foreign affairs and humanities@Bard College, New Perspectives Quarterly, Summer, JT)But what if it can't? What if the global economy stagnates - or even shrinks? In that case, we will face a new period of international conflict: South against North, rich against poor. Russia, China, India - these countries with their billions of people and their nuclear weapons will pose a much greater danger to world order than Germany and Japan did in the '30s. Cap Good: EconomyCapitalism is key to economic growth and the expansion of civilizationVance 5 (Laurence, econ@Pensacola Junior College, August 16, , accessed: 30 June 2011, JT)The title of the book may initially seem to be an exercise in hyperbole, but such is not the case. How Capitalism Saved America is indeed the untold history of our country. After a brief introduction and two very crucial introductory chapters on the nature of capitalism and the perpetrators of anticapitalism, DiLorenzo takes us through nine chapters of American history — from the Pilgrims to the recent California energy "crisis" — and shows "how, from the very beginning, capitalism has been vital to America's growth, and how excessive government interference in the economy has only exacerbated economic problems and stifled growth." Although the book is written chronologically, any of these nine chapters can be read independently. However, only one of them is necessary to see that the book's title is not an overstatement. Because it was Marx himself who coined the term, it is no surprise that capitalism has been falsely thought to benefit only capitalists and the rich while exploiting workers and the poor. DiLorenzo dismisses as Marxist propaganda the idea that capitalism is "a zero-sum game in which 'somebody wins, somebody loses.'" Instead, "Capitalism succeeds precisely because free exchange is mutually advantageous." And not only does it succeed, it is "the source of civilizations and human progress." Capitalism has "brought to the masses products and services that were once considered luxuries available only to the rich." Capitalism is not only "the best-known source of upward economic mobility," it "actually reduces income inequalities within a nation." In short, capitalism alleviates poverty, raises living standards, expands economic opportunity, and enables scores of millions to live longer, healthier, and more peaceful lives. The global expansion of capitalism is key to U.S. economic growthGriswold 10 (Daniel, dir. Trade policy@CATO, January 6, , accessed: 30 June 2011, JT)Three items in the news this week remind us why we should be glad we live in a more global economy. While American consumers remain cautious, American companies and workers are finding increasing opportunities in markets abroad: Sales of General Motors vehicles continue to slump in the United States, but they are surging in China. The company announced this week that sales in China of GM-branded cars and trucks were up 67 percent in 2009, to 1.8 million vehicles. If current trends continue, within a year or two GM will be selling more vehicles in China than in the United States. James Cameron’s 3-D movie spectacular “Avatar” just surpassed $1 billion in global box-office sales. Two-thirds of its revenue has come from abroad, with France, Germany, and Russia the leading markets. This has been a growing pattern for U.S. films. Hollywood—which loves to skewer business and capitalism—is thriving in a global market. Since 2003, the middle class in Brazil has grown by 32 million. As the Washington Post reports, “Once hobbled with high inflation and perennially susceptible to worldwide crises, Brazil now has a vibrant consumer market …” Brazil’s overall economy is bigger than either India or Russia, and its per-capita GDP is nearly double that of China. As I note in my Cato book Mad about Trade, American companies and workers will find their best opportunities in the future by selling to the emerging global middle class in Brazil, China, India and elsewhere. Without access to more robust markets abroad, the Great Recession of 2008-09 would have been more like the Great Depression. Cap Good: EconomyCapitalism is the only system that can maintain growth and stability – any alternative system results in global warAshworth 10 (Stephen, academic publishing@Oxford, December 18, , accessed: 2 July 2011, JT)The only types of industrial civilisation we have observed so far have been that based on capitalist economics, and that based on socialism, in which a political ideology takes over the role of capital. Capitalist societies would seem to be expansionary in their very nature: they are defined by the self-multiplying power of capital. But could a socialist society, one with a suitable ideology which was sufficiently severely imposed, preserve zero growth indefinitely? I think not, because societies evolve in an unpredictable manner. Governments which have tried to maintain control in, say, Tokugawa Japan (1603-1868) or Soviet Russia (1917-1989) have failed in their goals of stability (Japan) or planned growth (Russia), and modern liberal democracy works by limiting its ambitions and ceding much power to the economy at large. Even a global dictatorship, which unlike those two historical examples would by definition not face competition from abroad, would, I think, be unable to control all the disruptive political, technological and economic forces emerging unpredictably worldwide over centuries and millennia. The result would then be either the breakout of a new phase of growth, or decline and collapse. In view of the likelihood of long-term adverse climate change (whether triggered by industrial pollution, or asteroid impact, or an outbreak of super-vulcanism, or the return of ice-age conditions, or solar variations), and in addition the persistent threat of global high-tech conflict (whether spreading destruction by nuclear weapons, or computer viruses, or genetically engineered organisms, or microscopic or macroscopic robots), decline would be the more plausible outcome. Cap Good: EnvironmentCapitalism solves for endangered species, nonrenewable resource shortages, and global warmingMurphy 7 (Bob, PhD econ from NYU, April 27, , accessed: 30 June 2011, JT)So far I'm saying nothing controversial. The tradeoff between jobs and the spotted owl is familiar to all, and indeed the typical environmentalist relishes the material sacrifice necessary to make amends with Mother Nature. (After all, you can't properly atone for past sins without a little suffering.) But what most people don't realize is that unbridled capitalism is the best way to achieve the environmentalists' objectives. Let's consider a few major issues to see how. Endangered Species Pop quiz: What's the difference between white rhinos, giant pandas, and spotted owls on the one hand, versus dairy cows, thoroughbred horses, and talking parrots on the other? Answer #1: All of the former are endangered species, while all of the latter are in abundant supply. Answer #2: It is illegal to trade in the former, while the latter are bought and sold as commodities. This is no coincidence. When owners have well-defined property rights in a reproducible resource, they have every incentive to maintain it. The government doesn't need to pass laws to protect our supply of cows. Even when beef prices rise, ranchers aren't so shortsighted that they slaughter the last pair of the animals, just as rising agriculture prices don't lead farmers to eat all of the seedcorn. Although it's politically incorrect to say so, the best way to protect endangered species is to allow private individuals to own them and sell them to the highest bidder. Politicians might make stirring speeches and pass a few token laws to punish poachers, but you can bet they'd be a lot more vigilant in saving the rhino if it meant millions of dollars in their own pockets. Nonrenewable Resources Capitalism is routinely denigrated as myopic when it comes to nonrenewable resources such as oil. The government supposedly needs to place taxes on oil consumption, and hand out subsidies for hydroelectric or solar power, before it's too late. Private corporations, it seems, are incapable of seeing the coming catastrophe when our SUVs guzzle the last barrels of oil. Nothing could be further from the truth. There are literally futures markets in oil, natural gas, and other commodities, which give precise estimates of the future availability of these resources. Unlike the wildly alarmist predictions of professional scaremongers, the futures prices are our best estimate of the relative scarcities of these items, because inaccurate prices lead to huge profit opportunities for speculators. In contrast, when Paul Ehrlich claimed in 1968 that in "the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now," it didn't cost him money; indeed it boosted sales of The Population Bomb. At any given time, the market price signifies the consensus of true experts on what the future price of a commodity will be. If the geologists and other analysts working for Exxon realized with horror that there were only five years' left of oil at current rates of consumption, their superiors would immediately stop all extraction of oil. They would wait for the impending shortage to manifest itself, and would only start selling oil again once its price had gone through the roof. The high price of oil, in turn, would spur consumers to buy more fuel-efficient vehicles, and producers of alternative energy sources would see an increased demand for their products. In other words, the self-interested reaction of private individuals would be exactly what the environmentalists want. Of course, in the real world today, people continue to buy SUVs and few houses run on solar power. But this isn't because of shortsightedness, it's rather because there is plenty of oil to last for decades and decades. Keep in mind that the official warnings of oil stocks refer to known reserves. When those supplies dwindle, the oil companies go find more. (Proven worldwide reserves of crude oil went from 51 billion barrels in 1944 to 1.27 trillion barrels by 2002.) At current market prices, it would be an inefficient use of satellites and labor to discover three hundred years' worth of oil, just as the typical household doesn't buy three years' worth of groceries to stock in the pantry at a time. The alarmist cries over the impending shortage are nothing new; in 1939 the Interior Department predicted U.S. oil supplies would last only thirteen more years. Global Warming Of course, the bogeyman of the day is global warming. Now admittedly, as an economist I don't claim to be an expert in climate change. Even so, I don't quite see how mankind's economic activity can be responsible for temperature increases over the 20th century, since most of the increase happened in the first four decades when industrial output was quite modest, while worldwide temperatures actually dropped during the massive postwar industrial boom. (That's why Time magazine famously warned of a coming Ice Age in 1974.) In any event, suppose the official global warming theory is true. Does it follow that governments around the world will be our saviors? The U.S. federal government can't keep cocaine out of prisons or catch Osama bin Laden. Do we really believe that if we only would allow it to ruin the economy with massive taxes and regulations, it would at least succeed in stamping out carbon emissions around the globe? Rather than a "solution" based on dubious science and a na?ve faith in <CONTINUED><CONTINUED>politicians, better to let the unbridled market reduce pollution through innovation and increased standards of living. After all, which countries are more polluted — those in relatively free Western Europe, or those that suffered under communist rule in Eastern Europe? Answer that and you'll know which system, capitalism or socialism, is more likely to save the planet. Cap Good: EnvironmentFree market capitalism is the best manager of the environmentAdler 8 (Jonathan, law@ Case Western Reserve University, The New Atlantis, November 22, , accessed: 30 June 2011, JT)The first item on his agenda is the replacement of modern capitalism with some undefined “non-socialist” alternative. “The planet cannot sustain capitalism as we know it,” he warns, calling for a fundamental transformation. But he does not understand the system he wants to reform, let alone what he would substitute in its place. According to Speth, “most environmental deterioration is a result of systemic failures of capitalism.” This is an odd claim, as the least capitalist nations of the world also have the worst environmental records. The ecological costs of economic statism are far worse than those of economic liberty. The environmental record of the various Soviet regimes amply bears this out: The West’s ecological nightmares were the Soviet bloc’s environmental realities. This is not due to any anomaly of the Soviet system. Nations with greater commitment to capitalist institutions experience greater environmental performance. While Speth occasionally acknowledges pockets of environmental progress, he hardly stops to consider the reasons why some environmental resources have been conserved more effectively than others. Fisheries are certainly declining throughout much of the world—some 75 percent of fisheries are fully or over-exploited—but not everywhere. It is worth asking why. Tropical forests in less-developed nations are declining even as most temperate forests in industrialized nations are rebounding. Recognizing these different trends and identifying the key variables is essential to diagnosing the real causes of environmental deterioration and prescribing a treatment that will work. Speth acknowledges that much of the world is undergoing “dematerialization,” such that economic growth far outpaces increases in resource demand, but seems not to appreciate how the capitalist system he decries creates the incentives that drive this trend. Were it not for market-driven advances in technological capability and ecological efficiency, humanity’s footprint on the Earth would be far greater. While modern civilization has developed the means to effect massive ecological transformations, it has also found ways to produce wealth while leaving more of the natural world intact. Market competition generates substantial incentives to do more with less—thus in market economies we see long and continuing improvements in productive efficiency. This can be seen everywhere from the replacement of copper with fiber optics (made from silica, the chief component in sand) and the light-weighting of packaging to the explosion of agricultural productivity and improvements in energy efficiency. Less material is used and disposed of, reducing overall environmental impacts from productive activity. The key to such improvements is the same set of institutional arrangements that Speth so decries: property rights and voluntary exchange protected by the rule of law—that is, capitalism. As research by Wheaton College economist Seth Norton and many others has shown, societies in which property rights and economic freedoms are protected experience superior economic and environmental performance than those societies subject to greater government control. Indeed, such institutions have a greater effect on environmental performance than the other factors, such as population growth, that occupy the attention of Speth and so many other environmental thinkers. Speth complains that capitalism is fundamentally biased against the future; but the marketplace does a far better job of pricing and accounting for future interests than the political alternative. “Future generations cannot participate in capitalism’s markets [today],” says Speth. Fair enough, but they cannot vote or engage in the regulatory process either. Thus the relevant policy question is what set of institutions does the best—or least bad—job of accounting for such concerns, and here there is no contest. However present-oriented the marketplace may be, it is better able to look past the next election cycle than any plausibly democratic alternative. Cap Good: EnvironmentCapitalism allows for the production of technologies that reduce the death toll from natural disastersLockitch 9 (Keith, fellow@ Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights, Energy & Environment, 20(5), , accessed: 1 July 2011, JT)Looked at from the vantage point of human history, recent climate-related tragedies suggest an opposite perspective to that offered by the advocates of green policies. The message these and numerous other examples convey is not “man’s vulnerability to climate,” but his vulnerability only under the wrong political and economic conditions. Standing out above all else is the unprecedented degree of protection from climate-related threats that exists under industrial capitalism. Consider the poster child of global warming alarm: Hurricane Katrina. In 1970, a severe tropical cyclone struck the coast of the Bay of Bengal, in what is today Bangladesh. It is estimated that the storm was a category 3 cyclone, and the death toll it left in its wake was estimated to have been as high as three hundred thousand people. 21 Compare this with Hurricane Katrina, which struck New Orleans in 2005. By the time it made landfall Katrina was also a category 3 storm and the directly affected population was comparable to that in Bangladesh. 22 23 Yet the number of people dead or missing was far, far less—estimates put it at around two thousand. 24 Without denying the tragedy of the lives lost to Katrina, two thousand versus three hundred thousand is an incredible difference. In assessing what accounts for that difference, one can debate the relative roles of social, political, geographic and climatologic factors, but there can be no question of the fundamental and decisive importance of the technology and infrastructure made possible by industrial capitalism. Unlike the helpless victims of the Bangladesh storm, the citizens of New Orleans could rely on advanced early warning systems and a functioning communications infrastructure, modern vehicles and paved roads to facilitate evacuation and transport relief supplies, sturdier homes and structures and advanced flood control systems, etc. Indeed, much of this even failed in New Orleans: the levees were breached, many people couldn’t or wouldn’t evacuate, the relief effort was delayed, and so on. Yet, even in spite of these failures, hundreds of thousands of lives were saved by the products of industrial technology and industrial-scale energy. This is the real lesson of today’s climate-related tragedies: the immeasurable degree to which industrial development under capitalism has reduced our vulnerability to climate threats. Cap Good: EnvironmentCapitalist economies are the only economies capable of overcoming environmental degradationAldrich 6 (Samuel, econ@U of Illinois, October 1, , accessed: 1 July 2010, JT)It is good news that many world travelers have learned the truth about market capitalism. Contrary to the slogans of demonstrators throughout the world, the nations that have the best track records on environmental protection and improvement are those with the highest amount of free-market capitalism. Make no mistake, the anti-capitalism demonstrators often add environmentalism to their claimed objectives solely because it attracts many gullible young persons and appears to legitimize their activities, which often have little or nothing to do with the environment. Nations with the freest economic systems are the ones whose citizens can afford the luxury of protecting their environments. Conversely, persons living in command-and-control economies barely surviving on life's necessities of food, clothing, and shelter use their natural resources to the absolute limit. They have no other choice in providing for themselves and their families. As family incomes rise, the improving quality of life allows people to devote more resources to solving environmental problems. Thus, with expanding societal wealth under free-market economies, environmental degradation is first arrested and then reversed. Society goes through a form of "environmental transition." After the transition, greater wealth and technology improve environmental quality instead of worsening it. Capitalism is the best manager of the environment – the Soviet Union provesLehr 4 (Jay, science director@Heartland Institute, September 1, , accessed: 1 July 2011, JT)Though a philosopher by trade, Machan proves to a be a strong proponent of free markets, private property, and the rule of law. While we know this to be capitalism by definition, he proves its effectiveness as a mathematician might prove an equation in differential calculus. He writes, "Governments use force to accomplish their goals. But force, unless used in self-defense--as the military is supposed to use it--wreaks havoc in its path, even when the ostensible results seem to be grand. And nowhere is this more evident than in environmental matters. When the laws and public policy favor the system of eminent domain and the use of publicly owned lands and waters for whatever happens to be in quasi-democratic demand, the usual result is akin to a zero-sum game: the favored policy wins, the disfavored one loses. By contrast, in the free market, there are many disparate demands that get satisfied to a greater or lesser extent. This has vital implication for environmental policy." Machan concludes there is evidence for the environmental benefits of free markets all around us but, perhaps most clearly, in the contrast between what Soviet-style socialist central planning has done to the environment in eastern Europe and the comparatively less-harmful results arising from the far more capitalist, free market, private property-based system of the West. Cap Good: EnvironmentCapitalism empirically improves the environmentCaruba 8 (Alan, writer@The National Anxiety Center, August 4, , accessed: 1 July 2011, JT)“The record clearly shows environmental conditions are improving in every capitalist country in the world and deteriorating only in non-capitalist countries,” wrote the book’s authors. Only affluent nations can afford to protect their environmental conditions. By way of example, total air pollution emissions in the United States fell 34 percent between 1970 and 1990. Particulate matter emissions fell by 60 percent, sulfur oxides by 25 percent, carbon monoxide by 40 percent, and lead by 96 percent, The book’s authors noted that “Total emissions of air pollutants tracked by the EPA are forecast to fall by 22 percent between 1975 and 2015.” Water pollution has decreased dramatically throughout the U.S. Sport fishing has returned, for example, to all five of the Great Lakes. There is a critical reason why capitalism favors a cleaner environmental. “The security of personal possessions made possible by the capitalist