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eCapitalism Kritik
Capitalism Kritik..............................................................................................................................................................................................................................1
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Links
Interpassivity Link...........................................................................................................................................................................................................................5
Reform Link.....................................................................................................................................................................................................................................8
Reform Link.....................................................................................................................................................................................................................................9
Reform Link...................................................................................................................................................................................................................................10
Reform Link...................................................................................................................................................................................................................................11
Reform Link...................................................................................................................................................................................................................................12
Ecology Link..................................................................................................................................................................................................................................13
Biomimicry....................................................................................................................................................................................................................................14
Emissions Trading Link.................................................................................................................................................................................................................16
Single Issue Environment Link......................................................................................................................................................................................................20
Renewables Link............................................................................................................................................................................................................................21
Technology Link............................................................................................................................................................................................................................23
Alternative Energy Increases Consumption...................................................................................................................................................................................24
Environment Link..........................................................................................................................................................................................................................27
Environment Link..........................................................................................................................................................................................................................28
Warming Link................................................................................................................................................................................................................................29
Emissions Trading/Reform Link....................................................................................................................................................................................................30
Sustainable Development Link......................................................................................................................................................................................................31
Impact
Hegemony Link/Impact.................................................................................................................................................................................................................32
Ethical Obligation Impact..............................................................................................................................................................................................................34
Extinction Impact...........................................................................................................................................................................................................................35
Everything Impact..........................................................................................................................................................................................................................39
Environment Impact.......................................................................................................................................................................................................................43
Global Warming Impact.................................................................................................................................................................................................................47
Alternative
Zizek Alternative............................................................................................................................................................................................................................50
Zizek Alternative............................................................................................................................................................................................................................51
Alternative Solves..........................................................................................................................................................................................................................52
Ballot Key......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................53
Answers to Affirmative Arguments

AT Permutation..............................................................................................................................................................................................................................54
AT Permutation..............................................................................................................................................................................................................................55
AT Link Turns................................................................................................................................................................................................................................56
AT Capitalism Inevitable...............................................................................................................................................................................................................57
AT Thats Just Bad Capitalism.......................................................................................................................................................................................................59
Ballot Key......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................60
AT Permutation/Link Turn.............................................................................................................................................................................................................61
Affirmative Answers
Aff: Capitalism Inevitable..............................................................................................................................................................................................................62
Aff: Gibson-Graham......................................................................................................................................................................................................................65
Aff: Gibson-Graham......................................................................................................................................................................................................................66
Aff: Capitalism Good Environment............................................................................................................................................................................................67
Aff: Capitalism Good Environment............................................................................................................................................................................................68
Aff: Capitalism Good - Environment............................................................................................................................................................................................69
Aff: Capitalism Good Peace.......................................................................................................................................................................................................70
Aff: Capitalism Good Peace.......................................................................................................................................................................................................71
Aff: Capitalism Good Equality...................................................................................................................................................................................................72
Aff: Capitalism Good Poverty....................................................................................................................................................................................................73
Aff: Socialism Bad.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................74
Aff: Permutation............................................................................................................................................................................................................................75
Aff:Perm........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................76
Aff: Perm.......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................77
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Capitalism K 1NC
First we begin with the LINK: The affirmatives attempt to produce green energy allows the
system to mask the underlying consumption and capitalization patterns that lead to the
destruction of the environment.
John Foster Professor of Sociology and Dennis Soron from the University of Alberta 04 , (Ecology,
capitalism, and the socialization of nature 2004 ) JXu
JBF: I think so. As you know, I've recently been quite critical of the strategies adopted by some groups. Take the example
of the International Forum on Globalization and other similar organizations, which are very good and very progressive in
many respects. In some of their recent reports, however, their main policy prescription is to "green" the World Bank, the
WTO, and so on--that is, to somehow make these institutions "greener" and more environmentally friendly. I think that
this approach is completely ludicrous. These institutions are controlled primarily by capital, and their basic nature is
not going to change. They are merely instruments of other powerful forces that need to be addressed. The whole purpose of
the WTO, for instance, is to expand global capital accumulation, primarily to the benefit of the richest countries, by removing barriers to the international
mobility of capital, eliminating state subsidies and regulations, and basically applying neoliberal prescriptions everywhere. To this extent, there is no
way that it can be "greened" in some way or turned into an environmental organization. To move forward, we need to
be not only a lot more organized, but more realistic about the forces we're up against, and more willing to address the larger
economic issues at the heart of today's environmental crisis. Most of all, the environmental movement needs to stop
believing that simply talking to elite groups will somehow lead to a compromise that will save the environment. For
the powers that be, the primary goal of "sustainable development" has come to be that of sustaining development-that is, sustaining economic development in the rich countries and sustaining the process of capital accumulation.
There is no basis for a compromise with that kind of institutional reality. Ecology Against Capitalism DS: Unlike some
fellow radical ecologists, who have tended to portray "modernity" or "industrialism" as the primary causes of environmental
destruction, you've made a strong argument for the need to anchor ecological theory and practice in a systemic critique of
capitalism. Could you elaborate on this point? JBF: First of all, it is a simple and unavoidable fact that capitalism is the
actual social system in which we live, and that our primary way of designating and understanding that system is to see
it as capitalist. For a very long time now, social scientists from different disciplines and from across the political spectrum have agreed on this and have
shared a basic understanding of how the system works. In progressive circles, of course, people continue to debate about whether they should "name the
system" or not, because sometimes it seems too radical or too grandiose to claim that capitalism itself is to blame for the problems we face. In contrast, the
establishment shows no such reluctance to "name" capitalism. Fortune magazine and Business Week explicitly praise the virtues of capitalism all the time.
Whatever approach one adopts, however, there is still very little doubt about what our social system actually is. With respect to "industrialism,"
we need to remember that capitalism was destructive of the environment on a global scale long before the Industrial
Revolution--so the problem can't simply be attributed to the presence of industrial production methods. "Modernity" is a
category that is so over-arching that it is sometimes difficult to know precisely what it means. Whatever it is, and we could certainly discuss this topic for a
long time, it isn't a useful way of describing a social system. It might provide a way of describing a certain pattern of historical development characteristic of
the social system we have today, but it doesn't really point us to anything concrete. If modernity itself were somehow to blame for environmental
degradation, then the problem could be expected to exist only in "modern" societies. I think that this is too simplistic a conclusion to draw. My own view is
that the ecological problem has existed for millennia, but that to understand it in any particular historical period we have to look concretely at the historical
systems that are in place. I think that capitalism has been enormously destructive of the environment, but it is by no means the only social system that has
been this way. Soviet-style systems were destructive of the environment in somewhat different ways for somewhat different reasons. Feudal and other
tributary societies of earlier millennia were also enormously destructive of the environment. That said, the unprecedented magnitude of
today's global ecological crisis shows us that capitalism really takes the cake. When you start looking concretely at the
forces that are generating this crisis, it becomes clear that they are inseparable from the basic dynamics of the global
capitalist system itself. Today, as much as ever, capitalism demands constant and rapid economic growth. Historically, it has
generally been assumed that capitalist economies could be expected to enjoy an overall rate of growth of about 3 percent a year. At this rate, the world
economy would increase sixteen times in a century, 250 times in two centuries, and 4000 times in three centuries. This is just an arithmetical game in a way,
but it shows us that a system as expansive as the one we have is inevitably going to cause problems in the context of a limited biosphere. Indeed, the
global economic system is increasingly beginning to rival the biogeochemical processes of the planet itself in terms of
scale. Obviously, this situation casts doubt upon the viability and effectiveness of environmental approaches which
simply take the imperative of capitalist growth for granted.
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Capitalism K 1NC
The Impact is Environmental Destruction: Capitalism is the root cause of all environmental
destruction and is a necessary component of the drive for profits.
John Foster again in 2002 (John Bellamy, Professor of Sociology at University of Oregon, II. Capitalism and ecology:
the nature of the contradiction, June 15, 2002) JXu
Today ecological crisis looms larger in our vision of anticapitalist revolt--to a degree that Marx did not and could not
perceive. But our overall vision of the ecological features of a socialist revolution is scarcely more radical than what Marx
himself envisioned, with his idea of the dissolution of the antagonistic relation of town and country and an attempt to
overcome the metabolic rift through sustainable production based on a communal society of freely associated producers.
When William Morris developed his ideas for the reorganization of relations between town and country in News from
Nowhere he was knowingly or unknowingly very close to the spirit of Marx. We have no more reason today than Marx
did in his day to restrict our analysis of ecological contradictions to what can be incorporated into some specific
theory of economic crisis. Economic crisis theory can be overemphasized, even fetishized. Let me give you an example of
this. For many years Marxist political economists of various persuasions have engaged in elaborate attempts to explain the
imperialistic tendencies of capitalism--that is, the drive of the center of the system to exploit the periphery--by pointing to
various specific theories of economic crisis. The problem of all such perspectives, in my view, is that they miss the point:
imperialism is not the product of this or that economic crisis (nor does its significance lie in how it in turn bears on
economic crisis phenomena), rather it is just as basic to the system, as it has historically evolved, as the search for
profits itself. In other words, imperialism is a necessary product of capitalism as a globalizing force, and to the extent
that Marx himself dealt with imperialism it was of course mainly in this sense. Economic crisis can complicate things in
certain instances. But attempts to see the whole reality of imperialism through the prism of economic crisis only
obscures its essential nature. In the case of ecological degradation we are dealing with a first order, not a second order,
problem of capitalism (and not just of capitalism). Ecological degradation, like imperialism, is as basic to capitalism as
the pursuit of profits itself (which depend to a large extent upon it). Nor should the environmental problem be seen
largely through the economic prism in the sense that it derives its significance from the extent to which it generates
economic crisis for capitalism. As Rosa Luxemburg pointed out, song birds were dying out not because they were directly
part of capitalism, or its conditions of production, but simply because their habitat was destroyed in the process of the
system's relentless expansion. Luxemburg rightly did not connect this phenomenon to economic crisis, but this did not stop
her from raging against the destruction of what she called "these defenseless little creatures." * There is no doubt that
Luxemburg believed that the economy could be organized under socialism so as to lessen such destruction. But her reasons
for advocating change were not in this case economic, though they were consistent with materialism. The ultimate strength of
Marxist analysis has never resided chiefly in its economic crisis theory, nor even in its analysis of class struggle as such, but
lies much deeper in its materialist conception of history, both human and natural--understood, as this only truly can be, as a
dialectical and endlessly contingent process. This means overcoming in a nonreductive way the split between naturalphysical science and social science that has been one of the main alienated intellectual products of bourgeois society.
Capitalism K 1NC
The Alternative is to reject the affirmative! Reform of the system is not the answer. Only a
rejection of capitalism and a refusal to participate in its policies can destroy the system.
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James Herod Author in 2004 (James, Getting Free, http://jamesherod.info/?sec=book&id=1) JXu

It is time to try to describe, at first abstractly and later concretely, a strategy for destroying capitalism. At its most basic,
this strategy 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 from 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; it is 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 ones, and then continually build and strengthen our new pattern while doing everything we can to weaken capitalist relations. In
this way our new democratic, nonhierarchical, noncommodified 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 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 were doing and how we want to live, what obstacles have to be overcome before we can live that way, and 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. (As mentioned earlier, there is no
elsewhere.) There is at least one thing, wage slavery, that we cant 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. Its 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
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. The
cooperative labor and cooperatively produced goods. Another clarification is needed.
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. The content of this vision is actually not new at all.
The long-term goal of communists, anarchists, and socialists has always been to restore community. Even the great peasant revolts of early capitalism sought to free people from
external authorities and restore autonomy to villages. Marx defined communism once as a free association of producers, and at another time as a situation in which the free
development of each is a condition for the free development of all. Anarchists have always called for worker and peasant self-managed cooperatives. The
long-term
goals have always been clear: to abolish wage slavery, eradicate a social order organized solely around the
accumulation of capital for its own sake, and establish in its place a society of free people who democratically and
cooperatively self-determine the shape of their social world.
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Interpassivity Link
The affirmative is interpassivity not an attempt to break down the capitalist system but to
challenge it while maintaining it. Reform and resistance is tolerated and co-opted by capitalism,
leaving us disempowered.
Slavoj Zizek professor of philosophy at the Institute for Sociology 2002 ( Revolution at the Gates, pg 167-172)
JXu
The problem lies in the further implicit qualifications which can easily be discerned by a concrete analysis of the concrete
situation, as Lenin himself would have put it. Fidelity to the democratic consensus means acceptance of the present
liberal-parliamentary consensus, which precludes any serious questioning of the way this liberal-democratic order is
complicit in the phenomena it officially condemns, and, of course, any serious attempt to imagine a different
sociopolitical order. In short, it means: say and write whatever you like on condition that you do not actually
question or disturb the prevailing political consensus. Everything is allowed, solicited even, as a critical topic: the
prospect of a global ecological catastrophe; violations of human rights; sexism, homophobia, anti-feminism; growing
violence not only in faraway countries, but also in our own megalopolises; the gap between the First and the Third World,
between rich and poor; the shattering impact of the digitalization of our daily lives ... today, there is nothing easier than to
get international, state or corporate funds for a multidisciplinary research project on how to fight new forms of ethnic,
religious or sexist violence. The problem is that all this occurs against the background of a fundamental Denkverbot: a
prohibition on thinking. Todays liberal-democratic hegemony is sustained by a kind of unwritten Denkverbot similar to the
infamous Berufsverbot (prohibition on employing individuals with radical Left leanings in the state organs) in Germany in
the late 1960s the moment we show a minimal sign of engaging in political projects which aim seriously to challenge
the existing order, the answer is immediately: Benevolent as it is, this will inevitably end in a new Gulag! The
ideological function of constant references to the Holocaust, the Gulag, and more recent Third World catastrophes is thus to
serve as the support of this Denkverbot by constantly reminding us how things could have been much worse: Just look
around and see for yourself what will happen if we follow your radical notions! What we encounter here is the ultimate
example of what Anna Dinerstein and Mike Neary have called the project of disutopia: not just the temporary absence of
Utopia, but the political celebration of the end of social dreams.2 And the demand for scientific objectivity amounts to just
another version of the same Denkverhot: the moment we seriously question the existing liberal consensus, we are accused of
abandoning scientific objectivity for outdated ideological positions. This is the Leninist point on which one cannot and
should not concede: today, actual freedom of thought means freedom to question the prevailing liberal-democratic
post-ideological consensus or it means nothing. The Right to Truth The perspective of the critique of ideology
compels us to invert Wittgensteins What one cannot speak about, thereof one should be silent into What one should not
speak about, thereof one cannot remain silent. If you want to speak about a social system, you cannot remain silent about its
repressed excess. The point is not to tell the whole Truth but, precisely, to append to the (official) Whole the uneasy
supplement which denounces its falsity. As Max Horkheimer put it back in the l930s: If you dont want to talk about
capitalism, then you should keep silent about Fascism. Fascism is the inherent symptom (the return of the repressed) of
capitalism, the key to its truth, not just an external contingent deviation of its normal logic. And the same goes for
todays situation: those who do not want to subject liberal democracy and the flaws of its multiculturalist tolerance to critical
analysis, should keep quiet about the new Rightist violence and intolerance. If we are to leave the opposition between liberaldemocratic universalism and ethnic/religious fundamentalism behind, the first step is to acknowledge the existence of liberal
fundamentalism: the perverse game of making a big fuss when the rights of a serial killer or a suspected war criminal are
violated, while ignoring massive violations of ordinary peoples rights. More precisely, the politically correct stance betrays
its perverse economy through its oscillation between the two extremes: either fascination with the victimized other (helpless
children, raped women . . .), or a focus on the problematic other who, although criminal, and so on, also deserves protection
of his human rights, because today its him, tomorrow itll be us (an excellent example is Noam Chomskys defence of a
French book advocating the revisionist stance on the Holocaust). On a different level, a similar instance of the perversity of
Political Correctness occurs in Denmark, where people speak ironically of the white womans burden, her ethico-political
duty to have sex with immigrant workers from Third World countries this being the final necessary step in ending their
exclusion. Today, in the era of what Habermas designated as die neue Unubersichtlichkeit (the new opacity),~ our everyday
experience is more mystifying than ever: modernization generates new obscurantisms; the reduction of freedom is
presented to us as the dawn of new freedoms. The perception that we live in a society of free choices, in which we have
to choose even our most natural features (ethnic or sexual identity), is the form of appearance of its very opposite: of the
absence of true choices. The recent trend for alternate reality films, which present existing reality as one of a multitude of
possible outcomes, is symptomatic of a society in which choices no longer really matter, are trivialized. The lesson of the
time-warp narratives is even bleaker, since it points towards a total closure: the very attempt to avoid the predestined course
of things not only leads us back to it, but actually constitutes it from Oedipus onwards, we want to avoid A, and it is
through our very detour that A realizes itself. In these circumstances, we should be especially careful not to confuse the
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ruling ideology with ideology which seems to dominate. More than ever, we should bear in mind Walter Benjamins
reminder that it is not enough to ask how a certain theory (or art) positions itself with regard to social struggles we ask
how it actually functions in these very struggles. In sex, the true hegemonic attitude is not patriarchal repression, but free
promiscuity; in art, provocations in the style of the notorious Sensation exhibitions are the norm, the example of art fully
integrated into the establishment. Ayn Rand brought this logic to its conclusion, supplementing it with a kind of Hegelian
twist, that is, reasserting the official ideology itself as its own greatest transgression, as in the title of one of her late nonfiction books: Capitalism, This Unknown Ideal, or in top managers, Americas last endangered species. Indeed, since the
normal functioning of capitalism involves some kind of disavowal of the basic principle of its functioning (todays
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
Marxs 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 co-ordinates. 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 dont 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 preiudice. 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 Mediecins 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.6 This 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 Lets
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.8 Let us take one of the hottest topics in todays radical
American academia: postcolonial studies. The problem of postcolonialism is undoubtedly crucial; however, postcolonial
studies tend to translate it into the multiculturalist problematic of the colonized minorities right to narrate their victimizing
experience, of the power mechanisms which repress otherness, so that, at the end of the day, we learn that the root of
postcolonial exploitation is our intolerance towards the Other, and, furthermore, that this intolerance itself is rooted in our
intolerance towards the Stranger in Ourselves, in our inability to confront what we have repressed in and of ourselves
the politico-economic struggle is thus imperceptibly transformed into a pseudopsychoanalytic drama of the subject unable to
confront its inner traumas. . . . (Why pseudo-psychoanalytic? Because the true lesson of psychoanalysis is not that the
external events which fascinate and/or disturb us are just projections of our inner repressed impulses. The unbearable fact of
life is that there really are disturbing events out there: there are other human beings who experience intense sexual enjoyment
while we are half-impotent; there are people submitted to terrifying torture.. . . Again, the ultimate truth of psychoanalysis is
not that of discovering our true Self, but that of the traumatic encounter with an unbearable Real.) The true corruption of
American academia is not primarily financial, it is not only that universities are able to buy many European critical
intellectuals (myself included up to a point), but conceptual: notions of European critical theory are imperceptibly
translated into the benign universe of Cultural Studies chic. At a certain point, this chic becomes indistinguishable from
the famous Citibank commercial in which scenes of East Asian, European, Black and American children playing is
accompanied by the voice-over: People who were once divided by a continent ... are now united by an economy at this
concluding highpoint, of course, the children are replaced by the Citibank logo. The great majority of todays radical
academics silently count on the long-term stability of the American capitalist model, with a secure tenured position as
their ultimate professional goal (a surprising number of them even play the stock market). If there is one thing they are
genuinely afraid of, it is a radical shattering of the (relatively) safe life-environment of the symbolic classes in
developed Western societies. Their excessive Politically Correct zeal when they are dealing with sexism, racism, Third
World sweatshops, and so on, is thus ultimately a defence against their own innermost identification, a kind of compulsive
ritual whose hidden logic is: Lets talk as much as possible about the necessity of a radical change, to make sure that nothing
will really change! The journal October is typical of this: when you ask one of the editors what the title refers to, they halfconfidentially indicate that it is, of course, that October in this way, you can indulge in jargonistic analyses of modern art,
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with the secret assurance that you are somehow retaining a link with the radical revolutionary past.. . . With regard to this
radical chic, our first gesture towards Third Way ideologists and practitioners should be one of praise: at least they play their
game straight, and are honest in their acceptance of the global capitalist co-ordinates unlike pseudo-radical academic
Leftists who adopt an attitude of utter disdain towards the Third Way, while their own radicalism ultimately amounts to an
empty gesture which obliges no one to do anything definite. There is, of course, a strict distinction to be made here
between authentic social engagement on behalf of exploited minorities (for example, organizing illegally employed chicano
field workers in California) and the multiculturalist/postcolonial plantations of no-risk, no-fault, knock-off rebellion which
prosper in radical American academia. If, however, in contrast to corporate multiculturalism, we define critical
multiculturalism as a strategy of pointing out that there are common forces of oppression, common strategies of
exclusion, stereotyping, and stigmatizing of oppressed groups, and thus common enemies and targets of attack, I do
not see the appropriateness of the continuing use of the term multiculturalism, since the accent shifts here to the
common struggle. In its normal accepted meaning, multiculturalism perfectly fits the logic of the global market.
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Reform Link
Reform articulated within capitalism only reinforces the capitalist economy.
Zizek Professor of philosophy in 2001 (Slavoj, professor of philosophy at the Institute for Sociology, Ljubljana,
REPEATING LENIN, http://www.lacan.com/replenin.htm) JXu
However, the outcome of this crisis of the private property of the means of production is by no means guaranteed - it is
HERE that one should take into account the ultimate paradox of the Stalinist society: against the capitalism which is
the class society, but in principle egalitarian, without direct hierarchical divisions, the "mature" Stalinism is a
classless society articulated in precisely defined hierarchical groups (top nomenklatura, technical intelligence, army...).
What this means is that, already for Stalinism, the classic Marxist notion of the class struggle is no longer adequate to
describe its hierarchy and domination: in the Soviet Union from the late 20s onwards, the key social division was not defined
by property, but by the direct access to power mechanisms and to the privileged material and cultural conditions of life (food,
accommodation, healthcare, freedom of travel, education). And, perhaps, the ultimate irony of history will be that, in the
same way Lenin's vision of the "central bank Socialism" can be properly read only retroactively, from today's World Wide
Web, the Soviet Union provided the first model of the developed "post-property" society, of the true "late capitalism" in
which the ruling class will be defined by the direct access to the (informational, administrative) means of social power and
control and to other material and social privileges: the point will no longer be to own companies, but directly to run them, to
have the right to use a private jet, to have access to top health care, etc. - privileges which will be acquired not by property,
but by other (educational, managerial, etc.) mechanisms. Today, we already can discern the signs of a kind of general
unease - recall the series of events usually listed under the name of "Seattle." The 10 years honeymoon of the
triumphant global capitalism is over, the long-overdue "seven years itch" is here - witness the panicky reactions of the
big media, which - from the Time magazine to CNN - all of a sudden started to warn about the Marxists manipulating
the crowd of the "honest" protesters. The problem is now the strictly Leninist one - how to ACTUALIZE the media's
accusations: how to invent the organizational structure which will confer on this unrest the FORM of the universal
political demand. Otherwise, the momentum will be lost, and what will remain is the marginal disturbance, perhaps
organized as a new Greenpeace, with certain efficiency, but also strictly limited goals, marketing strategy, etc. In other
words, the key "Leninist" lesson today is: politics without the organizational FORM of the party is politics without politics,
so the answer to those who want just the (quite adequately named) "New SOCIAL Movements" is the same as the answer
of the Jacobins to the Girondin compromisers: "You want revolution without a revolution!" Today's blockade is that
there are two ways open for the socio-political engagement: either play the game of the system, engage in the "long
march through the institutions," or get active in new social movements, from feminism through ecology to anti-racism.
And, again, the limit of these movements is that they are not POLITICAL in the sense of the Universal Singular: they
are "one issue movements" which lack the dimension of the universality, i.e. they do not relate to the social
TOTALITY. Here, Lenin's reproach to liberals is crucial: they only EXPLOIT the working classes' discontent to
strengthen their position vis-a-vis the conservatives, instead of identifying with it to the end.52 Is this also not the case
with today's Left liberals? They like to evoke racism, ecology, workers' grievances, etc., to score points over the
conservatives WITHOUT ENDANGERING THE SYSTEM. Recall how, in Seattle, Bill Clinton himself deftly referred to
the protesters on the streets outside, reminding the gathered leaders inside the guarded palaces that they should listen to the
message of the demonstrators (the message which, of course, Clinton interpreted, depriving it of its subversive sting
attributed to the dangerous extremists introducing chaos and violence into the majority of peaceful protesters). It's the same
with all New Social Movements, up to the Zapatistas in Chiapas: the systemic politics is always ready to "listen to their
demands," depriving them of their proper political sting. The system is by definition ecumenical, open, tolerant, ready
to "listen" to all - even if one insist on one's demands, they are deprived of their universal political sting by the very form of
negotiation. The true Third Way we have to look for is this third way between the institutionalized parliamentary politics and
the new social movements. The ultimate answer to the reproach that the radical Left proposals are utopian should thus be
that, today, the true utopia is the belief that the present liberal-democratic capitalist consensus could go on indefinitely,
without radical changes. We are thus back at the old '68 motto "Soyons realistes, demandons l'impossible!": in order to be
truly a "realist," one must consider breaking out of the constraints of what appears "possible" (or, as we usually out it,
"feasible").
Capitalism Kritik
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Reform Link
The affirmatives reform serves to maintain our current capitalist lifestyles at the detriment of the
environment technological solutions only increase the scale of capital and worsen environmental
destruction.
John Foster Professor of Sociology in 2007 (John Bellamy, Professor of Sociology at University of Oregon, The
Ecology of Destruction, Feb 2007, http://www.monthlyreview.org/0207jbf.htm) JXu
Most climate scientists, including Lovelock and Hansen, follow the IPCC in basing their main projections of global
warming on a socioecnomic scenario described as business as usual. The dire trends indicated are predicated on our
fundamental economic and technological developments and our basic relation to nature remaining the same. The
question we need to ask then is what actually is business as usual? What can be changed and how fast? With time running out
the implication is that it is necessary to alter business as usual in radical ways in order to stave off or lessen catastrophe. Yet,
the dominant solutionsthose associated with the dominant ideology, i.e., the ideology of the dominant classemphasize
minimal changes in business as usual that will somehow get us off the hook. After being directed to the growing
planetary threats of global warming and species extinction we are told that the answer is better gas mileage and better
emissions standards, the introduction of hydrogen-powered cars, the capture and sequestration of carbon dioxide
emitted in the atmosphere, improved conservation, and voluntary cutbacks in consumption. Environmental political
scientists specialize in the construction of new environmental policy regimes, embodying state and market regulations.
Environmental economists talk of tradable pollution permits and the incorporation of all environmental factors into
the market to ensure their efficient use. Some environmental sociologists (my own field) speak of ecological
modernization: a whole panoply of green taxes, green regulations, and new green technologies, even the greening of
capitalism itself. Futurists describe a new technological world in which the weight of nations on the earth is
miraculously lifted as a result of digital dematerialization of the economy. In all of these views, however, there is one
constant: the fundamental character of business as usual is hardly changed at all. Indeed, what all such analyses
intentionally avoid is the fact that business as usual in our society in any fundamental sense means the capitalist
economyan economy run on the logic of profit and accumulation. Moreover, there is little acknowledgement or even
appreciation of the fact that the Hobbesian war of all against all that characterizes capitalism requires for its
fulfillment a universal war on nature. In this sense new technology cannot solve the problem since it is inevitably used
to further the class war and to increase the scale of the economy, and thus the degradation of the environment.
Whenever production dies down or social resistance imposes barriers on the expansion of capital the answer is always to find
new ways to exploit/degrade nature more intensively. To quote Pontecorvos Burn!, that is the logic of profit....One builds to
make money and to go on making it or to make more sometimes it is necessary to destroy.
Capitalism Kritik
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Reform Link
Working within the capitalist system fails to understand capitalisms role in environmental
destruction. The affirmatives ecological restructuring only creates more degradation.
George Liodakis Professor of Social Science in 2001 (George, Professor of Social Science at Technical
University of Crete, The people-nature relation and the historical significance of the Labour Theory of Value, Capital and
Class, Spring 2001, http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3780/is_200104/ai_n8940388) JXu
The overall attempt to respond to the exacerbated ecological crisis, from the side of capital, entails extensive recycling,
economising on natural resources, the development of new materials and non-polluting technologies, and an overall
restructuring towards a `green capitalism'. This restructuring of capital encompasses èco-regulation', which mainly
consists of an attempt to formulate ècologically adjusted prices'. These attempts and regulations, however, are usually
proved ineffective insofar as they operate within the system's logic, focus narrowly on the sphere of market exchange,
and fail to understand that all relevant phenomena (competition, externalities, etc.) are deeply embedded in capitalist
production itself. They also face great difficulties in internalising production cost, enhanced by the competitive contradiction
of capital and the contradictory character of state regulation (see Liodakis, 2000). As Marx has stressed, '[a] 11 thought of a
common, allembracing and farsighted control' of the production and consumption of raw materials under capitalism is no
more than a `pious wish', flatly ìrreconcilable with the laws of capitalist production' (1967 III: 118-20). It should be noted
though, that capitalism's only absolute limit is extinction of the human race (i.e., of exploitable labour power), and that
the restructuring of capitalism can potentially ameliorate or postpone the crisis, ensuring thus, for a certain time span,
the reproduction of the system (see Goodman and Redclift, 1991: 254). Given the law of conservation of matter and energy,
however, there are more proximate, both quantitative and qualitative, limits which put the sustainability of capitalism under
question (see J. O'Connor, 1988; Benton, 1989; M. O'Connor, 1994; Foster, 1995b, 1997). All attempts at ecological
restructuring basically concern the restructuring of property relations, through the market, the rearrangement of competitive
conditions, and the rationalisation of capitalist accumulation, without essentially affecting the impact of capitalist rationality and private property on nature.
The key thing for capitalism, however, is not the juridical form of private property, but rather the social separation of labour power from natural conditions
and the use of the latter as conditions of capital accumulation. Independently of any restructuring of capital and property relations, or of any limited attempt
at a valuation of nature, as long as the property of capital as a whole on nature is maintained, the squandering of nature and environmental destruction cannot
be prevented. In other words, it is impossible to ensure the sustainability of capitalism and, within its limits, an essential
reconciliation of people with nature. On the contrary, the currently proposed further commoditisation of nature and
privatisation of natural resources (see Dasgupta, 1990; Chichilnisky, 1994), will most likely lead to an aggravation of the
problem (see Liodakis, 1995,2000). Capitalist restructuring implies a certain modification of the law of value and not a qualitative conversion or a radical
upsetting of the law itself. This modification derives specifically from the increasing internationalisation of production, the changes in state regulation, the
increasing externalities and the ecological restructuring towards internalising these externalities, as well as from the continuous concentration of capital,
which implies a greater divergence of prices from commodity values in branches with a pronounced monopolistic character. In other words, this
modification concerns the specific manner in which the law of value operates under contemporary conditions. Insofar as natural resources are
taken as a `free gift of nature , competition leads to a permanent tendency to increase constant capital, as a
crystallisation of alienated labour and natural resources through the labour process, and consequently to a rising organic
composition of capital. This tendency, which also serves the needs of capital in increasing the productive power of
labour and disciplining it in the context of the production process, creates a crisis-generating pressure through the
falling tendency of the rate of profit. This pressure tends toward an increasing externalisation of production cost and,
combined with an over-utilisation of natural resources, leads to destructive consequences for the environment.
Quantitative changes will be permanently converted into qualitative changes resulting in a degradation of the environment. On the other hand, the qualitative
changes deriving from the real subsumption and capitalisation of nature (see M. O'Connor, 1993; 1994), the increasing socialisation (interdependence) of
production on a global level and the competitive race for the increase of relative surplus value, will render further quantitative changes necessary, taking the
form of technological modernisation and of an increase in the organic composition of capital, and thus reinforcing the above mentioned tendency . The
overaccumulation crisis of capital tends, as the crisis unfolding since the mid '70s shows, to a serious environmental
degradation, following a dialectical process from the part to the whole, the latter being the global economy and the
planetary ecosystem.
Capitalism Kritik
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Reform Link
Capitalism views nature as a gift of natural resources, necessitating exploitation. Attempts at
environmental reform ignore the need for a new struggle to challenge the capitalist system.
George Liodakis Professor of Social Science in 2001 (George, Professor of Social Science at Technical
University of Crete, The people-nature relation and the historical significance of the Labour Theory of Value, Capital and
Class, Spring 2001, http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3780/is_200104/ai_n8940388) JXu
If our interpretation of Marx's labour theory of value is correct, it becomes clear that an ecological revision or correction of
this theory, contrary to what is often argued, is not necessary, at least in its specific historical context. As I have shown, the
problem is not the Marxian approach to value and the people-nature relation, but the character of capitalism, which
on the one hand, considering the natural forces as 'a gift to capital, leads to the squandering of natural resources and
the degradation of the environment, while value, on the other hand, as the historically specific and dominant reflection of
economic calculation in capitalism, is objectively determined by the quantity of necessary 'abstract' labour, disregarding the
substantial contribution of nature in production. it has also been shown that the abolition of private property in the means of
production and of the law of value in communism implies a dialectical reconciliation of people with nature at a higher level.
As economic scarcity cannot be totally eliminated, the ecological compatibility of communism requires, apart from the
necessary minimisation of labour-time, an independent accounting for natural resources. Environmental degradation has
often been attributed, in the context of the current environmentalism, to the character of technology and of the dominant
ethical values. A plea is also made for an alternative (ecological) technology and new ecological ethics. This approach,
however, captures only part of the reality and indeed only the surface of phenomena, while in fact neither technology nor
ethics can be considered independent from the dominant capitalist relations of production. On the other hand, if the
experience of environmental destruction should stimulate further development of Marxist theory, this should be in the
direction of a more specific qualitative and class analysis of the productive forces, of science and technology. As accumulated
experience shows, the character of these factors is not necessarily emancipatory, and their quantitative growth alone will not
automatically lead to the communistic `realm of freedom'. What is more specifically required, from within the
contemporary capitalist context, is a conscious struggle for their reorientation, aiming at the meeting of social needs
and the protection of the environment, and grounded on a logic tending to supersede the narrow class rationality of
capitalist production. There is here, therefore, a great field for collaboration, mutual interaction and common struggle
between Marxism and the ecological movement (see also M. O'Connor, 1994; Foster, 1995a; Kovel, 1995; Burkett, 1996a).
Although the reconciliation of people with their natural environment constitutes a major strategic political issue, implying the
supersession of the capitalist relations of production, the interaction of Marxism, as a science and movement for social
emancipation, with the ecological movement constitutes an urgent task, which should aim at the gradual change of the
terms of production and of the character of the productive forces, of science and technology. With today's social and
environmental data, the movement for the protection of the environment is particularly expedient and must
necessarily become a component of the broader struggle of the working class for its full emancipation and complete
liberation.
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Reform Link
The affirmatives small reforms will fail. Capitalism thrives on a never-ending quest for growth
environmental reforms and increased efficiency are used to promote ever-more growing
consumption, making ecological catastrophe inevitable.
Townsend Managing Editor 2008 (Terry, managing editor, Individual Versus Social Solutions to Global Warming)
We have to convince millions of people and build a mass movement for emission-reductions that genuinely address the
real problem. For Australia, thats at least 90% by 2030 not Labors anaemic 60% by 2050. A movement that demands that governments impose farreaching measures that force giant industrial polluters to rapidly and massively slash their emissions, at the risk of massive fines. And if they refuse, they
should be nationalized and run in the interests of the workers and consumers. All public subsidies and tax concessions for the giant fossil fuel industries and
resource corporations which amount to billions should be redirected to research the development of publicly owned renewable energy sources. We
could help ordinary people implement individual actions, by supplying free or at a massive subsidy to all households solar waters heaters and water tanks .
There should be a massive reorganization of society to move away from private-car-based transportation to free and
frequent mass public transport, and, redesign our cities to put peoples homes close to work and shops. We need to think about ways of linking these wider
demands with our more immediate campaigns, for example as we fight to stop the Tasmanian pulp mill, oppose power privatization, end coal and uranium
mining, and to stop the building of new freeways and toll roads, we have to also convince people that the workings of capitalism itself is both responsible for
the crisis and also the main obstacle to its solution. The real source of the problem Through struggles for immediate and broader
demands, masses of people can come to understand that the source of the problem lies with capitalism itself. The
scientific analysis of capitalism first made by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, illustrates how, despite the assertions of
many environmental movement theorists over the years, Marxism not only provides essential insights into the
fundamental cause of the environmental crisis ,but also offers a political guide to its solution. Capitalisms
fundamentally anti-ecological trait is captured by Marxs analysis of the working of capitalism. Capitalists buy or
produce commodities only in order to sell them for a profit, and then buy or produce yet more to sell more again.
There is no end to the process. Competition between capitalists ensures that each one must continue to increase their
production of commodities and continue to expand in order to survive. Production tends to expand exponentially until
interrupted by crises (depressions and wars) and it is this dynamic at the very core of capitalism that places enormous,
unsustainable pressure on the environment. Capitalism is a system that pursues growth for its own sake, whatever the
consequences. This is why all schemes based on the hope of a no-growth, slow-growth or a sustainable-growth forms
of capitalism are pipe dreams. As too are strategies based on a critical mass of individual consumers deciding to go green
in order to reform the system. People are not consumers by nature. A multi-billion-dollar capitalist industry called
advertising constantly plays with our minds to convince us that happiness comes only through buying more and more
stuff, to keep up with endless wasteful fads, fashions, upgrades, new models and built-in obsolescence. The desire
for destructive and/or pointless goods is manufactured along with them. In 2008, an estimated $750 billion will be spent on corporate
advertising and public relations in the US alone. In Australia, such spending is now well in excess of $12 billion a year. Many in the environmental
movement argue that with the right mix of taxes, incentives and regulations, everybody could be winners. Big business would have cheaper, more efficient
production techniques, and therefore be more profitable, and consumers would have more environment-friendly products and energy sources. In a rational
society, such innovations would lower the overall environmental impact of production. Unfortunately, we dont live in a rational society. Any energy
and money savings made through efficiency are used to make and sell more commodities, cheaper than their
competitors. Capitalism approaches technology in the production process or in the final product in the same way as it does everything else. What
will generate the most profits? Whether it is efficient, clean, safe, environmentally benign or rational has little to do with it. The technologies that could
tackle global warming have long existed. Even though research into them has been massively underfunded, renewable energy sources are today competitive
with coal and nuclear power (if the negative social and environmental costs are factored in). Public transport systems have been around since the late 1800s .
Fundamental to capitalisms development has been its power to shift the cost of its ecological and social vandalism
onto society as whole. More profits can accrue if the big capitalists dont have to bother themselves with the elimination,
neutralization or recycling of industrial wastes. Its much cheaper to pour toxic waste into the air or the nearest river. Rather
than pay for the real costs of production, society as a whole subsidizes corporate profit-making by cleaning up some of
the mess or suffering the environmental and/or health costs. Or the whole messy business can simply be exported to
the Third World. It is becoming abundantly clear that the Earth cannot sustain this systems plundering and
poisoning without the humanity sooner or later experiencing a complete ecological catastrophe. To have any chance of
preventing this, within the 10- to 30-year window that we have in relation to global warming, humanity must take
conscious, rational control of its interactions with the planet and its ecological processes, in ways that capitalism is
inherently incapable of doing.
Capitalism Kritik
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Ecology Link
Ecology is the new opium for the masses fear of massive catastrophe allows the hegemonic
ideology of capital to sustain itself and short circuit attempts to break the system.
Zizek Professor of Philosophy in 2007 (Slavoj, professor of philosophy at the Institute for Sociology, Ljubljana,
Censorship Today: Violence, or Ecology as a New Opium for the Masses, http://www.lacan.com/zizecology1.htm) JXu
No wonder, then, that the by far predominant version of ecology is the ecology of fear, fear of a catastrophe - humanmade or natural - that may deeply perturb, destroy even, the human civilization, fear that pushes us to plan measures
that would protect our safety. This ecology of fear has all the chances of developing into the predominant form of
ideology of global capitalism, a new opium for the masses replacing the declining religion: it takes over the old religion's
fundamental function, that of putting on an unquestionable authority which can impose limits. The lesson this ecology is
constantly hammering is our finitude: we are not Cartesian subjects extracted from reality, we are finite beings embedded
in a bio-sphere which vastly transgresses our horizon. In our exploitation of natural resources, we are borrowing from the
future, so one should treat our Earth with respect, as something ultimately Sacred, something that should not be unveiled
totally, that should and will forever remain a Mystery, a power we should trust, not dominate. While we cannot gain full
mastery over our bio-sphere, it is unfortunately in our power to derail it, to disturb its balance so that it will run amok,
swiping us away in the process. This is why, although ecologists are all the time demanding that we change radically our
way of life, underlying this demand is its opposite, a deep distrust of change, of development, of progress: every
radical change can have the unintended consequence of triggering a catastrophe. It is this distrust which makes
ecology the ideal candidate for hegemonic ideology, since it echoes the anti-totalitarian post-political distrust of large
collective acts. This distrust unites religious leaders and environmentalists - for both, there is something of a transgression, of
entering a prohibited domain, in this idea of creating a new form of life from scratch, from the zero-point. And this brings us
back to the notion of ecology as the new opium for the masses; the underlying message is again a deeply conservative one any change can only be the change for the worst - here is a nice quote from the TIME magazine on this topic: Behind much
of the resistance to the notion of synthetic life is the intuition that nature (or God) created the best of possible worlds. Charles
Darwin believed that the myriad designs of nature's creations are perfectly honed to do whatever they are meant to do - be it
animals that see, hear, sing, swim or fly, or plants that feed on the sun's rays, exuding bright floral colours to attract
pollinators. This reference to Darwin is deeply misleading: the ultimate lesson of Darwinism is the exact opposite, namely
that nature tinkers and improvises, with great losses and catastrophes accompanying every limited success - is the fact that 90
percent of the human genome is 'junk DNA' with no clear function not the ultimate proof of it? Consequently, the first lesson
to be drawn is the one repeatedly made by Stephen Jay Gould: the utter contingency of our existence. There is no Evolution:
catastrophes, broken equilibriums, are part of natural history; at numerous points in the past, life could have turned
into an entirely different direction. The main source of our energy (oil) is the result of a past catastrophe of
unimaginable dimensions. One should thus learn to accept the utter groundlessness of our existence: there is no firm
foundation, a place of retreat, on which one can safely count. "Nature doesn't exist": "nature" qua the domain of
balanced reproduction, of organic deployment into which humanity intervenes with its hubris, brutally throwing off the
rails its circular motion, is man's fantasy; nature is already in itself "second nature," its balance is always secondary, an
attempt to negotiate a "habit" that would restore some order after catastrophic interruptions. With regard to this inherent
instability of nature, the most consequent was the proposal of a German ecological scientist back in 1970s: since
nature is changing constantly and the conditions on Earth will render the survival of humanity impossible in a couple
of centuries, the collective goal of humanity should be not to adapt itself to nature, but to intervene into the Earth
ecology even more forcefully with the aim to freeze the Earth's change, so that its ecology will remain basically the
same, thus enabling humanity's survival. This extreme proposal renders visible the truth of ecology.
Capitalism Kritik
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Biomimicry
Alternative energy is becoming a new driver for capitalism. Its a way to fill the gap left by
depleting fossil fuel reserves.
Matthew Yi, Chronicle Sacramento Bureau Saturday, November 4, 2006 Alternative energy lighting it up Big venture
capitalists pony up in sizzling market that may get boost from Prop. 87 http://www.sfchroniclemarketplace.com/cgibin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/11/04/BUG07M5S481.DTL
In the heart of Silicon Valley, David Pearce's startup Miasole is in a mad dash to figure out a more cost-effective way to
manufacture solar cells. So far, he's been getting help from big investors including venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins
Caufield & Byers, whose portfolio of success stories includes Google and Sun Microsystems. But fledgling Silicon Valley
firms like Miasole that are trying to make breakthroughs in producing energy from alternative sources like the sun,
corn or even bio-waste, may end up finding a bigger boost if California voters approve Proposition 87 on Tuesday. The
statewide ballot initiative seeks to raise $4 billion by taxing oil production in California and using the funds for research and
development, production and distribution of alternative fuels. The ultimate goal is to slash California's petroleum
consumption by 25 percent by 2017. Companies like Miasole won't be the only potential beneficiary if the measure passes.
The new public money would continue to fuel what has been a surprising increase in venture capital investments in
companies that are looking for commercially viable alternative fuels and energy. The trend is causing some industry and
financial analysts to liken venture capital flowing into "clean tech" to the Internet bubble. "We've had eight consecutive
quarters of significant growth in clean tech (venture capital) funding," said John Balbach, senior consultant for Cleantech
Venture Network LLC, which tracks investment dollars in that area. In the second quarter of this year, $843 million was
poured into clean tech, a 64 percent increase from the first quarter and 129 percent increase from the same period last year, he
said. The Dow Jones VentureOne and Ernst & Young, which has a more focused "alternative energy production" category,
also has seen a significant uptick in venture capital activity in that group: 31 deals worth a total of $380 million in the first
nine months of this year. In all of 2005, there were 18 investments worth a total of $178 million. "There are some who
believe there is a bubble sense to it ... but we think this is the beginnings of a long-term trend," Balbach said. "We
believe this is one of the biggest economic drivers of the 21st century." Analysts say there are at least two major
reasons investors are looking at alternative fuels. First, venture capitalists who have become gun-shy after the Internet
bubble burst are now itching to get back into action, and second, oil prices are skyrocketing. Investor interest is also
being fueled by government mandates such as Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's solar roof initiative that has a goal of creating
3,000 megawatts of new, solar-produced electricity by 2017. This is all a recent phenomenon, Pearce said, adding that
raising investment money just two years ago was notably tougher than it has been in the past year. Now, he has eight
venture capital firms backing his company, which uses thin sheets of stainless steel to manufacture lightweight and
flexible solar cells. The Santa Clara company's initial target market is for large solar arrays, but lightweight and flexible solar
cells could easily be used in other ways, such as on tops of large trucks or tractor trailers to replace gas-guzzling, fumespewing diesel engines, Pearce said. The growing excitement is becoming more mainstream within venture capital circles as
evidenced by investments from top-tier firms such as Kleiner Perkins. And some of the key partners at Kleiner Perkins have
been at the forefront of supporting Prop. 87. The list includes John Doerr, Ray Lane, Will Hearst and Vinod Khosla, giving a
total of $2.2 million to the Yes on 87 campaign. The venture capitalist Khosla, who has been a vocal proponent of Prop. 87
and the campaign's co-chair, has been at the forefront of investing in alternative fuels in recent months. In fact, Khosla
Ventures, a firm that he founded in 2004 to focus on alternative energy, was the most active venture capital firm in the third
quarter of this year with three investments, according to the latest Dow Jones VentureOne and Ernst & Young data. Khosla
Venture's investment portfolio includes a half-dozen startups that all deal with ethanol. -- Cilion Inc., Tulare County: A joint
venture between Western Milling and Khosla Ventures to build several ethanol-production plants. -- Altra Inc., Los Angeles:
Building a network of ethanol and biodiesel plants. The firm has a plant in Goshen (Tulare County) and has broken ground in
Ohio and has plans to build another in Nebraska. -- Celunol Corp., Dedham, Mass.: The firm is working with a
microbiologist from the University of Florida who has a patent in producing cellulosic ethanol using the E. coli bacteria. -Kergy Inc., Menlo Park: A maker of alternative energy equipment. -- Mascoma Corp., Cambridge, Mass.: The firm is
researching ways to turn agricultural and forestry waste into bioethanol. -- LS9 Inc., San Carlos: A recently formed
company that reportedly is working on making biofuels commercially viable. Several calls were made to Khosla requesting
an interview, but none was returned. Khosla has been trumpeting the virtues of ethanol as a viable replacement for petroleum
in conferences and articles that he's written recently. "I believe we can replace most of our gasoline needs in 25 years with
biomass from our farmlands and municipal waste, while creating a huge economic boom cycle and a cheaper, cleaner
fuel for consumers," he wrote in a Wired magazine article. William Reichert, managing director of Garage Technology
Ventures in Palo Alto, said that while it's clear Khosla is focusing on ethanol, he is also spreading his bets within that sector.
"I happen to agree with him that ethanol has the best promise to replace (gasoline) fuel over the next two decades," Reichert
said. However, he said, he thinks the real breakthroughs will have to come from making ethanol from something other than
corn. "From my point of view, corn-based ethanol is a short-term opportunity, but a long-term dead end," Reichert said.
Capitalism Kritik
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"Corn is a bad source of sugar, and fermentation is only effective if you have good sugar. It just happens that corn has been a
surplus crop." Perhaps that's why Khosla is being smart about spreading his bets, Reichert said. "He's investing everywhere in
ethanol right now," he said.
Note: Biomimicry (from bios, meaning life, and mimesis, meaning to imitate) is a relatively new science that studies nature,
its models, systems, processes and elements and then imitates or takes creative inspiration from them to solve human
problems sustainably
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Emissions Trading Link