institution of private-property rights is a key reason why capitalism protects the environment,” said the book’s authors. When you own property investing in improvements increases its long-term value. “Markets, the second capitalist institution, tend to increase efficiency and reduce waste by putting resources under the control of those who value them most highly.” Capitalism is the only system that can effectively preserve the environmentBast et al 94 (Joseph, pres Heartland Institute, Peter Hill, econ@Wheaton College, Richard Rue, EnergyWise CEO, Eco-Sanity, , accessed: 1 July 2011, JT)The superior economic and environmental performance of capitalism is probably not what many environmentally conscious readers expected. The images that have stayed with us from grade school or college classes are of the industrial revolution’s smoky factories, sweatshops, violent strikes, child labor, and colonialism. A system that would allow such atrocities, we feel almost instinctively, cannot be trusted to protect the rights of workers or a fragile environment. Even a professional writer on economics, the aforementioned Frances Cairncross, writes: For it is only government that can decide how much society should value the environment, and how that value should be inserted into economic transactions. The market, that mechanism that so marvelously directs human activity to supply human needs, often has no way of putting a proper price on environmental resources, It is time to update our attitudes toward capitalism, and particularly our understanding of how it puts “a proper price on environmental resources.” Capitalism is based on a system of markets and private property rights. When rights are correctly defined and enforced, capital- ism will protect the environment for four reasons: ti It creates incentives to do the right things; ti It generates and distributes needed information; ti It enables people to trade things or rights in order to solve problems that otherwise can’t be solved; and r/ It enables property rights to evolve over time. The free-enterprise system creates wealth, rewards efficiency, and _ protects the environment better than any other system yet devised by man. The tireless campaign against this system by some quarters of the environmental movement is wrong-headed and counterproductive. Cap Good: EthicsGood and evil will exist regardless of economic systems. Capitalism provides a means of punishing evil and rewarding good, creating a more ethical societyLudwig von Mises Institute 95 (October, , accessed: 1 July 2011, JT)The Left (still essentially Marxian) wants us to think of capitalism as modern and industrial. More correctly, capitalism is just a name for the social recognition of private property, trade, and contract enforcement. It was as much a part of ancient Athens as 19th-century America. In its total absence, civilization would crumble, and the arts vanish. In modern times, the confusion usually starts this way. Someone flips on the television to find the usual rotten show and offensive commercials. He concludes that's the market at work: base, vulgar, and insulting to our intelligence. Once on this track, the anti-capitalist mentality runs wild. The decadence of the cash nexus appears everywhere. Strip malls and yellow M's in the sky. Boxing, moshing, tabloids, rap, and low pay for intellectuals. It's all horrible, sniffs this person, and it's all capitalism's fault. If this theory were correct, the prophets, saints, and ancient philosophers were wasting their breath. They called on people to abandon sin and adopt virtue, when they could have taken the fast-track to social salvation by condemning free exchange and private property. What the great moralists knew, and we've forgotten, is that people and cultures are products of human choice. Good lives can flourish in any social setting, whether the prison camp, the Wild West, or Washington, D.C. (hard as the latter is to believe). Sin and stupidity will, of course, always be with us. From an economic perspective, our goal should be to make sure that sinners pay for their sins, and that minimal resources are used to cater to them. In this process, capitalism is our ally. In addition to making prosperity possible, the whole point of economics and markets is to make sure the minimum amount of resources is used to satisfy any particular demand of any particular group. The free economy is efficient because it deals with tastes and preferences as a given, it organizes resources in an economically practical way, and it arranges for the consumer to get what he wants at the least possible cost to everyone else. Capitalism opens the opportunity for people to learn about and effectively practice ethicsBast 1 (Joseph, pres Heartland Institute, March 1, , accessed: 1 July 2011, JT)What distinguishes capitalism from all other methods of organizing production is that capitalist institutions act as a check on greed by elevating trade--voluntary exchanges that create new wealth, not just redistribute existing wealth--over the use of force, fraud, or privilege. Capitalism created a path to financial security and wealth that protects rather than violates human rights and is open to the vast majority of people without political or military power. The unprecedented spread of affluence caused by capitalism created the right conditions for the emergence of a new type of social morality that found virtue in the consequences of human action rather than only in the purity or benevolence of the actors' intentions. Michael Novak writes: "These champions of civic humanism argued that for common people, it would be better if the aim of social systems ceased being power and plunder. It would be better if the leading social purpose became the pursuit of plenty and the creation of new wealth. In that case, one could hope to banish poverty from all the nations of the earth." The classical virtues of honor, chivalry, courage, and so on remain, but feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, and giving shelter to the homeless require that we first produce, trade, and accumulate wealth. This is why capitalism, the best system for creating wealth ever discovered, has profoundly moral consequences. Cap Good: Food ProductionOnly capitalism can respond fast enough to prevent faminesLockitch 9 (Keith, fellow@ Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights, Energy & Environment, 20(5), , accessed: 1 July 2011, JT)Despite drought conditions severe enough to rate comparison with the 1930s Dust Bowl, Americans saw only minor economic losses and fluctuations in food prices. It is telling that the most that Weart could find to say was that the Midwest droughts showed up on “the front pages of newspapers and on television news programs.” Observe that they specifically did not “show up” at all on people’s waistlines and barely registered on their pocketbooks. Such resilience is testament to the adaptive flexibility of an industrialized economy and a (relatively) free market—to industrial capitalism’s ability to respond quickly when normal conditions are disrupted. While the other regions mentioned suffered a total failure of their food production and distribution systems, the United States donated surplus food supplies to Africa, sold food grains to India, and arranged a massive sale of wheat to the Soviet Union in late 1972. Contrast this to the helplessness before nature of India’s peasant farmers or the Sahel’s nomadic tribes. Why were they unable to benefit from the agricultural practices that empowered the American farmers—the irrigation of fields, the use of fertilizers and pesticides, and the application of sophisticated methods of agricultural management? What role did their primitive cultural traditions and their countries’ oppressive political systems play in suppressing the industrial development and free market mechanisms that made such advances possible? And in the case of the Soviet Union, should there really be any surprise that its state-owned collective farms were unable to cope with unfavorable weather conditions? Even under good conditions— and with the advantage of some of the most fertile agricultural land in the world—the central planners of the Soviet agricultural ministry were rarely able to coerce adequate food production.Cap Good: FreedomCapitalism is inevitable and key to freedom and innovationCooper 9 (Don, economist in Georgia, January 9, , accessed: 1 July 2011, JT)The wonderful thing about capitalism is that it provides opportunity. It provides the opportunities for individuals, communities, social organizations and the like to improve themselves, their communities or their organization in one way or another. It provides them with the incentive to use their resources efficiently. It provides them with alternatives. It provides them with choices. It provides them with freedom! Capitalistic behavior can be found everywhere around us from the student who has chosen to improve his human capital by attending university; the working professional who has chosen to add to his financial capital by going to work everyday; the community organization that has chosen to improve the community’s social capital by building houses for the poor. Capitalistic behavior is innate in every one of us. We can’t escape it. And it is good. It’s what has driven us to excel, to explore, to innovate and invent, to think creatively and "outside the box." It’s what drove the first human beings to invent tools. It’s what drove Europe out of the middle ages and into the enlightenment of the renaissance. It’s what drove pioneering American’s to build this country. It is in fact human nature and our constitution was written so as not to preclude capitalistic behavior in what was to be a great experiment. Cap Good: FreedomCapitalism is key to freedomRockwell 2 (Llewellyn, jr pres Ludwig Von Mises Institute, July 18, , accessed: 29 June 2011, JT)And this is only to mention the economic benefits of capitalism. It is also an expression of freedom. It is not so much a social system but the natural result of a society wherein individual rights are respected, where businesses, families, and every form of association are permitted to flourish in the absence of coercion, theft, war, and aggression. Capitalism protects the weak from the strong, granting choice and opportunity to masses who once had no choice but to live in a state of dependency on the politically connected and their enforcers. Must we compare the record of capitalism with that of the state, which, looking at the sweep of this past century alone, killed hundreds of millions of people in its wars, famines, camps, and deliberate starvation campaigns? And the record of central planning of the type now being urged on American enterprise is perfectly abysmal. Let the state attempt to eradicate anything--unemployment, poverty, drugs, business cycles, illiteracy, crime, terrorism--and it ends up creating more of it than would have been the case if it had done nothing at all. The state has created nothing. The market has created everything. But let the stock market fall 20 percent in 18 months, and what happens? The leading intellectuals discover anew why the Bolshevik Revolution was a pretty good idea, even if the results weren't what idealists might have hoped. We are told that we must rethink the very foundations of civilization itself. Freedom outweighs – it is the foundation of existence and is the only value that makes life worth