The affirmative is literally selling a license to pollute. Clever manipulations of the market by
companies allow them to continue their destructive activities while promoting a mask of reform.
Heidi Bachram JD 2004 (Heidi, Climate Fraud and Carbon Colonialism: The New Trade in Greenhouse Gases) JXu
To understand the impact of pollution permits and emissions trading1 on the ecological crisis, the findings of the
international scientific community must be noted. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a UN
advisory body numbering 3,000 scientists, concluded in 2001 that the present CO2 concentration has not been exceeded
during the past 420,000 years and likely not during the past 20 million years.2 The clear and alarming consensus in the
scientific community is that humankind is wreaking havoc on the atmosphere. Across the world 80 million people are
at severe risk of their homes and livelihoods being destroyed by flash flooding as sea levels rise, fed by melting icecaps,
and extreme weather events become more frequent. Although these weather changes will occur everywhere, poorer
countries will have less ability to adapt. Meanwhile the emissions of greenhouse gases, that are creating the problems,
come overwhelmingly from the richer industrialized countries that do have the resources to adapt. For example the US
and the EU, with only 10 percent of the worlds population, are responsible for producing 45 percent of all emissions of
carbon dioxide (CO2), the principle greenhouse gas.3 Three-quarters of all the CO2 emitted by human activities is from
burning fossil fuels.4 The rest mostly comes from deforestation. The IPCC concludes that an immediate reduction of 5070
percent of carbon dioxide emissions is necessary to stabilize the concentrations in the atmosphere. In their most recent report,
they state that eventually CO2 emissions would need to decline to a very small fraction of current emissions. Faced with
this looming climate crisis, the global community of states response has been passage of the Kyoto Protocol in 1997,
slowly ratified by 156 countries, and infamously rejected by the worlds biggest polluter the US. At the core of the Protocol
is an agreement to reduce emissions by an average of 5.2 percent below 1990 levels of greenhouse gases by the year 2012.5
Larry Lohmann vividly sums up the inadequacy: Shortly after the treaty was initialed in 1997, a scientific journal
pointed out that 30 Kyotos would be needed just to stabilize atmospheric concentrations at twice the level they stood
at, at the time of the Industrial Revolution. At this rate, 300 years of negotiations would be required just to secure the
commitments necessary by the end of this decade.6 Also agreed upon in 1997 was the main mechanism for achieving this
target, tabled by the US in response to heavy corporate lobbying: emissions trading. This market driven mechanism
subjects the planets atmosphere to the legal emission of greenhouse gases. The arrangement parcels up the
atmosphere and establishes the routinized buying and selling of permits to pollute as though they were like any
other international commodity. The Dutch institute RIVM estimate that with emissions trading the actual reductions
achieved under Kyoto will only be 0.1 percent far below the already inadequate 5.2 percent reduction from 1990 levels.7 In
addition, as we shall show, emissions trading is rife with controversy and the potential for exacerbating environmental and
social injustice. The changes necessary to avert climate catastrophe are simple enough, namely, a switch away from fossil
fuels and to renewable energy like solar and wind, along with a reduction in energy use generally. Instead, world leaders
have taken ten years to agree to inadequate targets and the deeply flawed mechanism of emissions trading. Although
emissions trading is represented as part of the solution, it is actually a part of the problem itself. Despite the scope and
gravity of the dangers posed by greenhouse gases, and the major role of emissions trading in compounding them, this
arrangement has not been seriously challenged in any international forum. The continuing acquiescence toward emissions
trading is not an accident or bureaucratic oversight. The smooth sailing of this arrangement is attributable to the armtwisting tactics of the richer nations and their constituencies of corporate polluters whenever global treaties are hammered
out. The failure of the Kyoto Protocol to deal adequately and effectively with climate change is also representative of wider
issues of democratic decisionmaking and symptomatic of the injustices that permeate international relationships between
peoples. 2. What is Emissions Trading? Under the Kyoto Protocol the polluters are countries that have agreed to targets
for reducing their emissions of gases in a pre-defined time period. The polluters are then given a number of emissions
credits equivalent to their 1990 levels of emissions minus their reduction commitment. These credits are measured in
units of greenhouse gases, so one ton of CO2 would equal one credit. The credits are licenses to pollute up to the limits set by
the commitment to achieve the average reduction of 5.2 percent agreed in Kyoto. The countries then allocate their quota of
credits on a nation-wide basis, most commonly by grandfathering, so that the most polluting industries will receive the
biggest allocation of credits.8 In this system it pays to pollute. Several possibilities then exist: 1. The polluter does not use its
whole allowance and can either save the remaining credits for the next time period (bank them), or sell the credits to another
polluter on the open market. 2. The polluter uses up its whole allowance in the allotted time period, but still pollutes
more. In order to remain in compliance, spare credits must be bought from another polluter that has not used up its
full allowance. 3. The polluter can invest in pollution reduction schemes in other countries or regions and in this way earn
credits that can then be sold, or banked, or used to make up shortfalls in its original allowance. Credit-earning projects that
take place in a country with no reduction target (mostly in the developing world) come under the contentious rubric of the
Clean Development Mechanism (CDM). There have already been signs that traditional Overseas Development Aid (ODA)
given by developed countries will be used to fund CDM projects. Instead of building wells, rich countries can now plant trees
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to offset their own pollution. Projects which take place in countries with reduction targets come under Joint Implementation
(JI). For example, an energy efficiency program in Poland funded by a UK company could qualify. It appears that JI projects
will mainly take place in Eastern Europe and Russia, where equivalent reductions can be made more cheaply as costs and
regulatory standards are lower. Both CDM and JI projects can be of different kinds: monoculture tree plantations, which
theoretically absorb carbon from the atmosphere (carbon sinks); renewable energy projects such as solar or wind projects;
improvements to existing energy generation; and so on. The amount of credits earned by each project is calculated as the
difference between the level of emissions with the project and the level of emissions that would occur in an imagined
alternative future without the project. With such an imagined alternative future in mind, a corporate polluter can conjure up
huge estimates of the emissions that would be supposedly produced without the companys CDM or JI project. This
stratagem allows for a high (almost limitless) number of pollution credits that can be earned for each project. It allows
the company to pollute more at other sites, to sell its credits to other polluters, or to engage in a combination of these
lucrative tactics. Its long-term consequences are (1) increased greenhouse gas emissions and (2) increased corporate profit
obtained from their production. There is yet another provision in emissions trading that introduces increasing levels of
complexity and confusion: the pollutants are interchangeable. In effect, a reduction in the emission of one greenhouse gas
(e.g., carbon dioxide) enables a polluter to claim reductions in another gas (e.g., methane). Thus, progress in cleaning up
the atmosphere might appear to be going forward, while closer scrutiny reveals that no actual improvement is taking place. 3.
Climate Fraud While many hundreds of millions of dollars are being invested in setting up emissions trading schemes all over
the world (the UK government alone has spent UK 215 million on its trial trading scheme), virtually no resources are being
channeled into their regulation. This imbalance can only lead to an emissions market dangerously reliant upon the
integrity of corporations to file accurate reports of emissions levels, and reductions. In practice, corporations such as
PricewaterhouseCoopers are acting as both accountants for and consultants to polluting firms, and as verifiers of
emission reduction projects. Some entrepreneurial firms such as CH2M Hill and ICF Consulting are also offering
consultancy and brokerage as well as verification services. These potential conflicts of interest were at the heart of
scandals relating to Enron and Arthur Andersen, who were both pioneers in emissions trading.
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Emissions trading helps the interests of large corporations and creates more pollution.
Heidi Bachram JD in 2004 (Heidi, Climate Fraud and Carbon Colonialism: The New Trade in Greenhouse Gases) JXu
However, there are many problems with this approach. Offset schemes typically do not challenge the destructive
consumption ethic, which literally drives the fossil fuel economy. These initiatives provide moral cover for
consumers of fossil fuels. The fundamental changes that are urgently necessary, if we are to achieve a more
sustainable future, can then be ideologically redefined or dismissed altogether as pipe dreams. Furthermore, land is
commandeered in the South for largescale monoculture plantations which act as an occupying force in impoverished rural
communities dependent on these lands for survival. The Kyoto Protocol allows industrialized countries access to a parcel of
land roughly the size of one small Southern nation or upwards of 10 million hectares every year for the generation of
CDM carbon sink credits.16 Responsibility for over-consumptive lifestyles of those in richer nations is pushed onto the poor,
as the South becomes a carbon dump for the industrialized world.17 On a local level, long-standing exploitative
relationships and processes are being reinvigorated by emissions trading. Indigenous communities, fisher folk, and other
marginalized rural Brazilian peoples were systematically removed from land during the colonial obsession with plantations.
Now the World Bank is funding a eucalyptus plantation in Brazil run by an existing plantation company called Plantar, with
the intention that it be approved as a CDM project. While plantations have their own ecologically destructive qualities
such as biodiversity loss, water table disruption and pollution from herbicides and pesticides, their social impact is
equally devastating to a local community. Lands previously used by local peoples are enclosed and in some cases they have been forcibly
evicted. This was the case in Uganda when a Norwegian company leased lands for a carbon sink project which resulted in the eviction of 8,000 people in 13
villages.18 The workers on such plantations have little or no health and safety protection and are exposed to hazardous chemicals and dust particles. Plantar
is a company with an especially sordid history. In March, 2002, the Regional Labour Office (DRT), prosecuted 50 companies, among them Plantar, for the
illegal outsourcing of labor, a process synonymous with extreme degrees of exploitation. Indeed, in the 1990s, the Montes Claros (MG) Pastoral Land
Commission (CPT), an organization originating in the Catholic Church and well-respected in the region, verified that slave labor was used on the companys
property.19 Similar disregard exists for the natural environment. Thus local fisher folk in the regions around the plantations in Brazil are poverty-stricken
and devastated due to the pollution caused by the over-use of pesticides and herbicides, which contaminates rivers and water sources and kills fish. In some
cases, the water in streams and rivers has entirely dried up because the non-indigenous eucalyptus is a thirsty tree. With the World Banks assistance, this
plantation will now expand by 23,400 hectares. This is a disaster for local agriculture and people dependent on water sources for subsistence . The
ruination caused by the trafficking in pollution credits serves only to place the cloak of ecological respectability over
local and global unequal power relations. 6. Might Makes Right One of the more tragic ironies of the Kyoto Protocol is
that carbon sinks (forests, oceans, etc.) can only qualify for emission credits if they are managed by those with official
status. This means that an old-growth rainforest inhabited for thousands of years by indigenous peoples does not
qualify under Kyoto rules as managed, and cannot get credits. However, a monoculture plantation run by the state
or a registered private company does qualify. This exposes the vested interests which are served by emissions trading,
as ordinary people are not recognized by the official process. Neither does Kyoto offer protection for forests. Instead
emissions trading provides an opportunity for extended encroachment on the lives of indigenous peoples by government and
corporations, expanding the potential for neo-colonial land-grabbing. Further, other ecosystems such as grasslands are not
protected under Kyoto, therefore a monoculture plantation could supplant them. Under the guise of creating solutions for one
environmental problem, climate change, further destruction of diverse ecosystems has been legitimized. Emissions
trading represents the latest strategy in an ongoing process that stems from 16th century European land enclosures to
the recent World Trade Organization (WTO) negotiations on public health and education, to privatize and liberalize
the global commons and resources. By its very nature, an emissions credit entitles its owner to dump a certain amount of
greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Control of such credits effectively leads to control of how the atmosphere, perhaps the
last global commons, is used. The Kyoto Protocol negotiations has not only created a property rights regime for the
atmosphere. It has also awarded a controlling stake to the worlds worst polluters, such as the European Union, by
allocating credits based on historical emissions. A similar relationship applies to the process leading to the agreement
of Kyoto.
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Emissions trading is a way for corporations to reinforce current unequal power structures in
capitalism while seeming to reform the system.
Heidi Bachram JD 2004 (Heidi, Climate Fraud and Carbon Colonialism: The New Trade in Greenhouse Gases) JXu
In the best case scenario that emissions trading is strictly regulated, it is still unlikely to achieve even the woefully
inadequate reductions in greenhouse gas emissions enshrined in the Kyoto Protocol. This would be true even if the US
joined the rest of the major polluting countries in ratifying the Protocol. Yet should a foolproof monitoring system be put in
place, the whole system would lose its appeal of being cheap and unchallenging for corporations, and so any attempt to
introduce such methods will be strongly opposed. Furthermore, the neo-liberal trends in international trade make it
unlikely that emissions markets will ever be tightly regulated. The strategy and tactics of emissions trading have been
adorned with the rationale of neo-liberal ideology; they have become so institutionalized in international forums that
regulatory initiatives are unlikely to be proposed from within their circles. Yet even if emissions trading were adequately
regulated, the reality is that the trading in pollution best serves the needs of those with the most to lose from resolving
the climate crisis. As climate change exposes fundamental flaws in the current world order, only the most challenging
responses will have any prospect of success. Transnational fossil fuel corporations and the governments of industrialized
countries will not concede power willingly. That is why emissions trading is being used to distract attention away from
the changes that are urgently needed. In this way corporations and government are able to build the illusion of taking
action on climate change while reinforcing current unequal power structures. Emissions trading therefore becomes an
instrument by means of which the current world order, built and founded on a history of colonialism, wields a new
kind of carbon colonialism. As with the colonialism of old, this new colonizing force justifies its interference through
moral rhetoric. As the colonizers seek to resolve climate change, they conveniently forget the true source of the
problem. With the looming climate crisis and the desperate need for action, the resulting course recommended by
corporations and government is not analyzed critically. The debate is transformed, shifting the blame onto the poor
masses of the global South. Lost in this discourse is the reality that the worlds richest minorities are the culprits who have
over-consumed the planet to the brink of ecological disaster. Instead of reducing in the rich countries, a carbon dump is
created in the poor countries. Thus rich countries can continue in their unequal over-consumption of the worlds
resources. The poor countries are so poor that they will accept crumbs. They know that and they are taking advantage of it.
Sajida Khan, community organizer campaigning against an emissions trading project in Durban, South Africa. On almost
every level of emissions trading, colonial and imperialistic dimensions exist. There may be new labels for these
phenomena, such as environmental injustice, but the fundamental issues are the same. The dynamics of emissions
trading, whereby powerful actors benefit at the expense of disempowered communities in both North and South, is a
modern incarnation of a dark colonial past. European colonialism extracted natural resources as well as people from the
colonized world. In the 20th century, international financial institutions took on the role of economic colonizer in the form of
Structural Adjustment Policies (SAPs) for the Third World. Now an ecological crisis created by the old colonizers is
being reinvented as another market opportunity. This new market brings with it all the built-in inequities that other
commodity markets thrive upon. From the pumping of pollution into communities of color in Los Angeles to the land
grabbing for carbon sinks in South America, emissions trading continues this age-old colonial tradition.
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Single Issue Environment Link

A singular focus on environmental reform allows capital to turn labor forces and other groups
against environmental movements and destroys the possibility of truly challenging capital.
John Foster Professor of Sociology and Dennis Soron from the University of Alberta 04 , John
Bellamy, Professor of Sociology at University of Oregon and Dennis, researcher with the Neoliberal Globalism and Its
Challengers Project at the University of Alberta, where he also teaches part-time in the sociology department, Ecology,
capitalism, and the socialization of nature) JXu
JBF: The piece that you mention was written in the early 1990s at the time of the so-called spotted owl crisis in the ancient
forests of the Pacific Northwest. At that time, the strategy of the most influential environmental organizations involved
was to adopt a very narrow, single-issue approach to the conflict. Basically, their position was that they stood for
nature--that it was their sole concern to protect the ancient forests, and it wasn't their business to address the effect
this might have on forestry workers or the economic conditions of the communities in which they lived. I sat down with
somebody who was doing lobbying in Washington, D.C. on this issue, and he explicitly told me that, from the point of view
of his organization, the environmental position would only be weakened by any mention of the economic situation of
workers. For him, the job of environmentalists was simply to draw the line over protecting the forest. The downside of
adopting a strategy like this is that you leave the workers who actually have some interest in maintaining the
environment, yet still have to worry about their jobs and livelihood, with no choice but to join up with management
and adopt a common industrial front against ecology. In the case of the spotted owl crisis, even though workers had been
in conflict with the major lumber companies in the Pacific Northwest over wages and other labor issues, environmentalists
left them with no choice but to join with the owners against what they saw as something that threatened their jobs. In this
context, the "wise use movement" in the West gathered tremendous steam and was really able to exploit the discontent of
workers, even though it was being funded by capital and promoting capital's interests above all else. This political alliance
between workers and industry was one of the main reasons that environmental legislation got pushed back so much
across the West. My main point here is that if environmentalists adopt a single-issue approach, then they will simply
drive workers into the arms of capital. To be politically effective and to connect with a broader base, they need to
confront the issue of class. Most people in capitalist society are working class, and the environmental movement isn't likely
to get very far if it gets too middle- or upper-class in its orientation, or simply ignores class issues and says that the fate of
laid-off workers should be left to the sanctions of the market. Environmentalists need to avoid presenting people with a stark
choice between protecting the environment and protecting the means by which they live. Instead, they need to have a
political program that addresses the social and material needs of workers at the same time that it strives to protect the
natural environment. This would help to develop a common labor-environmentalist political strategy that is capable of
promoting real change.
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Renewables Link
The question is not whether the renewable tech they advocate is good or not in a vacuumthe
issue is whether it is operating in the service of capitalism. Mainstream environmentalism has no
hope of fundamentally challenging the system.
Ted Trainer, Senior Lecturer University of New South Wales 2007 (Ted Trainer, Senior Lecturer in the
School of Social Work at the University of New South Wales. "Renewable Energy Cannot Sustain a Consumer Society" p. 78)
As Chapter 10 will make clear, the Green Movement in general is deeply flawed. It is for the most part, only light
green. Most environmental gurus and agencies never go beyond seeking reforms within consumer-capitalist society.
They do not consider the possibility that environmental and other major global problems cannot be solved without radical
change to a very different kind of society. Chapter 10 explains why a sustainable and just society cannot be a consumer
society, it cannot be driven by market forces, it must have relatively little international trade and no economic growth
at all, it must be made up mostly of small local economies, and its driving values cannot be competition and
acquisitiveness. Whether or not we are likely to achieve such a transition is not crucial here (... and I am quite
pessimistic about achieving it). The point is that when our "limits to growth" situation is understood, a sustainable and
just society cannot be conceived in any other terms. Discussion of these themes is of the utmost importance, but few if
any green agencies ever even mention them. 8 Chapter 1 The "tech-fix optimists", who are to be found in plague
proportions in the renewable energy field, are open to the same criticism. If the position underlying this book is valid,
then despite the indisputably desirable technologies all these people are developing, they are working for the devil. If
it is the case that a sustainable and just world cannot be achieved without transition from consumer society to a Simpler Way
of some kind, then this transition is being thwarted by those who reinforce the faith that technical advances will
eliminate any need to even think about such a transition.
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Technology Link
Better Technology Merely Increases Consumption even if the Intent is to Conserve Resources
Princen, Maniates and Conca, 2002
(Thomas Princen, Michael Maniates, and Ken Conca, July 2002, Confronting Consumption)
It is important to understand that technical progress that leads to improved production efficiency of capital and labor is a
necessary but not sufficient condition for improvements in consumption efficiency. In general, improved efficiency of
production simply lowers the costs of producing stuff and transfers the resulting savings toward additional consumption.
Gains made in improving the fuel efficiency of the U.S. motor fleet, for example, have been more than offset by trends
toward larger vehicles, more cars per household, and more miles per car? A study by Peter Freund and George Martin
demonstrated that even though the automobile fuel efficiency in the United States improved con siderably (34 percent)
between 1970 and 1990, total fuel consumption during the same period increased by 7 percent. The number of multicar
families had increased and the family drove more miles.3 This paradox is sometimes referred to as "Jevons's paradox" after
economist Stanley Jevons, who pointed out in 1864 that efforts to conserve English coal by increasing the coal-use efficiency
of British steam engines ended UP making steam power cheaper compared to human and animal power, in the end
stimulating increased coal consumption .4 Likewise, production efficiencies unaccompanied by brakes on consumption tend
to bring the consumption of energy and materials to levels greater than what existed before the production efficiencies were
introduced. Energy-efficiency gains will thus only be successful in uncoupling improved quality of life from increased energy
use if they are accompanied by comprehensive political and economic strategies to reduce consumption. Without such a
strategy, discussed in detail later in this chapter, improved efficiency leads to lower costs and increased consumption. <68>
Alternative energy sources increases consumption of the earth

Wall Street Journal , 2008
William Tucker. May 2. Wall Street Journal Online. Pa A15)
Wind, hydro, and all the "alternate" sources of energy have been dubbed "green" because they are supposedly clean,
renewable, and sustainable. In fact, what being "green" really means is that they all require vast amounts of land.
In a 2007 paper well on its way to becoming a classic Jesse Ausubel, director of the program for the human environment
at Rockefeller University, calculated the amount of wood it would take to run one standard 1,000-megawatt electrical plant,
the kind that can power a city the size of Cincinnati. Feeding the furnace year-round would require a forest of one thousand
square miles. We have 600 such coal plants around the country now to burn wood instead would require a forest the size of
Alaska.
Glen Canyon Dam, which can produce 1,000 megawatts of electricity, is backed up by a reservoir 250 miles square (Lake
Powell, in Arizona and Utah). That's why we stopped building dams in the 1960s because they were drowning scenic
canyons and displacing populations.
Those 30-story windmills produce 1.5 megawatts apiece about 1/750th the power of a conventional generating station.
Getting 1,000 megawatts would require a wind farm 75 miles square.
In a January cover story for Scientific American, three leading solar researchers proposed meeting our electrical needs in
2050 by covering southwestern desert with solar collectors. The amount of land required would be 34,000 square miles, about
one-quarter of New Mexico.
And that's where biofuels went awry. Nobody ever bothered to calculate how much land they would require.
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Alternative Energy Increases Consumption

Alternative energy takes more energy to produce than conventional energy
Marjorie Mazel Hecht 2006
http://www.larouchepub.com/other/2006/3319ethanol.html date accessed July 10, 2008
The truth about ethanol, the wonder fuel that is supposed to replace U.S. dependence on "foreign oil," is that it takes more
energy to produce the ethanol, than the resulting ethanol fuel will provide. And to replace imported oil with ethanol would
require covering more than half the land area of the United States in corn or other biomass. One of the strongest arguments
against the use of ethanol comes from Prof. David Pimentel of Cornell University, a longtime low-technology advocate. He
and a colleague, Tad W. Patzek, professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of California at Berkeley,
conducted a detailed analysis of energy input-yield ratios of producing ethanol from corn, switchgrass, and wood biomass.
Their findings, published in Natural Resources Research (Vol. 14, No. 1, March 2005, pp. 65-76), are that ethanol from corn
requires 29% more fossil fuel energy than the fuel produced; ethanol from switchgrass requires 45% more fossil energy than
the fuel produced; and ethanol from wood biomass requires 57% more fossil energy than the fuel produced. Pimentel and
Patzek looked at the energy used in producing the crop, which includes pesticide and fertilizer production, farm machinery,
irrigation, and transportation, and the energy necessary for distilling the ethanol. As Pimentel told the Cornell University
News Service in July 2005, "There is just no energy benefit to using biomass for liquid fuel. These strategies are not
sustainable.... Ethanol production requires large fossil energy input, and therefore is contributing to oil and natural gas
imports and U.S. deficits."Pimentel calculated that it takes about 131,000 BTUs (British Thermal Units) to make 1 gallon of
ethanolbut 1 gallon of ethanol has an energy value of only 77,000 BTUa net loss of 54,000 BTU per gallon. Pimentel
and Patzek did not include in their calculations the cost of the Federal and state subsidies that are handed out to the large
corporate biomass-energy producers. Pimentel, it should be noted, supports the use of biomass (wood) for home heating, just
not for producing liquid fuel. That's Not All But that's not all. Even the cheerleaders for ethanol production, such as former
CIA director James Woolsey, note that the main obstacle to ethanol replacement for gasoline is its "high cost of production"
and the fact that it requires "large subsidies." Woolsey and others point to new research in genetic engineering that will
develop special microbes to ferment the corn and other biomass. But Woolsey et al. miss the ethanol elephant sitting in the
middle of their arguments: land use. Dr. Howard Hayden, professor emeritus from the University of Connecticut and
publisher of The Energy Advocate newsletter, notes in an article in the Spring 2006 issue of 21st Century Science &
Technology, that "to produce ethanol with as much energy as we use in transportation would require 1.1 billion acres devoted
to high-yield corn production, complete with all the things environmentalists hatefertilizer, irrigation, and pesticides. That's
about 1.8 million square miles, some 51 percent of the land area of the 50 states."This staggering amount of land-use doesn't
faze the many companies, which are intoxicated with the prospect of government subsidies for distilling alcohol for fuel. The
U.S. Department of Agriculture announced in April that a Florida company, Progress Energy Florida, signed a 25-year
contract to buy power from a 130-megawatt "grassy biomass" power plant in central Florida, which will get a government
subsidy for the next ten years. In Georgia, another alternative energy company, Earth Resources, plans a chicken-litter power
plant (the technology for which was funded with a $1 million grant from the USDA). Other companies are pioneering the use
of cow manure with government subsidy. In California, long a leader in anti-physical-economy energy schemes, Gov. Arnold
Schwarzenegger just signed an executive order setting goals to produce 20% of the state's 900 million gallons per year of
biofuels within the state by 2010, increasing to 40% by 2020, and to 75% by 2050. The order also calls for biomass to
provide 20% of the electricity generated to meet the state's renewable power requirementsa real energy loser. At the same
time, California green groups are citing a University of California report that documents how the use of ethanol would result
in higher concentrations of toxic air contaminants. Today's drive for ethanol comes directly out of the counterculture, foisted
on the United States 30-some years ago, with the promotion of a post-industrial society and the devolution of science and
technology. Reality and physical economy became irrelevant, and like Orwell's 1984 "Newspeak," more became less. Hence
the popularity of ethanol, and the non-development of advanced technologiesnuclear and fusionthat can power an
industrial society.
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Hydroelectric Projects Cause Destruction of Natural Habitats and Local People
Rhett Butler, University Californian San Diego 2000
(Rhett A. Butler, 2000, Bachelors of Economics/Management Science at University of California at San Diego,
http://rainforests.mongabay.com/0813.htm)
Large hydroelectric projects, funded by international aid and development organizations like the World Bank, have led to
widespread forest loss. Besides inundating large tracts of rainforest (dams in the Amazon are generally ecologically
inefficient because large tracts of forest are flooded due to the flatness of the basin) and killing off local wildlife, the dams
have the effect of destroying aquatic habitats and affecting fish populations, displacing indigenous peoples, and adding
carbon to the atmosphere (as the submerged wood rots). On top of the ecological damage, several projects have silted up
from the erosion resulting from deforestation, rendering the dams inefficient. The reduced water flow downstream disturbs
riverbeds and affects floodplain farmers who rely on seasonal floods for nutrients to enrich the soil and kill pests. Thus they
may turn to pesticides and artificial fertilizers which have their own negative environmental effects. Deltas experience a
greater influx of salt water, affecting coastal ecosystems essential to fisheries. Hydroelectric projects are also of concern from
a health standpoint because they provide opportunities for the spread of disease-carrying organisms including snails
schistosomiasis/bilharzia) and mosquitoes (dengue fever, yellow fever, malaria).
Renewable energy is not cost-effective.

Oregon State University (2007, July 30).
ScienceDaily,Economists Find Current Biofuel Potential In Oregon May Be Costly And Limited. Retrieved July 10, 2008,
from http://www.sciencedaily.com /releases/2007/07/070726154343.htm
The study, by OSU economists William Jaeger, Robin Cross, and Thorsten Egelkraut, compared three types of biofuels
corn ethanol, canola biodiesel, and wood-based (cellulosic) ethanol. They examined their commercial viability, potential
production scale, and cost-effectiveness for achieving energy independence and reducing greenhouse gases. The promotion of
biofuels is a public issue," said Jaeger. "Would a shift to biofuels achieve energy independence and a reduction of greenhouse
gas? To answer this, we need to compare the cost for different approaches. Especially in terms of energy independence, these
biofuels represent a costly and inefficient method compared to other approaches the government might take to achieve the
same goal."The researchers estimate that to achieve a given improvement in energy independence, biofuels could be 6 to 15
times more costly than other policy approaches such as raising fuel economy standards for vehicles. When looking
exclusively at reducing emissions of greenhouse gases, however, their analysis suggests that both canola biodiesel and woodbased ethanol may be cost-effective ways to achieve that goal. The results are also mixed in terms of commercial
competitiveness. The study finds that corn ethanol and canola biodiesel are currently commercially viable in Oregon, thanks
in part to government subsidies and regulations that have increased demand and lowered the cost of production. However,
current production costs are still too high to make wood-based ethanol commercially attractive. How can these biofuels be
commercially competitive yet represent very high-cost ways to achieve energy independence? The authors explain that in
addition to subsidies that lower the cost of production while adding cost to taxpayers, there are large differences in the
amounts of fossil-fuel energy required to produce each fuel, and there are large differences in the amount of energy contained
in a gallon of each fuel.The OSU study looked only at large-scale commercial production of these three biofuels. The authors
acknowledge that local or on-farm production may offer other advantages in some cases. They also caution that their
estimates are subject to future changes in prices, technologies, or other developments. The authors find that the potential
scale of production for these biofuels in Oregon is limited. They estimate that these biofuels could contribute no more than a
fraction of one percent of Oregon's current energy use."The main results of our analysis do not depend on our regional
focus," Jaeger said. Although the scale of production of Midwest corn ethanol and soybean-based biodiesel is much larger
than Oregon biofuels, the cost and cost-effectiveness of their production is not much different.
Capitalism Kritik
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Renewable energy can cause deforestation.
Spiegel Online 2006
[Spiegel Online International, When Renewable Energy is Bad for the Environment,September 28,2006,
http://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,439809,00.html]
But just because something is a renewable energy source, doesn't automatically mean it's good for the environment. In fact, if
you ask environmental groups, palm oil diesel can be extremely detrimental to the environment.The problem is that in order
to grow more of the lucrative crop, environmental groups fear Indonesia will clear rainforest land. Earlier this year,
Indonesia's government tossed plans to develop the world's largest palm oil plantation -- nearly 2 million hectars -- by
clearing one of the most diverse rainforest areas in the world only after it was proven that much of the proposed area was too
high and steep for cultivation. But in order to supply just 1 percent of the EU's fuel needs, a 3 million hectar plantation would
be required, according to a new study by the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF).
Renewable Energy is harmful to the environment.
Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute ,January 7, Some Biofuels Are Worse Environmentally Than Fossil Fuels, Analysis
Shows. ScienceDaily. Retrieved July 10, 2008, http://www.sciencedaily.com /releases/2008/01/080103144404.htm#
Because fossil fuels contribute to global warming and supplies are dwindling, more eco-friendly alternatives are required.
However, biofuels may not be superior if their production results in environmental destruction, pollution and damage to
human health, argue postdoctoral fellow Jrn Scharlemann and William Laurance, staff scientist at the Smithsonian Tropical
Research Institute.A new study by Zah et al., commissioned by the Swiss government, calculates the relative merits of 26
biofuels based on relative reduction of greenhouse-gas emissions and an environmental-impact index, which includes
damages to human health and ecosystems and natural resource depletion.The Swiss study identifies striking differences in the
environmental costs of different biofuels. Fuels made from U.S. corn, Brazilian soy and Malaysian palm oil may be worse
overall than fossil fuels. The best alternatives include biofuels from residual products, such as recycled cooking oil and
ethanol from grass or wood.The Zah et al. study falls short in that it fails to consider secondary consequences of biofuels,
such as rising food costs, but it is a big step forward in providing a way to compare the environmental benefits and costs of
dozens of different biofuels.
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Environment Link
Current solutions to ecological disaster are tied to vested capitalist interests who will maintain
capitals dominance while stifling any meaningful resistance.
John Foster professor of Sociology 01 (John Bellamy, Professor of Sociology at University of Oregon, Ecology
Against Capitalism - Statistical Data Included) JXu
"The modern world," Rachel Carson observed in 1963, "worships the gods of speed and quantity, and of the quick and
easy profit, and out of this idolatry monstrous evils have arisen." The reduction of nature to factory-like forms of
organization in the interest of rapid economic returns, she argued, lies behind our worst ecological problems (Lost
Woods, pp. 194-95). Such realities are, however, denied by the vested interests who continue to argue that it is possible
to continue as before only on a larger scale, with economics (narrowly conceived) rather than ecology having the last word
on the environment in which we live. The depth of the ecological and social crisis of contemporary civilization, the need
for a radical reorganization of production in order to create a more sustainable and just world, is invariably
downplayed by the ruling elements of society, who regularly portray those convinced of the necessity of meaningful
ecological and social change as so many "Cassandras" who are blind to the real improvements in the quality of life that
everywhere surround us. Industry too fosters such an attitude of complacency, while at the same time assiduously
advertising itself as socially responsible and environmentally benign. Science, which all too often is prey to corporate
influence, is frequently turned against its own precepts and used to defend the indefensible--for example, through risk
management analysis. It was in defiance of such distortions within the reigning ideology, reaching down into science itself,
that Rachel Carson felt compelled to ask, in her 1962 Women's National Press Club speech: Is industry becoming a screen
through which facts must be filtered, so that the hard, uncomfortable truths are kept back and only the harmless morsels
allowed to filter through? I know that many thoughtful scientists are deeply disturbed that their organizations are
becoming fronts for industry. More than one scientist has raised a disturbing question--whether a spirit of lysenkoism may
be developing in America today--the philosophy that perverted and destroyed the science of genetics in Russia and even
infiltrated all of that nation's agricultural sciences. But here the tailoring, the screening of basic truth, is done, not to suit a
party line, but to accommodate to the short-term gain, to serve the gods of profit and production (Lost Woods, p. 210). We
are constantly invited by those dutifully serving "the gods of profit and production" to turn our attention elsewhere,
to downgrade our concerns, and to view the very economic system that has caused the present global degradation of
the environment as the solution to the problems it has generated. Hence, to write realistically about the conflict
between ecology and capitalism requires, at the present time, a form of intellectual resistance--a ruthless critique of
the existing mode of production and the ideology used to support its environmental depredations. We are faced with a
stark choice: either reject "the gods of profit" as holding out the solution to our ecological problems, and look instead
to a more harmonious coevolution of nature and human society, as an essential element in building a more just and egalitarian
social order-or face the natural consequences, an ecological and social crisis that will rapidly spin out of control, with
irreversible and devastating consequences for human beings and f or those numerous other species with which we are
linked.
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Environment Link
Capitalism converts nature into commodities of exchange value which makes ecological
destruction inevitable. Pollution control only feeds into this system of profitability calculation.
Joel Kovel Professor of Social Studies 02 (Joel, Alger Hiss Professor of Social Studies at Bard College, The Enemy
of Nature: The End of Capitalism or the End of the World? pg 39-40) JXu
The combination makes an ever-growing ecological crisis an iron necessity so long as capital rules, no matter what
measures are taken to tidy up one corner or another. We need to examine why we talk of capital as though it has a life
of its own, which rapidly surpasses its rational function and consumes ecosystems in order to grow cancerously. Capital is not in itself a living organism,
needless to say. It is rather a kind of relationship like that set UI) by a cancer-causing virus that invades living human beings, forces them to violate
ecological integrity, sets up self-replicating structures and polarizes the giant force field . It is humans living as capital, people who become
capitals personfica1ions, who destroy ecosystems. The Faustian bargain that gave rise to this way of being arose through the discovery that
fabulous wealth could be achieved by making money first of all, and things through the making of money. Those who do not know yet that
capitalist production is for profit and not use can learn it right away from watching Wall Street discipline
corporations that fail to measure up to standards of profitability Capitalists celebrate the restless dynamism that these
standards enforce, with its drive for innovation, efficiency and new markets. They fail to recognize because a kind of failure of recognition is built into
their being that what looks like resourcefulness and resilience from one side becomes on the other an addiction and a treadmill to oblivion. Commodities
appeared at the dawn of economic activity, and commodity production became generalized with the advent of capital. The germ of capital is inserted into
each commodity, and can be released only through exchange, and with this, the conversion of what is desirable into money. To employ a formalism
employed by Marx, which we shall find helpful to express our ideas as we proceed, every commodity is a conjunction of a use-value and
an exchange-value.8 Use-value signifies the commoditys place in the ever-developing manifold of human needs and
wants, while exchange-value represents its commodity-being, that is, its exchangeability, an abstraction that can he
expressed only in quantitative terms, and as money. Broadly speaking, capital represents that regime in which exchangevalue predominates over use-value in the production of commodities and the problem with capital is that, once installed, this
process becomes self-perpetuating and expanding. If production be for profit - that is, for the expansion of the money value invested in it then prices must be
kept as high as possible and costs as low as possible. As prices will tend to be held down by the competition endemic to the system, in practice, cutting costs
becomes a paramount concern of capitalists. But costs of what? Clearly, of what enters into the production of commodities. Much of this can be expressed in
terms of other commodities for example, fuel, machinery, building materials, and so on, and, crucially, the labour-power sold by workers for wages at the
heart of the capitalist system. However, if the same analysis is done upon the latter, at some point we arrive at entities that are not produced as commodities,
yet are treated as such in the great market that defines capitalism. These are the above-mentioned conditions of production, and they include publicly
produced facilities, i.e., infrastructure, the workers themselves, and, last but certainly not least, nature - even if this nature already expresses, as it almost
always does, the hand of prior human activity. The process is a manifestation of the ascendancy of exchange-value over use-value, and entails a twofold
degradation. In the first place, we have the commodification of nature, which includes human beings, and their bodies . However, nature, as we shall
examine further in Part II, simply does not work in this way, No matter what capitals ideologues say, the actual laws
of nature never include monetization; they exist, rather, in the context of ecosystems whose internal relations are
violated by conversion to the money- form. Thus the ceaseless rendering into commodities, with its monetization and
exchange, breaks down the specificity and intricacy of ecosystems. lb this is added the devaluation, or basic lack of
caring, which attends what is left over and unprofitable. Here arise the so-called externalities that become the
repositories of pollution. To the extent to which the capital relation, with its unrelenting competitive drive to realize profit, prevails, it is a certainty
that the conditions of production at some point or other will be degraded, which is to say that natural ecosystems will be destabilized and broken apart. As
James OConnor has demonstrated in his pioneering studies of this phenomenon, this degradation will have a contradictory effect on profitability itself (the
Second Contradiction of Capital), either directly, by so fouling the natural ground of production that it breaks down, or indirectly, as in the case that
regulatory measures, being forced to pay for the health care of workers, and so on, re-internalizes the costs that had been expelled into the environment . in
a case such as Bhopal, numerous insults of this kind interacted and became the matrix of a ghastly accident. For
Bhopal, degradation was concentrated in one setting, while the ecological crisis as a whole may be regarded as its
occurrence in a less concentrated but vastly more extended field, so that the disaster is now played out more slowly
and on a planetary scale. it will surely be rejoined to this that a great many countervailing techniques are continually
introduced to blunt or even profit from the degradation of conditions of production - for example. pollution-control
devices, making commodities of pollutants. and so on. To some degree these are bound to be effective. Indeed, if the overall system were in
equilibrium. then the effects of the Second Contradiction could be contained, and we would not be able to extrapolate from it to the ecological crisis. Bu t
this brings us to the other great problem with capital, namely, that confinement of any sort is anathema to it.
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Warming Link
Global warming is good for business corporations inculcate a fear of warming that drives
consumers to demand modern green developments which feed profits.
Joel Kovel Professor of Social Studies 2002 (Joel, Alger Hiss Professor of Social Studies at Bard College, The
Enemy of Nature: The End of Capitalism or the End of the World? pg 47-48) JXu
With respect to global warming, arguably the supreme instance of the ecological crisis, we now find a gathering
realization of just how deadly the prospects are. But the chaotic world-system keeps the response lagging far behind
the pace of events. Consider only the frequency and impact of violent storms. These are the equivalent, on the climatic level, of methylisocyanate, on
the physiological level, tearing through a body. Each represents the intrusion of wild energy uncontainable by ecosystemic buffering. with chaotic and
devastating results. In the last few years, we have seen Hurricane Mitch, which laid waste to Honduras and Nicaragua, along with other devastating storms,
all leading to deaths in the tens of thousands, which struck China, India, Mozambique and Venezuela. In the latter instance, the killer became rain-induced
landslides sweeping down on shanty-towns on the lee side of a mountain next to Caracas, burying or sweeping out to sea some 20,000 poor folk who would
never have been living there in a just or sane society . Each of these catastrophes, observe, is of the scale of a Bhopal, yet none is
considered an event for which the industrial system is to be held responsible, because there is no accident to focus on,
no Union Carbide to blame, only the dispersal of an uncountable number of ecosystemic insults, and the unpredictable yet inevitable reckoning. We
know with great precision what MIC does and how it got to where it could wreak havoc at Bhopal, whereas the evidence of storms is subject to much
uncertainty But there is something called the precautionary principle, according to which society is obliged to err on the side of caution where significant
evidence exists of an ecologically disruptive relationship without a final proof (which, given the nature of such events, may never transpire). It is clear that
sufficient evidence exists as to the presence of greater quantities of trapped solar energy and the mounting frequency of devastating storms.6 After all, what
are storms but the coming down of energy beyond the capacity of the atmosphere to bind? Yet in proportion to the menace, the world-systems response is as
negligent as was Carbides at Bhopal.7 The explanation lies within the logic of accumulation. It is not just the obvious fact that
any serious grappling with greenhouse gas production will spell trouble for profit in the short and medium run that
comprises the horizon of capitals vision. No, there is another motive right here in the present. And that is a realization
that global warming, here and now, is good for business. In France, for example, the terrible storms of 1999 not only turned out to have
little macro-economic impact; they are said to be, according to Denis Kessler, president of the French Insurance Companies Federation, a rather good thing
for GDP. This is because the damages caused by such events for a highly developed country are relatively low no shantytowns in France, plenty of emergency equipment, and so on- and exceeded in monetary value by the funds spent on repairs, which tends to renovate
damaged property in a more modern manner. As the author of the article, Herv Kempf, comments : It looks as though the worlds economic
decision-makers have decided to do nothing about climate change on the basis that if no change happens, we shall take
advantage of a form of growth that continues to intensify the greenhouse effect; and if it does happen, we shall be able
to protect ourselves from it and it may even have a favourable effect on the global economy8 The we here refers not to
humanity as a whole, but to the inhabitants of the developed nations to be more exact, their privileged classes. As for the others, well, let them eat mud.
Like the untold numbers of birds and other animals wasted by these storms, the fate of the poor is irrelevant to the great march of accumulation, and so
becomes a non-issue. Thus Kempf comments: Venezuelas flood victims counted for little economically in so far as the countrys
oil Output remained unaffected. Consequently their fate, like that of billions of others, is discounted. Such thinking is
both a manifestation of the ever-widening gap between the worlds rich and poor, and a cause of that gaps widening. It
is also a prime example of the kind of reasoning specific to capital, which employs purely quantitative indices such as
gross domestic product (GDP) because they are convenient indices of accumulation. Scarcely a critic of the ecological
crisis has refrained from commenting upon the stupid brutality of this number, which reduces the living and the dead alike to the
common denominator of what can be extracted from their commodification. It is necessary though, to see thinking in terms of GDP as no mere error, but the
actual logic of the reigning power; and all cries for revising it to reflect human and ecological judgements are simply risible so long as that power remains in
place. But it still is an error, and a huge, future-threatening one. In the reduction of the world to value, and the economy to GDP there occurs both an
abstraction and a narrowing. All things seen through the lens of capital become commodities whose concrete sensuous
ecological links are now merely quantities. Hence they drift apart and are separated. The bourgeois calculator of global
warming reduces the subject to a series of storms and their effect on profits. Aha! he says, were still making money, then closes
his books and narrows his vision, until he sees the world, in Blakes term, thro narrow chinks in a prison-house of the mind, and forgets that global
warming is a process at the level of the whole, all ecosystems engaged and mutually interacting. While he counts his money and contentedly spews forth his
greenhouse gas, events elsewhere take their course. Capital wants boundaries dissolved strictly according to its logic of endless accumulation, but there are
other boundaries whose dissolution is not at all to its taste. The polar ice cap melts, and oceanic currents are transformed. And then, like a colossal Bhopal,
all these little negligences may come together some day into a very nasty surprise. Perhaps one day; the French bourgeoisie may wake up to find that the
Gulf Stream no longer flows by their fair country but dissipates its warmth into an undifferentiated sea. And what will that do to the GDP?
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Emissions Trading/Reform Link

Trading emissions credits has little effects on capitals ecologically destructive tendencies its
imperative to expand displaces efforts at reform.
Enemy of Nature: The End of Capitalism or The End of the World?, pg 51-52) JXu
Capitals responsibility for the ecological crisis can he shown empirically by tracking down ecosystemic breakdowns
to the actions of corporations and/or governmental agencies under the influence of capitals force field. Or it can be
deduced from the combined tendencies to degrade conditions of production (the Second Contradiction), on the one hand, and,
on the other, the cancerous imperative to expand. Although the Second Contradiction may be offset in individual
circumstances by recycling, pollution control, the trading of credits and the like, the imperative to expand continually
erodes the edges of ecologies along an ever-lengthening perimeter, overcoming or displacing recuperative efforts and
accelerating a cascade of destabilization. On occasion, the force of capital expansion can be seen directly as when
President George W Bush abruptly reversed his pledge to trim emissions of CO in March 2001, the day after the stock market
went into free-fall and in the context of a gathering crisis of accumulation. More broadly, it operates through a host of
intermediaries embedded within the gigantic machine for accumulation that is capitalist society. We need to take a closer look
at how this society works on the ground. Too much is at stake to close the argument with a demonstration of abstract laws.
Capital is no automatic mechanism, and the laws it obeys, being mediated by consciousness, are no more than
tendencies. When we say capital does this or that, we mean that certain human actions are carried out under the auspices of
capital. We need to learn, then, as much as we can about just what these actions are and how they can be changed. Capital
originates with the exploitation of labour, and takes shape as this is subjected to the peculiar forces of money. Its nucleus is
the abstraction of human transformative power into labour-power for sale on the market. The nascent capitalist economy was
fostered by the feudal state, then took over that state (often through revolution), centering it about capital accumulation. With
this, the capitalist mode of production was installed as such - after which capital began to convert society into its image and
created the conditions for the ecological crisis. The giant corporations we rightly identify as ecological destroyers are not
the whole of capital, but only its prime economic instruments. Capital acts through the corporation, therefore, but also
across society and within the human spirit. Broadly speaking, this has taken place in three dimensions - existentially
temporally and institutionally. In other words, people increasingly live their lives under the terms of capital; as they
do so, the temporal pace of their life accelerates; finally, they live in a world where institutions are in place to secure
this across an ever-expanding terrain: the world of globalization. In this way a society and a whole way of being, arc
created hostile to the integrity of ecosystems.
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Sustainable Development Link

Environmental reform and sustainable development hide capitalisms responsibility for global
ecological crisis. These mantras really represent the sustaining of capitals expansion at any cost.
John Foster Professor of Sociology 07 (John Bellamy, Professor of Sociology at University of Oregon, The Ecology
of Destruction, Feb 2007, http://www.monthlyreview.org/0207jbf.htm) JXu
It is a characteristic of our age that global ecological devastation seems to overwhelm all other problems, threatening
the survivability of life on earth as we know it. How this is related to social causes and what social solutions might be
offered in response have thus become the most pressing questions facing humanity. The world has so far convened two major
earth summits: in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in 1992 and Johannesburg, South Africa in 2002. These summits took place a mere ten years apart. Yet, they can be
seen as lying in the dividing line separating one historical period from another, revealing the contradictions of an entire centurythe twenty-first. The 1992
Earth Summit in Rio, organized by the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, represented the boundless hope that humanity could
come together to solve its mounting global ecological problems. The late 1980s and early 1990s were a period in which the global
ecological crisis penetrated the public consciousness. Suddenly there were grave concerns about the destruction of the
ozone layer, global warming, and the rising rate of species extinctions resulting from planetary destruction of
ecosystems. In June 1988 James Hansen, Director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, testified before the U.S. Senate Energy and Natural
Resources Committee, presenting evidence of global warming due to the emission of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. That
same year the United Nations set up a new international organization, the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), to address global warming.
A new ideology of world unity pervaded the Rio summit. The Gulf War of 1991 and the demise of the Soviet Union later
in the same year had given rise to the then dominant rhetoric of a new world order and of the end of history. The world,
it was said, was now one. The recent passage of the Montreal Protocol, placing restrictions on the production of ozone-depleting chemicals, seemed
to confirm that the worlds economically dominant countries could act in unison in response to global environmental threats. The site chosen for the
Earth Summit, Brazil, home to the Amazon, was meant to symbolize the planetary goal of saving the worlds
biodiversity. The summits principal document, known as Agenda 21, was intended to launch a new age of sustainable development for the twenty-first
century. The mood of the second earth summit, the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg, could not have been more different than
the first. Rios hope had given way to Johannesburgs dismay. Rather than improving over the decade that had elapsed, the world
environment had experienced accelerated decline. The planet was approaching catastrophic conditions, not just with
respect to global warming, but in a host of other areas. Sustainable development had turned out to be about sustaining
capital accumulation at virtually any ecological cost. All the rhetoric ten years earlier of a new world order and the
end of historyit was now clear to many of the environmentalists attending the Johannesburg summithad simply
disguised the fact that the real nemesis of the global environment was the capitalist world economy. The site of the
Johannesburg summit had been chosen partly to symbolize the end of apartheid, and hence the advent of significant world
social progress. Yet, critics at the second earth summit raised the issue of global ecological apartheid, emphasizing the
destruction wrought on the environment by the rich nations of the North in ways that disproportionately affected the
global South. The ecological imperialism of the center of the capitalist world economy was symbolized by
Washingtons refusal to ratify the Kyoto Protocol on limiting greenhouse gas emissions generating global warming.
Significantly, U.S. President George W. Bush declined to attend the earth summit. Instead, at the very moment that debates were taking place in
Johannesburg on the future of the world ecology, the Bush administration seized the worlds stage by threatening a war on Iraq, ostensibly over weapons of
mass destructionthough to the worlds environmentalists assembled in Johannesburg it was clear even then that the real issue was oil.4 In fact, a new
historical period had emerged in the ten years since the Rio summit. Economically, the world had witnessed what Paul Sweezy in 1994 called the triumph
of financial capitalism with the transformation of monopoly capital into what might be called global monopoly-finance capital.5 By the end of the
twentieth century capitalism had evolved into a system that was if anything more geared to rapacious accumulation
than ever before, relatively independent from its local and national roots. Global financial expansion was occurring on top of a world
economy that was stagnating at the level of production, creating a more unstable and more viciously inegalitarian order, dominated by neoliberal economics
and financial bubbles. Declining U.S. hegemony in the world system, coupled with the demise of the Soviet Union, induced repeated and increasingly naked
U.S. attempts to restore its economic and political power by military means. Meanwhile, global warming and other crucial environmental
problems had crossed critical thresholds. The question was no longer whether ecological and social catastrophes
awaited but how great these would be. For those (including myself) in Johannesburg in 2002, watching the U.S. president
prepare for war in the petroleum-rich Persian Gulf while the planet was heating up from the burning of fossil fuels, the
whole world seemed on fire.
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Hegemony Link/Impact
The hegemonic expansion of the United States is rooted in capital and the drive for profits. This
imperialist expansion will end humanity through nuclear warfare and ecological destruction.
John Foster Professor of Sociology 05 (John Bellamy, Professor of Sociology at University of Oregon, Naked
imperialism) JXu
To be sure, the shift toward a more openly militaristic imperialism occurred only gradually, in stages. For most of the 1990s
the U.S. ruling class and national security establishment had waged a debate behind the scenes on what to do now that the
Soviet Union's disappearance had left the United States as the sole superpower. Naturally, there was never any doubt about
what was to be the main economic thrust of the global empire ruled over by the United States. The 1990s saw the
strengthening of neoliberal globalization: the removal of barriers to capital throughout the world in ways that directly
enhanced the power of the rich capitalist countries of the center of the world economy vis-a-vis the poor countries of the
periphery. A key development was the introduction of the World Trade Organization to accompany the World Bank and the
International Monetary Fund as organizations enforcing the monopoly capitalist rules of the game. From the standpoint of
most of the world, a more exploitative economic imperialism had raised its ugly head. Yet for the powers that be at the
center of the world economy neoliberal globalization was regarded as a resounding success--notwithstanding signs of
global financial instability as revealed by the Asian financial crisis of 1997-98. U.S. ruling circles continued to debate,
however, the manner and extent to which the United States should push its ultimate advantage--using its vast military
power as a means of promoting U.S. global supremacy in the new "unipolar" world. If neoliberalism had arisen in
response to economic stagnation, transferring the costs of economic crisis to the world's poor, the problem of declining
U.S. economic hegemony seemed to require an altogether different response: the reassertion of U.S. power as military
colossus of the world system. Immediately after the collapse of the Soviet Union the Defense Department under the
administration of George H.W. Bush initiated a reconsideration of U.S. national security policy in light of the changing global
situation. The report, completed in March 1992 and known as the Defense Planning Guidance, was written under the
supervision of Paul Wolfowitz, then undersecretary of policy in the Defense Department. It indicated that the chief nationalsecurity goal of the United States must be one of "precluding the emergence of any potential global competitor" (New York
Times, March 8, 1992). The ensuing debate within the U.S. establishment over the 1990s focused less on whether the United
States was to seek global primacy than whether it should adopt a more multilateral ("sheriff and posse," as Richard Haass
dubbed it) or unilateral approach. Some of the dominant actors in what was to become the administration of George W. Bush,
including Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, were to organize the Project for the New American Century, which in
anticipation of Bush winning the White House, issued, at then vice-presidential candidate Dick Cheney's request, a foreign
policy paper, entitled Rebuilding America's Defenses (September 2000), reaffirming the unilateral and nakedly aggressive
strategy of the Defense Planning Guidance of 1992. Following September 11, 2001, this approach became official U.S. policy
in The National Security Strategy of the United States of 2002. The beating of the war drums for an invasion of Iraq
coincided with the release of this new declaration on national security--effectively a declaration of a new world war. It
is common, as we have noted, for critics to attribute these dramatic changes simply to the seizure of the political and military
command centers of the U.S. state by a neoconservative cabal (brought into power by the disputed 2000 election), which,
when combined with the added opportunity provided by the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, led to a global imperial
offensive and a new militarism. Yet, the expansion of American empire, in the wake of the Soviet Union's demise was, as
the foregoing argument has demonstrated, already well advanced at that time and had been a bipartisan project from
the start. Under the Clinton administration the United States waged war in the Balkans, formerly part of the Soviet sphere in
Eastern Europe, while also initiating the process of establishing U.S. military bases in Central Asia, formerly part of the
Soviet Union itself. Iraq in the late 1990s was being bombed by the United States on a daily basis. When John Kerry as the
Democratic presidential candidate in the 2004 election insisted that he would prosecute the war on Iraq and the war on
terrorism if anything with greater determination and military resources--and that he differed only on the degree to which the
United States adopted a lone vigilante as opposed to a sheriff and posse stance--he was merely continuing what had been the
Democratic stance on empire throughout the 1990s and beyond: an all but naked imperialism. 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 Istvan
Meszaros 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
Capitalism Kritik
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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 Chavez. 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,
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 needs--by organizing a global resistance movement against the
new naked imperialism.
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Ethical Obligation Impact