livingClifford 1 (Michael, philosophy@Mississippi State, Political Geology After Foucault, p. 143-144, , accessed: 6 July 2011, JT)Interestingly, almost the same sort of objections were raised against Jean-Paul Sartre and existentialism. In Being and Nothingness, Sartre could largely dodge charges of moral nihilism by claiming that he was doing an “ontology,” not an ethics; but later, in his famous public address, “Existentialism Is a Humanism,” he tried to address such criticisms by insisting that “existentialism is optimistic, it is a doctrine of action.”57 However, this characterization of existentialism was more asserted than it was argued. It was really Simone de Beauvoir who addressed the issue of the possibility of an ethics from an existential point of view directly in her book, The Ethics of Ambiguity. In this work, Beauvoir offers an ethics of radical freedom in which freedom founds itself as a value and as a principle of ethical choice: By turning toward this freedom we are going to discover a principle of action whose range will be universal. . . . Freedom is the source from which all signi?cations and all values spring. It is the original condition of all justi?cation of existence. The man who seeks to justify his life must want freedom itself absolutely and above everything else. At the same time that it requires the realization of concrete ends, of particular projects, it requires itself universally. It is not a ready-made value which offers itself from the outside to my abstract adherence, but it appears (not on the plane of facticity, but on the moral plane) as a cause of itself. It is necessarily summoned up by the values which it sets up and through which it sets itself up. It can not establish a denial of itself, for in denying itself, it would deny the possibility of any foundation. To will oneself moral and to will oneself free are one and the same decision.58 Cap Good: FreedomCapitalism is key to freedomRockwell 2 (Llewellyn, jr pres Ludwig Von Mises Institute, July 18, , accessed: 29 June 2011, JT)And this is only to mention the economic benefits of capitalism. It is also an expression of freedom. It is not so much a social system but the natural result of a society wherein individual rights are respected, where businesses, families, and every form of association are permitted to flourish in the absence of coercion, theft, war, and aggression. Capitalism protects the weak from the strong, granting choice and opportunity to masses who once had no choice but to live in a state of dependency on the politically connected and their enforcers. Must we compare the record of capitalism with that of the state, which, looking at the sweep of this past century alone, killed hundreds of millions of people in its wars, famines, camps, and deliberate starvation campaigns? And the record of central planning of the type now being urged on American enterprise is perfectly abysmal. Let the state attempt to eradicate anything--unemployment, poverty, drugs, business cycles, illiteracy, crime, terrorism--and it ends up creating more of it than would have been the case if it had done nothing at all. The state has created nothing. The market has created everything. But let the stock market fall 20 percent in 18 months, and what happens? The leading intellectuals discover anew why the Bolshevik Revolution was a pretty good idea, even if the results weren't what idealists might have hoped. We are told that we must rethink the very foundations of civilization itself. Capitalism is key to freedomReisman 2 (George, econ@Pepperdine, October 24, , accessed: 29 June 2011, JT)Individual freedom—an essential feature of capitalism—is the foundation of security, in the sense both of personal safety and of economic security. Freedom means the absence of the initiation of physical force. When one is free, one is safe—secure—from common crime, because what one is free of or free from is precisely acts such as assault and battery, robbery, rape, and murder, all of which represent the initiation of physical force. Even more important, of course, is that when one is free, one is free from the initiation of physical force on the part of the government, which is potentially far more deadly than that of any private criminal gang. (The Gestapo and the KGB, for example, with their enslavement and murder of millions made private criminals look almost kind by comparison.) The fact that freedom is the absence of the initiation of physical force also means that peace is a corollary of freedom. Where there is freedom, there is peace, because there is no use of force: insofar as force is not initiated, the use of force in defense or retaliation is not required. The economic security provided by freedom derives from the fact that under freedom, everyone can choose to do whatever he judges to be most in his own interest, without fear of being stopped by the physical force of anyone else, so long as he himself does not initiate the use of physical force. This means, for example, that he can take the highest paying job he can find and buy from the most competitive suppliers he can find; at the same time, he can keep all the income he earns and save as much of it as he likes, investing his savings in the most profitable ways he can. The only thing he cannot do is use force himself. With the use of force prohibited, the way an individual increases the money he earns is by using his reason to figure out how to offer other people more or better goods and services for the same money, since this is the means of inducing them voluntarily to spend more of their funds in buying from him rather than from competitors. Thus, freedom is the basis of everyone being as economically secure as the exercise of his own reason and the reason of his suppliers can make him. Cap Good: InnovationCapitalism is key to the division of labor which allows for the multiplication of knowledge and the creation of new productsReisman 2 (George, econ@Pepperdine, October 24, , accessed: 29 June 2011, JT)The division of labor, a leading feature of capitalism, which can exist in highly developed form only under capitalism, provides among other major benefits, the enormous gains from the multiplication of the amount of knowledge that enters into the productive process and its continuing, progressive increase. Just consider: each distinct occupation, each suboccupation, has its own distinct body of knowledge. In a division-of-labor, capitalist society, there are as many distinct bodies of knowledge entering into the productive process as there are distinct jobs. The totality of this knowledge operates to the benefit of each individual, in his capacity as a consumer, when he buys the products produced by others—and much or most of it also in his capacity as a producer, insofar as his production is aided by the use of capital goods previously produced by others. Thus a given individual may work as a carpenter, say. His specialized body of knowledge is that of carpentering. But in his capacity as a consumer, he obtains the benefit of all the other distinct occupations throughout the economic system. The existence of such an extended body of knowledge is essential to the very existence of many products—all products that require in their production more knowledge than any one individual or small number of individuals can hold. Such products, of course, include machinery, which could simply not be produced in the absence of an extensive division of labor and the vast body of knowledge it represents. Moreover, in a division-of-labor, capitalist society, a large proportion of the most intelligent and ambitious members of society, such as geniuses and other individuals of great ability, choose their concentrations precisely in areas that have the effect of progressively improving and increasing the volume of knowledge that is applied in production. This is the effect of such individuals concentrating on areas such as science, invention, and business. Capitalism spurs competition which drives innovationReisman 2 (George, econ@Pepperdine, October 24, , accessed: 29 June 2011, JT)Perhaps even more importantly, the operation of the tendency toward a uniform rate of return on capital invested serves to bring about a pattern of progressive improvement in products and methods of production. Any given business can earn an above-average rate of return by introducing a new or improved product that consumers want to buy, or a more efficient, lower-cost method of producing an existing product. But then the high profit it enjoys attracts competitors, and once the innovation becomes generally adopted, the high profit disappears, with the result that the consumers gain the full benefit of the innovation. They end up getting better products and paying lower prices. If the firm that made the innovation wants to continue to earn an exceptional rate of profit, it must introduce further innovations, which end up with the same results. Earning a high rate of profit for a prolonged period of time requires the introduction of a continuing series of innovations, with the consumers obtaining the full benefit of all of the innovations up to the most recent ones. Cap Good: PovertyCapitalism empirically reduces povertyChapin 4 (Bernard, writer living in Chicago, June 14, , accessed: 1 June 2011, JT)"The critics suggest that there is little or no room for the ‘poor’ to advance, that class of people is essentially stuck in the bottom 20 percent. But this is unequivocally false. In reality, the bottom 20 percent (like all other quintiles) is constantly made up of different people. A family in the lowest income quintile today, as recorded by the census data gatherers, will typically move up into a higher income category over the next five or ten years and be replaced in the lower category by a different family…" Readers would be wise to remember the next time they are challenged with the mantra, "social justice," to retort that the only way to achieve it is through, "capitalism." Capitalism, through its cheaper goods and higher wages, has distinctly benefited the working class. A hundred years ago, the fattest of the fat cats could not purchase the same type of goods that your average retail worker can purchase today, and the fact that such unbelievable wares are available is strictly due to the incentives created by a capitalist system. In a socialist economy, they would never have been invented or discovered in the first place. We find as well that those dubbed "robber barons" were not as they enriched far more often than they robbed. Men like James J. Hill, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and John D. Rockefeller were brilliant entrepreneurs who employed thousands and gave stability to countless American families. The charitable organizations and nonprofits they bequeathed remain viable today and many of their innovations benefited all Americans–not just those they directly employed. Capitalism allows multinational corporations to employ the poor of the world, reducing povertyDiLorenzo 6 (Thomas, econ@Loyola College, November 9, , accessed: 1 June 2011, JT)One of the oldest myths about capitalism is the notion that factories that offer the poor higher wages to lure them off the streets (and away from lives of begging, stealing, prostitution, or worse) or away from back-breaking farm labor somehow impoverishes and exploits them. They are said to work in "sweatshops" for "subsistence wages." That was the claim