The primary ethical directive of politics is to fight against global capitalism. The large scale social
exclusion and exploitation of entire groups of people is rendered incalculable and hidden within
the framework of capital.
Zizek Professor of Philosophy and Glyn Daly 2004 (Slavoj, professor of philosophy at the Institute for
Sociology, Ljubljana, and Glyn, Conversations with Zizek, pg 14-16) JXu
For Zizek it is imperative that we cut through this Gordian knot of postmodern protocol and recognize that our ethicopolitical 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 breaks with these types of positions 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 too long, Marxism has been bedevilled by an almost fetishistic economism that has tended towards political
morbidity. With the likes of Hilferding and Gramsci, and more recently Laclau and Mouffe, crucial theoretical advances
have been made that enable the trascendence 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 the 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 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 population. 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
judgement in a neutral marketplace. 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 of 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 to reduce the status of the abject Other to that of a 'glitch' in an otherwise sound
matrix.
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Extinction Impact
Capitalism leads to extinction multiple scenarios for nuclear war.
Russell Marko Author in 2003 (Anarchism and Human Survival: Russells problem., May 14, 2003,
https://www2.indymedia.org.uk/en/2003/05/68173.html)
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 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 Staffs
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
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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 overemphasised. 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. The militarisation of space is intimately linked with US strategic nuclear forces, for the previous command
covering space, known as Space Command, has merged with the command responsible for nuclear forces, Strategic
Command. Upon merger, the commander of Strategic Command stated, "United States Strategic Command provides a single
war fighting combatant command with a global perspective, focused on exploiting the strong and growing synergy between
the domain of space and strategic capabilities." The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff added, "this new command is going
to have all the responsibilities of its predecessors, but an entirely new mission focus, greatly expanded forces and you might
even say several infinite areas of responsibility." In other words, we are witnessing the integration of strategic
conventional, nuclear and space planning into the command responsible for overseeing US nuclear forces. In turn these
forces become an ordinary facet of US strategic planning, severing the break between conventional and nuclear war. The link
between the increase in threats to survival and state capitalism (as well as globalisation) was provided for us by the old Space
Command as noted above. We may justly also conclude that US nuclear weapons provide a shield, or shadow, enabling the
deployment of offensive military firepower in what Kennedy era commander General Maxwell Taylor referred to as the key
theatre of war, namely "under-developed areas". This shield was made effective by "escalation dominance", as noted above,
now known as "full spectrum dominance". It is this facet of US strategic policy that compels Washington place such a
premium on nuclear superiority and nuclear war fighting. The link between US nuclear strategy and the global political
economy is intimate. US nuclear weapons, both during and after the cold war, have acted as the ultimate guarantors
of US policy, which is concerned with managing the world capitalist system in the interests of dominant domestic
elites. Nuclear weapons provide the umbrella of power under which the system is able to function in much the same way that
Karl Polanyi in his classic work, The Great Transformation, argued that the balance of power functioned in the service of the
world capitalist system in the 19th century. The great restoration of the world capitalist system, under the rubric of liberal
internationalism, and the onset of the nuclear age in the wake of the second world war, are not merely coincidental. To
understand the contours of contemporary world order is to appreciate the deep nexus between the two. Military superiority is
necessary because of threats to "stability". It is to be expected that a system of world order constructed for the benefit of an
elite core of corporate interests in the US will not go down well with the world's population, especially in key regions singled
out for capital extraction such as the Middle East and Latin America. Planners recognise that the pursuit of capital
globalisation and the consequent widening of the gap between rich and poor would be opposed by the globe's
population. Absolute strategic superiority is meant to keep the world's population quite and obedient out of sheer
terror, as Bush administration aligned neo-conservative thinkers have argued it is better that Washington be feared rather
than loved. As they have asserted, after world war two US hegemony had to be "obtained", now it must be "maintained"
(Robert Kagan and William Kristol). It is only natural that this "maintenance operation" should be a militaristic one
given that the US has a comparative advantage in the use of force; a nuclear global first strike capability would give
Washington an absolute advantage. Should anyone get out of line, possibly threatening to spread the "virus" of
popular social and economic development, force is to be used to restore "credibility" to beat down the threat of a
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better example. The US pursues a dangerous nuclear strategy because such a strategy in its terms is "credible". Anarchists
are well aware of this important aspect of international relations given the events of the Spanish Civil War. Such a situation is
no joke, for this was precisely the fear of Kennedy era planners that led to the Cuban Missile Crisis. Washington sought to
return Cuba to the "Latin American mode" fearing that Cuba would set an example to the population of Latin America in
independent social and economic planning conducted in the interests of the population rather than US capital. In response to
the Castro takeover the US engaged in one of the most serious terrorist campaigns of recent times, meant as a prelude to
invasion in order to ensure "regime change" thereby teaching the people of the region the lesson that "what we say goes".
One of the key reasons why Khrushchev sought to place nuclear missiles in Cuba was to deter a US invasion and to achieve
strategic parity with Washington. Throughout the Cuban Missile Crisis many potential flashpoints almost lead to a full-scale
nuclear exchange between the Soviet Union and the US, how close we came to annihilation is only now being fully realised.
These are not matters for idle speculation: destruction almost occurred in the past and may very well occur in the future; even
cats have only nine lives. This is a matter of great contemporary significance because of the current geographical expansion
of the US military system. One of the most significant results of the invasion of Afghanistan was the expansion of the US
military system into Central Asia, including into some former Soviet republics. The Russians have traditionally considered
this to be their version of the Western hemisphere. If a "great game" were to develop in the region between Russia and the US
(perhaps also Pakistan, China and India all nuclear powers, Turkey which sits under US "extended deterrence" and Iran, a
potential nuclear power) then such a "great game" may become a nuclearised great game. Indeed the standoff in Kashmir may
have global consequences if a system of alliance politics were to develop in the region between the globe's nuclear powers,
especially as the threshold of nuclear war is being lowered. In this sense Central Asia may develop into a global version of
the link between the Balkans and central alliance systems prior to 1914. Of even greater concern is the further expansion of
the US military system into the Middle East following the invasion of Iraq. Washington has already foreshadowed a desire to
construct permanent military bases in Iraq in order to facilitate intervention into the region. Both Iran and Syria are potential
targets of US attack. Iran may decide upon the nuclear option in order to deter the globes leading rogue state. This could be
potentially explosive because it is well known that Israel posses a significant nuclear force. Israel has always feared that its
paymaster would ultimately abandon it. In response Israel has reportedly developed a "samson option" nuclear targeting
strategy. The idea is that Israel would target Russia with its nuclear weapons (Israel has developed delivery systems with an
excessive range capability), which would lead to a full-scale nuclear exchange between Moscow and Washington. In essence
Israel is saying: we should be allowed to continue repressing the Palestinians if not we have the "samson option".
Furthermore, in order to facilitate intervention into these regions the US has began a programme to shift the basing of
its military forces into "new Europe" that is Eastern Europe. Washington for instance pushed Romania into NATO
for this very reason. Placing military forces in Eastern Europe no doubt would give the Russians some cause for
concern. After Kosovo Russia conducted large-scale war games assuming an invasion through "new Europe". The
game ended with the release of nuclear weapons. Indeed, expanding the US military system up to the border of
Belarus may be dangerous for it is quite possible that Russia extends nuclear deterrence to Minsk; for instance Russia
is building a new ground based strategic early warning radar in Belarus. This may all become a series problem in the
future because of what the US Geological Survey refers to as "the big rollover": the time at which the world oil market
changes from a buyers market into a sellers market (which may occur in the next 15-20 years). Washington has always
regarded the oil resources of the Middle East as "the most stupendous material prize in world history" which is a key lever of
US global dominance. The big rollover will ensure that Middle Eastern oil reserves will become an even more
significant lever of world control placing greater premium on US control over the political development of the Arab
world. In 1967, 1970 and 1973 strategic developments in the Middle East were overshadowed by nuclear weapons. In fact
the events of 1970 and 1973 convinced many, such as Henry Kissinger, that the US needed to strive to retain nuclear
superiority and reverse the condition of strategic parity with Moscow. This ultimately lead to the Carter-Reagan build-up of
the late 1970s and early 1980s; a build-up which easily could have been disastrous. The militarisation of space, the
development of so called "useable" nuclear weapons, the globalisation of the US nuclear planning system, the hair
trigger alert status of the globe's nuclear forces and the expansion of the US military system into Central Asia and the
Middle East possibly triggering a "great game" in these regions between nuclear powers, not to mention military
expansion into "new Europe", all seriously increase the threats to our long term (indeed short term) survival.
Washington's aggressive nuclear strategy is not only meant to deter democracy abroad; it is also meant to deter democracy at
home. In 1956 the author of NSC 68 and one of the chief ideologues behind the Carter-Reagan nuclear build-up, Paul Nitze,
made a distinction between what he referred to as "declaratory" nuclear weapons policy and "actual" nuclear weapons policy.
For anybody interested in unravelling truth from fiction the distinction is critical. In Nitze's words, "the word 'policy' is used
in two related but different senses. In one sense, the action sense, it refers to the general guidelines, which we believe should
and will govern our actions in various contingencies. In the other sense, the declaratory sense, it refers to policy statements
which have as their aim political and psychological effects". The most important target audience of declaratory policy is the
American population, the so-called "internal deterrent". Consider for instance the key nuclear proliferation planning
document of the cold war era, the Gilpatric report delivered to President Johnson. In it Gilpatric spelt out the threat that
nuclear proliferation poses to US security: "as additional nations obtained nuclear weapons our diplomatic and military
influence would wane, and strong pressures would arise to retreat to isolation to avoid the risk of involvement in
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nuclear war". So if it were seen by the population that the pursuit of foreign policy, conducted in the interests of domestic
elites, would increase the threat of nuclear war then the internal deterrent may become dangerously aroused possibly calling
off the show. In the strategic literature this is referred to as self-deterrence. In other words US non proliferation policy
was meant to lock in US strategic dominance so that the domestic population would not become dangerously
aroused whilst providing Washington the freedom of action necessary to brandish its nuclear superiority over others.
This sentiment was reflected in the Bush administrations Nuclear Posture Review, nuclear capabilities also assure the US public that the United States will
not be subject to coercion based on a false perception of U.S. weakness among potential adversaries. Many strategic thinkers have argued that the greatest
threat to US hegemony or "unipolarity" is the internal "welfare role" and the populations lack of understanding for the burdens of Empire, in other words
popular democracy. One of the reasons that the Reagan administration pursued "Star Wars" a programme to render nuclear weapons "impotent and obsolete"
was to outflank the domestic and global peace movements that were gathering pace as a result of the administration's pursuit of potentially apocalyptic
nuclear policies (the very same people have their fingers on the button again). It was well recognised that the Star Wars programme would have increased the
chances of a nuclear exchange between Moscow and Washington, just as today the pursuit of short term interests is known to have potentially serious
international consequences, such as increase in conflict and global weapons of mass destruction proliferation . The ruling class is well aware of
the adverse impact the pursuit of its own sectional interests will have on international order. It pursues those interests
with renewed zeal anyway. As far as the ruling class is concerned the greatest threat we face is not nuclear war, it is
popular democracy. 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 longterm 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.
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Everything Impact
Capitalism necessitates large-scale systematic murders and was responsible for the Holocaust,
Hiroshima, and more. All the affirmatives impacts are inevitable if we allow capitalisms
continued existence.
Internationalist Perspective 2K (Internationalist Perspective #36, spring 2000,
http://www.geocities.com/wageslavex/capandgen.html) JXu
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! Yet, confronted by the horror of Auschwitz, Kolyma, and Hiroshima, Marxist theory has been silent or
uncomprehending. While I am convinced that there can be no adequate theory of mass death and genocide which does not link these phenomena to the
unfolding of the logic of capital, revolutionary Marxists have so far failed to offer one. Worse, the few efforts of revolutionary Marxists to grapple with the
Holocaust, for example, as I will briefly explain, have either degenerated into a crude economism, which is one of the hallmarks of so-called orthodox
Marxism, or led to a fatal embrace of Holocaust denial; the former being an expression of theoretical bankruptcy, and the latter a quite literal crossing of the
class line into the camp of capital itself. Economism, which is based on a crude base-superstructure model (or travesty) of Marxist theory, in which politics,
for example, can only be conceived as a direct and immediate reflection of the economic base, in which events can only be conceived as a manifestation of
the direct economic needs of a social class, and in the case of the capitalist class, the immediate need to extract a profit, shaped Amadeo Bordiga's attempt to
"explain" the Holocaust. Thus, in his "Auschwitz ou le Grand Alibi" Bordiga explained the extermination of the Jews at the hands of the Nazis, as the
reaction of one part of the petty bourgeoisie to its historical demise at the hands of capital by "sacrificing" its other -- Jewish -- part so as to save the rest, an
undertaking welcomed by big capital, which could thereby liquidate a part of the petty bourgeoisie with the support of the rest of that same class. Quite apart
from an economism which simply ignores the dialectic between the economy on the one hand, and the political and ideological on the other (about which
more later), such an "explanation" asks us to conceive of genocide not as the complex outcome of the unfolding of the
operation of the law of value in the diverse spheres of social life, but as the direct outcome of the utilitarian calculation
of segments of the petty bourgeoisie and big capital. Auschwitz, the veritable hallmark of the fundamental
irrationality of late capital, is transformed by Bordiga into a rational calculation of its direct profit interests on the
part of the capitalists. However, an undertaking which fatally diverted the scarce resources (material and financial) of Nazi Germany from the
battlefields of the imperialist world war, simply cannot, in my view, be comprehended on the basis of a purely economic calculus of profit and loss on the
part of "big capital." While Bordiga's reaction to Auschwitz fails to provide even the minimal bases for its adequate theorization, the reaction of the militants
of La Vieille Taupe, such as Pierre Guillaume, constitutes a political betrayal of the struggle for communist revolution by its incorporation into the politics of
Holocaust denial. For Guillaume, Auschwitz can only be a myth, a fabrication of the allies, that is, of one of the imperialist blocs in the inter-imperialist
world war, because it so clearly serves their interests in mobilizing the working class to die in the service of democracy; on the alter of anti-fascism. Hence,
La Vieille Taupe's "fervor to contest the evidence of its [the Holocaust's] reality by every means possible, including the most fraudulent. For the evidence of
genocide is just so many deceptions, so many traps laid for anticapitalist radicality, designed to force it into dishonest compromise and eventual loss of
resolve." It is quite true that capital has utilized antifascism to assure its ideological hegemony over the working class, and that the Holocaust has been
routinely wielded for more than a generation by the organs of mass manipulation in the service of the myth of "democracy" in the West (and by the state of
Israel on behalf of its own imperialist aims in the Middle-East). And just as surely the ideology of antifascism and its functionality for capital must be
exposed by revolutionaries. Nonetheless, this does not justify the claims of Holocaust denial, which not only cannot be dissociated from anti-Semitism, but
which constitutes a denial of the most lethal tendencies inherent in the capitalist mode of production, of the very barbarism of capitalism, and thereby serves
as a screen behind which the death-world wrought by capital can be safely hidden from its potential victims. This latter, in its own small way, is the
despicable contribution of La Vieille Taupe, and the basis for my conviction that it must be politically located in the camp of capital . Marxism is in
need of a theory of mass death and genocide as immanent tendencies of capital, a way of comprehending the link (still obsure)
between the death-world symbolized by the smokestacks of Auschwitz or the mushroom cloud over Hiroshima and the unfolding of the logic of a mode of
production based on the capitalist law of value. I want to argue that we can best grasp the link between capitalism and genocide by focusing on two
dialectically inter-related strands in the social fabric of late capitalism: first, are a series of phenomena linked to the actual unfolding of the law of value, and
more specifically to the completion of the transition from the formal to the real domination of capital; second, are a series of phenomena linked to the
political and ideological (this latter understood in a non-reductionist sense, as having a material existence) moments of the rule of capital, specifically to the
forms of capitalist hegemony. It is through an analysis of the coalescence of vital elements of these two strands in the development of capital, that I hope to
expose the bases for the death-world and genocide as integral features of capitalism in the present epoch. The real domination of capital is
characterized by the penetration of the law of value into every segment of social existence. As Georg Lukcs put it in his
History and Class Consciousness, this means that the commodity ceases to be "one form among many regulating the
metabolism of human society," to become its "universal structuring principle." From its original locus at the point of
production, in the capitalist factory, which is the hallmark of the formal domination of capital, the law of value has
systematically spread its tentacles to incorporate not just the production of commodities, but their circulation and
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consumption. Moreover, the law of value also penetrates and then comes to preside over the spheres of the political and ideological, including science
and technology themselves. This latter occurs not just through the transformation of the fruits of technology and science into commodities, not just through
the transformation of technological and scientific research itself (and the institutions in which it takes place) into commodities, but also, and especially,
through what Lukcs designates as the infiltration of thought itself by the purely technical, the very quantification of rationality, the instrumentalization of
reason; and, I would argue, the reduction of all beings (including human beings) to mere objects of manipulation and control.
As Lukcs could clearly see even in the age of Taylorism, "this rational mechanisation extends right into the worker's `soul'." In short, it affects not only his
outward behavior, but her very internal, psychological, makeup. The phenomenon of reification, inherent in the commodity-form, and its tendential
penetration into the whole of social existence, which Lukcs was one of the first to analyze, is a hallmark of the real domination of capital: "Its basis is that a
relation between people takes on the character of a thing and thus acquires a `phantom objectivity', an autonomy that seems so strictly rational and allembracing as to conceal every trace of its fundamental nature: the relation between people." Reification, the seeming transformation of social relations into
relations between things, has as one of its outcomes what the German-Jewish thinker H.G.Adler designated as "the administered man" [Der verwaltete
Mensch]. For Adler, when human beings are administered, they are treated as things, thereby clearing the way for their
removal or elimination by genocide. The outcome of such a process can be seen in the bureaucractic administration of
the Final Solution, in which the organization of genocide was the responsibility of desk killers like Adolf Eichmann
who could zealously administer a system of mass murder while displaying no particular hatred for his victims, no
great ideological passion for his project, and no sense that those who went to the gas chambers were human beings
and not things. The features of the desk killer, in the person of Eichmann, have been clearly delineated by Hannah Arendt. He is the high-level
functionary in a vast bureaucratic organization who does his killing from behind a desk, from which he rationally plans and organizes mass murder; treating
it as simply a technical task, no different than the problem of transporting scrap metal. The desk killer is the quintessential bureaucrat functioning according
to the imperatives of the death-world. As a human type, the desk killer, that embodiment of the triumph of instrumental reason, has become a vital part of the
state apparatus of late capitalism. Here, the Lukcsian concept of reification, the Adlerian concept of the administered man, and the Arendtian portrait of the
desk killer, can be joined to Martin Heidegger's concept of das Gestell, enframing, in which everything real, all beings, including humans, are treated
as so much Bestand, standing-reserve or raw material, to be manipulated at will. This reduction of humans to a raw
material is the antechamber to a world in which they can become so many waste products to be discarded or turned
into ashes in the gas chambers of Auschwitz or at ground zero at Hiroshima. While the reification which attains its culminating
point in the real domination of capital may contain within itself the possibility of mass murder and its death-world, it does not in and of itself explain the
actual unleashing of the genocidal potential which, because of it, is now firmly ensconced within the interstices of the capitalist mode of production. To
confront that issue, I want to elucidate two concepts which, while not directly linked by their authors to the unfolding of the capitalist law of value, can be
refunctioned to forge such a link, and have already been effectively wielded in the effort to explain genocide: the concept of the obsolescence of man [Die
Antiquiertheit des Menschen], articulated by the German-Jewish philosopher Gnther Anders, and the concept of bio-politics, articulated by Michel
Foucault. For Anders, the first industrial revolution introduced the machine with its own source of power as a means of production, while the second
industrial revolution saw the extension of commodity production to the whole of society, and the subordination of man to the machine. According to Anders,
the third industrial revolution, in the epoch of which humanity now lives, has made humans obsolete, preparing the way for their replacement by machines,
and the end of history (Endzeit). For Anders, the Holocaust marked the first attempt at the systematic extermination of a whole group of people by industrial
means, opening the way for the extension of the process of extermination to virtually the whole of the human species; a stage which he designates as "postcivilized cannibalism" [postzivilisatorischen Kannibalismus], in which the world is "overmanned", and in which Hiroshima marks the point at which
"humanity as a whole is eliminatable"[ttbar]. Anders's philosophy of technology is unabashedly pessimistic, leaving virtually no room for Marxist hope
(communist revolution). Nonetheless, his vision of a totally reified world, and technology as the subject of history, culminating in an Endzeit, corresponds to
one side of the dialectic of socialism or barbarism which presides over the present epoch. Moreover, Anders's concept of an overmanned world can be
fruitfully linked to the immanent tendency of the law of value to generate an ever higher organic composition of capital, culminating in the present stage of
automation, robotics, computers, and information technology, on the bases of which ever larger masses of living labor are ejected from the process of
production, and, indeed, from the cycle of accumulation as a whole, ceasing to be -- even potentially -- a productive force, a source of exchange-value, in
order to become an insuperable burden for capital, a dead weight, which, so long as it lives and breathes, threatens its profitability . This "obsolescence
of man" can at the level of total capital thereby create the necessity for mass murder; inserting the industrial
extermination of whole groups of people into the very logic of capital: genocide as the apotheosis of instrumental
reason! Reason transmogrified into the nihilistic engine of destruction which shapes the late capitalist world. Michel
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,
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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 biopower 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. What is at issue here is not Gramsci's politics, his
political practice, his interventions in the debates on strategy and tactics within the Italian Communist Party, where he followed the counter-revolutionary
line of the Stalinist Comintern, but rather his theorization of the political and ideological moment of capital, and in particular his concept of the "integral
state", his understanding of the state as incorporating both political and civil society, his concept of hegemony, and his understanding of ideology as
inscribed in practices and materialized in institutions, which exploded the crude base-superstructure model of orthodox Marxism and its vision of ideology
as simply false consciousness, all of which have enriched Marxist theory, and which revolutionaries ignore at their peril. In contrast to orthodox Marxism
which has equated the state with coercion, Gramsci's insistence that the state incorporates both political and civil society, and that class rule is instanciated
both by domination (coercion) and hegemony (leadership) allows us to better grasp the complex and crisscrossing strands that coalesce in capitalist class
rule, especially in the phase of the real domination of capital and the epoch of state capitalism. For Gramsci, hegemony is the way in which a dominant class
installs its rule over society through the intermediary of ideology, establishing its intellectual and cultural leadership over other classes, and thereby reducing
its dependence on coercion. Ideology, for Gramsci, is not mere false consciousness, but rather is the form in which humans acquire consciousness, become
subjects and act, constituting what he terms a "collective will". Moreover, for him, ideology is no mere superstructure, but has a material existence, is
materialized in praxis. The state which rests on a combination of coercion and hegemony is what Gramsci designates as an integral state. It seems to me,
that one major weakness of the Gramscian concept of hegemony is that he does not seem to apply it to the control exercised over an antagonistic class. Thus,
Gramsci asserts that one dominates, coerces, antagonistic classes, but leads only allied classes. Gramsci's seeming exclusion of antagonistic classes from the
ideological hegemony of the dominant class seems to me to be misplaced, especially in the epoch of state capitalism, when the capitalist class, the
functionaries of capital, acquire hegemony, cultural and intellectual leadership and control, not just of allied classes and strata (e.g. the middle classes, petty
bourgeoisie, etc.), but also over broad strata of the antagonistic class, the working class itself. Indeed, such hegemony, though never total, and always subject
to reversal (revolution), is the veritable key to capitalist class rule in this epoch. One way in which this ideological hegemony of capital is established over
broad strata of the population, including sectors of the working class, is by channeling the disatisfaction and discontent of the mass of the population with the
monstrous impact of capitalism upon their lives (subjection to the machine, reduction to the status of a "thing", at the point of production, insecurity and
poverty as features of daily life, the overall social process of atomization and massification, etc.), away from any struggle to establish a human
Gemeinwesen, communism. Capitalist hegemony entails the ability to divert that very disatisfaction into the quest for a "pure community", based on hatred
and rage directed not at capital, but at the Other, at alterity itself, at those marginal social groups which are designated a danger to the life of the nation, and
its population. One of the most dramatic effects of the inexorable penetration of the law of value into every pore of social
life, and geographically across the face of the whole planet, has been the destruction of all primitive, organic, and precapitalist communities. Capitalism, as Marx and Engels pointed out in the Communist Manifesto, shatters the bonds of
immemorial custom and tradition, replacing them with its exchange mechanism and contract. While Marx and Engels
stressed the positive features of this development in the Manifesto, we cannot ignore its negative side, particularly in light of the fact that the path to a human
Gemeinwesen has so far been successfully blocked by capital, with disastrous consequences for the human species. The negative side of that development
includes the relentless process of atomization, leaving in its wake an ever growing masas of rootless individuals, for whom the only human contact is by way
of the cash nexus. Those who have been uprooted geographically, economically, politically, and culturally, are frequently left with a powerful longing for
their lost communities (even where those communities were hierarchically organized and based on inequality), for the certainties and "truths" of the past,
which are idealized the more frustrating, unsatisfying, and insecure, the world of capital becomes. Such longings are most powerfully felt within what Ernst
Bloch has termed non-synchronous strata and classes. These are stata and classes whose material or mental conditions of life are
linked to a past mode of production, who exist economically or culturally in the past, even as they chronologically dwell in the present. In
contrast to the two historic classes in the capitalist mode of production, the bourgeoisie and proletariat, which are synchronous, the products of the capitalist
present, these non-synchronous strata include the peasantry, the petty bourgeoisie, and -- by virtue of their mental or cultural state -- youth and white-collar
workers. In my view, Bloch's understanding of non-synchronicity needs to be extended to segments of the working class, in particular those strata of the
blue-collar proletariat which are no longer materially synchronous with the high-tech production process upon which late capitalism rests, and the mass of
workers ejected from the production process by the rising organic composition of capital and its comcomitant down-sizing. In addition, the even greater
mass of peasants streaming into the shanty towns around the great commercial and industrial metropolitan centers of the world, are also characterized by
their non-synchronicity, their inability to be incorporated into the hyper-modern cycle of capital accumulation. Moreover, all of these strata too are subject to
a growing nostalgia for the past, a longing for community, including the blue-collar communities and their institutional networks which were one of the
features of the social landscape of capitalism earlier in the twentieth century. However, no matter how powerful this nostalgia for past community becomes,
it cannot be satisfied. The organic communities of the past cannot be recreated; their destruction by capital is irreversible.
At the same time, the path to a future Gemeinwesen, to which the cultural material and longings embodied in the non-synchronous classes and strata can
make a signal contribution, according to Bloch, remains obstructed by the power of capital. So long as this is the case, the genuine longing for community of
masses of people, and especially the nostalgia for past communities especially felt by the non-synchronous strata and classes, including the newly nonsynchronous elements which I have just argued must be added to them, leaves them exposed to the lure of a "pure community" ideologically constructed by
capital itself. In place of real organic and communal bonds, in such an ideologically constructed pure community, a racial, ethnic, or religious identification
is merely superimposed on the existing condition of atomization in which the mass of the population finds itself. In addition to providing some gratification
for the longing for community animating broad strata of the population, such a pure community can also provide an ideological bond which ties the bulk of
the population to the capitalist state on the basis of a race, ethnicity, or religion which it shares with the ruling class. This latter is extremely important to
capital, because the atomization which it has brought about not only leaves the mass of humanity bereft, but also leaves the ruling class itself vulnerable
because it lacks any basis upon which it can mobilize the population, physically or ideologically.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
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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.
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Environment Impact
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Environment Impact
Capitalisms expansion requires the subordination of nature to resources to be exploited, making
ecological destruction of massive proportions inevitable.
John Foster Professor of Sociology 07 (John Bellamy, Professor of Sociology at University of Oregon, The Ecology
of Destruction, Feb 2007, http://www.monthlyreview.org/0207jbf.htm) JXu
In the almost five years that have elapsed since the second earth summit it has become increasingly difficult to
separate the class and imperial war inherent to capitalism from war on the planet itself. At a time when the United
States is battling for imperial control of the richest oil region on earth, the ecology of the planet is experiencing rapid
deterioration, marked most dramatically by global warming. Meanwhile, neoliberal economic restructuring
emanating from the new regime of monopoly-finance capital is not only undermining the economic welfare of much of
humanity, but in some regions is removing such basic ecological conditions of human existence as access to clean air,
drinkable water, and adequate food. Ecologists who once warned of the possibility of future apocalypse now insist that
global disaster is on our doorstep. Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature, declared in his article The Debate is
Over in the November 17, 2005, issue of Rolling Stone magazine that we are now entering the Oh Shit era of global
warming. At first, he wrote, there was the I wonder what will happen? era. Then there was the Can this really be true?
era. Now we are in the Oh Shit era. We now know that it is too late to avert global disaster entirely. All we can do is limit its
scope and intensity. Much of the uncertainty has to do with the fact that the world...has some trapdoors
mechanisms that dont work in straightforward fashion, but instead trigger a nasty chain reaction.6 In his book, The
Revenge of Gaia, influential scientist James Lovelock, best known as the originator of the Gaia hypothesis, has issued a grim
assessment of the earths prospects based on such sudden chain reactions.7 Voicing the concerns of numerous scientists,
Lovelock highlights a number of positive feedback mechanisms that couldand in his view almost certainly will
amplify the earth warming tendency. The destructive effect of increasing global temperatures on ocean algae and
tropical forests (on top of the direct removal of these forests) will, it is feared, reduce the capacity of the oceans and
forests to absorb carbon dioxide, raising the global temperature still further. The freeing up and release into the
atmosphere of enormous quantities of methane (a greenhouse gas twenty-four times as potent as carbon dioxide) as the
permafrost of the arctic tundra thaws due to global warming, constitutes another such vicious spiral. Just as ominous, the
reduction of the earths reflectivity as melting white ice at the poles is replaced with blue seawater is threatening to
ratchet-up global temperatures.8 In Lovelocks cataclysmic view, the earth has probably already passed the point of no
return and temperatures are destined to rise eventually as much as 8 C (14 F) in temperate regions. The human species will
survive in some form, he assures us. Nevertheless he points to an imminent shift in our climate towards one that could easily
be described as Hell: so hot, so deadly that only a handful of the teeming billions now alive will survive.9 He offers as the
sole means of partial salvation a massive technical fix: a global program to expand nuclear power facilities throughout
the earth as a limited substitute to the carbon-dioxide emitting fossil fuel economy. The thought that such a Faustian
bargain would pave its own path to hell seems scarcely to have crossed his mind. Lovelocks fears are not easily
dismissed. James Hansen, who did so much to bring the issue of global warming to world attention, has recently issued his
own warning. In an article entitled The Threat to the Planet (New York Review of Books, July 13, 2006), Hansen points out
that animal and plant species are migrating throughout the earth in response to global warmingthough not fast enough in
relation to changes in their environmentsand that alpine species are being pushed off the planet. We are facing, he
contends, the possibility of mass extinctions associated with increasing global temperature comparable to earlier periods in
the earths history in which 50 to 90 percent of living species were lost. The greatest immediate threat to humanity from
climate change, Hansen argues, is associated with the destabilization of the ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica. A
little more than 1 C (1.8 F) separates the climate of today from the warmest interglacial periods in the last half million years
when the sea level was as much as sixteen feet higher. Further, increases in temperature this century by around 2.8 C (5 F)
under business as usual could lead to a long term rise in sea level by as much as eighty feet, judging by what happened the
last time the earths temperature rose this highthree million years ago. We have, Hansen says, at most ten yearsnot
ten years to decide upon action but ten years to alter fundamentally the trajectory of greenhouse gas emissionsif we are to
prevent such disastrous outcomes from becoming inevitable. One crucial decade, in other words, separates us from
irreversible changes that could produce a very different world. The contradictions of the entire Holocenethe geological
epoch in which human civilization has developedare suddenly being revealed in our time.10 In the Oh shit era, the debate,
McKibben says, is over. There is no longer any doubt that global warming represents a crisis of earth-shaking
proportions. Yet, it is absolutely essential to understand that this is only one part of what we call the environmental crisis.
The global ecological threat as a whole is made up of a large number of interrelated crises and problems that are confronting
us simultaneously. In my 1994 book, The Vulnerable Planet, I started out with a brief litany of some of these, to which others
might now be added:
Overpopulation, destruction of the ozone layer, global warming, extinction of species, loss of genetic
diversity, acid rain, nuclear contamination, tropical deforestation, the elimination of climax forests, wetland destruction, soil
erosion, desertification, floods, famine, the despoliation of lakes, streams, and rivers, the drawing down and contamination of
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ground water, the pollution of coastal waters and estuaries, the destruction of coral reefs, oil spills, overfishing, expanding
landfills, toxic wastes, the poisonous effects of insecticides and herbicides, exposure to hazards on the job, urban congestion,
and the depletion of nonrenewable resources.11 The point is that not just global warming but many of these other
problems as well can each be seen as constituting a global ecological crisis. Today every major ecosystem on the earth
is in decline. Issues of environmental justice are becoming more prominent and pressing everywhere we turn.
Underlying this is the fact that the class/imperial war that defines capitalism as a world system, and that governs its
system of accumulation, is a juggernaut that knows no limits. In this deadly conflict the natural world is seen as a
mere instrument of world social domination. Hence, capital by its very logic imposes what is in effect a scorched earth
strategy. The planetary ecological crisis is increasingly all-encompassing, a product of the destructive uncontrollability
of a rapidly globalizing capitalist economy, which knows no law other than its own drive to exponential expansion.
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Environment Impact
Capitalism destroys the environment by creating a state of addiction to commodity consumption
that necessitates poverty and waste.
The culture of advanced capital aims to turn society into addicts of commodity consumption, a state good for
business, and, pari passu, had for ecologies. The evil is doubled, with reckless consumption leading to pollution and
waste, and the addiction to commodities creating a society unable to comprehend, much less resist, the ecological
crisis. Once time is bound in capitalist production, the subtle attunement to natural rhythms required for an
ecological sensibility becomes thwarted. This allows accumulation itself to appear as natural. People with mentalities warped
by the casino complex are simply not going to think in terms of limits and balances, or of the mutual recognition of all beings. This helps account for the
chorus of hosannas from presumably intelligent authorities at the nightmarish prospect of a doubling of economic product in the next 20 years. Thus
capital produces wealth without end, but also poverty, insecurity and waste, as part of its disintegration of ecosystems.
As there is no single commodity (really, a vast system of commodities) more implicated in this than the automobile, we might round out this section with
some thoughts about autornobilia and its related syndromes, including the newly discovered disease of Road Rage. Autoinobilia2 is a prime example of
how rationality at the level of the part becomes irrationality at the level of the whole. Individually, cars are far better than they were a generation ago: they
are safer, more reliable, more fuel-efficient, longer-lasting and more comfortable to drive. In the interior of a reasonably advanced car one encounters all the
comforts of home: luxurious adjustable seats, cell phone, splendid sound system, carefully controlled air - the whole package, as the salesman says. The
interior of a car projects an image of a technological Utopia, which is convenient, since so many people spend so much time inside them. Step outside the
car, though, say on a busy road to fill up with petrol, and the externalization of a disorder that more than compensates for the internalized order becomes
clear. A horrendous cacophony assaults body and soul. Unlike a waterfall, even a train that organizes the human
landscape, the cars just roar on; there is no pattern, no particularized, differentiated tale to be told. There is no
integral ecology to it; it is just endless, consuming traffic aeons of stored sunlight converted into inertial momentum so
that individuals can go their own way in capitalist freedom. And it is repeated in thousands and thousands of places,
every day and night carbon dioxide going into the air for global warming; other substances entering the chains that lead to
photochemical smog or destruction of the ozone layer; fine particulate matter (think of the hundreds of millions of tires grinding down against concrete)
entering lungs to help create a planetary epidemic of asthma; the abovementioned noise adding another dimension of pollution; landscapes torn up and
paved over, historically breaking down the boundary between city and country while blighting both with strip malls, thickets of garish signs (for how else
can people in constant motion see where to shop?) and great swooping freeways on which we hurtle like so many corpuscles in the circulation of capital the
ensemble disintegrating, as has nothing else, the fabric of human ecology The ruinousness of automobilia is bound up with its absolutely
crucial role in the global economy combined, to be sure, with the ensemble of densely associated industries such as
oil, rubber, cement, construction, repairs, etc., etc.; and equals; from its embeddedness in the entire landscape of lived life, indeed, the very construction 01;
the self. Deep changes in needs accompany the growth of automobilia. If one is trapped within a stifling existence, then driving away from it, even if this is
just to go round and round in traffic-clogged circles (contributing, of course, to the clogging), is experienced as a release. This is one reason it is
easy for the autornobilious giants to spin forth their greenwashed ads that show people blithely moving, no other car
in sight, across the very landscapes they are actually wrecking, or to depict ecological advances in the production of cars that are, however rational in the
particular instance, simply overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of cars produced. Looming overcapacity hangs over the automobile industries, as it does for
capitalist production in general, with the ability to make some 80 million cars a year, and but 5 million or so able to be sold. Those unrealized 25 million
vehicles are a giant splinter in the soul of capitalism, and the goad to endless promotion of automobilious values. Since 1970 the population of the USA has
grown by some 30 per cent - while the number of licensed drivers has grown more than 6o per cent, the number of registered vehicles has nearly doubled
and the total vehicle-miles driven has more than doubled.2 Notably the miles of road added during this period has gone up only 6 per cent. This figure is
product of a set of hopeless choices: either perish in nightmarish traffic, or further destroy lived space with gargantuan roads (and eventually perish under
even more traffic, which fills newly created-highways like gas a vacuum). Even the relatively low figure of 6 per cent translates into major changes in
certain strategic locations. One is continually astounded, for example, by the numbers of lanes added to Los Angeles freeways (at some points, eight in either
direction by my recent estimate, with additional ones now being added above the roadway). As the logic of automobilia unfolds, new levels of disintegration
appear, I and even people deeply acculturated into the ways of motorcars crack under the strain of contemporary vehicular life. Road Rage, a new mental
illness, is one outcome, resulting directly or indirectly in some 28,000 traffic deaths a year caused by aggressive behaviour like tailgating, weaving through
busy lanes, honking or screaming at other drivers, exchanges of insults and even gunfire. This figure, though provided by chief federal highway safety
official Ricardo Martinez, may be speculative; another more recent survey, however, describes 1,500 homicides a year whose instigation is directly trafficrelated. According to Leon James. a psychologist from Hawaii, Driving and habitual road rage have become virtually inseparable. This is the age of rage
mentality James cites as contributing factors, a tightly wound controlled personality type for whom driving provides a release from normal, frustration
filled existences and gives rise to fantasies of omnipotence. Observe that the personality type in question is itself an adaptation to
the capitalist marketplace, while the second factor, the omnipotent release from frustration provided by driving, is a
basic component of the use-value of automobiles, hammered home by car chases in movies, and the romanticization of
auto advertisements. In short, a mental illness Road Rage may be, but one completely within the universe of capitalisms
automobilia.2
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Global Warming Impact

The capitalist drive towards profits is the root cause of global warming.
John Foster Professor of Sociology 01 (John Bellamy, Professor of Sociology at University of Oregon, Ecology
Against Capitalism - Statistical Data Included) JXu
Capitalist economies are geared first and foremost to the growth of profits, and hence to economic growth at virtually
any cost--including the exploitation and misery of the vast majority of the world's population. This rush to grow
generally means rapid absorption of energy and materials and the dumping of more and more wastes into the
environment--hence widening environmental degradation. Just as significant as capitalism's emphasis on unending
expansion is its short-term time horizon in determining investments. In evaluating any investment prospect, owners of capital
figure on getting their investment back in a calculable period (usually quite short) and profits forever after. It is true that a
longer-term perspective is commonly adopted by investors in mines, oil wells, and other natural resources. In these areas the
dominant motives are obviously to secure a supply of materials for the manufacture of a final product, and to obtain a
rate of return that over the long run is exceptionally high. But even in these cases the time horizon rarely exceeds ten to
fifteen years-a far cry from the fifty to one hundred year (or even more) perspective needed to protect the biosphere. With
respect to those environmental conditions that bear most directly on human society, economic development needs to
be planned so as to include such factors as water resources and their distribution, availability of clean water, rationing
and conservation of non-renewable resources, disposal of wastes, and effects on population and the environment
associated with the specific locations chosen for industrial projects. These all represent issues of sustainability, i.e.,
raising questions of intergenerational environmental equity, and cannot be incorporated within the short-term time horizon of nonphilanthropic capital, which
needs to recoup its investment in the foreseeable future, plus secure a flow of profits to warrant the risk and to do better than alternative investment
opportunities. Big investors need to pay attention to the stock market, which is a source of capital for expansion and a facilitator of mergers and acquisitions.
Corporations are expected to maintain the value of their stockholder's equity and to provide regular dividends. A significant part of the wealth of top
corporate executives depends on the growth in the stock market prices of the stock options they hold. Moreover, the huge bonuses received by top corporate
executives are influenced not only by the growth in profits but often as well by the rise in the prices of company stock. A long-run point of view is
completely irrelevant in the fluctuating stock market. The perspective in stock market "valuation" is the rate of profit gains or losses in recent years or
prospects for next year's profits. Even the much-trumpeted flood of money going into the New Economy with future prospects in mind, able momentarily to
overlook company losses, has already had its comeuppance. Speculative investors looking to reap rich rewards via the stock market or venture capital may
have some patience for a year or so, but patience evaporates very quickly if the companies invested in keep having losses. Besides investing their own
surplus funds, corporations also borrow via long-term bonds. For this, they have to make enough money to pay interest and to set aside a sinking fund for
future repayment of bonds. The short-term time horizon endemic to capitalist investment decisions thus becomes a critical factor in determining its overall
environmental effects. Controlling emissions of some of the worst pollutants (usually through end-of-pipe methods) can have a positive and almost
immediate effect on people's lives. However, the real protection of the environment requires a view of the needs of generations to come. A good deal of
environmental long-term policy for promoting sustainable development has to do with the third world. This is exactly the place where
capital, based in the rich countries, requires the fastest return on its investments, often demanding that it get its initial
investment back in a year or two. The time horizon that governs investment decisions in these as in other cases is not a
question of "good" capitalists who are willing to give up profits for the sake of society and future generations-or "bad"
capitalists who are not-but simply of how the system works. Even those industries that typically look ahead must sooner
or later satisfy the demands of investors, bondholders, and banks. The foregoing defects in capitalism's relation to the
environment are evident today in all areas of what we now commonly call "the environmental crisis," which
encompasses problems as diverse as: global warming, destruction of the ozone layer, removal of tropical forests,
elimination of coral reefs, overfishing, extinction of species, loss of genetic diversity, the increasing toxicity of our
environment and our food, desertification, shrinking water supplies, lack of clean water, and radioactive contamination-to
name just a few. The list is very long and rapidly getting longer, and the spatial scales on which these problems manifest
themselves are increasing. In order to understand how the conflict between ecology and capitalism actually plays out at
a concrete level related to specific ecological problems, it is useful to look at what many today consider to be the most
pressing global ecological issue: that of global warming, associated with the "greenhouse effect" engendered when carbon
dioxide and other "greenhouse gases" are emitted, trapping heat within the atmosphere. There is now a worldwide scientific
consensus that to fail to stop the present global warming trend will be to invite ecological and social catastrophe on a
planetary scale over the course of the present century. But little has been achieved thus far to address this problem,
which mainly has to do with the emission of fossil fuels.
Capitalism Kritik
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Attempts at reform only render us unable to deal with the crisis of warming capitalism proposes
only half-way solutions that preserve the capitalist system but guarantee ecological destruction
down the line.
John Foster Professor of Sociology 07 (John Bellamy, Professor of Sociology at University of Oregon, A New War
on the Planet?, 8/06/07, http://www.monthlyreview.org/mrzine/foster080607.html) JXu
During the last year the global warming debate has reached a turning point. Due to the media hype surrounding Al
Gore's film An Inconvenient Truth, followed by a new assessment by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC), the climate skeptics have suffered a major defeat. Suddenly the media and the public are awakening to what the
scientific consensus has been saying for two decades on human-induced climate change and the dangers it poses to the
future of life on earth. Proposed solutions to global warming are popping up everywhere, from the current biofuels
panacea to geoengineering solutions such as pumping sulfur particles into the stratosphere to shade the earth from the sun
to claims that a market in carbon dioxide emissions is the invisible hand that will save the world. "Let's quit the debate about
whether greenhouse gases are caused by mankind or by natural causes," President Bush said in a hastily organized retreat.
"Let's just focus on technologies that deal with the issue." It is characteristic of the magic-bullet solutions that now
pervade the media that they promise to defend our current way of life while remaining virtually cost free. Despite the
fact that economists have long insisted that there is no such thing as a free lunch, we are now being told on every side -even by Gore -- that where global warming is concerned there is a free lunch after all. We can have our cars, our
industrial waste, our endlessly expanding commodity economy, and climate stability too. Even the IPCC, in its policy
proposals, tells us that climate change can be stopped on the cheap -- if only the magic of technology and markets is
applied. The goal is clearly to save the planet -- but only if capitalism can be fully preserved at the same time. Hence,
the most prominent proposals are shaped by the fact that they are designed to fit within the capitalist box. There can
be no disruption of existing class or power relations. All proposed solutions must be compatible with the treadmill of
production. Even progressive thinkers such as George Monbiot in his new book Heat: How to Stop the Planet Burning have gotten into the act.
Monbiot pointedly tells us that the rich countries can solve the global warming problem without becoming "Third World" states or shaking up "middle-class"
life -- or indeed interfering with the distribution of riches at all. Politics is carefully excluded from his analysis, which instead focuses on such things as
more buses, better insulated homes, virtual work, virtual shopping and improved cement. Corporations, we are led to believe, are part of the
solution, not part of the problem. Less progressive, more technocratic thinkers look for substitutes for hydrocarbons,
such as biofuels or even nuclear power, or they talk of floating white plastic islands in the oceans (a geoengineering
solution to replace the lost reflectivity due to melting ice). The dominant answers to global warming thus amount to
what might be thought of as a new declaration of war on nature. If nature has "struck back" at capitalism's
degradation of the environment in the form of climate change, the answer is to unleash a more powerful array of
technological and market innovations so that the system can continue to expand as before. As Hannah Arendt, one of
the leading political philosophers of the 20th century, explained: "Under modern [capitalist] conditions not destruction but
conservation spells ruin." Hence, capitalism, faced by natural obstacles, sees no alternative to a new assault on nature,
employing new, high-tech armaments. The ecological irrationality of this response is evident in the tendency to
dissociate global warming from the global environmental crisis as a whole, which includes such problems as species
extinction, destruction of the oceans, tropical deforestation, desertification, toxic wastes, etc. It is then possible, from this
narrow perspective, to promote biofuels as a partial solution to global warming -- without acknowledging that this will accelerate world hunger. Or it is
thought pragmatic to dump iron filings in the ocean (the so-called Geritol solution to global warming) in order to grow phytoplankton and increase the
carbon absorbing capacity of the ocean -- without connecting this at all to the current oceanic catastrophe. The fact that the biosphere is one interconnected
whole is downplayed in favor of mere economic expediency. What all of this suggests is that a real solution to the planetary
environmental crisis cannot be accomplished simply through new technologies or through turning nature into a
market. It is necessary to go to the root of the problem by addressing the social relations of production. We must
recognize that today's ecological problems are related to a system of global inequality that demands ecological
destruction as a necessary condition of its existence. New social and democratic solutions need to be developed, rooted in
human community and sustainability, embodying principles of conservation that are essential to life. But this means
stepping outside the capitalist box and making peace with the planet -- and with other human beings.
Capitalism Kritik
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Capitalism is unable to reverse course working within its coordinates makes the fight to reduce
carbon emissions unwinnable.
John Foster Professor of Sociology 2001 (John Bellamy, Professor of Sociology at University of Oregon, Ecology
Against Capitalism, October 2001, http://monthlyreview.org/1001jbf.htm) JXu
All of the hopedfor carbon capture and sequestration technologies are designed to get around the emissions problem,
allowing the carbonbased economy to continue as before unchanged. None of these technologies are remotely
practical at present and may never be. Research ideas currently receiving government and corporate funding, discussed in
Discover magazine (August 2001), involve the search for something on the order of a giant absorbent strip, coated with any
of the many chemicals that react with carbon dioxide, that could pull the gas from the air as it passes by, coupled with fleets
of ships pulling twomilelong pipes that will pump chilled, pressurized carbon dioxide deep into the oceans. In other words,
proposals are under consideration that involve a scale of operation that might well dwarf the star wars defense system, both in
magnitude and sheer folly. All of them raise major environmental considerations of their own. The fact that such
research is being funded and given serious consideration demonstrates that, for the advanced capitalist economies,
emission reductions as a solution to global warming are much less desirable than scifi technological solutions that
will allow us simply to reroute such waste. The solution being proposed via sequestration technology is to dump the excess
carbon dioxide elsewherein the oceans instead of the atmosphere. The use of the ocean as the final destination for the
wastes of the human economy was an issue that already concerned Rachel Carson in the 1950s and 60s. From any rational
perspective, greenhouse gas emission reductions on a level far more aggressive than what was envisioned by the Kyoto
Protocol are now needed to address global warming. The IPCC Working Group I concluded in its 2001 report that there
is new and strong evidence that most of the warming observed over the last fifty years is attributable to human activities. In
place of the IPCCs earlier estimate of an increase in temperature by 1.03.5 C (1.86.3 F) in this century, they now
estimate an increase of 1.56.0 C (2.710.8 F). If this increase (even in the middle range) comes true, the earths
environment will be so radically changed that cataclysmic results will undoubtedly manifest themselves worldwide. These
will surely include increased desertification in arid regions and heavier rainfall and risks of floods in other regions;
serious damage to crops in the tropics and eventually in temperate areas as well; rising sea levels (due to the melting of
glaciers) that will submerge islands and delta regions; damage to ecosystems; and loss of both species and genetic
diversity. On top of all of this, there will be increased risks to human health. As always the most exploited areas of the
world and their inhabitants will prove most vulnerable. Yet, no matter how urgent it is for life on the planet as a
whole that greenhouse gas buildup in the atmosphere be stopped, the failure of the Kyoto Protocol significantly to
address this problem suggests that capitalism is unable to reverse coursethat is, to move from a structure of
industry and accumulation that has proven to be in the long run (and in many respects in the short run as well)
environmentally disastrous. When set against the getrichquick imperatives of capital accumulation, the biosphere
scarcely weighs in the balance. The emphasis on profits to be obtained from fossil fuel consumption and from a form of
development geared to the autoindustrial complex largely overrides longerterm issues associated with global warming
even if this threatens, within just a few generations, the planet itself.
Capitalism Kritik
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Zizek Alternative
Vote Negative to embrace the immanence of revolution against capitalism.
Rejection of the 1AC opens up the space of a revolutionary subjectivity voting negative is to
affirm the immanent presence of revolution the only thing stopping it is the belief that it's not
here.
Zizek Professor of Philosophy 2004 [Slavoj, Revolution at the Gates, Zizek on Lenin The 1917 Writings, p.259260]
As Deleuze saw very clearly, we cannot provide in advance an unambiguous criterion which will allow us to distinguish
"false" violent outburst from the "miracle" of the authentic revolutionary breakthrough. The ambiguity is irreducible
here, since the "miracle" can occur only through the repetition of previous failures. And this is also why violence is a
necessary ingredient of a revolutionary political act. That is to say: what is the criterion of a political act proper? Success
as such clearly does not count, even if we define it in the dialectical terms of Merleau-Ponty: as the wager that the
future will retroactively redeem our present horrible acts (this is how Merleau-Ponty, in Humanism and Terror, provided
one of the more intelligent justifications of the Stalinist terror: retroactively, it will become justified if its final outcome is true
freedom);129 neither does reference to some abstract-universal ethical norm. The only criterion is the absolutely
inherent one: that of the enacted utopia. In a genuine revolutionary breakthrough, the utopian future is neither simply
fully realized, present, nor simply evoked as a distant promise which justifies present violence it is rather as if in a
unique suspension of temporality, in the short circuit between the present and the future, we are as if by Grace
briefly allowed to act as if the utopian future is (not yet fully here, but) already at hand, there to be seized. Revolution
is experienced not as a present hardship we have to endure for the sake of the happiness and freedom of future
generations, but as the present hardship over which this future happiness and freedom already cast their shadow in
it, we are already free even as we fight for freedom; we are already happy even as we fight for happiness, no matter how
difficult the circumstances. Revolution is not a Merleau-Pontyan wager, an act suspended in the futur anterieur, to be
legitimized or de-legitimized by the long-term outcome of present acts; it is, as it were, its own ontological proof, an
immediate index of its own truth.
Capitalism Kritik
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Zizek Alternative
Withdrawal from capitalism is the only solution. Mapping a political struggle will fail to deal with
capitalisms core.
Adrian Johnston Emory University 2004 (Adrian, interdisciplinary research fellow in psychoanalysis at Emory,
The Cynics Fetish: Slavoj Zizek and the Dynamics of Belief, Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society)
Perhaps the absence of a detailed political roadmap in ieks recent writings isnt a major shortcoming. Maybe, at
least for the time being, the most important task is simply the negativity of the critical struggle, the effort to cure an
intellectual constipation resulting from capitalist ideology and thereby to truly open up the space for imagining
authentic alternatives to the prevailing state of the situation. Another definition of materialism offered by iek is that it
amounts to accepting the internal inherence of what fantasmatically appears as an external deadlock or hindrance ( iek,
2001d, pp 2223) (with fantasy itself being defined as the false externalization of something within the subject, namely, the
illusory projection of an inner obstacle, iek, 2000a, p 16). From this perspective, seeing through ideological fantasies
by learning how to think again outside the confines of current restrictions has, in and of itself, the potential to operate
as a form of real revolutionary practice (rather than remaining merely an instance of negative/critical intellectual
reflection). Why is this the case? Recalling the analysis of commodity fetishism, the social efficacy of money as the
universal medium of exchange (and the entire political economy grounded upon it) ultimately relies upon nothing more
than a kind of magic, that is, the belief in moneys social efficacy by those using it in the processes of exchange.
Since the value of currency is, at bottom, reducible to the belief that it has the value attributed to it (and that everyone
believes that everyone else believes this as well), derailing capitalism by destroying its essential financial substance is, in
a certain respect, as easy as dissolving the mere belief in this substances powers. The external obstacle of the
capitalist system exists exclusively on the condition that subjects, whether consciously or unconsciously, internally
believe in it capitalisms life-blood, money, is simply a fetishistic crystallization of a belief in others belief in the
socio-performative force emanating from this same material. And yet, this point of capitalisms frail vulnerability is
simultaneously the source of its enormous strength: its vampiric symbiosis with individual human desire, and the fact that the
late-capitalist cynics fetishism enables the disavowal of his/her de facto belief in capitalism, makes it highly unlikely that
people can simply be persuaded to stop believing and start thinking (especially since, as iek claims, many of these people
are convinced that they already have ceased believing). Or, the more disquieting possibility to entertain is that some
people today, even if one succeeds in exposing them to the underlying logic of their position, might respond in a
manner resembling that of the Judas-like character Cypher in the film The Matrix (Cypher opts to embrace
enslavement by illusion rather than cope with the discomfort of dwelling in the desert of the real): faced with the choice
between living the capitalist lie or wrestling with certain unpleasant truths, many individuals might very well
deliberately decide to accept what they know full well to be a false pseudo-reality, a deceptively comforting fiction
(Capitalist commodity fetishism or the truth? I choose fetishism).
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Alternative Solves
Our alternative is a crucial step to breaking down capitalism. A constant intellectual attack on
capitalism enables the paradigm shift necessary to overthrow capitalism.
Revolutions become feasible when a people decides that their present social arrangements are intolerable, when they
believe that they can achieve a better alternative, and when the balance of forces between them and that of the system is tipped in their
favour. None of these conditions is close to being met at present for the ecosocialist revolution, which would seem to make the exercise upon which we are
about to embark academic. But the present is one thing, and the future another. If the argument that capital is incorrigibly ecodestructive
and expansive proves to be true, then it is only a question of time before the issues raised here achieve explosive
urgency. And considering what is at stake and how rapidly events can change under such circumstances, it is most definitely high time to take up the
question of ecosocialism as a living process to consider what its vision of society may be and what kind of path there may be towards its achievement.
The present chapter is the most practical and yet also the most speculative of this work. Beaten down by the great defeats of Utopian and socialist ideals, few
today even bother to think about the kinds of society that could replace the present with one of ecological rationality, and most of that speculation is within a
green paradigm limited by an insufficient appreciation of the regime of capital and of the depths needed for real change. Instead, Greens tend to imagine an
orderly extension of community, accompanied by the use of instruments that have been specifically created to keep the present system going, such as
parliamentary elections and various tax policies. Such measures make transformative sense, however, only if seen as
prefigurations of something more radical - something by definition not immediately on the horizon. It will be our job
here to begin the process of drawing in this not-yet-seen. The only certainty is that the result will at most be a rough and schematic model
of what actually might emerge. However uncertain the end point , the first two steps on the path are clearly laid out, and are within the
reach of every conscientious person. These are that people ruthlessly criticize the capitalist system from top to
bottom, and that they include in this a consistent attack on the widespread belief that there can be no alternative to it.
If one believes that capital is not only basically unjust but radically unsustainable as well, the prime obligation is to
spread the news, just as one should feel obliged to tell the inhabitants of a structurally unsound house doomed to collapse of
what awaits them unless they take drastic measures. To continue the analogy for the critique to matter it needs to be
combined with an attack on the false idea that we are, so to speak, trapped in this house, with no hope of fixing it or
getting out. The belief that there can be no alternative to capital is ubiquitous and no wonder, given how wonderfully
convenient the idea is to the ruling ideology. That, however, does not keep it from being nonsense, and a failure of vision
and political will. Whether or not the vision of ecosocialism offered here has merit, the notion that there is no other way of organizing an advanced
society other than capital does not follow. Nothing lasts forever, and what is humanly made can theoretically be unmade. Of course it could be the case that
the job of changing it is too hard and capital is as far as humanity can go, in which instance we must simply accept our fate stoically and try to palliate the
results. But we dont know this and cannot know this. There is no proving it one way or the other, and only inertia, fear of change or opportunism can
explain the belief in so shabby an idea as that there can be no alternative to capital for organizing society. Logic alone neither persuades nor gives hope;
something more solid and material is required, a combination of the dawning insight of just how incapable capital is of resolving the crisis, along with some
spark that breaks through the crust of inert despair and cynicism by means of which we have adapted to the system. At some point it has to happen if capital
is the efficient cause - the realization will dawn that all the sound ideas for, say, regulating the chemical industries, or
preserving forest ecosystems, or doing something serious about species-extinctions, or global warming, or whatever point
of ecosystemic disintegration is of concern, are not going to be realized by appealing to local changes in themselves, or
the Democratic Party, or the Environmental Protection Agency or the courts, or the foundations, or ecophilosophies. or
changes in consciousness for the overriding reason that we are living under a regime that controls the state and the
economy, and will have to be overcome at its root if we are to save the future. 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 of the IMF, the hopes stirred forth by a campaign such as Ralph Naders 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 intellectuals. In what follows, there will be neither blueprints nor omniscience, although I will be
laying out certain hypothetical situations as a way of framing ideas. The overall task can be stated simply enough: if an ecological mode of production is the
goal, what sort of practical steps can be defined to get us there? What might an ecosocialist society look like? How are the grand but abstract terms of basic
change to be expressed as functions of lived life? And how can the path towards an ecosocialism that is not sharply defined incorporate the goal towards
which it moves?
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Ballot Key
The ballot is key. Every refusal and act of negativity can challenge capitalism.
Charlie Post, teaches sociology in New York City, is active in rank and file organizing in the American Federation of
Teachers and is a member of Solidarity, in 2002 (REVIEW OF EMPIRE,
http://archives.econ.utah.edu/archives/marxism/2002w24/msg00030.h_tm)-mikee
In this world, all those who are subject to the vicissitudes of capitalist production and reproduction-whether they labor
collectively in workplaces under the command of capital or are excluded from social production through
unemployment, forced migration and the like-are equally part of a new revolutionary subject. According to Hardt and
Negri 'the multitude has internalized the lack of place and fixed time; it is mobile and flexible, and it conceives the
future only as a totality of possibilities that branch out in every direction.' (p. 380) Almost any act of 'negativity' - the
refusal to work, migration from one part of the world to another, confrontations with the police, strike action - are
equally powerful forms of resistance because 'the construction of Empire, and the globalization of economic and
cultural relationships, means that the virtual center of Empire can be attacked from any point.' (p. 59)
Capitalism Kritik
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AT Permutation
The state cannot mediate our fight against our capitalism. The plan dooms the permutation to
failure.
John Holloway Professor of humanities 2005 (John, professor at Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences at
the Autonomous University of Puebla, Can We Change The World Without Taking Power?, 5 April 05,
http://www.isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=98) JXu
I dont know the answer. Perhaps we can change the world without taking power. Perhaps we cannot. The starting pointfor all of us, I thinkis
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
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
many rebellions and insubordinations that have brought us to Porto Alegre.
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
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
Lacandon Jungle or the Argentinazo of three years ago or the revolt in Bolivia just over a year ago.
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 powereither 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.
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 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 states 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
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.
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
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
organisational form.
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.
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AT Permutation
You cannot solve within the system. Only a complete rejection of capitalism can stop the suicide
economy. Vote negative to explore new ways of being and join a critical web of energy that can
challenge capital.
David Korten, President of the People-Centered Development Forum, in 2002 (BEYOND THE GLOBAL SUICIDE
ECONOMY, June 22, 2002, p. http://iisd1.iisd.ca/pcdf/2002/Gobal6Billion.htm.)
The first step is to get clear that transformational change is not going to come from within the institutions of the
suicide economy. The suicide economy is what organizational consultant Margaret Wheatley calls an "emergent system."
No one planned it. Those responsible for corporate interests grew it into being in their day-to-day effort to increase
profits and market share. Step-by-step over a period spanning hundreds of years they reshaped the politics, the legal
system, and the culture of humanity to create the interlocking system of interests, laws, and mutual obligations that make
the suicide economy virtually impossible to transform from within. Those who promote serious reforms with the
suicide economy are almost invariably marginalized or expelled. To change an emergent system that no longer serves you
must displace it by growing a more powerful emergent system. According to Wheatley: "This means that the work of
change is to start over, to organize new local efforts, connect them to each other, and know that their values and practices can
emerge as something even stronger." The key to transformational change is to create cultural, economic, political, and
even spiritual spaces in which to explore new ways of being with one another toward the emergence of new cultures
and institutions. This is why the existence of millions of living enterprises is so important. Presently most exist at the fringes
of and dependent on the institutions of the suicide economy. The possibility remains, however, for them to gradually walk
away from the institutions of the suicide economy and begin to growing webs of relationships among themselves to
bring into being newly emerging living economies. The greater the number of members and links in the web the greater the
life energy that participating enterprises may potentially attract and recycle within the living economy, thus increasing the
strength and viability of both the web and its individual members. Community members can be encouraged to give
preference to local living enterprises in their shopping choices, and eventually in their employment and investment choices.
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AT Link Turns
Other instruments of capitalism will ensure that the plan can't solve.
John Bellamy Foster, Professor of Sociology at the University of Oregon, in 2003 (MONTHLY REVIEW, January
2003, p. http://www.monthlyreview.org/0103jbf.htm)-mikee
If the Rio summit was transformed from within into a vehicle that mainly served the interests of capital, processes
were going on outside Rio that further weakened any attempts at global environmental reform. Even while the Rio
summit was taking place, the Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) negotiations was
proceeding. With the establishment of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1995, the leading capitalist states had
created an international structure to promote neoliberal free market principles while making environmental reforms
in individual countries much more difficult. Globalization of capitalism was to supplant local control, countries were
to be encouraged to exploit their natural resources to the fullest, public goods were to be opened up to relentless
privatization, and environmental regulations were to be geared to the lowest common denominator in order to not
interfere with free trade. The WTO was meant to mark the total triumph of capitalism, limiting environment and
development policies in the third world to those acceptable to the ruling interests of the wealthy capitalist states.
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AT Capitalism Inevitable
Capitalisms primary way of naturalizing itself is by saying that there is no alternative, that
anything but the status quo is utopian; it is precisely this fantasy of a perfect and inevitable
capitalism that is the most utopian stance. The capitalist system is vulnerable and there are
possible alternatives even if there was not, we should reject capitalism to create that alternative.
Working within the system is the worst possible option.
Zizek professor of philosophy and sociology in 2000 (Slavoj, professor of sociology at the Institute for
Sociology, Ljubljana, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality, pg 324 326)
The first thing to note about this neoliberal clich is that the neutral reference to the necessities of the market
economy, usually invoked in order to categorize grand ideological projects as unrealistic utopias, is itself to be inserted
into the great modern utopian projects. That is to say as Fredric Jameson has pointed out what characterizes utopia is
not a belief in the essential goodness of human nature, or some similar naive notion, but, rather, belief in some global
mechanism which, applied to the whole of society, will automatically bring out the balanced state of progress and
happiness one is longing for and, in this precise sense, is not the market precisely the name for such a mechanism which,
properly applied, will bring about the optimal state of society? So, again, the first answer of the Left to those Leftists
themselves who bemoan the loss of the utopian impetus in our societies should be that this impetus is alive and well
not only in the Rightist 'fundamentalist' populism which advocates the return to grass-roots democracy, but above all among
the advocates of the market economy themselves.12 The second answer should be a clear line of distinction between
utopia and ideology: ideology is not only a utopian project of social transformation with no realistic chance of
actualization; no less ideological is the anti-utopian stance of those who `realistically' devalue every global project of
social transformation as ùtopian,' that is, as unrealistic dreaming and/or harbouring 'totalitarian' potential today's
predominant form of ideological 'closure' takes the precise form of mental block which prevents us from imagining a
funndamental social change, in the interests of an allegedly 'realistic' and 'mature' attitude. In his Seminar on the Ethics of
Psychoanalysis,13 Lacan developed an opposition between 'knave' and 'fool' as the two intellectual attitudes: the right wing
intellectual is a knave, a conformist who considers the mere existence of the given order as an argument for it, and mocks
thee Left for its 'utopian' plans, which necessarily lead to catastrophe; while the left-wing intellectual is a fool, a court jester
who publicly displays the lie of the existing order, but in a way which suspends the performative efficiency of this speech. In
the years immediately after the fall of Socialism, the knave was a neoconservative advocate of the free market who cruelly
rejected all forms of social solidarity as counterproductive sentimentalism; while the fool was a deconstructionist cultural
critic who, by means of his ludic procedures destined to 'subvert' the existing order, actually served as its supplement. Today,
however, the relationship between the couple knavefool and the political opposition Right/Left is more and more the
inversion of the standard figures of Rightist knave and Leftist fool: are not the Third Way theoreticians ultimately
today's knaves, figures who preach cynical resignation, that is, the necessary failure of every attempt actually to
change something in the basic functioning of global capitalism? And are not the conservative fools those conservatives
whose original modern model is Pascal and who as it were show the hidden cards of the ruling ideology, bringing-to light its
underlying mechanisms which, in order to remain operative, have to be repressed far more attractive? Today in the face of
this Leftist knavery it is more important than ever to hold this utopian place of the global alternative open, even if it
remains empty, living on borrowed time, awaiting the content to fill it in. I fully agree with Laclau that after the
exhaustion of both the social democratic welfare state imaginary and the 'really-existing-Socialist' imaginary, the Left
does need a new imaginary (a new mobilizing global vision). Today, however, the outdatedness of the welfare state and
socialist imaginaries is a clich the real dilemma is what to do with how the Left is to relate to the predominant
liberal democratic imaginary. It is my contention that Laclau's and Mouffe's 'radical democracy' comes all too close to
merely 'radicalizing' this liberal democratic imaginary, while remaining within its horizon. Laclau, of course, would
probably claim that the point is to treat the democratic imaginary as an 'empty signifier', and to engage in the hegemonic
battle with the proponents of the global capitalist New World Order over what its content will be. Here, however, I think that
Butler is right when she emphasizes that another way is also open: it is not 'necessary to occupy the dominant norm in order
to produce an internal subversion of its terms. Sometimes it is important t refuse it terms to let the term itself wither, to starve
it of its strength' (JB, p. 177). This means that the Left has a choice today: either it accepts the predominant liberal
democratic horizon (democracy, human rights and freedoms . . .), and engages in a hegemonic battle within it, or it
risks the opposite gesture of refusing its very terms, of flatly rejecting today's liberal blackmail that courting any
prospect of radical change paves the way for totalitarianism. It is my firm conviction, my politico-existential premise that
the old '68 motto Soyons ralistes demandons l'impossible! still holds: it is the advocates of changes and resignifications
within the liberal-democratic horizon who are the true utopians in their belief that their efforts will amount to anything more
than cosmetic surgery that will give us capitalism with a human face. In her second intervention, Butler superbly deploys the
reversal that characterizes the Hegelian dialectical process: the aggravated 'contradiction' in which the very differential
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structure of meaning is collapsing, since every determination immediately turns into its opposite, this 'mad dance', is resolved
by the sudden emergence of a new universal determination. The best illustration is provided by the passage from the 'world of
self-alienated Spirit' to the Terror of the French Revolution in The Phenomenology of Spirit: the pre-Revolutionary 'madness
of the musician "who heaped up and mixed together thirty arias, Italian, French, tragic, comic, of every sort; now with a deep
bass he descended into hell, then, contracting his throat, he rent the vaults of heaven with a falsetto tone, frantic and soothed,
imperious and mocking, by turns" (Diderot, Nephew of Rameau)' ,14 suddenly turns into its radical opposite: the
revolutionary stance pursuing its goal with an inexorable firmness. And my point, of course, is that today's 'mad dance', the
dynamic proliferation of multiple shifting identities also awaits its resolution in a new form of Terror. The only 'realistic'
prospect is to ground a new political univeralisty by opting for the impossible, fully assuming the place of the
exception with no taboos, no a priori norms ('human rights', `democracy'), respect for which would prevent us also from
'resignifying' terror, the ruthless exercise of power, the spirit of sacrifice if this radical choice is decried by some
bleeding-heart liberals as Linksfaschismus, so be it!
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AT Thats Just Bad Capitalism