made by socialists and unionists in the early days of the industrial revolution, and it is still made today by the same category of malcontents — usually by people who have never themselves performed manual labor and experienced breaking a sweat while working. (I am not referring here to the red herring claim that most foreign "sweatshops" utilize some kind of slave labor. This is an outrageous propaganda ploy designed to portray defenders of free markets as being in favor of slavery). The self-interest of labor unions in this anti-capitalist crusade has always been transparent: Unions cannot exist without somehow prohibiting competition from non-union labor, whether that labor is at home or abroad. Thus, they wage campaigns of propaganda, intimidation, or violence against non-union workers, whether they are in Indiana or Indonesia. They are not in the least concerned about the well-being of the Third World poor. If the labor unions have their way, the poor whose lives are improved by their employment by multinational corporations would all be thrown out of work, many of whom would be forced to resort to crime, prostitution, or starvation. That is the "moral high ground" that has been staked out on college campuses all over America where unions have been successful in instigating "anti-sweatshop" campaigns, seminars, and protests. That the anti-factory movement has always been motivated by either the socialists' desire to destroy industrial civilization, or by the inherently non-competitive nature of organized labor, is further evidenced by the fact that there was never an "anti-sweat-farm movement." Farm labor is still as rigorous as any physical labor, as it was 150 years ago. Indeed, in the early days of the industrial revolution — and in Third World countries today — one reason why families had so many more children than they do in wealthier countries today is that they were viewed as potential farm hands. Abraham Lincoln had less than one year of formal education because his parents, like most others on the early nineteenth-century American frontier, needed him as a farm hand. But since agriculture was not considered to be a form of capitalism, and did not pose any real threat to unionized labor, there was never any significant social protest over it. Cap Good: PovertyCapitalism allows the gap between the rich and the poor to shrinkCarden 9 (Art, econ@Rhodes College, July 30, , accessed: 29 June 2011, JT)You have probably heard it said that under capitalism, "the rich get richer while the poor get poorer." This is simply false. It was actually a prediction of classical economics that incomes would accrue primarily to the owners of land and capital. In his 2007 book, A Farewell to Alms, economic historian Gregory Clark points out that if you look at real returns to land (rental rates), they have fluctuated but remain virtually unchanged. The same holds true for capital (interest rates). Real wages for unskilled workers, meanwhile, have exploded. Sources of mortality have also fallen: infant mortality and maternal mortality are miniscule fractions of what they used to be, and life expectancy has increased radically. It was 24 at the height of the Roman Empire, 30 in Britain at the end of the 15th century, 45 in the United States at the beginning of the 20th century, and it is pushing 80 today. Joseph Schumpeter once wrote that capitalist progress does not consist of more silk stockings for the queen of England but of reasonable substitutes for them for poor workers in exchange for progressively less labor. Further, he argued that the key beneficiaries of changes in material standards of living would be the poor at the expense of the rich. Cheap electric lighting was an absolute boon for the very poor, while the very rich could have paid flunkies (or forced slaves, in some cases) to stand around holding torches. Capitalism empirically improves the standard of living for the poorVance 5 (Laurence, econ@Pensacola Junior College, August 16, , accessed: 30 June 2011, JT)The next myth exploded in How Capitalism Saved America is that capitalism exploits the working class. The author considers this to be one of the most pervasive and pernicious myths about capitalism. The truth is just the opposite: "Capitalism has continually improved the lot of the working class." Capitalism results in more leisure time, provides new, better, and cheaper goods, and increases workplace safety, productivity, and wages. DiLorenzo defends "child labor" and "sweatshops" with an argument that should be quite obvious: They were better than the alternatives of malnutrition, starvation, prostitution, begging, and stealing. It is the increased productivity per adult worker brought about by capitalism that eliminates the need for child labor-whether in manufacturing or agriculture. The myth that labor unions are responsible for the long-term rise in wages and living standards in America is similarly demolished. The exploits of the heroic entrepreneurs falsely referred to as "robber barons" merits a whole chapter. Focusing on James J. Hill (railroads), John D. Rockefeller (oil), and Cornelius Vanderbilt (steamships), DiLorenzo concludes that these men were heroes because they improved the lives of millions of consumers, employed thousands of people, created entire cities, pioneered efficient management techniques, and donated hundreds of millions of dollars to charities. He carefully distinguishes between what he calls a "market entrepreneur" and a "political entrepreneur." A market entrepreneur succeeds by pleasing his customers; a political entrepreneur succeeds by influencing the government. In "Antitrust Myths" DiLorenzo refutes "the story of how capitalism supposedly became monopolistic in the late nineteenth century, and how it was brought under control by antitrust regulation." Indeed, he considers "the whole story of antitrust" to be a myth. Rather than being monopolies that restricted output to drive up prices, the late-nineteenth-century trusts "were expanding production and dropping prices." Cap Good: Quality of LifeCapitalism improves quality of life through the improvement of humanity’s environmentReisman 2 (George, econ@Pepperdine, October 24, , accessed: 29 June 2011, JT)Production and economic activity, by their very nature, serve to improve man's environment. This is because from the point of view of physics and chemistry, all that production and economic activity consist of is the rearrangement of the same nature-given chemical elements in different combinations and their movement to different geographical locations. The guiding purpose of this rearrangement and movement is essentially nothing other than to make the chemical elements stand in an improved relationship to human life and well-being. It puts the chemical elements in combinations and locations where they provide greater utility, greater benefit to human beings. The relationship of the chemical elements iron and copper, for example, to man's life and well-being is greatly improved when they are extracted from beneath the earth and made to appear in such products as automobiles, refrigerators, and electric cable. The relationship of chemical elements such as carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen to man's life and well-being is improved when they can be made to yield electric light and power. The relationship of a piece of land to man's life and well-being is improved when instead of his having to sleep upon it in a sleeping bag and take precautions against snakes, scorpions, and other wildlife, he can sleep in a well-constructed modern home that is built upon it, with all the utilities and appliances we take for granted. The totality of the chemical elements in their relationship to man, constitutes man's external, material environment, and precisely this is what production and economic activity serve to improve, by their very nature. Cap Good: Racism/SexismCapitalism punishes sexism and racismCarden 9 (Art, econ@Rhodes College, July 30, , accessed: 29 June 2011, JT)As Walter Block will talk about (video) and as I've written about on , this probably isn't the case. Capitalism punishes sexism and racism. Are we playing with a historically stacked deck? I think so. I also believe that there's good evidence that people are inherently tribal, and this manifests itself in racism and sexism. I'm also willing to believe that hidden biases are part of our psychological makeup. This reinforces rather than undermines the case for capitalism, however, and it undermines rather than reinforces the case for the state. Suppose we take two societies that are equally racist, equally sexist, and alike in every possible respect. Suppose we give free-market capitalism to one society and antimarket statism to the other. I would expect that over time, we will observe less racism and sexism in the capitalist society. I also think there is much truth to what Milton Friedman said about politics, commerce, and differences: commerce reduces and harmonizes our differences while politics turns those differences into a source of tension and violence. Unsurprisingly, granting a monopoly on force to local police departments and insulating them from the pressures of the market magnifies embedded racist assumptions. Consider the Henry Louis Gates debacle from this past summer. Professor Gates apparently broke into his own home and was arrested after it was established that he was, in fact, legally in his own home. Cap Good: Social JusticeCapitalism reforms with new technologies and innovations in a way that benefits the whole of society. The alternative is a system of oppression and mitigation of the poorAshworth 10 (Stephen, academic publishing@Oxford, December 18, , accessed: 2 July 2011, JT)Under capitalism, social benefit is primarily expressed in monetary terms, and society is stratified economically, with richer classes nearer the top of the social scale and poorer classes nearer the bottom. Under the socialist mode of society, the central function of capital – deciding the allocation of resources – is performed by political ideology. Social benefit is now primarily expressed in terms of ideological capital, being the level of influence, official or unofficial, which an individual enjoys within the institutions, such as in the Soviet Union the Communist Party, which express, teach and propagate that ideology. The rich in such a system are therefore the ideologically rich: those who rise to prominence in the political process and occupy official posts in the Party apparatus; while the poor are those who merely dutifully consume the Party propaganda. The poorest are those who disagree with or actively resist the ruling ideology, and who end up marginalised or criminalised as a result. In view of historical precedents such as the Soviet Union, it is highly unlikely that any realistic socialist society represents an advance over capitalist society in terms of the well-being of the majority of its members (as judged by those members). It is not known whether any third option exists that is compatible with industrialism; however, it is highly plausible that new options will appear in due course, given continued technological development and corresponding social change. Recent history suggests that politically driven attempts at creating a socially just society put all its members, except those at the very top of the Party hierarchy, at a considerable material disadvantage to corresponding members of capitalist societies. One reason for this is that democratic capitalist institutions tend to be flexible and thus capable of responding to changing circumstances, while ideology tends to resist change even in changing circumstances. It must also be clear that any beneficial changes to the modern global liberal democratic market capitalist order can only come about in an incremental fashion, as argued in the social philosophy of Karl Popper (in his book The Open Society and its Enemies). Violent political revolution would, judging by historical precedents, be so destructive that it cannot be contemplated except with extreme horror. Incremental changes in technology, for example the recent introduction of the internet, allow the institutions of democratic capitalism to evolve in ways which are unpredictable but generally beneficial to most groups in society. As civilisation continues to change under the influence of new technologies of computing, medicine and transport, particularly space transport, the democratic capitalist system will naturally also change. Considering the freedoms and privileges enjoyed by the peoples of developed countries compared with their forebears of a few generations ago, it is reasonable to look forward to continued incremental social evolution with optimism concerning the nature of future society, while setting impractical utopian dreams aside Cap Good: SpaceProfit motive is the primary driver of space explorationParker 9 (Martin, Prof of Organization and Culture @ U of Leicester, The Sociological Review, May, Vol. 57, Iss. Supp. s1, p. 83-97)This, it seems to me, is the paradox of having capitalists in space. As if the distance between the Earth and 47 Ursae Majoris is a problem for marketing, and the sublime evaporates in the exhaust fumes of managerialism. But, at the same time, it is na?ve to imagine that Apollo and the rest have been free from such earthly entanglements. In the context, it doesn’t matter that much whether we articulate these entanglements as nation building; party political interest; hidden subsidy of the military industrial complex, or research institutes; career and identity projects; needing to pay the mortgage; or compensating for small penis size. All these, and many more, have undoubtedly driven human beings to work on space exploration projects. But now, in an era of globalising capitalism, it seems that matters of profit and loss are becoming more relevant than ever in driving human beings to such work. Commercial space tourist flights will be the first clear example of what has, so far, been a tendency partly concealed by state and state agency operations. But now, it seems, NASA is being pushed out of the way, in order that enterprise can be launched. Astronauts seem to spend much of their free time looking back at Earth, photographing it, talking about it, recognising it. In this chapter, in order to see capitalism more clearly, I will try to see what it looks like from space, and perhaps what it could look like from the future. Cap Good: SpaceCapitalism is key to the formation of successful space programsMartin 10 (Robert, Amerika, June 21, , accessed: 3 July 2011, JT)Centralization and capitalism are necessary for any intelligent civilization, yet in excess drains the base population of any sustenance whatsoever, leaving them unemployed, homeless and starving at worst. The answer to this event is not a swing on the pendulum all the way onto total equality fisted socialism out on a plate for everyone who isn’t rich, that would be devastating for organization, but is a more natural ecosystem type of financing of a near-barter economics with different values and currencies for localized entities and more buoyant monetary for inter-localities – only monetizing where absolutely necessary. Without the higher economics that goes beyond small barter communities, there could be no space programs, or planetary defences providing the technology or the organization necessary to survive extinction events or fund a military etc, it’s critical for the structure of the superorganism – yet too much and some individuals inside of it become so padded from outside reality that they completely ignore the world around them. Capitalism provides the resources necessary for space explorationLaird 3 (Lori, editor of South Texas College of Law Annotations, International Trade Law Journal, Winter, LexisNexis, JT)America, on the other hand, has done its part to keep the public interest in the space program -- which is critical in retaining political support and funding. n232 While most space shuttle trips focus on outfitting the ISS, NASA also includes popular science experiments. One such experiment was known as "Fun with Urine" and was followed up by "More Fun with Urine" -- projects showing how the human byproduct might be used to water plants or make paint. n233 And who could forget the sports bra made from a material used in shuttle spacesuits that reduces "mammary bounce." n234 But these ploys aside, it has been suggested that NASA could make billions selling shuttle seats that otherwise would go empty -- taking a cue from the Russians who put Pizza Hut logos on their rockets. n235 A survey conducted in 1999 by the Space Transportation Association revealed that sixty-four percent of Americans would be interested in taking a space trip if it were safe and if the costs were kept to that of an African safari. n236 The interest in space tourism is expected to grow over the next ten to fifteen years. n237 Promoting the development of a private space station for wealthy space tourists could provide the aerospace industry with a much-needed revenue boost without significant new spending by the government. n238Cap Good: SpaceCapitalism is key to the technological innovations needed for further space explorationDiamandis 10 (Peter, CEO of the X PRIZE Foundation, February 1, , accessed: 3 July 2011, JT)After 30 years of doing business the same way, NASA is finally entering the 21st century by embracing competition, capitalism and entrepreneurship. In NASA's new budget, President Obama and NASA Administrator Charles Bolden have proposed spending billions of dollars to purchase commercial human launch services and invest in game changing technologies. Many of the traditional players have translated this to mean that NASA's "Moon Mission" has been canceled, that NASA is out of the exploration business and is making a risky move turning over the 'right stuff' from Government hands to entrepreneurs and commercial industry. In reality, NASA is making a brilliant move. During the past 30 years the cost of getting humans into space has gone up, while reliability has gone down. Rather than have two or three commercial suppliers of human spaceflight, we have been solely dependent on the Space Shuttle. When the Shuttle stands down from service in a year's time, NASA will need to send American Astronauts to Kazakhstan to launch aboard the Russian Soyuz at a price of over $50 million per person... Until, at least, new commercial U.S. vehicles are made operational. The U.S. Government doesn't build your computers, nor do you fly aboard a U.S. Government owned and operated airline. Private industry routinely takes technologies pioneered by the government and turns them into cheap, reliable and robust industries. This has happened in aviation, air mail, computers, and the Internet. It's about time that it happen in space. The President's plan for commercial competition will ultimately take us much farther and much faster, not only to the Moon, but to Mars, the asteroids and beyond. Private companies will drive a very high level of safety because they will cease to exist if they do not. America's capitalist engine drives reliability in our aircraft, our cars, our computers and will do so in space, as well. Private companies will also inject innovation and breakthrough technology into our space program because that is their ethos. Cap Good: SpaceCapitalist domination of resources is key to the development of other planetsZey 1 (Michael, founder of the Expansionary Institute, May 1, The Futurist, 35(3), p. 28, elibrary, JT)The term dominionization refers to the process whereby humankind establishes control over several key aspects of its physical universe. With each passing decade, we enhance our ability to manipulate matter, reshape the planet, develop innovative energy sources, and control fundamental aspects of the physical universe, such as the atom and electromagnetism. Someday, we will learn to influence weather patterns and climate. In a host of ways, dominionization helps humanity vitalize the planet and eventually the universe. As we master the basic dynamics of nature, we are more able to shepherd the evolution of our planet as well as others. As we develop novel and powerful forms of energy, we can rocket from one sphere to another. Moreover, by improving our already formidable skills in moving mountains and creating lakes, we will be better able to change both the topography and the geography of other planets. Examples of dominionization abound. Major macroengineering projects attest to man's ability to transform the very surface of the earth. By constructing man-made lakes, we will be able to live in previously uninhabitable areas such as interior Australia. Shimizu Corporation envisions a subterranean development called Urban Geo Grid-a series of cities linked by tunnels-accommodating half a million people. In the emerging Macroindustrial Era, whose framework was established in the 1970s and 1980s, we will redefine the concept of "bigness" as we dot Earth's landscape with immense architectural structures. Takenaka, a Japanese construction firm, has proposed "Sky City 1000," a 3,000-foot tower, to be built in Tokyo. Another firm, Ohbayashi, plans to erect a 500-story high-rise building featuring apartments, offices, shopping centers, and service facilities. A capitalist system is the only mechanism under which space can be developedAshworth 10 (Stephen, academic publishing@Oxford, December 18, , accessed: 2 July 2011, JT)However, in order for interplanetary growth to occur in the first place, an economic mechanism must be in place to drive it. The most suitable economic mechanism that has been demonstrated so far is capitalism. Its need for continuous expansion makes it highly appropriate as an economic system for a society colonising its local planetary system. It is not clear whether an economic system based on ideology could perform this function of capitalism. If the ideology was growth-oriented, then it would have no reason to conflict with the existing capitalist order, but would rather work in concert with it. But in the more plausible case that it was oriented towards social stability and economic stagnation, particularly in view of the environmentalist, anti-growth or anti-consumerist agendas it might very likely serve, then it would not want to promote disruptive new technologies such as those of access to space. The idea of a socially just socialist society (if such a hypothetical entity is possible) expanding into space is therefore a questionable one. If Earth remained divided among competing centres of power, then they might make the leap to interplanetary capability even without the driving force of capitalist economics. However, the competitive Moon-race of the 1960s showed, firstly, that if one competitor drops out, the other may well lose interest to the point of abandoning