There is no idealized capitalism the exploitation that runs rampant in the global economy and
the trend of environmental degradation are necessary outcomes of capitals expansion.
As globalization propagates the mechanisms of accumulation around the globe, society after society is swept into the
vortex of eco-destruction. Dependent and unequal development accompanied by massive debt becomes the midwife of
this process. Wherever a debt is incurred, there will be pressure to discharge it by sacrificing ecological integrity Indonesian
President Suharto, a great friend of globalization, put this clearly after the imposition of a structural adjustment programme.
No need to worry, said the amiable leader of the worlds fourth largest nation, Indonesia could always exchange its forests for
the money owed to the banks. The devastating effects of global debt on nations of the South25 are discomfiting to global
capital indeed, Jesse Helms, like the Walrus and the Carpenter, was reduced to tears by testimony to this effect. The
scandal has led to a flurry of efforts to bring the load down, with some $50 billion in debts being retired in 2000. Alas, the
South owed at the time about $2.3 trillion - twenty-six times as much nor do the terms of forgiveness free it from the
wheel of accumulation. As a recent account reported, The IMF, the World Bank, the United States and others say that
African countries must open up to the global economy and control wasteful internal spending and inflation if debt
relief is to be put to lasting use. In other words: give us your forests and cheap labour by other means, and we will
forgive the debt that you cant pay under any circumstances. Because of debts injustice, the IMF is usually considered
the heavy villain in the regime of globalization. Doctor Death, Time magazine called it recently, in an impressive sign that
elite opinion is fracturing.2 This is a reasonable assessment of the organization that has brought at least 90 poor nations
under its spell. But the IMF, or bad cop of globalization, should not be singled out as the source of the problem, an
impression fostered in a recent essay by Joseph Stiglitz, chief economist of the World Bank from 1996 to November 1999.
We met Stiglitz, you may recall, in the last chapter, joining the chorus of world economic leaders extolling the wonders of
unlimited growth. Now, however, he has become something of a whistleblower, and caused something of a sensation by an
article in the .New Republic that confirmed all the worst suspicions as to how utterly secretive, anti- democratic and
ruthlessly attentive to short-term profitability is the IMF. Using as examples the handling of the Asian and Russian fiscal
crises of 199799, Stiglitz leaves no doubt that the placing of profits over people, as the saying has it, has caused
calamities of Holocaust proportions throughout much of the world. However, he has no intention of calling into
question the capitalist system as a whole, but would have us believe that this disaster was the fault of bad capitalists at
the IMF and the Treasury Department, and that their sin lay in not taking the advice of the World Bank, with its superior
economists and good capitalism. The fantasy is widespread that somewhere a virtuous and all-knowing capitalist can be
found, a fairy prince who will rescue the mismanaged global economy. As the World Bank plays good cop in this
scheme of things, and no doubt has some wellintentioned individuals working for it (just like any bank, or indeed,
Monsanto, Chevron, etc., etc., even the IMF), many are disposed to believe that the Stiglitzs of the world can rescue us with
their superior technical wisdom. When plain people go to Lourdes in search of miracle cures, the intelligentsia proclaim them
superstitious. Yet many are willing to trust a profit-making Bank that puts technical intelligence in the service of
accumulation, a bank that helped finance enterprises such as Union Carbides plant in Bhopal, and put into place the
ecodestructive Green Revolution for which Bhopal was built, and was a great supporter of Suharto, and has built huge
fossil-fuel-consuming projects throughout the South while prating of the need to control global warming. Those persuaded
by recent propaganda to think that this leopard has changed its spots might ponder the case of Bolivia, the poorest
country in South America. Having been pressured by the Bank to sell off its airline, electric utilities and national train
service to private interests, the desperate nation was at length coerced into selling chunks of its water system to a
consortium headed by the US construction giant, the Bechtel corporation, along with partners from Italy, Spain and four
Bolivian companies an authentic spectacle of globalization at work, commodifying an essential substratum of life. Thanks to
the Bank, the investors only had to put up less than $20,000 initial capital for a water system worth millions. With Bank
loans, the consortium set about diverting various rivers no doubt with the ecological cart that usually attends enterprises of
this sort and then, to cover the costs, attempted, again with the Banks blessing, to force through price increases of as much as
$20 a month this in a country where the median working family income is $100 a month.
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Ballot Key
Capital is no longer purely material. Every day, we become producers of intellectual capital. This
immaterial labor is a crucial constitutive force in global capital. The ballots production has real
power.
Michael Hardt Professor of English and Antonio Negri in 2000 (Michael, prof of English at Duke, Antonio,
Empire, pg 346 347) JXu
Ether is the third and final fundamental medium of imperial control. The management of communication, the
structuring of the education system, and the regulation of culture appear today more than ever as sovereign
prerogatives. All of this, however, dissolves in the ether. The contemporary systems of communication are not
subordinated to sovereignty; on the contrary, sovereignty seems to be subordinated to communication-or actually,
sovereignty is articulated through communications systems. In the field of communication, the paradoxes that bring about
the dissolution of territorial and/or national sovereignty are more clear than ever. The deterritorializing capacities of
communication are unique: communication is not satisfied by limiting or weakening modern territorial sovereignty;
rather it attacks the very possibility of linking an order to a space. It imposes a continuous and complete circulation of
signs. Deterritorialization is the primary force and circulation the form through which social communication manifests itself.
In this way and in this ether, languages become functional to circulation and dissolve every sovereign relationship.
Education and culture too cannot help submitting to the circulating society of the spectacle. Here we reach an extreme
limit of the process of the dissolution of the relationship between order and space. At this point we cannot conceive this
relationship except in another space, an elsewhere that cannot in principle be contained in the articulation of sovereign acts.
The space of communication is completely deterritorialized. It is absolutely other with respect to the residual spaces
that we have been analyzing in terms of the monopoly of physical force and the definition of monetary measure. Here
it is a question not of residue but of metamorphosis: a metamorphosis of all the elements of political economy and
state theory. Communication is the form of capitalist production in which capital has succeeded in submitting society
entirely and globally to its regime, suppressing all alternative paths. If ever an alternative is to be proposed, it will have
to arise from within the society of the real subsumption and demonstrate all the contradictions at the heart of it. These
three means of control refer us again to the three tiers of the imperial pyramid of power. The bomb is a monarchic power,
money aristocratic, and ether democratic. It might appear in each of these cases as though the reins of these
mechanisms were held by the United States. It might appear as if the United States were the new Rome, or a cluster of
new Romes: Washington (the bomb), New York (money), and Los Angeles (ether). Any such territorial conception of
imperial space, however, is continually destabilized by the fundamental flexibility, mobility, and deterritorialization at
the core of the imperial apparatus. Perhaps the monopoly off force and the regulation of money can be given partial
territorial determinations, but communication cannot. Communication has become the central element that establishes the
relations of production, guiding capitalist development and also transforming productive forces. This dynamic produces an
extremely open situation: here the centralized locus of power has to confront the power of productive subjectivities,
the power of all those who contribute to the interactive production of communication. Here in this circulating domain
of imperial domination over the new forms of production, communication is most widely disseminated in capillary
forms.
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AT Permutation/Link Turn
The affirmatives strategy is flawed expenditure without reserve attempts to break through the
wall immediately, whereupon their strategy is violently repelled. It is utterly incommensurable
with our strategy of slowly filing down the wall.
Gilles Deleuze Professor of Philosophy and Felix Guattari psychoanalyst 1972 (Gilles, philosopher and
professor of philosophy at University of Paris VIII at Vincennes, and Felix, psychoanalyst Anti-Oedipus, pg 135-137)
Very few accomplish what Laing calls the breakthrough of this schizophrenic wall or limit: "quite ordinary people,"
nevertheless. But the majority draw near the wall and back away horrified. Better to fall back under the law of the
signifier, marked by castration, triangulated in Oedipus. So they displace the limit, they make it pass into the interior of
the social formation, between the social production and reproduction that they invest, and the familial reproduction that
they fall back on, to which they apply all the investments. They make the limit pass into the interior of the domain thus
described by Oedipus, between the two poles of Oedipus. They never stop involuting and evolving between these two
poles. Oedipus as the last rock, and castration as the cavern: the ultimate territoriality, although reduced to the analyst's
couch, rather than the decoded flows of desire that flee, slip away, and take us where? Such is neurosis, the displacement of
the limit, in order to create a little colonial world of one's own. But others want virgin lands, more truly exotic, families more
artificial, societies more secret that they design and institute along the length of the wall, in the locales of perversion. Still
others, sickened by the utensility (l'ustensilite) of Oedipus, but also by the shoddiness and aestheticism of perversions, reach
the wall and rebound against it, sometimes with an extreme violence. Then they become immobile, silent, they retreat to
the body without organs, still a territoriality, but this time totally desert-like, where all desiring-production is
arrested, or where it becomes rigid, feigning stoppage: psychosis. These catatonic bodies have fallen into the river like lead
weights, immense transfixed hippopotamuses who will not come back up to the surface. They have entrusted all their forces
to primal repression, in order to escape the system of social and psychic repression that fabricates neurotics. But a more
naked repression befalls them that declares them identical with the hospital schizo, the great autistic one, the clinical entity
that "lacks" Oedipus. Why the same word, schizo, to designate both the process insofar as it goes beyond the limit, and
the result of the process insofar as it runs up against the limit and pounds endlessly away there? Why the same word
to designate both the eventual breakthrough and the possible breakdown, and all the transitions, the intrications of the
two extremes? In point of fact, of the three preceding adventures, the adventure of psychosis is the most intimately related to
the process: in the sense of Jaspers' demonstration, when he shows that the "demonic-ordinarily repressed-erupts by means
of such a state, or gives rise to such states, which endlessly run the risk of making it topple into breakdown and
disintegration. We no longer know if it is the process that must truly be called madness, the sickness being only disguise or
caricature, or if the sickness is our only madness and the process our only cure. But in any case, the intimate nature of the
relationship appears directly in inverse ratio: the more the process of production is led off course, brutally
interrupted, the more the schizo-as-entity arises as a specific product. That is why, on the other hand, we were unable to
establish any direct relationship between neurosis and psychosis. The relationships of neurosis, psychosis, and also
perversion depend on the situation of each one with regard to the process, and on the manner in which each one represents a
mode of interruption of the process, a residual bit of ground to which one still clings so as not to be carried off by the
deterritorialized flows of desire. Neurotic territoriality of Oedipus, perverse territorialities of the artifice, psychotic
territoriality of the body without organs: sometimes the process is caught in the trap and made to turn about within the
triangle, sometimes it takes itself as an end-in-itself, other times it continues on in the void and substitutes a horrible
exasperation for its fulfillment. Each of these forms has schizophrenia as a foundation; schizophrenia as a process is the
only universal. Schizophrenia is at once the wall, the breaking through this wall, and the failures of this breakthrough:
"How does one get through this wall, for it is useless to hit it hard, it has to be undermined and penetrated with a file,
slowly and with patience, as 1 see it". What is at stake is not merely art or literature. For either the artistic machine, the
analytical machine, and the revolutionary machine will remain in extrinsic relationships that make them function in
the deadening framework of the system of social and psychic repression, or they will become parts and cogs of one
another in the flow that feeds one and the same desiring-machine, so many local fires patiently kindled for a
generalized explosion-the schiz and not the signifier.
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Aff: Capitalism Inevitable