capabilities developed for that competition, and secondly, that an ideologically based collectivist society is unlikely to make a good showing in the technologies required. Economic growth, however, has a vested interest in preserving and extending gains made. Cap Good: TechCapitalism is key to driving scientific competitiveness and the drive to develop new technologyCrews 3 (Clyde, senior fellow@Competitive Enterprise Institute, May 15, , accessed: 30 June 2011, JT)Politicians have no innate ability to pick among competing technologies, whether nano, macro or otherwise. If they did, they'd be entrepreneurs themselves. And they're particularly bad at the job when using taxpayer money. Politicians can merely transfer wealth, which automatically invites wasteful pork-barreling to propel funds to one's home state. Scientific merit need not carry the day. But even if it did, taxpayers should get to decide for themselves which technologies to invest in. Nanotechnology is plainly viable on its own, moving forward on fronts too numerous to catalog, all seeking to make breakthroughs before others. Nanotech venture capitalist Josh Wolfe told Wired magazine that most business proposals he sees now have "nano" in the title. Venture capitalists have plowed in hundreds of millions of dollars over the past five years. And according to the National Science Foundation, the market in nanotech products could be $1 trillion a year by 2015. That's nearly 10 percent the size of today's gross domestic product. The vigorous calls for government research seem in part a reaction to the technology market downturn. But we ought not look for a technology savior in emergent biotech or nanotech spawned in government labs. Forthcoming technologies should be products of capitalism and entrepreneurship, not central planning, government R&D, and pork barrel. Tomorrow's nanotechnology markets have too much potential and are too important be creatures of government. Cap Good: WarCapitalism incentivizes peace—outweighs all other factors Bandow, senior fellow at the Cato Institute, Nov 10, 2005[Doug, Spreading Capitalism is Good for Peace, ] But World War I demonstrated that increased trade was not enough. The prospect of economic ruin did not prevent rampant nationalism, ethnic hatred, and security fears from trumping the power of markets. An even greater conflict followed a generation later. Thankfully, World War II left war essentially unthinkable among leading industrialized - and democratic - states. Support grew for the argument, going back to Immanual Kant, that republics are less warlike than other systems. Today's corollary is that creating democracies out of dictatorships will reduce conflict. This contention animated some support outside as well as inside the United States for the invasion of Iraq. But Gartzke argues that "the 'democratic peace' is a mirage created by the overlap between economic and political freedom." That is, democracies typically have freer economies than do authoritarian states. Thus, while "democracy is desirable for many reasons," he notes in a chapter in the latest volume of Economic Freedom in the World, created by the Fraser Institute, "representative governments are unlikely to contribute directly to international peace." Capitalism is by far the more important factor. The shift from statist mercantilism to high-tech capitalism has transformed the economics behind war. Markets generate economic opportunities that make war less desirable. Territorial aggrandizement no longer provides the best path to riches. Free-flowing capital markets and other aspects of globalization simultaneously draw nations together and raise the economic price of military conflict. Moreover, sanctions, which interfere with economic prosperity, provides a coercive step short of war to achieve foreign policy ends. Positive economic trends are not enough to prevent war, but then, neither is democracy. It long has been obvious that democracies are willing to fight, just usually not each other. Contends Gartzke, "liberal political systems, in and of themselves, have no impact on whether states fight." In particular, poorer democracies perform like non-democracies. He explains: "Democracy does not have a measurable impact, while nations with very low levels of economic freedom are 14 times more prone to conflict than those with very high levels." Gartzke considers other variables, including alliance memberships, nuclear deterrence, and regional differences. Although the causes of conflict vary, the relationship between economic liberty and peace remains.Cap Good: WarCapitalism creates a spirit of cooperation which maintains peaceRockwell 3 (Llewellyn, pres Ludwig Von Mises Institute, January 1, , accessed: 1 July 2011, JT)What about the need to open foreign markets? The expansion of markets and the division of labor is always a wonderful thing. The more people involved in the overarching business of economic life, the greater the prospects for wealth creation. But force is hardly the best means to promote the cooperative and peaceful activity of trade, any more than it is a good idea to steal your neighbor's mower to improve lawn care on your block. Bitterness and acrimony is never good business, to say nothing of death and destruction. In any case, the problem in Iraq is not that Iraq is somehow withholding its oil from the market. For ten years, and even before the first war on Iraq, its oil supplies have been available to the world. In one of the great ironies of modern war history, the first Bush administration waged war, it said, to keep Iraq from withholding its oil resources from world markets. The US then proceeded to enforce a decade of sanctions that withheld most of Iraq's oil reserves from the market (thereby increasing prices and profits for US firms). We are somehow not permitted to say this, but the solution to Iraq is at hand. Repeal sanctions immediately. Trade with Iraq. Oil prices would fall dramatically. Hatred of the US would abate. The plight of Iraq could no longer be used as exhibit A in terrorist recruitment drives. The only downside, of course, is that US companies connected to the Bush administration would not be the owners of the oil fields, but instead would have to compete with other producers in supplying consumers with oil. Well, so be it. The idea of free enterprise is that everyone gets a chance, and no one industry or group of producers enjoys special privileges. Through competition and cooperation, but never violence, the living standards of everyone rise and we all enjoy more of the life we want to live. It's not hard to understand, except in the corridors of the Bush administration, where theorists have linked arms with Leninists in the belief that war is always good, and always necessary, for business. Cap Good: WarCapitalism empirically deters warGriswold 5 (Daniel, director of Center for Trade Policy Studies@CATO, December 28, , accessed: 29 June 2011, JT)As one little-noticed headline on an Associated Press story recently reported, "War declining worldwide, studies say." According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, the number of armed conflicts around the world has been in decline for the past half-century. In just the past 15 years, ongoing conflicts have dropped from 33 to 18, with all of them now civil conflicts within countries. As 2005 draws to an end, no two nations in the world are at war with each other. The death toll from war has also been falling. According to the AP story, "The number killed in battle has fallen to its lowest point in the post-World War II period, dipping below 20,000 a year by one measure. Peacemaking missions, meanwhile, are growing in number." Those estimates are down sharply from annual tolls ranging from 40,000 to 100,000 in the 1990s, and from a peak of 700,000 in 1951 during the Korean War. Many causes lie behind the good news -- the end of the Cold War and the spread of democracy, among them -- but expanding trade and globalization appear to be playing a major role. Far from stoking a "World on Fire," as one misguided American author has argued, growing commercial ties between nations have had a dampening effect on armed conflict and war, for three main reasons. First, trade and globalization have reinforced the trend toward democracy, and democracies don't pick fights with each other. Freedom to trade nurtures democracy by expanding the middle class in globalizing countries and equipping people with tools of communication such as cell phones, satellite TV, and the Internet. With trade comes more travel, more contact with people in other countries, and more exposure to new ideas. Thanks in part to globalization, almost two thirds of the world's countries today are democracies -- a record high. Second, as national economies become more integrated with each other, those nations have more to lose should war break out. War in a globalized world not only means human casualties and bigger government, but also ruptured trade and investment ties that impose lasting damage on the economy. In short, globalization has dramatically raised the economic cost of war. Third, globalization allows nations to acquire wealth through production and trade rather than conquest of territory and resources. Increasingly, wealth is measured in terms of intellectual property, financial assets, and human capital. Those are assets that cannot be seized by armies. If people need resources outside their national borders, say oil or timber or farm products, they can acquire them peacefully by trading away what they can produce best at home. Capitalism is not the root cause of war – it opposes warBresiger 6 (Gregory, editor of Traders Magazine, April 6, , accessed: 29 June 2011, JT)This is an idea that was destroyed many years ago by the great economist Joseph Schumpeter in his brilliant essays "Imperialism" and "Social Classes." Capitalism wants peace, Schumpeter argued. Wherever capitalism was the purest, wherever laissez-faire reigned, there were considerable peace parties. But we have come a long way from laissez-faire. The producers of this documentary don't seem to understand that. This capitalism-is-imperialism idea is also supported through "Why We Fight" by historian Chalmers Johnson. His book "Blowback" has documented American interventions around the world. But these interventions are anything but the fault of unsubsidized elements of the American business community. Did the average American businessperson—often struggling to pay the huge costs of empire—actually want the United States to embark on this path of empire? The producers have no answer to that question. Although "Why We Fight" sometimes attacks capitalism, we rarely hear from American capitalists, who historically have opposed much of the inflation and disasters that have been the result of the imperial policies of at least the last half-century. Their opposition was well founded. War, and its concomitant inflation, is bad for those capitalists who are not on the government dole, bad for those who are not court intellectuals, bad for anyone who isn't an enthusiastic part of Leviathan. Indeed, if one goes by the stock market, probably the worst extended recent period was in the mid 1960s to mid 1970s during the height of the Vietnam War. That's when stocks went through a very difficult time. Cap Good: WaterCapitalism is key to avoid water wars and water shortagesLehr 5 (Jay, science director@Heartland Institute, November 1, , accessed: 1 July 2011, JT)For-profit water corporations are more likely than government bureaucracies to handle water with care. Profit motives give them strong incentives to conserve water and see to it that customers are served rather than water being spilled. Furthermore, trading will guarantee maximum output of water, while clearly defined and recognized property rights to water lower the risk of conflicts. When countries trade water with each other--allowing water to be acquired by means other than force--those peaceful means are likely to be used. Critics of privatization will highlight individual cases of poor families who still do not get water in spite of privatization. But profit impels companies to satisfy as many customers as possible. When water systems are privatized, the record shows, the number of people served increases by an average of 40 percent over the number served by the government-controlled water supply. Segerfeldt's extensive experience around the world yields the following insightful comment: "Anti-privatisation activists use separate standards when judging public and private water management. As soon as any fault occurs in the private distribution of water, their anti-corporation bias persuades them to blame privatisation. Public sector failure, on the other hand, is rarely blamed on the fact that it is in the government's hands." Lack of water infrastructure kills millions of people every year.Lehr 5 (Jay, science director@Heartland Institute, November 1, , accessed: 1 July 2011, JT)Segerfeldt tells us things are worst in the big cities of the Third World. "Every year more than a billion people contract water-related diseases and nearly half the urban population of many of Africa's, Asia's and Latin American cities may suffer from one or more diseases associated with inadequate water and sanitation." Water shortages account for approximately 12 million deaths annually throughout the less-developed world. According to Segerfeldt, during the past 550 years some 507 interstate conflict situations worldwide--including 21 cases of outright hostilities--have arisen from disagreements over water. AT: InequalityCapitalism is the ultimate equalizerBast 1 (Joseph, pres Heartland Institute, March 1, , accessed: 1 July 2011, JT)Capitalism is profoundly egalitarian. Its existence relies on institutions that protect the equal rights of consumers and producers, eschews privilege and authority, and distributes wealth based on each participants' contribution to satisfying the needs of others. So we should immediately be suspicious of claims that capitalism causes inequality. Historical data on income inequality in the U.S. show that both the rich and the poor are getting richer. The proportion of the U.S. population that was poor, measured by household consumption, fell from 31 percent in 1949 to just 2 percent in the late 1990s. Census data released in September 2000 found the nation's poverty rate had reached a 33-year low, and poverty among African-Americans and Hispanics was at the lowest levels since record-keeping began in the 1950s. "Snap-shot" views of income distribution in a capitalist society overlook the movement of households from low- to middle- and high-income status, and sometimes back again. According to W. Michael Cox and Richard Alm in their 1999 book, Myths of Rich & Poor, only 5 percent of households in the bottom fifth of income earners in 1975 were still there in 1991. Almost 3 out of 10 had risen to the top fifth, and more than three-quarters had reached the two highest tiers of income earners for at least one year by 1991. These numbers should be reassuring to those who like to "keep score" on the relative wealth of various categories of people, but it is possible to focus too much on such statistics. Incomes, after all, are outcomes of voluntary decisions and moral behavior. Income inequality generally means different choices are being made, often involving complex trade-offs between leisure, status, and work that outside observers cannot hope to judge as right or wrong. AT: Globalization BadCapitalist globalization increases productivity and improves quality of lifeBast 1 (Joseph, pres Heartland Institute, March 1, , accessed: 1 July 2011, JT)William Greider's apocalyptic 1997 book, One World Ready or Not, is typical of a recent warnings that the growing integration of worldwide markets, called "globalism," poses a threat to us all. With the vagueness and doublespeak that characterizes professional scaremongers, he predicts "the global system will, indeed, probably experience a series of terrible events [when?]--wrenching calamities that are economic or social or environmental in nature--before common sense can prevail." [emphasis added] Greider imagines the world will run out of natural resources and places to store its waste before it can raise the standard of living for most of its expected inhabitants. But the plain fact of the matter is that in every part of world except those torn by civil war or governed by socialist tyrants, production is outpacing population growth and consumer demand for food, clothing, and shelter. Human intervention and productivity, spurred by the division of labor and widening expanse of markets, are finding new ways and means to grow more and waste less. According to Greider, "The industrial system must be reinvented to save the earth. The social values that are precious to most people must be freed from the confinements of economic imperatives and allowed to find fuller expression." This is utopian nonsense. No one, regardless of his brilliance or political power, can "reinvent" the industrial system. One might as well call for "reinventing" the English language, or a rainforest. Adopting policies that violate property rights and restrict trade doesn't free people, it reduces their choices and virtually guarantees that they will work harder and longer to feed and protect themselves and their children. AT: Value to LifeTheir view that capitalism destroys the value to life is an attempt to pass blame for failure onto a system. Human failure is inevitable and not caused by capitalism. Only the individual controls their value and actions.Dieteman 1 (David, attorney in Pennsylvania, September 3, , accessed: 2 July 2011, JT)Second, what is the nature of capitalism? Capitalism means the free market, in other words, men freely exchanging things. As a shortcut, we refer to the free exchange of goods and services as "a market." A market is of course also the physical space where such exchanges take place. Third, if men freely exchange things — if they buy and sell in a market — how does such voluntary activity "eat away at our lives and relationships"? For starters, it would seem that it sustains lives and relationships: food that you buy keeps you alive, and movies and dinners sustain relationships. Dating gets a lot more difficult when you cannot rely on the division of labor to supply you with entertainers, chefs, and waiters (waiters; yes, waiters; not "servers;" if service must be in the name, are they not "servants"? One's computer may be dependent upon a server, but one's dinner may not, unless your kitchen is really automated). For that matter, contemporary life would be nearly impossible without the division of labor provided by markets. Try growing a variety of nutritious foods on your own property, plus making your own furniture and clothing, and building your own home, generating your own electricity to run the appliances that you built yourself...and I hope you get the idea. Human beings have one large problem, and one large problem only, from which all the little problems flow. The problem is not capitalis. The problem is that human beings are imperfect beings, subject to temptation and sin. Not religious? Fine. Consider that human beings have a strong tendency to screw things up, and to simply be weak, i.e., to do something — anything! — but what they are supposed to be doing. The voluntary actions of buying and selling do not "eat away at our lives and relationships." Instead, we eat away at our lives by living like a walking version of the disposal under a kitchen sink. Similarly, we destroy our own relationships with our insistence upon control, or an unthinking, lazy sort of self-centered approach to life. If you can think of nothing better to do with your time than mindlessly walk shopping malls and spend money, that says more about you than about capitalism. Read a book, go swimming, or shoot skeet. Whatever you do, you are responsible for how you spend your time. Blaming capitalism for an unhappy life or a failed love makes about as much sense as blaming a gun maker for an act of murder, or blaming a dairy farmer for your clogged arteries. Or, you might say that it makes as much sense as blaming your parents for everything bad that happens to you. Recall that this was a trendy and acceptable thing to do, until the Menendez brothers took things a bit too far, and commentators had a field day with the "I'm not responsible for anything I do" crowd. AT: HappinessCapitalism doesn’t destroy happinessMises 56 (Ludwig Von, econ@NYU, , accessed: 29 June 2011, JT)People do not toil and trouble in order to attain perfect hap?piness, but in order to remove as much as possible some felt un?easiness and thus to become happier than they were before. A man who buys a television set thereby gives evi?dence to the ef?fect that he thinks that the possession of this contrivance will in?crease his well?being and make him more content than he was without it. If it were otherwise, he would not have bought it. The task of the doctor is not to make the patient happy, but to remove his pain and to put him in better shape for the pursuit of the main concern of every living being, the fight against all fac?tors pernicious to his life and ease. It may be true that there are among Buddhist mendicants, living on alms in dirt and penury, some who feel perfectly happy and do not envy any nabob. However, it is a fact that for the immense majority of people such a life would appear unbearable. To them the impulse toward ceaselessly aiming at the improve?ment of the external conditions of existence is inwrought. Who would presume to set an Asiatic beggar as an example to the av?erage American? One of the most re?markable achievements of capitalism is the drop in infant mortality. Who wants to deny that this phenomenon has at least removed one of the causes of many people’s unhappi?ness ? No less absurd is the second reproach thrown upon capital?ism—namely, that technological and therapeutical innova?tions do not benefit all people. Changes in human conditions are brought about by the pioneering of the cleverest and most en?ergetic men. They take the lead and the rest of man?kind follows them little by little. The innovation is first a luxury of only a few people, until by degrees it comes into the reach of the many. It is not a sensible objection to the use of shoes or of forks that they spread only slowly and that even today millions do without them. The dainty ladies and gentlemen who first began to use soap were the har?bingers of the big?scale production of soap for the common man. If those who have today the means to buy a tele?vision set were to abstain from the purchase because some peo?ple cannot afford it, they would not further, but hinder, the popu?larization of this contrivance. ................
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