Capitalism is too deeply rooted in our lifestyles. Even those oppressed by capital dont seek an
escape but a way they can advance in the system. We should reform capital.
John Wilson Coordinator Independent Press 2000 (John K., coordinator of the Independent Press Associations
Campus Journalism Project, How the Left can Win Arguments and Influence People, pg 15- 16)
Capitalism is far too ingrained in American life to eliminate. If you go into the most impoverished areas of America,
you will find that the people who live there are not seeking government control over factories or even more social
welfare programs; they're hoping, usually in vain, for a fair chance to share in the capitalist wealth. The poor do not
pray for socialism-they strive to be a part of the capitalist system. They want jobs, they want to start businesses, and they
want to make money and be successful. What's wrong with America is not capitalism as a system but capitalism as a
religion. We worship the accumulation of wealth and treat the horrible inequality between rich and poor as if it were an act of
God. Worst of all, we allow the government to exacerbate the financial divide by favoring the wealthy: go anywhere in
America, and compare a rich suburb with a poor town-the city services, schools, parks, and practically everything else will be
better financed in the place populated by rich people. The aim is not to overthrow capitalism but to overhaul it. Give it a
social-justice tune-up, make it more efficient, get the economic engine to hit on all cylinders for everybody, and stop
putting out so many environmentally hazardous substances. To some people, this goal means selling out leftist ideals for
the sake of capitalism. But the right thrives on having an ineffective opposition. The Revolutionary Communist Party helps
stabilize the "free market" capitalist system by making it seem as if the only alternative to free-market capitalism is a return
to Stalinism. Prospective activists for change are instead channeled into pointless discussions about the revolutionary
potential of the proletariat. Instead of working to persuade people to accept progressive ideas, the far left talks to itself
(which may be a blessing, given the way it communicates) and tries to sell copies of the Socialist Worker to an
uninterested public.
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We can't go backwards. Capitalism is inevitable.
John Isbister, Professor Economics, U. Cal @ Santa Cruz, in 2001 (Capitalism and Justice, p. 46)
Some in the capitalist world try to retain or re-create the best parts of precapitalism. Some Amish and Mennonite
communities are based on precapitalist values, as are some other faith-based groups. The 1960s and 1970s saw the creation
of secular alternative rural communes, communities whose members tried to eliminate all marks of distinction
between them, to be self-sufficient, and to live simply. The communes had some successes, but most eventually
collapsed. Communities such as these have attempted to embody precapitalist values, but none has succeeded in cutting
itself off from capitalist influences: from the market, from the media, from the legal system, and from other influences
of the modern world. While we can learn from our antecedent societies, we cannot return to them. The door has been
closed.
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Capitalism is inevitable. Even the groups that resist it are part and parcel of the system.
John Wilson coordinator of Independent Press Association 2K (John K., coordinator of the Independent
Press Associations Campus Journalism Project, How the Left can Win Arguments and Influence People, pg 12- 14)
Progressive capitalism is not a contradiction in terms, for progressives support capitalism in many ways. Even
nonprofit organizations and cooperatives are not antithetical to capitalism and the market; these groups simply use
capitalism for aims different from the single-minded pursuit of profits. But the rules of supply and demand, the expenses
and revenues, the idea of entrepreneurship and innovation, and the need to adapt to the market are essential. Any progressive
magazine or institution that tries to defy the rules of capitalism won't be around for very long and certainly wont have the
resources to mount a serious advocacy of progressive ideas. One of the most effective tactics of the environmental
movement was encouraging consumers to consider environmental values when making capitalist choices about what
products to buy. Today, a manufacturer who ignores environmental issues puts its profits at risk because so many
people are looking for environmentally friendly products and packaging. Crusades against Coca-Cola for its massive output
of non-recycled plastic bottles in America or against companies supporting foreign dictatorships are part of the continuing
battle to force companies to pay attention to consumer demands. Of course, consumer protests and boycotts are only one part
of making "capitalism for everyone." Many progressive groups are now buying stock in companies precisely to raise these
issues at stockholder meetings and pressure the companies to adopt environmentally and socially responsible policies.
Unfortunately, the legal system is structured against progressive ideas. In 2000, Ben and Jerry's Ice Cream was forced to sell
out to a big corporation that might ignore its commitment to many progressive causes. The company didn't want to sell, but
the law demanded that the company's duty to stockholders was to consider only the money involved. Imagine what would
happen if our capitalist laws were designed to promote progressive ideas instead of impeding them. Instead of
allowing a shareholder lawsuit against any company acting in a morally, socially, and environmentally conscious way,
American laws should encourage these goals. The claim by some leftists that capitalism is inherently irresponsible or
evil doesn't make sense. Capitalism is simply a system of markets. What makes capitalism so destructive isn't the
basic foundation but the institutions that have been created in the worship of the "free market." Unfortunately,
progressives spend most of their time attacking capitalism rather than taking credit for all the reforms that led to
America's economic growth. If Americans were convinced that social programs and investment in people (rather than
corporate welfare and investment in weaponry) helped create the current economic growth, they would be far more willing to
pursue additional progressive policies. Instead, the left allows conservatives to dismiss these social investments as too
costly or big government.
Capitalism Kritik
Page 65 of 77
Aff: Gibson-Graham
Totalizing depictions of capitalism preclude the possibility of concrete changes that can challenge
the worst aspects of capitalism.
J.K. Gibson-Graham Professor 06 (JK, The End of Capitalism as We Knew It, pg. 255-257)
What is important here, for my purposes, are not the different metaphors and images of economy and society but the
fact that they all confer integrity upon Capitalism. Through its architectural or organismic depiction as an edifice or body,
Capitalism becomes not an uncentered aggregate of practices but a structural and systemic unity, potentially coextensive with the national or global economy as a whole. 11 As a large, durable, and self-sustaining formation, it is
relatively impervious to ordinary political and cultural interventions. It can be resisted and reformed but it cannot be
replaced, except through some herculean and coordinated struggle. Understood as a unified system or structure, Capitalism
is not ultimately vulnerable to local and partial efforts at transformation. Any such efforts can always be subverted by
Capitalism at another scale or in another dimension. Attempts to transform production may be seen as hopeless without
control of the financial system. Socialisms in one city or in one country may be seen as undermined by Capitalism at the
international scale. Capitalism cannot be chipped away at, gradually replaced or removed piecemeal. It must be
transformed in its entirety or not at all. Thus one of the effects of the unity of Capitalism is to present the left with the
task of systemic transformation. Singularity If the unity of Capitalism confronts us with the mammoth task of systemic
transformation, it is the singularity and totality of Capitalism that make the task so hopeless. Capitalism presents
itself as a singularity in the sense of having no peer or equivalent, of existing in a category by itself; and also in the sense
that when it appears fully realized within a particular social formation, it tends to be dominant or alone. As a sui generis
economic form, Capitalism has no true analogues. Slavery, independent commodity production, feudalism, socialism,
primitive communism and other forms of economy all lack the systemic properties of Capitalism and the ability to reproduce
and expand themselves according to internal laws. 12 Unlike socialism, for example, which is always struggling to be
born, which needs the protection and fostering of the state, which is fragile and easily deformed, Capitalism takes on
its full form as a natural outcome of an internally driven growth process. Its organic unity gives capitalism the
peculiar power to regenerate itself, and even to subsume its moments of crisis as requirements of its continued growth
and development. Socialism has never been endowed with that mythic capability of feeding on its own crises; its
reproduction was never driven from within by a life force but always from without; it could never reproduce itself but always
had to be reproduced, often an arduous if not impossible process. 13 Other modes of production that lack the organic
unity of Capitalism are more capable of being instituted or replaced incrementally and more likely to coexist with
other economic forms. Capitalism, by contrast, tends to appear by itself. Thus, in the United States, if feudal or ancient
classes exist, they exist as residual forms; if slavery exists, it exists as a marginal form; if socialism or communism exists, it
exists as a prefigurative form. None of these forms truly and fully coexists with Capitalism. Where Capitalism does coexist
with other forms, those places (the so-called Third World, for example, or backward regions in what are known as the
"advanced capitalist" nations) are seen as not fully "developed." Rather than signaling the real possibility of Capitalism
coexisting with noncapitalist economic forms, the coexistence of capitalism with noncapitalism marks the Third World
as insufficient and incomplete. Subsumed to the hegemonic discourse of Development, it identifies a diverse array of
countries as the shadowy Other of the advanced capitalist nations. One effect of the notion of capitalist exclusivity is a
monolithic conception of class, at least in the context of "advanced capitalist" countries. The term "class" usually refers to a
social cleavage along the axis of capital and labor since capitalism cannot coexist with any but residual or prefigurative
noncapitalist relations. The presence and fullness of the capitalist monolith not only denies the possibility of economic
or class diversity in the present but prefigures a monolithic and modernist socialism - one in which everyone is a
comrade and class diversity does not exist.
Capitalism Kritik
Page 66 of 77
Aff: Gibson-Graham
Representing our entire social space as encapsulated by capitalism leads us to impossible
alternatives that will fail.
J.K. Gibson-Graham Professor 06 (JK, The End of Capitalism as We Knew It, pg. 258-259)
The third characteristic of Capitalism, and perhaps its best known, is its tendency to present itself as the social
totality. This is most obvious in metaphors of containment and subsumption. People who are not themselves involved
in capitalist exploitation nevertheless may be seen to live "in the pores" of capitalism (Spivak 1988: 135) or within
capitalism (Wallerstein 1992: 8, Grossberg 1992: 337) or under capitalism. Capitalism is presented as the embrace, the
container, something large and full. Noncapitalist forms of production, such as commodity production by self-employed
workers or the production of household goods and services, are seen as somehow taking place within capitalism.
Household production becomes subsumed to capitalism as capitalist "reproduction." Even oppressions experienced along
entirely different lines of social antagonism are often convened within "the plenary geography of capitalism." 15
Capitalism not only casts a wider net than other things, it also constitutes us more fully, in a process that is more like a
saturation than like a process of overdetermination. Our lives are dripping with Capitalism. We cannot get outside
Capitalism; it has no outside. 16 It becomes that which has no outside by swallowing up its conditions of existence. The
banking system, the national state, domestic production, the built environment, nature as product, media culture - all are
conditions of Capitalism's totalizing existence that seem to lose their autonomy, their contradictory capability to be
read as conditions of its nonexistence. We laboriously pry each piece loose theorizing the legal "system," for example, as a
fragmented and diverse collection of practices and institutions that is constituted by a whole host of things in addition to
capitalism - but Capitalism nevertheless exerts its massive gravitational pull. Even socialism functions as the dual or
placeholder of Capitalism rather than as its active and contradictory constituent. Socialism is just Capitalism's opposite, a
great emptiness on the other side of a membrane, a social space where the fullness of Capitalism is negated. When the
socialist bubble in eastern Europe burst, Capitalism flooded in like a miasma. We are all capitalist now. It seems we have
banished economic determinism and the economistic conception of class as the major axis of social transformation,
only to have enshrined the economy once again - this time in a vast metonymic emplacement (Laclau and Mouffe 1985).
Capitalism which is a name for a form of economy is invoked in every social dimension. The wealthy industrial
societies are summarily characterized as capitalist social formations. On the one hand, we have taken back social life
from the economy while, on the other, we have allowed it - under the name of Capitalism - to colonize the entire social
space. 17 This means that the left is not only presented with the revolutionary task of transforming the whole
economy, it must replace the entire society as well. It is not surprising that there seems to be no room for a thriving
and powerful noncapitalist economy, politics and culture, though it is heartening to consider that these nevertheless
may exist.
Capitalism Kritik
Page 67 of 77
Aff: Capitalism Good Environment

Empirically, capitalist economies are better for the environment.
Herbert Walberg Fellow Hoover institute and Joe Bast CEO of the Heartland Institute 2003
(Herbert, distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution, and Joseph, C.E.O. of the Heartland Institute, Education and
Capitalism: How Overcoming Our Fear of Markets and Economics Can Improve America's Schools, pg x)
Today most of us are environmentalists, so the environmental effects of capitalism concern us greatly. If we believe
capitalism allows greedy business owners to pollute the air and rivers without concern for the future or the health of others,
we are unlikely to entrust capitalism with the education of future generations. One way to judge the impact of capitalism
on the environment is to compare the environmental records of capitalist countries with those of countries with
precapitalist, socialist, or communist economies.35 The record clearly shows environmental conditions are improving
in every capitalist country in the world and deteriorating only in noncapitalist countries.36 Environmental conditions in
the former Soviet Union prior to that communist nations collapse, for example, were devastating and getting worse.37
Untreated sewage was routinely dumped in the countrys rivers, workers were exposed to high levels of toxic chemicals in
their workplaces, and air quality was so poor in many major cities that children suffered asthma and other breathing disorders
at epidemic levels. Some environmentalists say it is unfair to compare environmental progress in a very affluent nation, such
as the United States, to conditions in very poor nations, such as those in Africa. But it was the latters rejection of
capitalism that made those countries poor in the first place. Moreover, comparing the United States to developed
countries with mixed or socialist economies also reveals a considerable gap on a wide range of environmental
indicators. Comparing urban air quality and water quality in the largest rivers in the United States, France,
Germany, and England, for example, reveals better conditions in the United States.38 Emerging capitalist countries
experience rising levels of pollution attributable to rapid industrialization, but history reveals this to be a transitional
period followed by declining emissions and rising environmental quality.39 There is no evidence, prior to its economic
collapse, that conditions in the former Soviet Union were improving or ever would improve. There is no evidence
today that many of the nations of Africa are creating the institutions necessary to stop the destruction of their natural
resources or lower the alarming mortality and morbidity rates of their people.
Capitalism Kritik
Page 68 of 77
Aff: Capitalism Good Environment

Capitalism incentivizes protection of the environment.
Johan Norberg senior fellow at the CATO institute 03 (Johan, Senior Fellow at Cato Institute, In Defense of
Global Capitalism, pg 224)
Although multinational corporations and free trade are proving good for development and human rights in the Third World,
there still remains the objection that globalization harms the environment. Factories in the Western world, the argument
runs, will relocate to poorer countries with no environmental legislation, where they can pollute with impunity. The West has
to follow suit and lower its own environmental standards in order to stay in business. That is a dismal thesis, with the
implication that when people obtain better opportunities, resources, and technology, they use them to abuse nature. Does
there really have to be a conflict between development and the environment? The notion that there has to be a conflict runs
into the same problem as the whole idea of a race to the bottom: it doesn't tally with reality. There is no exodus of
industry to countries with poor environmental standards, and there is no downward pressure on the level of global
environmental protection. Instead, the bulk of American and European investments goes to countries with
environmental regulations similar to their own. There has been much talk of American factories moving to Mexico since
NAFTA was signed. Less well known, however, is that since free trade was introduced Mexico has tightened up its
environmental regulations, following a long history of complete nonchalance about environmental issues. This tightening up
is part of a global trend. All over the world, economic progress and growth are moving hand in hand with intensified
environmental protection. Four researchers who studied these connections found a very strong, positive association
between our [environmental] indicators and the level of economic development. A country that is very poor is too
preoccupied with lifting itself out of poverty to bother about the environment at all. Countries usually begin
protecting their natural resources when they can afford to do so. When they grow richer, they start to regulate effluent
emissions, and when they have still more resources they also begin regulating air quality. A number of factors cause
environment protection to increase with wealth and development. Environmental quality is unlikely to be a top priority
for people who barely know where their next meal is coming from. Abating misery and subduing the pangs of hunger
takes precedence over conservation. When our standard of living rises we start attaching importance to the environment
and obtaining resources to improve it. Such was the case earlier in western Europe, and so it is in the developing countries
today. Progress of this kind, however, requires that people live in democracies where they are able and allowed to mobilize
opinion; otherwise, their preferences will have no impact. Environmental destruction is worst in dictatorships. But it is the
fact of prosperity no less than a sense of responsibility that makes environmental protection easier in a wealthy society. A
wealthier country can afford to tackle environmental problems; it can develop environmentally friendly technologies
wastewater and exhaust emission control, for exampleand begin to rectify past mistakes.
Capitalism Kritik
Page 69 of 77
Aff: Capitalism Good - Environment

Property ownership in capitalism incentivizes long-term environmental protection.
John Norberg Senior Fellow at the CATO institute 2003 (Johan, Senior Fellow at Cato Institute, In Defense of
Global Capitalism, pg 224)
Very often, environmental improvements are due to the very capitalism so often blamed for the problems. The
introduction of private property creates owners with long-term interests. Landowners must see to it that there is good
soil or forest there tomorrow as well, because otherwise they will have no income later on, whether they continue using the
land or intend to sell it. If the property is collective or government-owned, no one has any such long-term interest. On
the contrary, everyone then has an interest in using up the resources quickly before someone else does. It was because
they were common lands that the rain forests of the Amazon began to be rapidly exploited in the 1960s and 1970s and are
still being rapidly exploited today. Only about a 10th of forests are recognized by the governments as privately owned, even
though in practice Indians possess and inhabit large parts of them. It is the absence of definite fishing rights that causes
(heavily subsidized) fishing fleets to try to vacuum the oceans of fish before someone else does. No wonder, then, that the
most large-scale destruction of environment in history has occurred in the communist dictatorships, where all ownership was
collective. A few years ago, a satellite image was taken of the borders of the Sahara, where the desert was spreading.
Everywhere, the land was parched yellow, after nomads had overexploited the common lands and then moved on. But
in the midst of this desert environment could be seen a small patch of green. This proved to be an area of privately
owned land where the owners of the farm prevented overexploitation and engaged in cattle farming that was
profitable in the long term. Trade and freight are sometimes criticized for destroying the environment, but the problem can
be rectified with more efficient transport and purification techniques, as well as emissions fees to make the cost of pollution
visible through pricing. The biggest environmental problems are associated with production and consumption, and
there trade can make a positive contribution, even aside from the general effect it has on growth. Trade leads to a
country's resources being used as efficiently as possible. Goods are produced in the places where production entails least
expense and least wear and tear on the environment. That is why the amount of raw materials needed to make a given product
keeps diminishing as productive efficiency improves. With modern production processes, 97 percent less metal is needed for
a soft drink can than 30 years ago, partly because of the use of lighter aluminum. A car today contains only half as much
metal as a car of 30 years ago.
Capitalism Kritik
Page 70 of 77
Aff: Capitalism Good Peace

Capitalism is critical to maintaining peace in the international system.
Dough Bandow Senior Fellow at the CATO institute 05 (Doug, senior fellow at the Cato Institute, Spreading
Capitalism Is Good for Peace, http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=5193)
In a world that seems constantly aflame, one naturally asks: What causes peace? Many people, including U.S. President
George W. Bush, hope that spreading democracy will discourage war. But new research suggests that expanding free
markets is a far more important factor, leading to what Columbia University's Erik Gartzke calls a "capitalist peace." It's a
reason for even the left to support free markets. The capitalist peace theory isn't new: Montesquieu and Adam Smith
believed in it. Many of Britain's classical liberals, such as Richard Cobden, pushed free markets while opposing imperialism.
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. His conclusion hasn't gone unchallenged. Author R.J. Rummel,
an avid proponent of the democratic peace theory, challenges Gartzke's methodology and worries that it "may well lead
intelligent and policy-wise analysts and commentators to draw the wrong conclusions about the importance of
democratization." Gartzke responds in detail, noting that he relied on the same data as most democratic peace theorists. If it
is true that democratic states don't go to war, then it also is true that "states with advanced free market economies
never go to war with each other, either."The point is not that democracy is valueless. Free political systems naturally entail
free elections and are more likely to protect other forms of liberty - civil and economic, for instance.However, democracy
alone doesn't yield peace. To believe is does is dangerous: There's no panacea for creating a conflict-free world. That
doesn't mean that nothing can be done. But promoting open international markets - that is, spreading capitalism - is
the best means to encourage peace as well as prosperity. Notes Gartzke: "Warfare among developing nations will remain
unaffected by the capitalist peace as long as the economies of many developing countries remain fettered by governmental
control." Freeing those economies is critical. It's a particularly important lesson for the anti-capitalist left. For the most part,
the enemies of economic liberty also most stridently denounce war, often in near-pacifist terms. Yet they oppose the very
economic policies most likely to encourage peace. If market critics don't realize the obvious economic and philosophical
value of markets - prosperity and freedom - they should appreciate the unintended peace dividend. Trade encourages
prosperity and stability; technological innovation reduces the financial value of conquest; globalization creates
economic interdependence, increasing the cost of war. Nothing is certain in life, and people are motivated by far more
than economics. But it turns out that peace is good business. And capitalism is good for peace.
Capitalism Kritik
Page 71 of 77
Aff: Capitalism Good Peace

Capitalism promotes global peace and stability It is mutually beneficial for everyone to
coordinate economic policies.
Simon Bromley, Lecturer International Political Economy Open University, in 2006 (The War on Terrorism and the
American "Empire" after the Cold War, eds. A. Colas & R. Saull, p. 51-2)-mikee
More specifically, contra the Lenin-Bukharin thesis that continues to underpin notions of (incipient) inter-imperialist
rivalries, there are marked differences between the economic competition of many capitals and the political competition of
many states. Competition between statesfor market shares, for access to internationally mobile capital and for
leadership in the field of technological innovationis not a zero-sum phenomenon in the way that competition
between capitals is in any given market, because the overall process of competition, capital accumulation and technological
innovation is constantly expanding the size of the market. And in so far as capitalism involves an historically specific
privatization of the relations of production, freeing property relations from fixed territorial bases, it correspondingly fixes
the general political aspects of domination in the territorial (national) state. This tends to result in a general
subordination of the economy to the rule of law and of money functioning as capital. Its political correlate is the
impersonal bureaucratic state also operating according to the rule of law. This separation is a process that is constantly
repeated and it is always an object of class struggles, but it provides, in liberal capitalist states, a general framework
for accumulation. Moreover, since the liberal state is dependent for its tax base on the tempo of accumulation in the
domestic economy as a whole, it is routinely compelled to attend to the general functioning of the economy, both
domestically and internationally. Self-destructive competition among states, potentially ruinous for the system as a
whole, remains a standing possibility but it is not the general case. In short, states that are able to uphold broadly
liberal forms of economic and political regulation, checking the monopoly, rent-seeking activities of capital, are able to
compete with one another to mutual advantage, and, because of this, they have strong incentives to coordinate with
one another in order to govern this competition. That is to say, the liberal form of regulating capitalism is as much a
project of international management as it is a set of domestic arrangements. Its international elements involve the
subordination of key aspects of the external economic policies of states to individual rights to trade, to ownership and to
travel across borders, including the extension of these rights to foreign nationals. Any given state thus becomes a "local
guardian of the world republic of commerce," in which states coordinate with one another to ensure mutual gains.
Capitalism Kritik
Page 72 of 77
Aff: Capitalism Good Equality

Capitalism is a key element in promoting economic equality.
Johan Norberg, Fellow at Timbro (Swedish think tank), in 2003, In Defense of Global Capitalism, p. 154
Arguments that capitalism is somehow to blame for world poverty are oddly contradictory. Some argue that capital
and corporations make their way only into the affluent countries leaving the poor ones up the proverbial creek.
Others maintain that capital and corporations flock to poor countries with low production costs, to the detriment of
workers in the developed world. The truth seems to be that they make their way into both. Trade and investment flows
in the past two decades have come to be more and more evenly distributed among the economies that are relatively open to
the rest of the world. It is the really closed economies that, for obvious reasons, are not getting investments and trade.
Moreover, the difference between these groups of countries are increasing. Clearly, instead of globalization
marginalizing certain regions, it is the regions that stand back from globalization that becomes marginalized.
Capitalism Kritik
Page 73 of 77
Aff: Capitalism Good Poverty

Capitalism is the most effective system to end poverty. Governance is more important than the
economy.
Bill Emmott, Editor-in-Chief of The Economist, in 2003 (20:21 Vision, pp. 272-273)-mikee
The findings of history are quite simple, even if it is not becoming any easier to implement them. To believe them,
however, one must first believe in capitalism and in the fact that it has been the only successful generator of sustained
improvements in human welfare that has so far been discovered. The next thing is to work out what it is that makes
capitalism tick. Or, put another way, one must find out what is different about the places where it ticks and the places
where it doesn't. That is what an international study, Economic Freedom of the World, has sought to do every year since it
was first published, in 1996, by eleven economic think tanks around the world led by the Fraser Institute in Canada. The
correlations it finds between sustained economic success and aspects of capitalist circumstances suggest that most of
the explanations lie in how poor countries are governed, rather than in natural disadvantages or unfairness by the
rich. Those suspicious of free-marketeers should note that conclusion: it is government, or the lack of it, that makes
the crucial difference. The aim of the study was to see whether countries in which people had more economic freedom were
also richer and grew more rapidly. But the study also sought to define economic freedom, in the hope of capturing and
measuring the things that matter in making capitalism work. Broadly, economic freedom means the ability to do what
you want with whatever property you have legally acquired, as long as your actions do not violate other people's rights to
do the same. Goods and services do not, alas, fall like manna from heaven; their arrival depends on property rights and the
incentives to use and create them. So the issues surrounding those are what matter: Are property rights legally protected?
Are people hemmed in by government regulations and trade barriers, or fearful of confiscation? Are their savings
under attack from inflation, or can they do what they want with their money? Is it economically viable for parents to
send their kids to school? The study's authors initially found seventeen measures of these things, expanded in the 2001
update to twenty-one, and rated 102 (now 123) countries on each of them, going back, if possible, to 1975. They then had to
find ways to weight the measures according to their importance, and used a panel of economists to do so. The conclusion
was abundantly clear: the freer the economy, the higher the growth and the richer the people. This was especially so
for countries that maintained a fairly free economy for many years, since before individuals and companies will
respond to such freedom they need to feel confident that it will last.
Capitalism Kritik
Page 74 of 77
Aff: Socialism Bad

Socialism is a failure resulting in mass death.
Richard M. Ebeling, vice president of academic affairs for The Future of Freedom Foundation, in 1993 (THE
FAILURE OF SOCIALISM, March 1993, p. http://www.fff.org/freedom/0393b.asp.)
Socialism's failure in the former Soviet Union and in the other socialist countries stands as a clear and unquestionable
warning as to which path any rational and sane people should never follow again. Government planning brought
poverty and ruin. The idea of collectivist class and ethnic group-rights produced tens of millions of deaths and a legacy
of civil war and conflict. And nationalized social services generated social decay and political privilege and corruption.
Capitalism Kritik
Page 75 of 77
Aff: Permutation
Individual action fails, to stop the current environmental problem we need political action
Dauvergne, 2005
(Peter, Canada Research Chair in Global Environmental Politics, Director of the Environment Program of the Liu Institute for
Global Issues, and Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of British Columbia, Global Environmental
Politics 5.3, Dying of Consumption: Accidents or Sacrifices of Global Morality?, accessed online 7-08-08,
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/global_environmental_politics/v005/5.3dauvergne02.html)
Somewhere, a critic is no doubt lambasting: "Is there no individual responsibility?" Certainly some will always perish in the
muck of their own choices. This is inescapable in any good and free society. This does not, however, absolve polities from
the moral duty to ensure safe and healthy environments for current and future generations of young people everywhere.
Without this, we will continue to sacrifice humanity's children. Without this, we cannot tackle global ecological decline or
gross inequalities. Moving toward safer and healthier environments will require polities to deal with the consequences of
consumption with more than sporadic education and fundraising campaigns. It will require more than the goodwill of
volunteers and activists. Recycling. Donating. Inventing. Campaigns against drunk driving. These can all help. Yet ultimately,
achieving this moral duty will require policymakers to challenge the compromise of sustainable development to focus more
on ethics and less on macroeconomics and national security, striving for a more humane global political economy of
consumption that respects the health of ordinary people as well as the far from ordinary planet Earth.
Capitalism Kritik
Page 76 of 77
Aff:Perm
Capitalism Kritik
Page 77 of 77
Aff: Perm
Perm is the best option. Their totalizing critique is politically suicidal it prevents strategic coalitions from forming to
counter the new right and closes off space for effective activist politics.
Sankaran Krishna, Professor of Political Science at the University of Hawaii-Manoa, 1993 ("The Importance of Being
Ironic: A Postcolonial View on Critical International Relations Theory," Alternatives, Volume 18, p. 399-401)
While this point is, perhaps, debatable, Der Derian's further assertion, that a postmodern critique of the Gulf War
mobilization would be somehow more effective, sounds less convincing. [end page 399]
An alternative, late-modem tactic against total war was to war on totality itself, to delegitimize all sovereign truths
based on class, nationalist, or internationalist metanarratives . . . better strategically to play with apt critiques of the
powerful new forces unleashed by cyberwar than to hold positions with antiquated tactics and nostalgic unities. (AD:
177-178; emphasis in original)
The dichotomous choice presented in this excerpt is straightforward: one either indulges in
total critique, delegitimizing all sovereign truths, or one is committed to "nostalgic,"
essentialist unities that have become obsolete and have been the grounds for all our
oppressions. In offering this dichotomous choice, Der Derian replicates a move made by Chaloupka in his equally
dismissive critique of the more mainstream nuclear opposition, the Nuclear Freeze movement of the early 1980s,
that, according to him, was operating along obsolete lines, emphasizing "facts" and "realities" while a "postmodern"
President Reagan easily outflanked them through an illusory Star Wars program. (See KN: chapter 4)
Chaloupka centers this difference between his own supposedly total critique of all sovereign truths (which he
describes as nuclear criticism in an echo of literary criticism) and the more partial (and issue-based) criticism of what
he calls "nuclear opposition" or "antinuclearists" at the very outset of his book. (KN: mi) Once again, the unhappy
choice forced upon the reader is to join Chaloupka in his total critique of all sovereign truths or be trapped in obsolete
essentialisms.
This leads to a disastrous politics, pitting groups that have the most in common (and need
to unite on some basis to be effective) against each other. Both Chaloupka and Der Derian
thus reserve their most trenchant critique for political groups that should, in any analysis,
be regarded as the closest to them in terms of an oppositional politics and their desired
futures. Instead of finding ways to live with these differences and to (if fleetingly) coalesce
against the New Right, this fratricidal critique is politically suicidal. It obliterates the space
for a political activism based on provisional and contingent coalitions, for uniting behind a
common cause even as one recognizes that the coalition is comprised of groups that have
very differing (and possibly unresolvable) views of reality. Moreover, it fails to consider the
possibility that there may have been other, more compelling reasons for the "failure" of the
Nuclear Freeze movement or anti-Gulf War movement Like many a worthwhile cause in our
times, they failed to garner sufficient support to influence state policy. The response to that
need not be a totalizing critique that delegitimizes all narratives .
The blackmail inherent in the choice offered by Der Derian and [end page 400] Chaloupka, between
total critique and "ineffective" partial critique, ought to be transparent. Among other things,
it effectively militates against the construction of provisional or strategic essentialisms in
our attempts to create space for an activist politics . In the next section, I focus more widely on the
genre of critical international theory and its impact on such an activist politics.

Cap K Impacts

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Cap K Impacts

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Capitalism Kritik

Answers to Affirmative Arguments

James Herod Author in 2004 (James, Getting Free, http://jamesherod.info/?sec=book&id=1) JXu

This strategy does not call for reforming capitalism, for

Emissions Trading Link

Emissions Trading Link

Emissions Trading Link

Single Issue Environment Link

Alternative energy sources increases consumption of the earth

Alternative Energy Increases Consumption

Alternative Energy Increases Consumption

Renewable energy is not cost-effective.

Alternative Energy Increases Consumption

Emissions Trading/Reform Link

Sustainable Development Link

Ethical Obligation Impact

Global Warming Impact

Global Warming Impact

Global Warming Impact

The world is full of such rebellions, of people saying NO to

All of these insubordinations are characterised by a

we move in one direction, in order to be able to move in another: the problem

AT Thats Just Bad Capitalism

Aff: Capitalism Inevitable

Aff: Capitalism Inevitable

Aff: Capitalism Inevitable

Aff: Capitalism Good Environment

Aff: Capitalism Good Environment

Aff: Capitalism Good - Environment

Aff: Capitalism Good Peace

Aff: Capitalism Good Peace

Aff: Capitalism Good Equality

Aff: Capitalism Good Poverty

Aff: Socialism Bad

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